A city festival can feel like a choose your own adventure – and at this year’s Perth festival, the adventure I chose kept requiring the same gear: a pair of headphones.
On Thursday night at the Invisible Opera, I sat in a grandstand at Scarborough beach, on Noongar-Whadjuk country, as a live narrator in my ears voyeuristically commented on passersby – including some who had no idea that they were part of the show.
Theatre-maker Sophia Brous played the role of a surveillance camera, speaking gently at times, judgementally at others, as I followed her directions with my gaze. With headphones cancelling out the ambient noise, it was as if it were just the two of us there, spying together like creeps.
Afterwards I raced to the Bold Park Aquatic Centre, where I was handed my second set of headphones. Written by Steve Rodgers and directed by Kate Champion, the Pool is a site-specific homage to Australia’s public pools and the diverse communities they foster. Through our headphones, the audience tuned into the dialogue happening on the vast, floodlit stage, as characters flirted, fought, swam with and learned from each other; occasionally, the action stopped and we were let into their inner monologues, too.
Closing on Sunday, this is the fifth and final Perth festival to be helmed by artistic director Iain Grandage – whose acclaimed career as a composer may be to blame for the 900 sets of headphones his team had to track down this year.
“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’re somewhat removed from the place, and you’re suddenly observing things in a very different way.”
In a piece of live theatre, 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. That’s what a good piece of classical music does too.”
As for what a good piece of theatre does –that might be changing. Much has been written about the crisis facing the performing arts, kicked first by the pandemic that shut it down, and then a cost of living crisis that left people far less likely to book tickets. For an arts festival programmer, trying to guess what audiences will leave the house for now is “undoubtedly a big consideration”.
Among the more traditional concert halls and contemporary dance works, this year’s Perth festival had a notable predominance of interactive shows and multi-sensory works, which brought an extra dimension that audiences seem to respond to – a sort of “theatre AND”.
There was the Pool and the Invisible Opera: two site-specific outdoor works involving headphones, and offering a new way of looking at public space. In Nightwalks With Teenagers, teen tour guides led the public through the streets of Perth at night. In Wetland, a native marsh was growing inside an abandoned CBD mall, emitting a damp, living smell.
And at Food by US clown Geoff Sobelle, audience members sat around an oversized table as he presented a sweeping history of humanity and greed through sounds, scents, stagecraft and a horrifying gorging scene.
At Yhonnie Scarce’s expansive retrospective at the Art Gallery of WA, I stepped inside a shed made of flimsy corrugated iron, to find 20 hand-blown glass orbs lined up – they looked like bush plums or cartoon bombs. Nuclear testing destroyed Scarce’s ancestral country of Maralinga in the 1950s, with many in the community not notified, and left exposed. The attendant encouraged me to reflect on what it would have felt like to stand there unprotected, waiting for the bombs to go off.
Then she shut the door.
I grabbed headphones again for Logue Lake: a queer horror by 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 shows up.
Smoke fills your nostrils as you descend into the set: a house with no walls that takes centre stage on the theatre floor. The cast roam through the rooms and around the audience, who toggle between five radio channels to follow the dialogue and inner thoughts of whichever character they like. It’s a literal 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 is a long history of audiences willing to take risks at festival time that they wouldn’t necessarily take at the rest of the year”, Grandage says. This may explain why I jumped into the pool after the Pool, for the show’s optional aqua aerobics class.
“Works which are experiential, of a moment, that you’ll always remember – those help define the festival,” he says.
He mentions 2020’s Highway to Hell, a takeover of Canning Highway, with bands on flat-bed trucks rolling by playing AC/DC covers to a crowd of 100,000 people. “You can’t drive past that particular bit of the highway again without having a memory of that time when 10 bands came to you,” Grandage says now.
The pandemic did change the way festivals are programmed – or at least it did 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 then started to go down deeper … and you ask more questions about the earth on which you’re walking, and the stories that come from that earth.”
This has been particularly reflected in the festival’s deepening commitment to Noongar artists, particularly at an organisational level: a Noongar Advisory Circle is now built into the festival’s constitution, which Graindage says is his proudest achievement at the helm. (A close second: the Björk coup.)
There were 11 works and exhibitions led by First Nations artists at Perth festival this year, including Noongar opera Wundig Wer Wilura, which took pride of place at His Majesty’s Theatre on opening weekend: a “work of immense beauty”, Grandage says, “delivered at the highest level”.
“The greatest privilege has been the connection to Noongar-Whadjuk [land] offered by the Noongar custodians. Which is tied into falling in love with the place too.”
Perth festival closes on Sunday 3 March. Yhonnie Scarce: the Light of Day is on show at the Art Gallery of NSW until 19 May. Guardian Australia travelled to Perth as a guest of Perth festival and Perth writers’ weekend
