_{Cover Image: Operation: Orfeo. Image by Roberto Fortuna.}

What is a work of art worth when the name on its canvas is a lie? Perth Festival will open its 2027 program with that destabilising question, bringing the Australian premiere of ROHTKO to His Majesty’s Theatre for an exclusive season.

Created by trailblazing Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, the large-scale theatrical thriller takes one of the art world’s most notorious forgery scandals and turns it into a feverish inquiry into authenticity. Its starting point is the 2004 purchase of a supposed Mark Rothko painting for $8.3 million. Years later, the work was exposed as a fake – painted not by the Latvian-Jewish master, but by a Chinese maths teacher living in Queens.

Twarkowski’s production does not simply dramatise the scandal. It builds a total environment around it: pumping techno, two enormous video screens, live cinema and a set designed to keep the audience alert to the mechanics of looking. Theatre, choreography, music and film overlap until the boundaries between original and copy, object and image, begin to blur.

Dailes Theatre of Latvia brings the work to life with Twarkowski’s regular creative collaborators and performers from Latvia, Poland and China. At its centre are deceptively simple questions: can a fake painting provoke real feeling, and if it can, where does authenticity reside?

Perth Festival Artistic Director Anna Reece describes Twarkowski as a leading figure in a new wave of European theatre-making that is redefining the stage. For Reece, ROHTKO is “visceral, exhilarating and entirely its own”: a technically audacious production whose scale and ambition make it an emphatic opening statement for the Festival.

If ROHTKO multiplies images until certainty gives way, Operation:Orfeo strips opera back to its essential elements. Hotel Pro Forma’s landmark work retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through voices, light, architecture and illusion, leading audiences on an austere, hypnotic descent into the underworld.

First seen in Australia at Barrie Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival, the production has become a touchstone of contemporary performance. Its revival forms part of a major retrospective celebrating Kirsten Dehlholm, the visionary Copenhagen director and Hotel Pro Forma founder who died in 2024.

For its Perth season, the Latvian Radio Choir will sing Ib Michael’s sensuous libretto in symphonic a cappella, with music by Bo Holten and excerpts from John Cage and Christoph Willibald Gluck. The result promises less a conventional opera than a precisely composed visual and acoustic experience.

Reece sees ROHTKO and Operation:Orfeo as two distinct answers to the same question: what can live performance do that no other form can? One is cinematic, restless and overloaded; the other is luminous, spare and exact. Together, they bookend the theatrical arc of the Festival.

The Festival’s final night shifts the inquiry from authenticity to memory. The Avalanches will take over East Perth Power Station on 28 February, presenting their new album No Bad Memories alongside highlights from a career that changed the possibilities of sample-based music.

More than 25 years after Since I Left You, the Australian band remains fascinated by the unstable material of recollection. No Bad Memories looks at the magical and insidious ways advertising and branded technology wrap themselves around our inner lives: commercial jingles, start-up sounds and half-forgotten audio logos resurfacing as involuntary nostalgia.

Collaborators on the album include Jamie xx, Haley Joel Osment, Mike Patton, Suzanne Ciani and Khadija Al Hanafi. At the Power Station, Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and Andy Szekeres will fold that new material into the group’s densely layered back catalogue.

The riverside venue will also host Northern Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance and Australian indie-folk band The Paper Kites on 7 February. Vance – whose admirers include Elton John and whose work with Ed Sheeran for the Ted Lasso soundtrack won an Emmy – will revisit The Wake and If in a one-night pairing with The Paper Kites.

“East Perth Power Station is back, our iconic riverside home for summer,” Reece says. Her early reveal comes with a promise: “Clear your diaries. We’re not planning a quiet summer.”

ROHTKO – 5–13 February, His Majesty’s Theatre

Operation:Orfeo – 25–27 February, His Majesty’s Theatre

The Avalanches – 28 February, East Perth Power Station

Foy Vance and The Paper Kites – 7 February, East Perth Power Station

Festival Club tickets for ROHTKO, Operation:Orfeo and The Avalanches are on sale from midday 9 September; general tickets go on sale at midday AWST on 11 September via perthfestival.com.au. Tickets for Foy Vance and The Paper Kites are already on sale. The full Perth Festival 2027 program will be announced on 29 October.