A city festival can feel like choosing your own adventure – and at this year’s Perth festival the adventure I chose always required the same equipment: headphones.
On Thursday evening at the Invisible Opera I sat in a stand on Scarborough beach, in the Noongar-Whadjuk country, as a live narrator in my ears provided voyeuristic commentary on passers-by – including some who had no idea they were part of the show .
Theater maker Sophia Brous played the role of a surveillance camera, sometimes speaking softly, others condemning, while I followed her directions with my gaze. With headphones that canceled out the ambient noise, it was like the two of us were there, spying together like creeps.
Then I raced to the Bold Park Aquatic Center where I was handed over my second pair of headphones. Written by Steve Rodgers and directed by Kate Champion, The Pool is a site-specific tribute to Australia’s public swimming pools and the diverse communities they foster. Through our headphones, the audience listened to the dialogue that took place on the huge, illuminated stage, as the characters flirted, fought, swam with each other and learned from each other; every now and then the action stopped and we were also allowed into their inner monologues.
Closing on Sunday, the festival is the fifth and final festival in Perth led by artistic director Iain Grandage – whose acclaimed career as a composer may be responsible for the 900 headphones his team had to track down this year.
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“Good art is about the spaces between the external and the internal,” he says. “And for me as a composer, those inner worlds have always been the interesting thing… [With headphones]you are somewhat removed from the place, and you suddenly see things in a completely different way.
In a live theater piece, sound can open doors that nothing else can reach, “filling the gap between the notes,” as Grandage puts it. “That’s what a good poem does. So does a good piece of classical music.”
As for what a good piece of theater does, that could change. Much has been written about the crisis facing the performing arts, first caused by the pandemic that brought it to a standstill, and then about a cost of living crisis that made it far less likely that people would book tickets. For an arts festival programmer, it is “undoubtedly a big consideration” to guess which audience will leave the house for the time being.
Among the more traditional concert halls and contemporary dance works, this year’s Perth festival saw a notable predominance of interactive shows and multi-sensory works, which brought an extra dimension that the audience seemed to respond to – a kind of “theatre AND”.
There was the Pool and the Invisible Opera: two site-specific outdoor works with headphones that offer a new way of looking at public space. In Nightwalks With Teenagers, teen guides led the audience through the streets of Perth at night. In Wetland, a native swamp grew in an abandoned CBD mall, emitting a moist, living scent.
And at Food by American clown Geoff Sobelle, audience members sat around an oversized table as he presented a compelling history of humanity and greed through sounds, smells, stagecraft and a gruesome, jaw-dropping scene.
At Yhonnie Scarce’s comprehensive retrospective at the Art Gallery of Washington, I stepped into a shed of thin corrugated iron and saw twenty hand-blown glass spheres lined up in a row—they looked like wild plums or cartoon bombs. Nuclear testing destroyed Scarce’s ancestral land of Maralinga in the 1950s, leaving many in the community unaware and exposed. The attendant encouraged me to think about what it would have felt like to stand there unprotected waiting for the bombs to explode.
Then she closed the door.
I grabbed headphones again for Logue Lake: a strange horror from Perth residents Georgie Crawley and Elise Wilson, set in a cabin in the woods where four friends spend the weekend – before a mysterious fifth turns up.
Smoke fills your nostrils as you descend into the set: a house without walls that takes center stage on the theater floor. The cast wanders through the rooms and around the audience, who switch between five radio channels to follow the dialogue and inner thoughts of each character. It’s literally choose your own adventure as you try to solve the mystery before they do.
While there are certainly more site-specific and interactive works this year, “there’s a long history of audiences being willing to take risks during festivals that they wouldn’t necessarily take the rest of the year,” says Grandage. This might explain why I jumped in the pool after the show for the show’s optional aqua aerobics class.
“Works that are experiential, of a moment, that you will always remember – that help define the festival,” he says.
He mentions 2020’s Highway to Hell, a takeover of Canning Highway, with bands on trucks playing AC/DC covers to an audience of 100,000 people. “You can’t drive along that particular stretch of highway anymore without having a memory of that time when 10 bands passed by you,” Grandage says now.
The pandemic has changed the way festivals are programmed – or at least they are for Perth. WA’s strict border controls, he says, “made us fall in love with the place even more”.
“We were asked to slow down, we couldn’t get anywhere, so we went deeper… and you ask more questions about the earth you walk on, and the stories that come from that earth.”
Related: ‘Nature will have its way’: how an abandoned shopping center in Perth has been transformed into a vast swampland
This is particularly evident in the festival’s increasing commitment to Noongar artists, especially at an organizational level: there is now a Noongar Advisory Circle built into the festival’s constitution, which Graindage says is his proudest achievement at the helm. (A close second: Björk’s coup.)
There were eleven works and exhibitions led by First Nations artists at this year’s Perth festival, including the Noongar opera Wundig Wer Wilura, which took pride of place in His Majesty’s Theater during its opening weekend: a “work of immense beauty” , says Grandage, “delivered at the highest level”.
“The biggest privilege was the connection with Noongar-Whadjuk [land] brought to you by the Noongar keepers. That is also related to falling in love with the place.”