I know I promised you a Wil Anderson review, but I’m afraid we’re defeated by time today – in a moment I’ll be skipping off to record a podcast, and then to review Windmill Theatre’s festival trilogy which I’m very much looking forward to. So I’ll post my review of Anderson’s show tomorrow.

In the meantime, Jane has one more dispatch from Fringe for the day – a review of Bitch Boxer at Holden Street Theatres, the tale of a would-be female boxer fighting against the horrors life throws up. You can read Jane’s four-star review here. Here’s an extract.

Built around Chloe’s physical approach to the world as a boxer, Holly Augustine’s performance is filled with energy. Director Bryony Shanahan has Augustine claim the stage absolutely, filling it with her body and her voice as she leaps and tells us of her escapades to get into her locked house.

Then the news of her father hits, and Chloe appears a smaller woman. Josephine plays with contrasts in energy throughout the script, and constantly toys with the disconnect between Chloe’s true emotions and those she allows us to see.

She’s one woman trying to make sense of over 900 shows and more tents than a Scouting jamboree. And – what’s more – succeeding. Here’s the second instalment from Jane’s festival diary, in which she whizzes around Adelaide, sitting on uncomfortable seats in makeshift venues, in an effort to help you negotiate the programme.

• The Street Theatre festival kicked off yesterday, managing to pull massive crowds even on a Friday, slowing pedestrian traffic in Rundle Mall down to single file around the crowds. I first caught the Little Red Trapeze Companyon their purpose-built trapeze rig, swinging over the delighted gasps of the crowd – they surely have the best sightlines you’re going to find this weekend. I only managed to see the tail end of the Pitts Family Circus, in which a boy about seven was pulled out of a suitcase and then became part of the act. It wasn’t long before his two-year-old sister was on stage, too.

• Away from the crowds of the city at Holden Street Theatres in Hindmarsh, I saw A Special Day from US’s the Play Company and Mexico’s Por Piedad Teatro. A stage version of the 1977 Italian film by the same name, the production embraces theatricality – the two cast members provide sound effects and supplementary voices, and the set is developed throughout the production with chalk drawings – but it never feels like anything more than a theatrical experiment where the text could be easily replaced. It doesn’t feel as if there’s a reason for this story to be onstage: its plot is insubstantial, meandering and dated, and the two characters are neither likable nor interesting.

• My experience of Kraken was almost certainly different from the experience you will have. This is a work-in-progress from Trygve Wakenshaw, better known as Squidboy, and I don’t even have any idea of what sort of a work he is progressing towards. If there was a through-line – or anything to do with the kraken – I missed it completely, but we all laughed uproariously at 45 minutes of clowning, with the occasional audience punctuation of “what?!” and “really?!” I don’t know if the characters were exactly likable (I was “stabbed” in the forehead, getting off a lot lighter than most) but they are certainly interesting.

Which makes me only sadder that I am indoors writing about it, rather than in a park experiencing it. On the upside, I did get to have a lunchtime dash with Alex Needham round Adelaide’s amazing Central Market – our haul included decent sushi, fruit supplies, and gelato for good behaviour on the way back. Adelaide dwellers, I am very, very jealous of this market. Although I did overhear a lady at the art gallery yesterday talking about how she and her partner had eaten $40 of cheese in one evening after an overzealous visit to its halls. Which I fear would be far too regular an event if I had unfettered access to it.

Anyway, the rest of Guardian Australia’s team are out in the Womadelaide sunshine. And video producer Bill Code has been very much enjoying Osaka Monaurail

Jana Perkovic has been considering the lack of physical theatre work being made in Australia. Stone/Castro – Jo Stone and Paulo Castro – are among the few practitioners creating work here, she says. So Jana was interested to see the duo’s new work, Blackout. You can read her full review of the piece here. I’m intrigued by the premise: a group of people celebrating a wedding together on a boat. Seemingly happy until it becomes very clear that they are not.

Jana has lots of praise for Castro’s script – which is pretty unusual for this kind of work – but is less sure whether the audience entirely connected with it. Her review is nuanced and interesting, and here’s a taster of it.

The expressive possibilities of physical theatre are well deployed. Above-the-table visible interaction is expressed through language, with all its potential for understatement and deceit. Dance sequences are visceral expressions of characters’ emotional states, often abruptly interrupting the proceedings.

The contrast is often devastating: a particular early sequence, in which the groom, his best man and the bride’s sister perform a synchronised dance of sadness, while singing The Power of Love and speaking only in formalities, had me in tears. But I’m not sure that the audience as a whole connected with emotional timbre of the work. Perhaps the humour was too dark, the violence too bleak.

Jana Perkovic has been talking to the brilliant Batsheva choreographer Ohad Naharin. His company are here at Adelaide festival with Sadeh21, which I saw a couple of weeks ago in Perth – and had a really interesting, quite emotional reaction to. It took me a while to process the performance, which is both challenging and playful, funny and quite emotionally confronting.

Jana will be reviewing that for us tonight, but in the meantime, she’s been talking to Ohad about the way he works, and his movement philosophy Gaga. You can read the interview in full here – well worth it if you’re interested in movement. And here’s a quick snippet to whet your appetite.

Gaga is what creates the difference between a dancer and a gymnast or athlete, the choreographer argues. “Sometimes you can see them doing amazing things, but you don’t feel that they’re listening to their bodies, you feel that they’re telling them.” Naharin looks to the example of animals when it comes to demonstrating letting go. “The way a resting cat will get into motion – it has a collapse-dependent quality of movement, without which it becomes locked, blocked and stiff.” Hearing Batsheva dancers talk about Gaga, one is struck by the repetition of terms such as joy, pleasure, healing properties.

Guardian Australia’s Alicia Canter has been out at Womadelaide, and sent back these fantastic pictures. You can find more of them here, in a lovely big gallery, and here’s a few below

Womadelaide kicked off yesterday, with three more days of music from all parts of the world to come. Last night Alfred Hickling watched Hanggai and Neko Case, both of whom seemed to go down a storm with the assembled crowd. You can read his review in full here – including Neko Case’s gorgeous reaction to her fellow performers – or here’s a taster for you below.

Every first evening at Womad has its transformative moment – that defining point at which a general dispersal of picnickers is suddenly galvanised into a mob of open-mouthed onlookers undergoing a collective WTF? experience. This year the epiphany belonged to Hanggai, the six-piece Mongolian metal outfit who engendered a passion for traditional throat singing that probably few knew they possessed.

It was great to see Case back on stage after a difficult few years following the death of her parents, says Alfred – and playing an album that is one of her strongest yet.

The haunting Nothing to Remember elicits perhaps the strongest reaction – its inclusion on the Hunger Games soundtrack has made it possibly Case’s most widely-heard tune. Her fine, remarkably hirsute band features the impressive versatility of Jon Rauhouse on lap steel, guitar, banjo and a green trombone; though the long lay-off from the road occasionally becomes apparent.

The first instalment of our festival podcast is now available for your listening pleasure. You can hear Alex, Alfred, Jane and I discuss the shows we’ve been seeing in Adelaide, listen to festival director David Sefton talk about his favourite festival moments, and hear an interview with the author Christos Tsiolkas, who considers the subject of drugs and writing.

Listen to the podcast here – or subscribe to it via iTunes

Unsound, Adelaide festival’s mini-festival of electronic music, kicked off with Snowtown Live on Thursday, and last night had a line-up that included Lee Gamble, Cut Hands, Morton Subotnick and headliners Nurse With Wound. (According to Alex Needham, their 1984 single was called Brained by Falling Masonry).

To say experimental, electronic music is my blind spot would not really be doing justice to my ignorance in this area – so I’ll leave it to Alex to do the talking on this one. He had a brilliant night out, calling the gig “another vindication of this extraordinary festival-within-a-festival”. You can read his full, four-star review here. Here’s a snippet:

Last year, Adelaide festival’s electronic music strand Unsound caused a sensation by bringing the heaviest, loudest and weirdest elements of the avant garde to South Australia. People from as far away as Perth flocked to see the likes of Ben Frost and Hype Williams reduce the venerable Queen’s theatre, the first playhouse built in mainland Australia, to a shuddering mass of smoke and strobes. It was a total triumph, achieved against the odds, and this year it’s enjoying a victory lap.

Matthew Barney’s operatic film – like many other events at Adelaide festival, an epic event – has drawn some quite diverse reactions. Alex Needham’s been rounding them up. It’s a fascinating read: there’s outrage, of course, alongside thoughts on gender, and comparisons to the Lego Movie. You can find the article here. (It also, of course, has the bonus of making you seem very informed on a very hot topic). And here’s a quick taste of it.

The Hollywood Reporter’s review detailed with some relish scenes that include people defecating, a close-up of an anus being licked and a snogging session between two pregnant women that culminates in one removing her glass eye and sticking it up the other one’s bottom. (The recipient is a woman called Bobbi Starr, who according to Barney is “a classical oboist. And one of the most famous anal actresses in the adult film business.” So now you know.)

However, others who have seen the film say that these are brief moments in a massively long work, and not indicative of its tone as a whole. Despite the extremity of the concept (and content), Barney has certainly amassed a starry cast, who are perhaps aiming for art-world immortality alongside their literary, viral or Hollywood fame.

We’ll have reviews for you today from Unsound, Womadelaide and Fringe, plus thoughts on Blackout and Wil Anderson’s new show. But first, here’s what other people made of last night’s offerings