Cover Image: UP THERE (Boorloo) by UP THERE Collective and The Blue Room Theatre. Photo: Delphine Jamet.

UP THERE (Boorloo), UP THERE Collective and The Blue Room Theatre
The streets of Perth CBD, Thursday 6 November 2025

Beyond shiny office towers and swept streets in the Perth CBD, there’s a labyrinth of empty shopfronts, echoing stairwells and forgotten buildings. If you stop to listen, those places will whisper stories of what once was.

These stories form the basis of UP THERE (Boorloo) – a new site-specific work from UP THERE Collective presented together with The Blue Room Theatre. The team, consisting of Lead Creatives Tay Conway, William Gammel, Leah Robyn and Music Producer Rebecca Riggs-Bennett, invite their audience on an audio walking tour of empty and under-utilised spaces – the hollow ribs of the city. 

Starting off at the Urban Orchard in Perth Cultural Centre you’re given a pair of headphones offering your ears ambient nature sounds – birdsong and rustling leaves – as dusk descends. An invitation to breathe, observe and listen feels like a guided mediation before the group steps out under the care of Conway, Gammel and Robyn.

Quickly there’s a pastiche of unnamed voices as interviews and anecdotes from over 30 individuals with some connection to the area are stitched together to form a story of the past and of the present.

It’s heavily nostalgic. The voices weave together tales of times gone by – wistful recollections of special events and ordinary life. Of clubs and cinemas, shops and squats, parties and pancakes. The audio paints a picture of Perth’s heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s – or could it be the storytellers’ heydays? Either way, the work laments the loss both of small, independent businesses and also large hotels that now exist as vast, empty spaces.

There are honest and personal admissions that high rents from private landlords are unsustainable for many small businesses. Later this idea is raised again as a failing of capitalism and city planning when the work critiques the lack of incentive to develop old buildings. Something doesn’t seem right, it suggests, when an owner prefers to leave a void than have their space occupied. And how can we justify these empty buildings, they ask, when so many people have nowhere to sleep?

UP THERE (Boorloo) is not just a romantic look back at glossy times past, the work also acknowledges a dark history that haunts the spaces, particularly the theft of Noongar land, execution of Noongar elder Midgegooroo and the exclusion of Indigenous people from certain areas in the city.

While the work questions who gets to occupy space and interrogates how they do it, it is both critical and celebratory of our city and the way people engage with it. And engage, too, with one another. A major current through UP THERE (Boorloo) is community and how people can mobilise with a common goal – whether it be for a party or a protest.

There’s an exquisite balance between the stories. UP THERE (Boorloo) is so enjoyable (and it is so enjoyable) because of the tales that are told: a result of the interview questions and choice of interviewees. But what makes this show remarkable is how the stories are spliced together with impeccable editing.

Orchestrating a walking tour that involves waiting for traffic lights and moving as a group must not be easy, but on opening night it went off without a hitch with perfectly synchronised audio and a pace that never felt rushed.

Riggs-Bennett’s soundscape is delicate, largely complementing the voices with a subtle ambience. It’s most noticeable when the audience weaves through a maze of abandoned shopfronts, dust and locked screens in Carillon City Arcade. As you walk past windows that reflect the ghosts of tenants past, the score swells with a haunting atmosphere.

It is a sweetly balanced work that invites you to linger at the spaces we usually hurry past, to engage with the quiet remains of an urban landscape. For some viewers, the route taken through the city will be a well worn path, for others it will be a road rarely travelled, but in each case UP THERE (Boorloo) will uncover something new.