The five lessons travel taught me: Rachel Healy, co-director, Adelaide Festival

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The five lessons travel taught me: Rachel Healy, co-director, Adelaide Festival

By Julietta Jameson
Rachel Healy is joint artistic director of the Adelaide Festival.

Rachel Healy is joint artistic director of the Adelaide Festival.

ATAVISM

When I'm seeing shows in Europe it's common for me to be in a different country every day; in practice this means a lot of time in airports. This truly is the environment where everyone sweats the small stuff: the jostling to be among the first to get on to the plane or the first to get off the plane; seizing the optimum overhead locker space; subtly claiming the armrest, raging at the person in front for putting their seat back. It's a contemporary Hunger Games in which our basest and most competitive instincts are shamefully displayed. It takes a super-human effort to keep the beast at bay but I'm trying – I'm the one inviting you to take the prized aisle space ahead of me when we disembark.

DISRUPTION

I was in Edinburgh last year and in the middle of the night a video game started playing on my phone. Groggy and confused I turned my phone to mute. It turned out I'd been hacked: my phone's video function had been activated and a recording of me sleeping in a darkened room had been uploaded to Facebook; bids worth thousands of dollars had been made on my behalf on eBay, random emails had been sent to my contact list and my phone passwords changed. It was a nightmare to resolve. I'm told that using a hotel's open Wi-Fi system increases the risk of being hacked but the immediate lesson was to turn off my phone completely before sleep. The long-term lesson? Shit happens but digital shit is the worst to clean up.

SPECIFICITY

Whether travelling for work or pleasure, local knowledge is all, unless you have vast amounts of time. A few months ago I attended a showcase of Italian theatre in Rome and one of our board members, Amanda Vanstone, (a former ambassador to Italy) gave me a list of restaurants to try and exactly what to order in each one. I had time to go to only one – Trattoria dell'Omo, a very modest, family-run place near Termini. I ordered according to her instructions: ravioli ricotta e spinaci con burro e salvia. It was the most perfect Italian dish I've ever eaten. I still think about it. When time is limited, beg and borrow the hard-won wisdom of friends and colleagues – in highly distilled form.

LIMITATIONS

In Europe, there are dozens of airlines that fly short trips to all the cities of Europe, and none of them have in-flight entertainment. The choices are limited – look out the window, sleep, or read. And value-adding to the covert encouragement that we spend those in-flight hours with a book is the very limited English-language book selection in most European airports. Faced with this, I've read books that I wouldn't usually pick up: Paul Beatty's The Sellout; Michael Ondaatje's Warlight; Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt. I now feel a frisson of pleasure at the prospect of this literary lucky dip.

In a performing arts management career spanning two decades, Adelaide-born Rachel Healy has held positions with Belvoir Street Theatre, the City of Sydney and the Sydney Opera House. She is joint artistic director of the Adelaide Festival alongside Neil Armfield. In their third program together, the Adelaide Festival will feature 17 Australian premieres across more than 70 events, from March 1-17. See adelaidefestival.com.au

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