by A city festival can be your choice of adventure – and at this year’s Perth festival, my chosen adventure always required the same equipment: a pair of headphones.
Thursday night at the Invisible Opera, I sat in a large stand at Scarborough beach, on the Noongar-Whadjuk country, as a live narrator spoke in my ears voyeuristically to passersby – including some who had no idea they were part of of the show.
Theater maker Sophia Brous played the role of a surveillance camera, speaking gently at times, judgmentally at others, while I followed her directions with my gaze. With headphones canceling out the ambient noise, it was as if it was just the two of us, spying together like eagles.
Afterwards I ran to the Bold Park Aquatic Centre, where I was given a second set of headphones. Written by Steve Rodgers and directed by Kate Champion, The Pool is a site-specific tribute to Australia’s public pools and the diverse communities they support. Through our headphones, the audience watched the dialogue taking place on the huge, floodlit stage, as characters flirted, fought, swam with each other and learned from each other; from time to time, the action stopped and we were also let into their inner monologues.
Coming up on Sunday, this is the fifth and final festival in Perth led by artistic director Iain Grandage – whose illustrious career as a composer can be blamed on the 900 series of headphones his team had to do this year.
Related: Perth Festival 2024: a voyeuristic work where the public is on show – but not everyone is excited
“Good art is about the spaces between the outside and the inside,” he says. “And for me as a composer, those inner lives have always been the interesting thing… [With headphones]you’re a bit out of place, and suddenly you’re looking at things in a very different way.”
In a live piece of theater, sound can open doors that nothing else can, “bridging the gap between the notes,” as Grandage says. “That’s what makes a good poem. That’s what makes a good piece of classical music, too.”
As for what makes a good piece of theater – that may be changing. Much has been written about the crisis facing the performing arts, which was first triggered by the pandemic that closed it, and then a cost of living crisis that made people less likely to book tickets. For an arts festival programmer, “trying to gauge what’s leaving the audience out of the house at the moment is undoubtedly a big consideration.
Amongst the more traditional concert halls and contemporary dance works, this year’s Perth festival featured a significant excess of interactive shows and multi-sensory works, giving an added dimension that audiences are responding to – a sort of “theater AND”.
There was the Pool and the Invisible Opera: two site-specific outdoor works related to headphones, which offer a new way of viewing public space. In Nightwalks With Teenagers, teenage tour guides led the public through the streets of Perth at night. In Bogach, a native marsh was growing inside an abandoned CBD complex, giving off a damp, alive smell.
And at Bia with US clown Geoff Sobelle, members of the audience sat around a large table as he presented the fascinating history of humanity and greed through sounds, smells, stagecraft and a terrifying horror scene.
At the spacious Yhonnie Scarce theater at the Art Gallery of WA, I stood inside a jewel made of bare corrugated iron, to find 20 hand-blown glass orbs – they looked like bush plumes or cartoon bombs. Maralinga’s ancestral land, Scarce, was devastated by nuclear testing in the 1950s, and many in the community were not notified, and left exposed. The attendant encouraged me to think about how it would feel to stand there defenseless, waiting for the bombs to drop.
Then she closed the door.
I grabbed my headphones again for Logue Lake: a strange horror from Perth locals Georgie Crawley and Elise Wilson, which takes place in a cabin in the woods, where four friends are spending the weekend – before a mysterious fifth turns up.
Smoke fills your hallway as you enter the set: a house without walls that takes center stage on the theater floor. The cast moves through the rooms and around the audience, who switch between five radio channels to follow the dialogue and inner thoughts of whatever character they like. It is a literal choose your own adventure, as you try to solve the mystery before they do.
While there are certainly more site-specific and more interactive works this year, “there’s a long history of audiences willing to take risks at a festival time they don’t have to take the rest of the year”, says Grandage. This might explain why I jumped into the pool after Pool, for the show’s optional water aerobics class.
“Experiential work, of a moment, that you’ll always remember – those help define the festival,” he says.
He mentions Highway to Hell from 2020, which is related to Canning Highway, with bands on flatbed trucks rolling through playing AC/DC covers to a crowd of 100,000. “You can never drive over that particular stretch of freeway again without remembering that time when 10 bands came to with you,” Grandage says now.
The pandemic changed the way festivals are programmed – or at least it did for Perth. Because of WA’s strict border controls, he says, “we fell in love with the place” even more.
“We were told to slow down, we couldn’t get anywhere, so we started going down deeper … and you ask more questions about the world you’re walking on, and the stories comes from that world.”
Related: ‘Nature will have her way’: how a desolate Perth shopping center has been transformed into a sprawling wetland
This was particularly reflected in the festival’s deepening commitment to Noongar artists, particularly at an organizational level: the Noongar Advisory Circle is now part of the festival’s constitution, which Graindage says is his proudest achievement in led (A close second: Björk’s coup.)
This year’s Perth festival featured 11 works and exhibitions led by First Nations artists, including the Noongar musical Wundig Wer Wilura, which took pride of place in His Majesty’s Theater on the opening weekend: “a work of immense beauty”, he says. Grandage, “delivered at the highest level”.
“Connecting with Noongar-Whadjuk was the greatest privilege [land] offered by Noongar guardians. Which is connected to falling in love with the place too.”
