In 2026, the State Library of NSW continues its 200th Anniversary celebrations with a six-week festival of performances, talks and live music across September and October, featuring extraordinary new work from some of Australia's leading creatives.
The State Library of NSW is Australia's oldest Library with a history as rich and layered as the collection it holds. These new works emerged from a series of creative residencies over the past two years drawing inspiration from the Library's collection and spaces.
Commencing the 200th Anniversary performance program, Nunukul and Munaldjali man and former artistic director of Bangarra Dance Theatre for 32 years, Stephen Page AO, will reawaken First Nations stories within the iconic Mitchell Library Reading Room.
In a series of connected vignettes, RECLAIM: A Contemporary Ceremony combines dance, spoken word, poetry and music to survey a cast of First Nations characters from First Contact to present day in a continuum of resilience and presence.
Through compelling re-enactments of the knowledge held within the Library walls, and a powerful recalibration of how that knowledge is understood and celebrated, Page and his award-winning team reclaim the stories that haunt our Library and the site on which it stands.
"Spending time in the archives talking to long-term librarian and Bundjalung woman Melissa Jackson has both educated and inspired me," Page said.
"Never short of a story, Melissa has connected me deeply to the wonder and spirit of Sydney's Koori ancestors, tracing our history across this place from the ancient to the contemporary."
Responding to the Library's two centuries as keeper of stories, Kalkadunga composer and yidaki (didgeridoo) master William Barton brings Earth Flow: Song Book to the Mitchell Library Reading Room. Barton asks, what if a library could breathe? The new work carries on the four winds an ensemble of special guests, a human forest, and a living, flowing archive. With Auntie Delmae Barton, Jack Thompson, Ray Martin, and the Sydney Street Choir alongside guest musicians, this collage of music, poetry, movement and song celebrates two centuries of story-keeping at the Library.
Conceived and created by Skye McIntosh (artistic director of the Australian Haydn Ensemble), The Scott Sisters: Pioneers of Science and Art is inspired by the lives of Harriet and Helena Scott and their acclaimed 'Butterfly Book', Australian Lepidoptera and Their Transformations.
Presented in the Library Auditorium, this new multimedia performance blends animation, theatre and live classical music performed on period instruments by the Haydn Ensemble.
Drawing on the Library's collections of original artworks, letters, books, manuscripts and family papers, the production travels across close to a century, following a family whose legacy helped shape Australia's scientific, artistic and cultural history.
"The exquisite moth and butterfly illustrations of the remarkable nineteenth- century naturalist-artists Harriet and Helena Scott have fascinated me for years," said McIntosh said.
"It is my hope that this work invites audiences to experience these extraordinary artworks in a new way while discovering the wider history preserved within the Library's collections. Bringing those collections to new life has been an extraordinary privilege."
To round out the performance program, Australia's national Shakespeare company, Bell Shakespeare, invites adventurers aged 8 to 10 and their families on an epic quest through the extraordinary world hidden within the State Library - under the cover of night! In A Night at the Library, written by Joanna Erskine, a young student who is not a fan of reading or books spends one memorable night 'stuck' in the Library, meeting real historical figures and characters from literature, and discovering that there is far more to the Library and its contents than they ever imagined.
With a strictly limited season, tickets are on sale now online.
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