Summer stars: Stellar line-up to light up this year’s Perth Festival

Iain Grandage has taken us on an epic journey during his tenure as artistic director of Perth Festival.

Beginning with karla (or home fire) in 2020, Grandage sent us on an odyssey into the ever-expanding thematic circles found in Noongar place names, moving on to bilya or river in 2021, then to wardan or ocean and finally, with djinda in 2023, the cosmos.

Paul Kelly, Angelique Kidjo and Courtney Barnett are a part of the strong musical strand at this year’s Perth Festival.

Djinda was where it was supposed to have ended for Grandage who, like his immediate predecessors, was given a four-year contract heading Australia’s oldest arts festival.

But the COVID disruption prompted the Perth Festival board to invite Grandage to stick around for another year and deliver his fifth summer arts event.

Grandage was thrilled with the extension to his contract, then realised he’d painted himself into a corner, thematically speaking.

“I swore loudly – “Faaaaaark!” – because I’d already reached the cosmos. Where do you go after the cosmos?” Grandage tells me ahead of this week’s launch of the 2024 Perth Festival program.

Grandage’s solution was to choose a single star in the cosmos, the sun or ngaangk, which in Noongar culture is a female entity (this makes the moon masculine, which is the opposite of what you see in most other cultures).

“It creates a beautiful triangle of sustenance, with the sun, the mother and the earth – boodjar – all being female,” explains Grandage.

When I suggest that the theme of warmth and nurturing is perfect for our troubled times – the war in Ukraine is dragging on, Israel drowning in blood, the twin existential threat of climate change and A.I. – Grandage is reluctant to make grandiose claims for Perth Festival in the face of such overwhelming bleakness and fear.

Perth Festival artistic director Iain Grandage at the launch of the 2024 program. Credit: Rift Photography

“What can we do?” he sighs.

“What we can claim,” continues Grandage, “is that putting on a festival is an act of affirmation. While we don’t shy away from the difficulties of the world what we can contribute are compassion and humanity and healing.”

That sense of joy in coming together and community will be most vividly expressed in the closing event at next year’s festival, Under the Same Sun, a free concert in Supreme Court Gardens featuring World Music superstar Angelique Kidjo, legendary Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, Shane Howard of Solid Rock fame and a host of first-class First Nations performers, such as Emma Donovan, Gina Williams, Jess Hitchcock, Maatakitj and Stephen Pigram.

Grandage, who will be conducting the orchestra accompanying the performers, says Under the Same Sun is a perfect summation of what he set out to achieve in his five years at Perth Festival.

“Communication through music is the best way to describe my ambition for Perth Festival,” he says.

“It is the capacity of music to hold simultaneous voices and to be consistently in conversation. And, without driving the musical metaphors too much, what makes music important for me is the harmony that can be generated.”

While the music programs is as strong as you would expect from a festival director whose day job is playing music and composing there are compelling offerings across the entire line-up.

Perth Festival favourite Akram Khan returns with a futuristic reimagining of the Rudyard Kipling classic Jungle Book; the Townsville-based contemporary company Dancenorth brings Wayfinder, in which 70 kilometres of salvaged wool is used as a symbol of hope in our dark times; Jacques Lecoq-trained Geoff Sobelle invites audiences to join him on the stage of His Majesty’s Theatre for the immersive dinner/show Food; and Black Swan is mounting their Perth Festival offering, a comedy about a swimming group titled The Pool, in the Bold Park Aquatic Centre.

Colour your world: Wayfinder from the innovative Townsville-based contemporary dance company Dancenorth.

The Bold Park performance is one of several that move away from traditional venues and into spaces not normally known for showcasing art, such as the long-mothballed Carillon Arcade in the Hay Street Mall. It is hosting a wetland created of Linda Tegg and Vivienne Hansen and a light show devised by Rebecca Baumann.

This edition’s Lotterywest film program also looks strong, with a rich selection of dramas, comedies, documentaries and animated features from around the world sure to fill out the justly famous Norfolk pine tree-lined Somerville Auditorium on the grounds of the University of Western Australia.

Arguably the most keenly anticipated movie this season, which begins on November 20 with the women’s soccer documentary Copa 71, is Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes-winning adaptation the late Martin Amis’ novel The Zone of Interest.

Set in Poland during the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest tells the story of an Auschwitz commandant named Rudolf Hoss and his wife (played Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Muller) who strive to build a dream home next to the Nazi death camp.

“It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope,” said Variety, grouping Glazer’s film in the pantheon of masterpieces dealing with the Holocaust along with Schindler’s List and Son of Saul.

Other hotly anticipated titles include May December, Todd Hayne’s controversial psychological drama about an actress (played by Natalie Portman) who visits the woman she is about to play in a movie (Julianne Moore) who had a scandalous relationship with a teenager; Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning drama about a woman (Sandra Muller again) who is on trial for her husband’s murder; and, also from France, The Taste of Things, a period romance starring Juliet Binoche as a master chef who works for renowned gourmet (Benoit Magimel).

Somerville Auditorium on the grounds of UWA is the home of Lotterywest Films and one of Perth’s iconic summertime entertainment destinations.Credit: Jess Wyld

While the Somerville film season is the embodiment of the international strand of the program, it is beefing up the homegrown component that Grandage believes will be the most significant legacy of his tenure as Perth Festival artistic director.

“We want to see ourselves represented on a stage because it is crucial to deepening our understanding of our identity and our place in this land. Stories that are made in this time and place resonate deeply, which is something I have felt has happened in my time at the festival,” says Grandage.

The most significant aspect of this engagement with place, which deepened during COVID because the border were shut, is the increased First Nations participation.

“It felt very natural to me that if we were going to celebrate place the bedrock had to be Noongar cultue and language,” says Grandage.

Black Swan’s The Pool, which will be staged in a swim centre.Credit: Simon Westlake

While COVID forced Perth Festival to look inward Grandage worried that if the lockdown went on any longer than it did it would lead to parochialism.

“It can work for a short period of time, but then there needs to be rebalancing, which is what happened inside the contemporary music sphere with Bon Iver and Bjork, and is what will happen inside the performance program in 2024,“he says.

This melding of the local and the international came together most vividly in arguably the crowning achievement of Grandage’s reign, the blockbuster (quite literally) closing performance of 2020, Highway to Hell. It was a celebration of WA’s biggest music export and a giant pub crawl that drew the kind of music fans who would never have been to Perth Festival.

“I’m just here for a very short time and only a facilitator,” says Grandage. “But if I leave the festival in a better shape than when I arrived and if I’ve deepened people’s relationship with Perth, made them look at it through a different lens then I feel I’ve done my job.”

Perth Festival is on from February 9 to March 3.

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