And Caspar here – echoing Alex Needham's sentiments. It's been a great festival – Womadelaide included, for me, and also the festival within a festival that was Unsound. I've just ended things up by seeing the final performance of Kamp, which Alex reviewed the other day. It was harrowing, but I'm pleased I managed to catch it, and only regret that there were other shows here that I simply didn't have time to see.

I could pretend that I've researched the following, but in fact it's lifted straight from the festival office's press release - because after all the action here, I'm bushed.

Offering one of the most diverse and exciting programs in many years, the first annual Adelaide Festival closed on Sunday 17 March surpassing its box-office target, with 76 sell-out performances contributing to a total income in excess of $2.6 million across 44 ticketed events.

Adelaide Festival Chief Executive Karen Bryant said: 

“The 2013 Festival has not only exceeded its box-office target, it has generated an increased level of economic impact for the state, proving its value as an annual event.”

The festival is projected to generate a total economic benefit in the vicinity of $25 million with approximately 28% of all ticketed attendances by visitors from interstate and overseas. (All figures above exclude Womadelaide and Turner from the Tate.)

Whilst final attendances for all 54 Adelaide Festival events are still being collated, it is anticipated they will exceed 327,000, including Womadelaide and Turner from the Tate.

Genial scouser David Sefton, responsible for pulling the artistic side of things together, also reckons (ahem ... according to this bit of paper): 

It’s been a thrilling experience ... throughout the festival people have embraced the unconventional and diverse range of shows on offer. It’s left me with no doubt that our Adelaide Festival audiences are hungry for challenging and progressive work. I can’t wait to let everyone know what I’ve got up my sleeve for next year!

And having had nattered to David at various points over the last week, you know what? I believe him.

To see what the Guardian team made of it all, have a butcher's around the site we created for the festival, which we've been proud to support. Here's some more facts, and tweets … until next time.

(Oh, and if anyone finds the pair of Ray-Bans I lost, just let me know!)

2013 Adelaide Festival Facts
• 54 events, 29 exclusive to Adelaide
• 314 performances
• 27 Australian premieres - 25 from the performance program and two from the visual arts program
• 14 theatre, five dance, 22 music events, alongside Adelaide Writers’ Week, two visual art exhibitions featuring the work of Laurie Anderson at Samstag Museum of Art and Turner from the Tate at Art Gallery of South Australia
• Almost 1100 artists and writers
• 440 International artists
• 654 Australian artists
• 520 artists from SA
• International artists from countries including New Zealand, Czech Republic, East Timor, Germany, Iceland, Belgium, Canada, Poland, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, South Africa, Spain, The Netherlands, France, USA, Norway, UK, Italy and Cuba

Alex here on the final night of the Adelaide festival and I've just posted my review of last night's Unsound Adelaide, which saw Lustmord, Demdike Stare, Pole and Ben Frost take the audience into deep, dark and extremely loud places. At one point I felt that my entire body was vibrating, but it was an exhilarating experience - and one that set off every car alarm in the vicinity.

I spoke to Dan Stewart, an electronic music fan from Perth, between Pole and Ben Frost - the latter being my favourite performer of the night. Here's his review.

While that was happening, Caspar was having a less enjoyable time at Flamenco Hoy - read his review here. 

This afternoon I've been the last of my collegues to experience Ontrerand Goerd's A Game of You, which I found more moving than I anticipated. Maybe it's that I'm very easy to read - or simply just a sap - but they certainly managed to push my buttons. It seemed a strangely apt show for me to end the festival on - small-scale and personal.

Here's Jane Howard for the last time with the tweets. First up, the Quartet who played at Unsound with Demdike Stare.

You could sleep over at Barrio last night if you made a $100 donation to Mission Australia. This person clearly did.

With that I'll sign off. I've had an amazing time - thanks to the many people who've been fantastically helpful and encouraging of this, our first - but hopefully not last - experience covering the Adelaide festival. Big up to everyone who's been reading, especially all of you who've tweeted, commented and who we've met around town. G'day!

I (Alex) have just posted my interview with the fascinating Lustmord, whose gig I'm very much looking forward to tonight. Here is on playing for the Church of Satan and exploring the site where the atomic bomb was first developed.

Some other stuff we've posted recently: here's Jane Howard's interview with Trudi Klever, one of the performers of Kamp.

Alicia Canter has left for Sydney, but before she got the plane she made this excellent gallery.

Then there are reviews by Caspar of Unsound and Solaris, while I give my verdict on Archie Roach.

Jane Howard has been perusing Twitter. First of all, the sonic assault of last night's Unsound caused a tweet sensation:

Archie Roach was mellower but no less potent:

Hi, it's Caspar again here, fresh as a daisy after a night spent seeing Solaris at the Town Hall and then suffering a full-on aural and physical assault at the Queen's Theatre, both events courtesy of Unsound.

Here's one review.

And here's another (spoiler: I give Hype Williams and co five stars).

Earlier in the day I'd spoken to Mat Schulz, the guy from Wagga Wagga responsible for this festival within a festival.

Schulz left Australia 15 years ago for Krakow in Poland, thinking he'd have the head space there to devote time to writing novels. Instead, a small experimental music festival that he started grew and grew, and now as well as an annual week-long event in his adopted home city, there have been a series of shows in New York, with plans for something in London later this year.

I asked him about his guiding ethos.

The guiding principle is that everything we put on has to have some experimental aims. The lineups have always been pretty varied – everything from classical and post-classical music to the more experimental indie bands. But most of it is electronic music because a lot of people experimenting with music are playing electronic music. It's still hard to define what it is. Other festivals working in similar territory use terms like “ambitious music” or “adventurous music” but none of those really capture what it is ...

He added how excited he was to bring Unsound to Adelaide because of the chance it brings to expose the sort of music he loves – he raved to me about acts on the bill like Hype Williams and also the UK artist Laurel Halo - to an audience that might otherwise never get the chance to think or experience it live. “It's a brave thing for the Adelaide festival to do!”

We also talked about how the most challenging music seems to always end up seeping into the mainstream – “look at dubstep! It's almost a dirty word now. And the same thing is starting to happen with noise ...”; whether the benefits of technology are always unambiguous – “software programs like Ableton make it much easier to create quite adequate music, but it's just as hard as ever to find your own voice”; and why what he calls experimental music shouldn't simply be regarded as something cerebral.

Oh no! A lot of it is very physical - with a lot of bass - and there's a big tendency towards the immersive. A lot of this music makes you feel uneasy, and that is somehow enjoyable.

And what other sorts of music does Schulz like? Kenny Rogers?

Well, yes … I love country music!

Afternoon, Alex here and I've just posted a review of last night's show by Archie Roach. He's a remarkable performer and inspired incredible audience warmth - probably the most I've seen all festival. Some of it will have been due to the extraordinary personal hardships he's experiences in the past three years - his partner has died, he's had a stroke and lung cancer - but as I say in the review, he is a powerful performer and didn't need anyone's sympathy vote.

Here's the verdict of audience member Sharon Golan.

After that, deterred by the enormous queue at Barrio, I went to Tuxedo Cat, where a mere seven uniformed police turned up at about midnight, presumably in search of liquor license violations. A bit heavy-handed, no?

Caspar here again. Here's a review of Raime, Lustmord and co at Unsound.

Meanwhile, a possibly disturbing result of my experience at A Game of You ... the person I described in it, has posted a reaction at the end of my review, and tweeted me ... 

Jane Howard has been rounding up the festival tweets, most of which concern the Barrio's Animal House, in which a variety of furry mammals were brought in for festivalgoers to pet.

Just across the road, an electronic music festival was also taking place. Sadly, no camels participated.

Morning, Alex here and last night the theatrical first night at the Adelaide festival was Nosferatu by Polish company TR Warszawa, who staged a very popular and innovative Macbeth at Edinburgh a few years ago. Alas Nosferatu is a bit of a dud - I've posted my review here.

After the show I spoke to some audience members who also seemed unenthusiastic. Here is a considered take from Susannah Jared who was perturbed by what she regarded as the production's sexism.

After that I went to the Barrio where the theme was "animal house". The camels and Shetland ponies had just left, but some very cute miniature pigs remained.

Yesterday afternoon I also wrote up and posted a quick interview with Iva Bittová, who was fantastic. Very sorry that I missed her show last night.

Good morning. Caspar here. Brain still in meltdown after the start of Unsound last night. A proper report will follow, but some images below perhaps give you a flavour of the event ...

Tonight there's more with performances from ambient artist Tim Hecker (who also featured last night with Oneohtrix Point Never); the fascinating Actress (Darren Cunningham to his mum; read more here); and the equally spellbinding Hype Williams.

The latter are a mysterious entity. This is from an interview by Ben Beaumont-Thomas with them in the Guardian last year:

Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland – not their real names – have claimed various things about themselves over the three years they've been together. That they released music by putting USB sticks in apples and selling them in Brixton market. That they're mates with New York rapper Cam'ron. That Inga recently tried out for Arsenal's womens' team. That Dean was caught robbing raccoons from taxidermists and joined the Nation of Islam. One press shot features them lurking in the background of the infamous 1997 meeting between Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher. Their name is a lie in a way – Hype Williams is already the name of a very successful rap video director. "Life's pretty exciting – some shit is true, some stuff really does happen," Blunt says. But there's no telling what shit is true and what shit isn't, a feeling enhanced by their shadowplaying music that flits between dub, rap and pop as samples stumble in, motheaten by echo.

I've seen the pair play in London before, but that one time, the dry ice in the venue was so thick and the tiny place so crowded that I couldn't actually see them. So it was exciting for me at the Queen's Theatre here last night when I spotted a pair I assumed to be Dean and Inge ... I'll perhaps write about this later, if I also manage to catch up with the folk behind Unsound to hear why they've made it here to Adelaide.

And here's a review of Severed Heads last night.

Caspar again. I now need to nip back to the Quen's Theatre for the Unsound festival that forms part ofthe bigger Adelaide shebang over the next three nights. Four hours of dark electronica await me tonight alone!

I'm particularly looking forward to Oneohtrix Point Never and, later, Raime - more about them here, plus vital inside knowledge: the poor boys can't afford breakfast in their posh hotel (they told me last night), so if you spot them out in Adelaide, perhaps be kind and buy them a bun.

And here is that promised chat with Tom Ellard from Severed Heads!

Well, Lustmord (AKA Brian William) was absolutely fascinating. There can't be any other people who've had cocktails with Burt Bacharach, dinner with Kenneth Anger and an American road trip with Chris and Cosey, formerly of Throbbing Gristle. I'll post that interview in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, here's Jane Howard with those #adlfest tweets - Unsound-flavoured today:

Good morning, Caspar here. Events have now overtaken this live blog. Yesterday I posted a review of A Game of You, the third piece from Belgian company Ontroerend Goed at the Dunstan Playhouse, with a passing reference to the papal conclave, and now we have a new pope.

BIG SPOILER ALERT!

A more closely kept secret than the identity of the new pontiff is what actually happens to audience members at the show. If you've not been, please immediately ignore the embedded audio below. If you have, and you've read my review, you'll understand what's going on (although this recording is a shortened version of the full thing and doesn't contain the final, dismaying judgment passed on me.)

It's not the only Ontroerend show from which punters take something away – or rather, are giving something. Those like my colleague Jane who saw Internal received a letter in the post several days later. Photographic evidence below also.

From the festival centre I then hot-footed it across town to meet Tom Ellard, the Severed Heads man. We had a fascinating chat, from which I'll pick out the bones and turn into something later today. And then I went to their gig, in the beautiul Queen's Theatre. More on that later too.

Alex checking in, and while my colleagues were watching Severed Heads I had a great Fringe experience watching Wolf Creek: the Musical at Format, a ramshackle venue just off Hindley Street. I wasn't sure what to expect - and I've always been too chicken to see the film - but it was genuinely very funny. Props should particularly go to Kel Balnaves as the axe-wielding serial killer, James McCann on the piano and the man playing a variety of parts including a frog and a campfire. Showing the industrious and enterprising nature of the Fringe here, each cast member seems to have their own individual Fringe show too.

Back at the official festival, I'm off to interview "dark ambient" maestro Lustmord who is playing as part of the Unsound strand. Here he is doing his thing:

Alex here. I've just posted my report on the Adelaide Fringe. Has comedy squeezed out other art forms? Are there enough bums to put on the seats? Do the artists have to take a financial bath?

I spoke to quite a few performers and other interesting folk, but couldn't quite fit in my chat with Sxip Shirey, composer/performer of Limbo, topping this bill at the Garden of Earthly Delights and which Caspar has reviewed here.

Shirey is a veteran of the Edinburgh fringe and compared the two places like so:

It's a little more chilled. Instead of being rainy all the time it's sunny and you can buy kangaroo meat to eat.

So now you know.

Jane Howard has been rounding up those festival tweets. The first is from Adelaidean Pete Muller, who takes it upon himself to see dozens of fringe and festival shows per year - this is his dispatch from his 131st:

And then an hour later:

A tweet about a show Alex saw last night and another he's thinking about seeing tonight:

This is a walking tour which purports to "crowdsource the quiet" although our team's verdict was that there was no quiet to be found. However, it worked for this person:

Good afternoon, Caspar here, fresh from a foray into the world of the Fringe. Last night I saw and enjoyed Limbo, a new show from Strut & Fret that heads to London after packing up in Adelaide.

After a lot of tramping about over the last few days, it was a joy to sit down in the amazing Spiegeltent in the Garden of Unearthly Delights. I felt exhausted just watching the hand-balancing, sword-swallowing and more. Here's my full review, with a taste of some other folks' reaction below.

Tonight I'll be watching Severed Heads, who come to the Festival for a one-off show at the Queen's Theatre. The band are one of festival director David Sefton's favourites, and as he told us the other week:

"They are cult artists and I played their records in my bedroom in my parents' house .... I went to meet the lead singer Tom Ellard [now a university film lecturer in Sydney], and the first thing he said to me was: 'Just don't ask me to reform the Severed Heads.'"

But with a wave of Sefton's magic wand ....

At this point I must confess I don't know much about them, other than they formed in Sydney in 1979, using tape loops and synths to create an unholy squall before developing into something a teensy bit more pop. They split in 2008, but reformed for a 30th anniversary show in 2010, and then toured with Gary Numan. But after tonight, that's it, for ever. Promise. Apparently. More later, but first, you too can enjoy the Hauntology House, an online installation - or "musical toy for your computer" - created by Ellard for the Festival ...

Alex here and I've posted my review of Kamp, which you can read here. For me, it was one of those shows that came into focus only a couple of hours after it finished and I'd had the chance to take it in and what it was trying to do. 

After the performance, the three people onstage invite the audience down to view the set - a minature version of Auschwitz - more closely, and discuss the issues with them. A fellow British journalist here, Etan Smallman, was shocked at the callousness of the some of the audience responses - people taking photographs to upload to their Facebook pages and clamouring for a good look at the gas chambers. I also was also taken aback by the response of a middle-aged man I spoke to who said that Kamp contained "every cliche about the Holocaust". What was he expecting - the Nazis depicted as the good guys?

We had a good - and only slightly heated - discussion about it this morning with some of the Australian folks we are hanging out with here, and they said that the Holocaust isn't really taught in great detail in Australian schools - especially not compared to the Gallipoli campaign, annually commemorated here on 25 April, Anzac day. Being so far from Europe, the Holocaust feels rather remote. All the more reason, I suppose that Kamp should be seen - and to be fair to the people of Adelaide, it is a sell-out.

I'm off to do three interviews back-to-back now: Czech violin and film star Iva Bittová, the dancers from Flamenco Hoy and Jason Craig, performing Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage. Anything I should ask them?

Finally, back at home Adam Boult has posted a list of the five best Australian bands you've never heard of. Any more we should include?

Alex checking in. I've just been to see Kamp by Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern. It's part stage work, part installation which depicts Auschwitz using puppets and models, which are filmed live by a minature camera, the results projected onto the back of the stage. I'll post my review tomorrow but it seemed to divide opinion among the people I spoke to afterwards - one man said he was not merely unmoved but bored by it. One theatre-goer, Constantine Costi, from Sydney, thought it was a "staggering and claustrophobic work". Here's his take.

Still slightly recovering from a long old night that included a WOMADelaide afterparty, it's Caspar here again. What I have managed to do is work up a conversation I had with Hugh Masekela - not in the bar in the wee hours, although he was there, rubbing shoulders with the festival's crew, but earlier on site - for our What I'm Thinking series with artists here in Adelaide for these two weeks. It's here.

There's more music to come this week, including a mini Unsound festival, featuring some of the world's more interesting electronic acts (not the sort of thing I imagine Masekela would care for!). It's an event with its origins in Poland and Australia - from 2001 to 2006 it seems it was part of the Wagga Space Program.

The bill has changed a bit since first advertised, but good news for me is that I really like a couple of the acts who are now involved. One of them is Hype Williams, whose Dean Blunt in his solo guise put out one of my favourite records of last year. Here it is to whet the appetite.

More tweets spotted by Jane Howard:

I've just posted a review of Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage, which had its first night in Adelaide at the German Club last night.

I had my reservations but theatre-goer Lydia Nicholson, who I interviewed after the show, was much more enthusiastic. Here she is with her verdict.

A quick Audioboo I made at the Future Music Festival last night. Madeon was DJing and not taking any prisoners - he went into a pulverising electro version of the Killers' Mr Brightside after this.

In the wee small hours of this morning - just before the aftershow got underway - Caspar posted his five-star review of WOMADelaide. He writes:

Goran Bregovic came within a whisker of stealing the weekend. The Marco Pierre White lookalike is a masterful chef d'orchestre, as they say in other parts of the world; he looked like the boss man in his immaculate silver suit, but stay seated for most of his by turns moving and then uproarious performance, letting his superb 18-piece band - involving, I think, a mixture of authentic Gypsy players such as the Kosovan refugee goc drummer Muharem Redzepi and conservatory pros including saxophonist Stojan Dimovget - get on with it. But for the odd moment when he did calm things down - as with a rendition of his hilarious In the Death Car - he mesmerised, too.

Our brilliant photographer Alicia Canter has also added some more images to her gallery here. Here's a taster.

As Caspar mentioned a while ago, I (Alex) had an extraordinary early evening away from the Adelaide festival when I looked in a shindig of a very different kind, the Future Music Festival. It was a bit like old-style Glastonbury in reverse - instead of all rock music with a token dance tent, this was a full on, multi-stage EDM/brostep assault, with one rock stage in the middle which Bloc Party were headlining.

The crowd were young, up for it and indulging in extra-musical activties including a foam party - sponsored by Strongbow - and a wrestling ring in which macho types could batter their mate in front of a rag tag and bobtail of mildly interested onlookers. Suffice it to say that the last time I'd experienced that much naked flesh and unbridled testosterone was at Gay Pride on Clapham Common circa 1995.

Into this melee strode probably the perfect act - Dizzee Rascal, roadtesting some new material so unabashedly pop it makes Dance Wiv Me sound like Throbbing Gristle. Not that I'm complaining - the top 10 is an infinitely more interesting place with Dizzee in it, and if new song (cough) Arse Like That is just a couple of notes away from being Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, who's counting?

It was hard to leave Dizzee, but the opening riff of I Wanna be Adored has a Pavlov's dogs-style reaction in northern men of a certain age, so I followed it to the "indie stage" where the Stone Roses were second on the bill. The first signs weren't good. The crowd was nearly as thin as Ian Brown's voice, and John Squires had a leather waistcoat on.

Yet as the sun went down and Waterfall turned into Don't Stop, something magical happened. It swiftly became apparently that the Stone Roses were sounding utterly brilliant - so tight that they were almost telepathic, pumping new blood through songs you thought worn out with overuse. Then they played a 15-miunte version of Fool's Gold, yet no-one wanted it to end. I swear it wasn't the sunshine, or the cans of gin and tonic. The Stone Roses were imperial.

I had to leave after that to see ... an adaptation of Beowulf in the main festival. I'll post a review in the morning. But the chords of This is the One are still crashing through my head, and will be for quite a while.

Oh, but he came close. This is a final dispatch from the WOMADelaide festival site, which I wasn't going to bother with but it's only just gone midnight, and even though I am disgustingly drenched in sweat, I do want to say that Goran Bregovic just came within a whisker of stealing the weekend. The Marco Pierre White lookalike is a masterful chef d'orchestre, as they say in other parts of the world; he looked like the boss man in his immaculate silver suit, but stay seated for most of his by turns moving and then uproarious performance, letting his superb 18-piece band - involving, I think, a mixture of authentic Gypsy players such as the Kosovan refugee goc drummer Muharem Redzepi and conservatory pros including saxophonist Stojan Dimovget (my research) - get on with it. But for the odd moment when he did calm things down - as with a rendition of his hilarious In the Deathcar - he mesmerised, too.

Someone at the festival this wekeend (was it the band Moriarty?) said that Adelaide has the highest number of serial killers per head of population in the world. I don't know about that. But on the basis of the dancing as Bregovic's set came to a close, there are certainly plenty of bona fide nutters here. Fair play all round.

Or as he indeed said at the end: "If you don't go crazy, you are not normal."

Caspar here again, and WOMADelaide is winding down, although the way in which the Herd have just ripped up the second stage with their Aussie hip hop rather gives the lie to that.

Did I happen to mention earlier that it's been hot? I feared for the health of a couple of fellahs dancing uproariously in the full glare of the mid-afternoon sun to Souad Massi earlier, especially as while she looked on the shy side when I saw her at Taste the World, she was really rocking it now. Then I enjoyed more rock and a touch of the blues from East Company, who come from the Yirrkala community in North East Arnhem Land, and whose set included a nice shout out to Gurrumul.

I then got a bit sidetracked interviewing, first, Hugh Masekela and then Jimmy Cliff. Hard life, I know. I'll write them up in due course, but the headlines are: Hugh isn't so convinced by stories of Africa's economic development; and Jimmy actually does rate Cool Runnings up there with The Harder they Come ...

Now I'm going to catch Goran Bregovic, who brings all the action to a close on the main stage. A full review of the festival will follow, I reckon. Time to get out of this cabin where I've been working, even if it still is air-conditioned ... (I know, hard life, etc etc etc.)

It's been grand.

They call it Mad March for a reason: not only is there the Festival and Womadelaide, but today the Future music festival blew into town, featuring the likes of bro-step champ Avicii, Dizzee Rascal and the more slimline Bloc Party - plus some old Mancunian legends, and Alex only went and caught a key hour of the action ...

Jane Howard has been rounding up those tweets:

And someone's having a very good, if confusing time

Afternoon, it's Alex Needham here. Yesterday I said that I was going to interview Joeri Smet from the controversial Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, whose one-to-one immersive theatre trilogy is one of the talking points of the Adelaide festival - one of the issues being whether it exploits its audience. That piece is now online here. Before I interviewed him I asked for questions and got this via Twitter: 

Ahem. I've also just posted a piece by the eminent Australian author Peter Robb in which he ruminates on men's fears of turning 40 - and whether they're justified. I'd be particularly interest in what women have to say about this, so please let me know in the comments here, there or on Twitter.

Good afternoon, Caspar here again on the last day of WOMADelaide – and if today is supposed to be a more relaxed affair, it's hotter than ever out there, with the temperature forecast to touch 38 degrees. Later there'll be performances from Goran Bregovic – here's an interview with the Balkan singer published in the Guardian last Friday – as well as Aussie hip hop outfit the Herd, and talents from across Oceania for a Sing Sing performance, plus a number of acts familiar from this long weekend in Mad March already.

First, though, I mentioned last night that after their rip-snorting showing on the second stage, I grabbed Tim Rogers and Lance Ferguson from the Bamboos for a brief chat in the bijoux garden in the backstage area. I've written that up here if you want to take a look. Turns out they're Katy Perry fans.

And here's a fabulous gallery of some of our photographer Alicia Canter's best photos from the festival so far. Plus some more reaction from the wonnerfulworldoftwitter (in which I fulfil a request) ...

Finally, in what is one miniscule step for mankind but a giant leap for me (and has taken about 48 hours), I have posted my first video, an interview with Adelaide native Kevin Cratham who kindly gave me his verdict after Friday's showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Take it away, Kevin.

Alex Needham reporting for duty after a blazing hot afternoon and evening exploring Adelaide's fringe. With Adelaide arts journalist Jane Howard as my guide, I saw three shows in five hours - and two of them were brilliant.

The first was a circus show called A Simple Space by Gravity and Other Myths at the Birdcage, an old cinema near Adelaide's East Terrace. My expectations weren't high - like Jarvis Cocker, I don't approve of things like tumbling - but the five performers, four men and one woman, were amazing. With nothing but a mat and a live drummer, they created a riveting show of the most incredible physical feats. You haven't lived until you've seen two blokes stand on each other's shoulders then suspend a woman, Jascha Boyce, on a pole between them - who then performs gymnastics about 12 ft in the air. Or a backflip competition. Alas about five minutes before the end, in a routine in which Boyce was flung around the room, one of the men dropped her, which made the rest of the show a rather heart-in-mouth affair. But it was a total triumph. You can see Gravity and Other Myths doing their thing here.

After that we went to the Gluttony space - which includes venues, bars and random paintings of Justin Bieber ...

... to watch Anthropoetry, a show by Brits Ben Mellor (words) and Dan Steele (music). It took the form of a journey around the human body, demonstrated by Steele, who wore a body stocking with pictures of the vital organs in the relevant places. Mellor, who in 2009 won Radio 4's poetry slam, certainly has a way with words, and his rhymes and beatboxing landed somewhere between Loose Ends and Mike Skinner. I particularly enjoyed Pain (inspired by the nervous system), which leaned on nu-metal to create something brilliantly witty and clever. I'm not sure that doing a song about the pasty tax 12,000 miles from the UK was very wise, but it was a virtuoso yet touching hour, a salutary reminder of just how much undiscovered talent is out there. Sign them up, someone.

After two great shows in a row I knew I was pushing my luck to see a third, The Book of Loco, and so it sadly proved. Written and performed by Alirio Zavarce in a space in the Tandanya gallery, which houses the largest collection of indigenous art in Australia, I wanted to like it. The space was walled in by cardboard boxes, on which were projected images in a way familiar from Es Devlin's stage designs but still impressive to see pulled off on a shoestring.

Unfortunately, the play lost me when Zavrice started passing a plate of shit around the audience (mercifully with clingfilm on top of it) and then tried to demonstrate that it could be sold for $20. This was to make a point about the intrinsic value of money. The script - which leaned on Zavrice's real-life experiences as a Venezuelan immigrant in Australia, and could have been moving in other circumstaces - was full of this half-baked student guff. Worse still, the show didn't know when to stop. Yet it pulled in a good-sized audience who applauded it warmly.

I finished the night with a drink in the Tuxedo Cat, a huge venue which contains six theatres and seems to be ground zero of Adelaide's fringe theatre scene. It's got a brilliant atmosphere and I can't wait to go back - probably not for this show, mind.

Caspar here again, with sore feet after a long day spent traipsing around the WOMADelaide site, however compact it might be. I half dozed off during the performance from Hindustani classical vocalist Manjiri Kelkar and one of the great singers in the southern Carnatic tradition Sudha Ragunathan, which is meant as a compliment, and I'm also pleased to report that I didn't then completely burn as I lay exposed on the grass. That said, even though the photographic evidence below doesn't tell this story, I was then seen dancing to the excellent Novalima, the band of Peruvian expats, who even brought out their notorious donkey jawbone (sounds like a metaphor; it isn't) - so perhaps the sun had got to me.

Otherwise there was the Soweto Gospel Choir, who finished their joyous set with a tribute to Miriam Makeba in the form of a version of Pata Pata, and then Oh Happy Day, the classic made famous by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. “I don't know anything about South African music,” said a woman in the crowd next to me, “but I know I like this,” a nice sentiment, although perhaps next time - just for kicks - they should knock out a Morrissey number.

On the main stage, Salif Keita came next, who is a decade younger than last night's headliner, Hugh Masekela. To begin with he looked a contained presence by comparison, sporting shades, moving little behind the mic. His band struggled to connect, too, partly I think because as well as a kora player, percussionists and a lead guitarist, they employ a figure hunched behind a keyboard, triggering sounds and samples from a computer – something to which I've precisley zero objections, except now the bigger band sound they were trying to emulate sounded slightly thin. And while there were classic songs – Yamore, for instance, from my very favourite of his albums, 2002's Moffou – he lent heavily on his new record, Talé, which is produced by Philippe Cohen Solal from the Gotan Project and which aims to create a contemporary dance sound. It only started to work as the sky darkened, but – big but – by the end, when they were locked into the groove, and the kora player was doing his best Hendrix impression, playing his instrument behind his back, it was stunning – far more convincing than on record.

Special mention must go to sinuous dancer-cum-backing vocalist Gladys Gambie, who not only took Cesaria Evora's part on Yamore, but also that of Salif's youngest daughter Natty on the track of that name which is my favourite tune on Talé. And does it need repeating that Salif Keita himself, who first appeared at Womadelaide 20 years ago, can sing a bit?

He was also dancing by the end, perhaps buoyed by the crowd serenading him with Happy Birthday, at his invitation earlier (only slightly strange as this doesn't tally with my extensive research).

Over on the second stage, it was the turn of the Bamboos, with their new guest vocalist Tim Rogers. That union follows the soaraway success of I Got Burned – which inevitably ended the set – but before then the singer had done enough to suggest that he merits the job on a permanent basis, something he joked about. More about this in the morning, because I've just had a chat with Lance from the band and Tim. Then little respite before the evening's main headliner, Jimmy Cliff.

He wasn't really for me. He played all his classics, but there wasn't the same musical questing evident in Salif Keita's show (interesting that they are pretty much exact contemporaries). Maybe it was just that I was disappointed that when he asked the crowd if they were aware of a movie that spread the reggae gospel worldwide, he actually did mean The Harder They Come, and not that bona fide classic Cool Runnings – whence his cover of Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now, a hit for him in 1993 and which featured in the set. As did his version of Hakuna Matata from The Lion King, which was just a step too Octopus's Garden far for me.

Apologies for sounding churlish. The good news is that the action continues tomorrow – with Goran Bregovic, more of Bassekou Kouyate and more. Until then.

Hi, it's Caspar Llewellyn Smith, back at WOMADelaide for the third day.

It's scorchio out there - the hottest day yet – and it makes you feel a bit for any performers who might think they've not drawn a big crowd, when in fact the audience is dispersed some distance away, seeking any shade that's going. It hasn't meant the crowds haven't lapped the music up. I just caught a bit of the Azerbaijani singer Alim Qasimov and his band on the main stage, and “transcendental” is the right word, even though his deeply spiritual music feels made for colder climes (I checked: it's a temperate 9 degrees in Baku right now).

I also wandered off to see Jimmy Cliff talk, but disappointingly, as with Salf Keita yesterday, he cancelled. Jet lag perhaps. Both play the main stage tonight. So instead I popped my head into the Taste the World tent, where local foodie Rosa Matto was talking to the charming Algerian singer Souad Massi as she cooked couscous – alas, Australian couscous from a packet, not the real sing – with white sauce, which as you asked involves 1kg leg of lamb cut into pieces, 6 zucchinis, 4 turnips, 3 finely chopped onions, some chickpeas, cinammon powder, olive oil, coriander, salt, pepper. Bet you're happy to know that. More of this sort of exciting journalism as it happens through the day.

Jane Howard has been rounding up some more Adelaide festival tweets:

Wait, there was a swarm of bees at the theatre yesterday? So it would seem:

And finally:

Alex Needham signing in on a sunny Sunday in Adelaide. I've just posted a powerful piece by the Afro-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe about the oppression of the Aboriginal people, and how it weighed on her mind at Adelaide writers' week, until she met an Aboriginal woman - a fellow writer - at a books signing. Read it here.

I'm about to go to the Adelaide festival venue to interview Joeri Smet of Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, whose trilogy of shows are among the most controversial at the festival. Read Claire Armitstead's review of The Smile off Your Face here. The show they finish today is called Internal which caused quite a stir when performed at Edinburgh in 2009. Lyn Gardner wondered whether it exploited the audience, and whether the theatre company were equipped to help them with any resulting emotional fallout.

Later on, Caspar will have more from Womad.

Alex Needham here. This evening I saw the final performance of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart by the National Theatre of Scotland, which got a well-deserved stnding ovation. As John Crace says in his five-star review, the show which takes place in a pub - the German Club in Adelaide, for the city's German community (I recommend the bockwurst) - and conjures a hilarious and complex evening out of almost nothing but some incredibly agile writing - in rhyming couplets at that! - and performers who seem to be able to do almost anything - singing, playing musical instruments, and of course acting. It's an extraordinary piece for theatre and I'm glad I saw it.

After that, to research a piece I'm writing I went to the fringe club, where the fringe performers and theatremakers seem to hang out after hours, and chatted to a lot of interesting people about Adelaide's fringe - incredibly, the biggest in the southern hemisphere - and how it has evolved over the years. Apparently comedians dominate these days, and according to one of the judges of the comedy awards, they're usually male and crude. She then told me a joke which would probably close this blog down if I printed it, so it wasn't prudishness talking. Women comics of Australia, your country needs you.

After the throng gyrated to a selection of music ranging from Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite to Snoop Dogg's Drop it Like it's Hot, a juggler took to the stage dressed as a German white rasta - think of a spin on Ali G. At that point I made my excuses and left. If you're at the festival, do let us know what you've been seeing by posting below.

It's Caspar Llewellyn Smith again.

So a day that began with Hugh Masekela in conversation finished with him headlining the main stage at Womadelaide, but first came several great performances. I particularly enjoyed Moriarty, a group from France whose parents were mainly American, and who named themselves after the hero in Kerouac's On the Road. They sound like they belong down a dirt track way off any US interstate, mining the blues and old time rock'n'roll, with singer Rosemary Standley looking quite the part; but there were sharp twists too, such as a quirky cover of Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence.

Bogota's LA-33 also impressed on the main stage, although for someone who's not the biggest salsa fan, just as entertaining was what I caught of their apperance at the Taste the World stage, where acts brave enough appear to cook a dish from their native country. I'll try and report properly on some more culinary action from there tomorrow (the Savoy Family Cajun Band sound appetising).

Then there was Antibalas, the Brooklyn-based afrobeat outfit, who as mentioned previously suffered the death of singer Amayo's mother in Nigeria yesterday; he dedicated their performance to her and to mothers everywhere, and they blasted their way through the late afternoon in uplifting fashion. And also I really liked the crazed tarantellas of what I saw of Nidi D'Arac.

The talk of the festival so far has, however, probably been the Compagnie Luc Amoros's “Blank Page”, a piece of performance art set to music on Stage 3 over the course of three nights. It involves six young artists working from a 10-metre high stage that is clad in clear perspex panels, which they then paint over throughout the course of an hour, changing the imagery; think Rolf Harris, only artier. And in fact, while some of the political messaging struck a slightly gauche chord, it was captivating, and the results – particularly the climax, when they conjured a Gauguin image – memorable.

Best, though, was Masekela, who completely enchanted the vast crowd basking before him on the main stage. He knows how to entertain – busting some dance moves, playing famous songs like Stimela, talking about the environment ("Let's make a resolution that when we see someone shitting on nature, we're going to say 'get off the pot!'" – but when he blows softly on his horn, it's something else again.

“Not too bad for a boy from a shebeen,” he said at one point, talking about his career and the distance it stretches from the township in South Africa in which he was born in 1939 – and it's a phrase that might have served notice on his performance tonight. But better yet was at the very end, when the compere urged further applause for a real legend, and the 73-year old, already off stage but stilled mic-ed up, yelled back: “No one's a legend!”

Some further Tweets from today and from last night at WOMADelaide

Day 2 of WOMADelaide began with a talk from Hugh Masekela at the Speakers Corner stage. This is Caspar Llewellyn Smith again.

I'd actually bumped into the 73-year old last night, and asked whether he'd ever met Archie Shepp, the radical late 60s saxophonist, simply because I've been listening to his oeuvre recently. And of course Masekela had: “I knew Archie well … I never liked his music.” That led to a discussion about his close friend Miles Davis, which included a great Miles impersonation and the view that Miles lost the plot when he ventured into that Sly Stone/ Stockhausen thing of his in the early 70s. “I told him I'd come see him play again when he started playing music again.”

On this Saturday morning, in a front of a crowd desperately fanning themselves in the sticky heat, he was at it again, a little bit, casually mentioning his friendship with Bob Marley, for instance. But he can't help it if he's known and worked with several of the greats, because he is one himself, and a measure of that was his insistence here, talking of politics, that “the ordinary person is the hero of every society. In a place like South Africa, the real heroes are the unknown people”.

It was also a delight to hear Masekela talk about the importance to him of his school geography lessons: “we learnt how to draw the outline of every country, their physical features .. their products, their climate” etc, which, he complained doesn't happen any more It meant that when he left South Africa after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and started his peripatetic existence that continues to this day – he has homes in South Africa, Ghana and California, though as he told me “I live in airports and hotels and festivals” - nowhere he went felt foreign to him.

“I don't recognise borders,” he told the audience, but talked about the vital cultural traditions of Africa. “If there were no Africans in America, it wouldn't be the place it is today – they'd still be wearing white wigs. Without Louis Armstrong, they'd still be walking straight, without a dip in their hip.” (Masekela, of course, once knew Armstrong too.)

Right, now for more music, and perhaps something to eat – a measure of how civilised Womadelaide can be is pictured …

Jane has been rounding up some #adlfest tweets:

And my favourite (from the outgoing arts editor of Time Out Sydney)

We've just posted a couple more pieces. First, Claire Armitstead gets the story behind Barrio, the after-hours place where the festival lets its hair down, feasts in the Naughty Corner - and sometimes handles large insects.

Second, Jane Howard reviews What the Body Does Not Remember, the Australian debut of a seminal dance piece by the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus.

I'm afraid I can't endorse the comment by JJRichardson on my 2001 review that said 'In eight years it will be 2001 in Adelaide', but it did make me laugh.

This morning I read an interesting interview (which isn't online) with David Sefton, the Adelaide festival's director, in local paper The Advertiser. There's a good anecdote:

On arrival, Sefton admitted he is constantly having to explain the difference between the Fringe and the Festival. He once explained to a confused soul that only one of the Fringe or the Festival would have Puppetry of the Penis on the program. The reply was, "You have that on at the Festival?"

Speaking on the fringe, my plan is to explore it over the next couple of nights, so if you have any tips, please post them here or tweet @alexneedham74. Might this be a good place to start?

This is Alex Needham on a rainy Saturday morning in Adelaide. Yesterday was spent getting my bearings and also watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Adelaide symphony orchestra. It's about 20 years since I last saw it, and that was on TV. To see it on a big screen with a live orchestra was an overwhelming experience which I've reviewed here.

I also interviewed two of my fellow cinemagoers about the experience on film which will hopefully be live soon. One of them, Adelaide native Stephen, shared his theory about the film's famously enigmatic end. He believes that at the end (SPOILER ALERT) Dave is reborn as master of the universe.

The rest of the day was spent getting my bearings and also watching a bit of Womadelaide, which my colleagues Caspar Llewellyn Smith and Alicia Canter are covering in detail over the next few days. The festival takes place in the splendid surroundings of the Botanical Gardens.

Here's backstage where plants are in abundance. The man walking in the distance is from the New York-based band Antibalas. They play tonight at 7pm.

Late in the evening I saw the Alim Quasimov Ensemble play, led by the Azerbaijani devotional singer acclaimed as one of the world's great voices. He certainly made an extraordinary sound - it felt like something completely ageless, that could have been heard at any point over the past centuries. I had to tear myself away.

You can see more pictures from Womadelaide, and the rest of the goings-on over the past 24 hours, here.

There's also an interview with the Balkan singer Goran Bregovic here. He plays on Monday night.

We've also posted a special edition of the Guardian books podcast from Adelaide writers' week. Claire Armitstead finds out what's become of 'ozlit' and the country's lost classics, meets some of the brightest young Australian poets, and goes in search of new Aboriginal writing.

Hi, this is Caspar Llewellyn Smith, and I'm in Adelaide for the coming week with my colleagues Alex Needham and Alicia Canter to report on the Adelaide festival, the fringe festival and, first of all, WOMADelaide – the world's festival, as it bills itself.

The gates of the beautiful Botanic Park opened for Womadelaide at 4pm on this Friday afternoon, and two hours later, as the day began to cool – it's been a really sticky one – the music began.

As mentioned at the end of our live-ish blog that covered all the action up to this point, there had been a media briefing earlier in the day that began with a performance from Stevie Goldsmith, an Adelaide native whose roots in this country go way, way, back, a figure of great charisma who's been keeping the culture of the Kaurna people alive through performances with his dance groups. They were back on stage to open the festival proper as it celebrates its 21st birthday, garnering cheers from the crowd beginning to gather and spread themselves out on picnic blankets when he talked of representing the oldest living cultures in the world. Stirring stuff, and Stevie seemed a lovely fellow when we chatted briefly afterwards, too, telling me about the progress that's been made in reviving the language and traditions of his people over the course of the last decade.

They were followed on stage for a full hour's set by the Alaev Family, whose apperance here has been criticised by the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions group - because while the band's roots are in Tajikistan, for two decades they've lived in Israel. How to answer that? With a rousing performance, the clarinet, violin and accordion weaving melodies over the top of two drum kits and an electric bassist, and the audience at this earliest stage of proceedings lustily joining in with some call-and-response encouragement.

If there was a theme to the day, perhaps it lay in the idea of family, because following the multi-generational Alaev gang on the main stage was Bassekou Kouyaté, with his equally splendidly-robed band.

Bassekou is one of a number of stellar talents from Mali to be playing the festival this year (and seems likely to join the likes of Rokia Traore at Glastonbury in the UK in June, too). His group involves his wife Amy Sacko, a stunningly powerful singer, one of his nephews and his two sons. One of them, Mustapha, took a turn in the spotlight with a song on the ngoni of his own, but the look on his face on the next number when his old man returned to the stage and let rip (making liberal use of his wah-wah pedal) was something else: a puff of the cheeks that said, jeez, I've got a ways to go yet.

Before then I glimpsed the Tallest Man On Earth, aka feted Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson, who covered Paul Simon's Graceland, which perhaps he thought was mandatory at a world music gig (though he did it rather beautifully); he is not of course particularly tall, but I am, so the fact he drew a pretty big crowd on stage 3 didn't bother me, craning to see from the back. On another small stage, the Zoo Stage (I've not worked out yet if the zoo is actually open during the festival), Scottish folk trio Lau held the attention of a decent throng as the sky turned tar black. It was just a shame that they had to compete with the evening's main attraction, the Cat Empire, back on the main stage.

If Stevie Goldsmith represents a tradition that is several millennia old, the Melbourne band with their kitchen-sink appropriation of genres from around the world – hip hop, reggae, Latin styles – may well stand for the future; perhaps as a visitor to these shores, it's churlish to say they weren't particularly my cuppa, but the vast audience drank them in.

Tell me if I'm wrong. And please don't think I'm not extremely happy to be at a festival where it turns out you really don't need to bother with any Wellington boots.

Tomorrow brings Hugh Masekela; another Malian act, Vieux Farka Toure; oud player Dhafer Youssef; the Brooklyn-based afrobeat band Antibalas (a sad note: they received the terrible news that the mother of one of the band members died yesterday in Lagos), a chance to catch Lau again, properly this time – and lots more.

I'll be around on @CasparLS, while Alex Needham plans to go scouting the Adelaide fringe festival action.