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Australia's longest-running arts festival's 73rd season will include an opera performance in a disused CBD office space, an opening event broadcast only on social media and a return of the popular festival club at East Perth Power Station. Perth Festival artistic director Anna Reece told Jo Trilling on ABC Radio Perth her goal was to "ensure that something in there hooks every individual that lives in the city". International acts include UK choreographer and dancer Aakash Odedra performing his solo work, Songs of the Bulbul, an ancient Sufi story about a nightingale in captivity. "The closer this nightingale gets to death, the more exquisitely it sings," Reece said. Performing (and cooking) on stage at the state theatre's underground studio is South Korean artist Jaha Koo. His show Haribo Kimchi "explores his story, which is about growing up in South Korea, struggling with isolation and anxiety, deciding ultimately it was time for him to leave and experience other places in the world". "He moves from Seoul to Belgium initially, and then he eventually arrives in Berlin," Reece said. "He cooks on stage, he might make kimchi pancakes, he might make those rather interesting jelly desserts, he might crack a Korean beer. He invites members of the audience up onto stage to sit with him, and he tells you his autobiographical story." East Perth Power Station to light up again The stand-out success of last year's festival, the transformation of the derelict East Perth Power Station into Casa Musica, which offered the contemporary music programming, food, drink and light projections by the Swan River, is back with plans to make the venue bigger this year. "We just want a bit more of everything. We want more food and beverage," Reece said. "We need more furniture because so many people came down, and we want more art on the walls and around the places and spaces that the power station offers our audiences." With the Perth Concert Hall closed until 2028 for extensive renovations, the festival is exploring new venues. A Philip Glass opera based on Franz Kafka's The Trial will play in an empty office space above Myer in the CBD. Another production, simply dubbed Secret Opera, will be performed in an undisclosed location. The Perth Town Hall will once again become a re-imagined Embassy Ballroom and St Mary's Cathedral will hold a series of choral and chamber music called the Sanctum Series. Opening with a reel Notably absent from the program are large-scale free public opening and closing events. While thousands once flocked to walk with giant puppets, wandered among the lit-up trees in Kings Park or celebrated Bon Scott with an all-day party that closed a 10-kilometre stretch of highway, this year's event, A View from a Bridge, is a more pared-back affair that people can take in on their phones from anywhere in the world. Created by London-based artist Joe Bloom, the digital project will use Matagarup Bridge and an old red landline to create a work that will be shared with audiences on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. "[Joe] puts an old dial-up red phone of his mother's on a bridge and he invites you to pick that phone up," Reece said. "Then Joe is hundreds of metres away on the other side of the phone and he speaks to you, and because you are standing on a bridge suspended in time and space, there's just something about people being a lot more honest and a lot more vulnerable. "What he's done is collected these extraordinary stories, these confessions, these jokes, these provocations from all of these different people who live and work in London across the London bridges. Bloom will spend a week in Perth filming stories, which will then be uploaded online. Reece conceded it might disappoint audience members used to a more traditional outing, but said she hoped they would take the opportunity to explore other events dotted around the city. "You've always got to choose how you carve up your budget," she said. "For me, the decision, at least for last year and this year, has been the East Perth Power Station, lots of different events in different neighbourhoods across the city, rather than, for want of a better word, a one-hit wonder for thousands of people." Costs double after COVID While the festival gets a grant from the state government through Lotterywest and attracts funding from private and corporate donors, Reece said budgets were always tight, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, and ticket sales only covered 30 per cent of the festival's costs. "The thing that's happened since COVID is that everything, especially in regards to international theatre, to freight, to flights, everything's doubled," she said. What that has meant, Reece said, is that rather than bringing international acts exclusively to Perth, she and her team looked to work closely with other festivals so that a performer or company could be brought to Australia for multiple events, and costs could be shared. "This idea of exclusivity, of one show only coming to Perth and nowhere else in Australia, that's just not realistic anymore," she said. "We've got to find ways to work together, to share great work across the country, and then find these little gems that really make Perth Festival stand out and celebrate our own identity and relevance in the community.
