Remembrance & Forgetting. English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, writing about Oscar Wilde in his book Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), notes that "great art, in Wilde's view...enables us to forget ourselves, our rational, conforming, intelligible, law-abiding, too-timid, explaining selves, and this forgetting makes things possible." Within a constellation of works ('great' or not) in an arts festival, we can even more intensely lose ourselves to reverie, joy, passion and bewilderment. Phillips extrapolates: "What we don't know, what we haven't understood, can be the realest thing about us." A good festival demands such openness. But it can also enact remembrance, of what we have forgotten or will forget or never knew, as Wesley Enoch looks to do with his 2017 Sydney Festival, celebrating the 1967 Referendum (which acknowledged the humanity of the Indigenous peoples of Australia), cultural continuity (in the lives of Tasmania’s muttonbirders; image above, Trevor Jamieson in The Season), and with sadness, the art of Myuran Sukumaran.

Keith & Virginia