Dazzling display
City turns on the lights for Vivid Sydney
cracking Australian art) or the Powerhouse Museum. Now showing: DC Comics heroes fashioned from Lego bricks, and the late Isabella Blow’s haute couture clothing and accessories collection.
Bjork’s on board
The Bjork digital experience at the Carriageworks is a must-see, and free too — just make sure you book. The beguiling Icelandic musical genius invites you right into the vortex of her breakup from her longtime partner, American artist Matthew Barney, with a heart-rending rendition of her hit Black Lake from last year’s Vulnicura album.
In a blackened room, two screens show slightly different shots of the singer as she walks along a volcanic plain, beats her chest in agony, and pulls at her face, as dozens of speakers provide surround sound. It is a strangely beautiful experience.
In another room you clamber onto a stool, pop on a virtual reality headset and headphones, and are transported to an Icelandic beach. Bjork dances around in front of you and flits to the side, seemingly moving out of sight, until you realise you can swivel on your stool to get a 360-degree view. Then there are two Bjorks, then three, and then the song is finished.
Next up, the magic of virtual reality offers a tour of the inside of Bjork’s mouth (I wasn’t a fan), and a chance to dance alongside her lit-up silhouette as it gradually grows in size, until Bjork is a virtual giant.
New Order
OK, so New Order – possibly the world’s most influential dance act – has now left Sydney, after bringing their disco ball (literally) into the Opera House and filling the place for four nights.
So I won’t go on about how incredible, how absolutely right they sounded with the Australia Chamber Orchestra (hat tip to the violinist who sang along to Blue Monday and waved her bow in the air). Suffice to say, it was an experience to cherish.
But it was the night after I saw New Order that I picked up my best Vivid insider’s tip. Coming out of Bennelong restaurant at the Opera House (recently relaunched by chef Peter Gilmore and offering counter dining at the Cured and Cultured bar), I noticed that the band’s final concert was being piped into the foyer.
I stood and listened long enough that I was invited to pop up to the theatre bar for a drink. Turns out that the Opera House relaxes the otherwise stringent rules about this sort of behaviour during Vivid, and you can enjoy an overheard concert for the price of a glass of rose or two. Brilliant.
Where to stay
I stayed at the QT in Market St, which is an experience in itself, kind of like falling into an Alice In Wonderland film set, where porcelain rabbits preside over the bathtub, a disembodied black hand holds the makeup mirror, and little signs invite you to ‘‘cover up’’ with a bathrobe and ‘‘indulge’’ in snacks.
You’re greeted at the kerb by one of a team of red-wigged ‘‘Directors of Chaos’’. It took me a while to realise there was more than one hard-working lovely hailing me taxis in the rain. I don’t know what their vaguely S&M outfits were all about, but the Directors were uniformly delightful.
The in-house Gowings Bar and Grill is superb — pork belly with mash for lunch, scrambled eggs with truffle oil for breakfast. It doesn’t hurt that everyone on staff — and I mean everyone — looks like a model and brings their A-game to work.
But my favourite thing of all was the cheeky way the QT designers have disrupted the usual awkward trip in the lift with stangers, by turning the space into a minidisco, piping in James Brown, Billy Idol, and The Human League. You can’t help but smile and jiggle a bit.
Where to eat
Food trucks! There are a tonne of them circling the city for Vivid. Download the Sydney Food Trucks app, which will direct you to the closest trucks at any given time, and chow down on Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, New York deli fare, waffles, sliders, organic juices, and veges; pretty much any fashionable food you can think of.