Cover Image: Perth Festival 2026, East Perth Power Station. Image by Sky Perth.

When I first arrived in Western Australia to live, the Perth Festival was a club I was delighted to join. A pleasurable, well-curated arts club whose members met in the leafy grounds of the University of Western Australia, the festival’s founder, and in Perth’s public performance halls.

It was a club of likeminded arts patrons, mainly from Perth’s more affluent western suburbs, for whom Joondalup and Armadale were distant and unexplored territory.

Over the decades, every festival director has attempted to broaden its reach, most memorably in recent times with previous artistic director Ian Grandage’s spectacular ‘Highway to Hell’ tribute to Fremantle band ACDC, with thousands of people lining the Canning Highway to greet a rock and roll truck convoy. A spectacle for free, from ageing heavy metal fans to their I-phone addicted grandkids.

In her second year as Festival Artistic Director, Anna Reece’s choice of festival offerings is probably a sign of yet more generational change. Take UK videographer Joe Bloom’s View from a Bridge, a purely online phenomenon in which Bloom talks to people via a red telephone positioned on a bridge. The clip of Bloom’s conversation with Noongar elder Richard Walley has alone reached two million people around the globe. No seat, no ticket price, no leafy western suburb vantage point required.

Also at the 2026 Festival, I attended The BhuMeJha Project in the hills of Kelmscott, at an Art Sanctuary I’d never visited before. I sat among so many migrant families that I suspect two thirds of the audience (including me) were born overseas. I felt privileged to be at a community festival event whose very essence contradicted the quasi-White Australia narrative that a few federal politicians are peddling these days.

Northern Territory Wagilak Yolŋu songman Daniel Wilfredperformed alongside dancers and musicians from widely diverse backgrounds: Indian classical musician Hariraam Lam, Malaysian artist Mohammad Hisharudy and dancers from Saraswati Mahavidhyalaya. Almost all of these accomplished artists call Perth – or Australia – home.

The cargo cult mentality of earlier festival years – importing a glamorous American symphony orchestra or a punky British theatre outfit as the main attractions – has long since given way to a potent blend of shows that are 100% Import or Made Right Here.

Here’s an example. This year’s spellbinding theatre production Lacrima from France’s Theatre national de Strasbourg was a Perth Festival highlight, but so was the superb and ambitious artistry of The Trial, an unforgettable iteration of Franz Kafka’s masterpiece by Perth-based Lost and Found Opera.

Perth is a radically different place from the 1950s when the city’s festival began. Now a multicultural sprawling metropolis with a clearer sense of its connection to Country, this shift is reflected in Reece’s festival ethos. Karla Bidi is the symbolic marker of this – a series of 11 light beacons stationed along the Swan River, or Derbarl Yerrigan, emitting light beams, music and stories by prominent Noongar artists into the night air.

Karla Bidi is one of four ‘pillars’, or fixtures, that Reece initiated last year in her first festival; they recurred in this current 2026 festival program and will feature in all her subsequent festivals. The other pillars are the Embassy Ballroom in Perth Town Hall, a glamorous nod to Perth’s big-band era; the Boorloo Contemporary visual art program and East Perth Power Station.

The last is Reece’s choice of riverside location, steeped in Indigenous lore, faded industrial glory and now hosting a phalanx of musical performers. The derelict building is also the ‘canvas’ on which the Boorloo Indigenous artists project their commissioned works.

That the festival’s hefty investment in securing East Perth as a ‘pillar’ site has paid off is visible in the thronging crowds – of all ages – who turn up at Casa Musica for free sunset concerts or ticketed night events on the banks of the river. The logic is that using the same venue over four years develops a sense of familiarity and habitual festival-going, and lower post-installation costs.

The fact is that Reece’s four pillars required a hefty initial investment in 2025, in venue preparation, light installation, and safety requirements in non-traditional venues. It led to a sizeable deficit in last year’s festival budget of $848,000. The last deficit was in 2000, when Sean Doran’s ambitious and well-reviewed festival resulted in a $2.6m loss.

I asked Reece about the bald facts of her first festival’s loss and the background behind it. The 2025 deficit “wasn’t the result that we’d hoped for”, she admits, but adds that closure of the normally lucrative Somerville film season for several weeks was a major contributor; “it significantly impacted our ticket sales.”

The closure was caused by poor weather and the need to remediate potential danger in Somerville’s outdoor pine tree setting.

But a major aspect was the high level of investment required to set up the four ‘pillars’ for her entire four-year festival run.  

“That’s the broader context around the figures,” she says. “The 2025 festival was the first year of an ambitious artistic program. The most incredible thing was that our board decided to invest in this vision, knowing that it was positioned as a four-year vision with recurring events or pillars.”

Reece says the festival board, which has raised healthy reserves over time, “saw that the first year of my new vision was a time to embrace the risk and ambition surrounding it.”

“They decided to proudly invest in groundbreaking non-traditional venues that needed upfront infrastructure costs. We saw a financial loss. However, we also attracted our highest percentage for new audiences, and our most diverse and youngest audiences.”

The 2025 festival recorded a 62 percent growth in audience on the previous year (Ian Grandage’s fifth and final festival). And 48 percent of ticket-buying audiences were new to the festival or hadn’t purchased a ticket for five years.

“Of course, we want to have due diligence and be financially robust and we still very much are. I feel very confident we’re going to make our box office target this year, which is really wonderful.

“But we are also a not-for-profit and we consider the community impact of what we do. We also need to be a lot more pragmatic and honest about what it costs to deliver arts and culture,” adds Reece.

The three-week Festival performance program wrapped up at the weekend but the free Visual Arts program and the Lotterywest films season continue for several weeks. 

A large free program of events was enabled by a welcome increase in funding (from $7.7m to $9.5m) by Lotterywest. “So last year 60 percent of the program was free, pretty significant for the festival and on a national level.”

It amounted to 105 free events versus 75 ticketed ones, with the free events spread widely across the festival program, not concentrated into one or two big events.  

“We run for four weeks, and we recognise there are different families, different communities, different postcodes,” says Reece. “The phrase ‘everyone is welcome’ is not something we’re committing to lightly. And I think we continually need to strive to make the festival more accessible for everyone.”

It’s why Reece was so keen to include a ‘virtual’ event like Joe Bloom’s View from a Bridge. “I think it would be foolish of festivals to not consider the digital realm. The definition of a festival could be ‘sitting together and watching something’. I would say it’s ‘coming together’. And how people are coming together now shifts and changes. We’re talking about new generations and individuals who are working within a three minute attention span.”

I observe that festivals have traditionally been about live performance and bums on paid seats, so is this another rupture between old and new festival models?

“I will champion the joy of live performance for the rest of my life,” responds Reece. “It’s really interesting how people interpret these choices. It was never (the intention) to cut a budget or replace a live performance – it’s there to add to a conversation and meet the reality of where some of our audiences sit.”

She is delighted by the wide international engagement with the two million views of the video clip of Richard Walley. “I really did love the idea of trying to share globally more of Western Australia with the rest of the world.”

Reece says she’s now had time to assess the risk and the reward, and has been thrilled that ithe Festival went so well. “We are seeing the Festival deepening its connection in year two, and the East Perth Power Station has been an extraordinary success. 

“Seeing The Trial sell out is saying there’s a demand for West Australian productions just as there is for international work, and they sit side by side. I’m really thrilled that (we brought) The Last Great Hunt’s show Le Nor back – I’ve programmed it very specifically so the Australian Performing Arts Market (an annual showcase to market Australian productions) can see that work because it should tour the world.”

A special moment, she says, was one Saturday night on Lunar New Year. “We worked with our cultural ambassadors to curate a new Year celebration down at East Perth Power Station. And there were thousands of people coming, all of these families and community wearing red for New Year.”

Suddenly, a rowdy State of Origin football crowd swarmed across nearby Matagarup Bridge and walked past the East Perth site. “The fireworks were going off, there were lion dancers moving through the crowd and these beautiful Noongar wall projections,” says Reece. “And for me, that was the moment of going, ‘yeah, it feels like Perth Festival is part of this city’.”

The Lotterywest Films season continues until March 29. The Visual Arts program runs until various dates through to June. Details: perthfestival.com.au