Early announcement for the Sydney Festival 2012

Early announce for Sydney Festival 2012 program:
Assembly
City Recital Hall, January 11-14
Meow Meow's Little Match Girl
The Famous Spiegeltent, January 5-29

With the full program to be announced on November 2, Sydney Festival is today revealing two of a series of new Australian works that form an integral part of the 2012 line-up - choreographer Gideon Obarzanek's swansong for Chunky Move, Assembly; and international cabaret sensation Meow Meow with Little Match Girl.  Both works are premiering in Melbourne before coming to Sydney Festival in January 2012.

In his final work as artistic director of one of Australia's most exciting and innovative dance companies, Gideon Obarzanek presents Assembly, an ambitious collaboration with the Opera Victoria's Music Director, Richard Gill and featuring Sydney Philharmonia Choir.

Premiering at Melbourne Festival in October 2011, Assembly draws together dance, theatre and voice to explore the motion of crowds.  With more than 60 performers on stage, this epic and ambitious production combines the force and agility of eight of Chunky Move's most exceptional dancers with waves of medieval and contemporary choral music from six Principal Singers and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, shifting the action between perfect order and the unpredictable clamour of the mob.

Obarzanek is acclaimed for his inventive approach to dance, augmenting the physicality of his choreography with technology and stagecraft, creating cross-disciplinary works that seek to redefine and challenge the boundaries of dance performance.  In Assembly, he returns to a stripped-back approach for a powerful exploration of the duality of human experience, both as an individual and as part of the human throng.

The new house-show in The Famous Spiegeltent, Little Match Girl, is cabaret on the edge - wild, exhilarating, tragic and always completely glamorous.  Premiering at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre in November, Little Match Girl has the perfect combination of the insatiable Meow Meow, the extraordinary Mitchell Butel and possibly a soothing fireman or two, all wrapped together in a 92 year old tent.

The very luscious Meow Meow can defrost even the coldest of hearts.  In the paws of this untameable storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen's bittersweet fable of a woebegone match-seller is a springboard into the vast realms of theatrical possibility.

Meow Meow (no fixed address) has been named one of the top performers of 2010 by The New Yorker; Top 10 Best of Cabaret by Time Out New York; 'cabaret diva of the highest order' by The New York Post; 'sensational' by The Times; and 'a phenomenon' by The Age.  Her work has been curated globally by David Bowie, Pina Bausch and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and she has collaborated with artists as diverse as John Cameron Mitchell (creator of Hedwig), Amanda Palmer and the National Academy of Music.  Most recently she starred in Michel Legrand's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on London's glittering West End and debuted Meow Meow in Concert at the legendary Apollo Theatre to sensational reviews.

The full program for Sydney Festival 2012 will be announced on November 2, 2011.
Tickets on sale on November 9.