The audience is put in the spotlight in this year’s “Youtopia”, celebrating the empowerment of the people.

With his first programme for the Brisbane Festival last year, artistic director David Berthold put some big topics in the spotlight. His debut selection in 2015 examined, challenged and defied aspects of racial discrimination, sexuality and political oppression, bringing brave and uncompromising subjects of global magnitude to the Queensland capital’s stages. For this year’s programme, Berthold has tightened his focus from the macro to the micro, bringing the intimate and personal to the fore.

Under the banner “Youtopia”, 2016’s offering celebrates the empowerment of the individual in an age where the ubiquity of technology and information has made us voyeurs, activists, influencers and pioneers; dynamic participants guiding the trajectory of our modern society. “Digital progress has created a world in which authority is more contested and the people more empowered than ever before,” Berthold explains. “Look at the convulsions in the media and music, or the great wave of human migration powered by smartphones in the hands of almost every refugee, or the power of a tweet to swing the conversation. Much of this year’s Brisbane Festival reflects this great realignment.”

Brisbane Festival Director David Berthold

With this principle in mind, several of 2016’s productions smash through the fourth wall, reimagining the often passive interaction between audience and artist. In total, 11 shows across the Festival programme, including one of this year’s headline acts, will use audience participation of some variety to bring the Festival-goers toe-to-toe with the action. In Alain Platel’s En Avant, Marche! local musicians will share the stage with the visionary Belgian dance company Les Ballets C de la B, in a genre-busting combination of live music, theatre, dance and opera. Also returning in 2016 is the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s lSymphony for Me, which sold out in just 27 minutes last year. The audience is given control of the concert billing, selecting the repertoire they hear on the night. Audience members will even have the chance to take to the stage themselves to share the reason for their choice.

On a slightly different tack, a particular type of storytelling also calls the subjectivity of our personal experiences into question. Fairytales are some of the first narratives we learn as children, and Snow White (in her 1937 Disney incarnation most commonly) is one of the most universally treasured. But there’s more to this sugar-coated fable than just cute dwarfs and warbling songbirds. The Brothers Grimm original is full of dark, twisted accents, and it’s these cruel and unusual details that have inspired two of this year’s headline shows. French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj gives Snow White a kinky makeover with the help of legendary fashion icon Jean Paul Gaultier. With a witch in bondage gear and a sensually provocative Snow White, this modern ballet unriddles the psychosexual undercurrents of this childrens’ story. Brisbane’s own La Boite Theatre Company will also present a newly devised reaction to Snow White, created by Lindy Hume, Suzie Miller and Zulya Kamolova that promises to be “enticing and confronting.”

Les Ballet C de la B’s En Avant, Marche!

Dance and Circus productions promise the most exhillerating spectacles of 2016’s programme. American dance prodigy Jonah Bokaer will present Rules of the Game, his collaboration with visual artist Daniel Arsham and multi-award-winning singer-songwriter Pharrell Williams. This Australian exclusive fuses dance, video, music and sculpture and features Williams’ first orchestral score for theatre or dance. Home-grown circus mavericks, Circa, will present an originally devised piece of jaw-dropping physical theatre, Troppo, channelling the madness of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and the magic of Shakespeare’s strange isle in The Tempest.

Berthold has again included a specific cultural showcase in his programme. In 2015, the Democratic Republic of Congo and its turbulent politics came under examination, and this year another politically charged nation will be brought into focus: Ireland. 2016 marks the centenary of the Easter Rising, in which the British Armed Forces and Irish Republican militia clashed on the streets of Dublin and several and several other towns in an ultimately futile insurrection that resulted in the deaths of 450 people. Irish theatre company, Dead Centre, will be 2016’s resident artists, offering a quartet of critically acclaimed productions that celebrate Ireland’s rich theatre history and explore the social, political and psychological vectors of that nation.

Chekhov’s First Play, by Dead Centre

Music features heavily in this year’s selection, with the evolution of the record label, adapting to the increasing dominance of streaming and downloads, as a thread for a host of pop, rock and indie acts. Among the classical works on offer will be a production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Albert Herring, a recital by the Jerusalem String Quartet and a programme of Russian classics presented by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.

Full details of the 2016 Brisbane Festival are available online.