Burra’s

FARTY BARD FESTIVAL

music - theatre - workshops - talks
celebrating the sillier side of
Shakespeare & friends

Welcome to the Farty Bard Festival.
An Elizabethan performing arts festival in SA’s Heritage town of Burra.

The first festival was held 5 - 7 May 2023 and was a ripsnorting, bumtooting success.

We will hold the festival every second year and will post the date for 2025 soon.

Farty Bard Festival would like to acknowledge the Ngadjuri people on whose ancestral land we live and create and pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Burra’s inaugural Farty Bard Festival was held May 5 -7 2023.

This was a celebration of joyous, inclusive and delightfully silly music and theatre, with musicians and actors from 5 visiting companies presenting concerts, plays, workshops and talks.

WHY A FARTY BARD FESTIVAL

The music and theatre of Shakespearean times is full of nonsense, there’s silliness about flatulent dogs, ‘fa-la-la’ refrains* and how drinking makes you wee. Farty Bard is all about celebrating this. Shakespeare can get a bad reputation for being arty-farty and hard to understand. But he can be great fun - he wrote at a time when the theatre was basically Netflix, everyone went to see plays on the weekend so he wrote to be entertaining. Elizabethan music is the same - songs were written for everyone to sing - they’re about normal problems - trying to find love or a good wine or being too old and flatulent to dance. This Festival is about celebrating that - everyone getting together and having fun. And a festival means there’s a range of things to see, hear and try. Over the weekend, everyone comes together - artists, tourists and locals - a chance to meet all sorts of interesting people.

WHY BURRA

This festival is run by the Burra based Mid North Theatre Group. We host it here partly because we live here, and partly because the Heritage listed town of Burra is beautiful, has a fascinating history and is a great place a visit.

WHY WORKSHOPS

The festival offers free workshops. Back in Shakespeare’ day, his plays were presented as mini-festivals. During intervals there were workshops like demonstrations of the newest swords. We don’t do that, but we offer a range of workshops so you can try your hand.

GET IN TOUCH

Please send an email if you’d like more info about Farty Bard Festival.

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* according to the dictionary ‘fa-la-la’ refrains are meaningless syllables that turn up in songs of this time. But that’s not what I was told at University. Nudge nudge wink wink.


“CLOWN: Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
MUSICIAN: Ay marry are they, sir.
CLOWN: O, thereby hangs a tail.
MUSICIAN: Whereby hangs a tail, sir?
CLOWN: Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know.”

Othello, William Shakespeare