This summer, experience innovative leaps in the world of visual arts, theatre, music, dance, film and literature at the longest-running arts festival in Australia. For its 66th year, Perth Festival will invite the brightest and bravest creatives from around the world to present three weeks of performances, installations, exhibitions and events across the city.
From February 8 to March 3, the 2019 program will take place – the fourth and final festival masterminded by beloved artistic director Wendy Martin. Of more than 80 exciting events on the bill, 26 will be exclusive to the summer festival in Perth.
Selecting the top events on the program is a difficult task, but a few fantastic international and local ones do stand out. The 2017 festival favourite, Boorna Waanginy: The Trees Speak, will return this year, transforming Kings Park with the cultural and ecological knowledge of the Noongar people, who are the original owners of the land around Perth. This epic work will run over four nights, and includes light installations and audio-visual works that use the natural environment to share a message of sustainability and maintenance of the Indigenous landscape.
Australian born theatrical genius Barrie Kosky brings his Komische Oper Berlin company to Australia for the first time with their production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, accompanied by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. The production drops Mozart’s famous opera into a melting pot of 1920s silent movies, Weimar cabaret, German expressionism and dark humour, and has turned heads with its use of large, colourful, meticulously detailed animations by British theatre group 1927.
New York City theatre company Elevator Repair Service are performing Gatz, their hugely entertaining eight-hour performance of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Looking for something family friendly? A Ghost in My Suitcase is based on Gabrielle Wang's award-winning novel and tells the story of 12-year-old Celeste, who arrives in China to scatter her mother’s ashes and is propelled into a world of magic and myth.
The acrobats, contortionists, jugglers and performers from the Vietnamese circus troupe who’ll bring Lang Toi to Perth Festival are sure to delight audiences. Meanwhile The Great Tamer, by Greek artist/theatre maker Dimitris Papaioannou, is a mesmering hybrid of dance and theatrical wizardry resulting in a series of 'live artworks' exploring the destructive human condition.
The heartbreaking classical ballet Giselle will be reimagined in Dada Masilo’s Giselle, with a powerful production set in a South African village, while Swan Lake becomes an Irish folk tale in a deconstruction by Michael Keegan-Dolan that includes live music and song.
The headliner on the big band stage is the Silkroad Ensemble. They are a Grammy Award-winning collective of musicians from more than 20 countries who combine traditional Armenian, Mongolian and Japanese instruments with their Western counterparts to create a new, complex musical tradition.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. These productions are surrounded by a whirlwind of extra events, like Writers Week from February 18-24, the festival’s film section, Lotterywest Films, which kicks off extra early with screenings from November 26, and a full stage of independent and world renowned music, theatre, dance and art.