Sydney goes pink for the new year

Sydney’s New Year’s Eve festivities will have a pink tinge to them this year thanks to event producer Brenton Kewley, who took inspiration from his experiences as associate producer of the Sydney Gay Games’ opening ceremony.

Sydney’s New Year’s production will begin with a performance of Hey Sydney a tongue-in-cheek parody of Hey Mickey originally written for the Gay Games opening ceremony in 2002.

The song will be performed by the gay and lesbian Door in the Wall Choir in front of the Opera House, as part of a new ceremony designed to welcome the 300,000-odd tourists who spend New Year’s Eve in Sydney watching the fireworks.

For the opening of the television broadcast, the city really wanted to produce a number which talked about Sydney, Kewley told Sydney Star Observer.

So I played a copy of Hey Sydney to our creative director Rhoda Roberts and we thought this deserves to go a hell of a lot further. It’s one of the many legacies that the Gay Games opening ceremony has left behind.

The song is quintessentially Sydney and it’s quintessentially New Year’s Eve, he said, explaining why it was the perfect choice.

It just says it all and it’s fun which is what New Year’s Eve is. It’s a celebration of hope for the future and renewal. We also very much wanted to celebrate ourselves, and this was so well done in the opening ceremony of the Gay Games.

I just think it’s great that we can take something done four years ago to a small audience and now take it right out there. Even though the words have changed, the concept and the idea belongs to our community and I think that says something great about how we’re still defining things as a community, an obviously proud Kewley said before acknowledging the array of talent in the GLBT community.

Adding to the backdrop of the ceremony will be a lights display designed to make the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons look like gifts. When unwrapped, they will display the words welcome to Sydney in English, Gadigal, Mandarin and Greek, marking the start of the evening’s proceedings which will be televised on Channel 10.