Olivia Ansell, artistic director of the Sydney Festival, is proud of what the event has achieved this year.(Anna Kucera)

Sydney Festival director condemns online ‘intimidation’

Sydney Festival director Olivia Ansell has accused activists of “intimidating” artists into boycotting the festival over funding that the event accepted from the Israeli embassy.

“Some artists felt pressured to the extent they had no option but to withdraw, or else they would be publicly shamed online, whilst other artists had a very strong opinion, and one respects those strong opinions. That’s why we live in a democracy,” Ansell said.

“In relation to the intimidation and pressure online: everyone has the right to feel safe, whether that’s physically, mentally or culturally. And I couldn’t say that everybody felt safe out there online during the height of the boycott.”

Activists called for the boycott after Sydney Festival accepted $20,000 in funding from the Embassy of Israel to stage a dance work made by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and performed by the Sydney Dance Company.

More than 30 performers withdrew from the festival, which ended on Sunday, including high-profile comedians Tom Ballard and Judith Lucy.

One of the boycott organisers, Fahad Ali, rejected the notion that artists had been pressured to withdraw.

“It’s a matter of public record that our communications with artists and the Festival board have been consistently respectful,” he said. “We are campaigning against the festival’s complicity with apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and the military and economic intimidation that entails for the Palestinian people.”

Read the article by Nick Gavlin in The Sydney Morning Herald.