Cover image: East Perth Power Station main stage. Credit Aaron Claringbold

Earlier this year incoming Perth Festival artist director Anna Reece really stuck her neck out.

Instead of clinging to the traditional culture centres in the CBD and the Western suburbs she moved the Perth Festival east, taking over the long-mothballed Power Station as the key contemporary music venue and for one of its hubs.

The doors of the East Perth Power Station were shut tight, so events had to take place outside the building — out back and on the stretch of grass alongside the Swan River. It was not promising; that part of the Swan is especially prone to mozzies and the Power Station and far from where the other events were taking place

But the masses came and relished what was on offer. Their eyeballs were popped by the astounding new space on the city side of the Power Station, with its soaring walls and exposed rusting skeleton, and the strip of grass between the front of the building and the river proved to be a place people were happy to linger.

Reece says the East Perth Power Station took off quicker than she anticipated, with over 2000 people per night enjoying the Mediterranean atmosphere of Casa Musica and a fair portion of those moving round the back for that night’s act.

“When you launch a new precinct you’re never quite on top of things. It’s trial and error. We had no idea how many people were going to come,” Reece tells me in Perth Festival’s Kings Park offices.

“But people came. Over 80,000 people came during the month. It built and built. I remember being there for the closing night when Kavisha Mazzella played. She attracted over 2,500 thousand people. It was very gratifying,” says Reece before taking me through the 2026 program.

When I suggest that the Festival had great numbers for Casa Musica because we are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and people were looking for free events Reece did not hesitate to agree with me.

“I absolutely understand what people are facing with the rising costs of food and rent and the basics of life. It has really impacted on the way people buy tickets to the festival. We used to sell a huge number of tickets when the program was announced. Now people wait,” says Reece.

“I get this. People want to see what situation they’re in, what else is out there, which is we fight to keep prices down. We want to retain quality but we never want it to become an elitist event,” she argues.

Arguably an even bigger challenge for festivals is streaming and the online explosion in general, with so much content pouring into home for little or no cost it is becoming increasingly difficult to lure audiences away from their screens to see a live performance.

“It is harder to get people off the couch,” admits Reece. “But live performance is not going away. People realise that being in the presence of flesh-and-blood artists gives you something that cannot come via a screen. There is a connection between human beings that cannot be replicated digitally.

“We also must have a point of difference. We don’t want to offer the same kind of shows that are on offer throughout the year. We seek work that pushes the boundaries, that challenges audiences, that provokes discussion. We remain relevant by using our resources to take audiences into new spaces,” says Reece.

Ironically, next year’s Perth Festival is kicking off with the kind of work that Perth Festival is standing up against, a digital project by young British artist Joe Bloom which audiences will experience through Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.

However, on closer  inspection we see that the piece, A View From A Bridge, pushes back against the tech takeover, in which Bloom will set up his mother’s old red dial-up phone on Perth bridges and encourage passers-by to pick it up and talk to him. Bloom will be a long way off recording and filming the conversations that will be uploaded to social media.

“There are now so many ways that we can communicate so we don’t bother with the most old-fashioned means, the telephone. This is especially true of the younger generation. They’ll send you a voicemail, text message, whatever. Anything to avoid picking up a phone and answering or making a call,” explains Reece.

“I’ve been following Joe doing A View From A Bridge in London. It is remarkable how he gets people to open up about the most intimate things in their lives, how he persuades them to be truthful and vulnerable. I thought it would be wonderful for Joe to come to Perth and record people on our beautiful bridges and launch the festival with a work that celebrates connection in a distracted age.”

Arguably the hottest ticket at next year’s Perth Festival will be LACRIMA, an epic drama from France about a Parisian atelier racing against the clock to complete a dress for a British royal wedding that, on the evidence of the trailer for the show and the rave reviews, feels more like a television series than a traditional play. 

“It is almost too painful to watch as characters feel the crushing pressure of their jobs, all emotional and family life squeezed to the sidelines,” writes Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. “Yet many regard the work as a vocation, dedicating themselves to the creation of beauty. It does not erase the circuit of exploitation, but makes this story all the more emotionally complicated. The making of a single dress gains shades of Greek tragedy.”

Reece says she lined up for four-and-half hours at the Avignon Festival to secure a ticket and was blown away. “It is extraordinary,” says Reece. “It is like watching a BBC crime thriller, with multiple plots and an incredible attention to detail. The director, Caroline Nguyen, has worked in film and television and really shows in this remarkable production.”

Another show that is bound to draw attention is Le Nor [the rain] from The Last Great Hunt, a Perth company that has garnered an international reputation for their cutting-edge work that mashes up retro, the here and now and the futuristic to create a magical world that is all their own.

Le Nor, which channels a Scandinavian art movie to tell an apocalyptic tale,  caused a sensation when it played in 2019 at Perth Festival  and phones ran hot as theatre lovers across the metropolitan area and beyond tried to secure a seat.

“Perth Festival commissioned the work, which I think is Last Great Hunt’s best, but only a few hundred people saw it. They had big plans to tour it but COVID hit and the company put it to bed. So we felt it was worth another season. It will play in the last week of the festival to coincide with the Australian Performing Arts market coming to Perth. I really want them to see Le Nor. I think they love it as much as those who saw it in 2019,” says Reece.

Another interesting local work taking its place alongside the east coast and international acts is Lost and Found’s production of Philip Glass’ adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The twist here is that Glass’ opera takes place not in a traditional high-culture place such as His Majesty’ but throughout a maze of unused offices in Forrest Chase, “where order masks chaos and every corner hides a secret” (according to the program).

The Trial is a part of a strong line-up of Western Australian work, which is something that grew out of necessity under the reign of Reece’s predecessor Iain Grandage, whose tenure straddled the COVID disruption, but is now a cornerstone of the 23-day event, with this year’s line-up featuring 13 Perth Festival commissions.

While some have complained that Perth Festival has lost its shine in recent years because of the lack of big touring shows — long gone are the days when when world-class orchestras would play at the Perth Concert Hall and every festival would feature a large-scale Shakespeare production — Reece is proud of the local involvement our flagship summertime arts event.

“The opening up of Perth Festival to local voices came when we started appointing Australian then Western Australian artistic directors,” argues Reece.

“They came in wanting to know more about the Western Australian arts sector. Where it was once a pure source of entertainment, Perth Festival now digs a little deeper into our culture and explores our identity. This mixing of the international, the national and the local also gives our artists a tremendous opportunity to learn from the best of the world,” says Reece.

The 2016 Perth Festival actually gets under way at the end of November with the start of the five-month outdoors film program at the Somerville Auditorium, an annual cinematic smorgasbord that continues to draw good crowds in the face of the post-COVID because of its glorious under-stars-setting,

This year’s opening film is one for the cinephiles, Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s recreation of the making of Breathless, Jean-Luc masterpiece about a cop killer on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and the American woman who he hooks up with (Jean Seberg) that married Hollywood film noir with a European arthouse sensibility to change the course of movie history.

Another highlight from the American indie sector is the latest from Kelly Reichart, The Mastermind, in which Josh O’Connor plays an embattled former art student who hatches a brilliant plan to rob a museum outside of Boston that goes comically wrong.

“The Mastermind delivers so many narrative surprises that, in discussing it, I’m unusually wary of spoilers,” writes The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “It offers the pleasures of being caught off guard both by major twists and by minor details whose startling originality merits discussion but that viewers should be allowed to discover unprepared”

And later in the season is Western Australian writer-director Zoe Pepper’s Birthright, a biting satire on the housing crisis in which a struggling millennial couple move into the home of the guy’s well-heeled parents, setting the scene for a generational clash  over the property. 

Films from Ireland, Spain, Norway, Italy, Iraq, Brazil and other offerings from across the cinematic universe summarise what Perth Festival is all about — whisking audiences into another realm and providing them with a set of experiences beyond the everyday without having to step on a plane.

Perth Festival is on from February 6 to March 1. Lotterywest Films commences on November 24 and continueS to March 29. Doors open at 6pm. Films start at 8pm. (7.30pm from March 2).