An urban festival can feel like choosing your own adventure, and the adventure I chose at this year’s Perth festival always required the same equipment: a pair of headphones.
At the Invisible Opera on Thursday night, I sat in a stand on Scarborough beach in Noongar-Whadjuk country, a live narrator in my ears voyeuristically commenting on passers-by, including those who had no idea they were part of the show.
Theater producer Sophia Brous played the role of a surveillance camera, speaking gently at times and judgmentally toward others as I followed her instructions with my gaze. With ambient noise-canceling headphones, it was as if it were just the two of us, spying together like reptiles.
I then ran to Bold Park Aquatics Center where I bought my second headset. 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 listened to dialogue on the large, illuminated stage as characters flirted, fought, swam together, and learned from each other; At times the action stopped and we joined their inner monologues.
This festival, which ends on Sunday, is the fifth and final Perth festival to be helmed by artistic director Iain Grandage, whose acclaimed career as a composer may be responsible for the 900 sets of headphones his team had to find this year.
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“Good art is about the spaces between outside and inside,” he says. “And for me as a composer, these inner worlds have always been interesting… [With headphones]You just kind of walk away and suddenly you observe things in a very different way.
In a live theater piece, sound can open doors that nothing else can reach, by “filling the space between the notes,” as Grandage puts it. “That’s what a good poem does. That’s what a good piece of classical music does.”
As for what makes a good piece of theater, that may vary. Much has been written about the crisis facing the performing arts; first the pandemic that put a stop to it, then the cost of living crisis that made people much less likely to book tickets. For an arts festival programmer, trying to predict which audience members will leave home for now is “undoubtedly a big consideration.”
Among more traditional concert halls and contemporary dance works, this year’s Perth festival had a notable dominance of interactive shows and multi-sensory works; This brought an extra dimension to which audiences responded; a kind of “theater AND”.
There was Pool and Invisible Opera: two site-specific outdoor works that included headphones and offered a new perspective on public space. In Night Walks with Youth, young tour guides took people through the streets of Perth at night. A local swamp was growing inside an abandoned CBD mall in Wetland, emitting a dank, vibrant smell.
And in Food by US clown Geoff Sobelle, audiences sat around a large table as he presented a sweeping history of humanity and greed through sounds, smells, stagecraft and a terrifying gorging scene.
At Yhonnie Scarce’s extensive retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA, I stepped inside a flimsy corrugated iron shed to find 20 hand-blown glass spheres lined up; They looked like bush plums or cartoon bombs. Nuclear testing destroyed Scarce’s ancestral homeland of Maralinga in the 1950s; Many people in society were not made aware of this and it was exposed. The officer encouraged me to think about what it felt like to stand there unprotected, waiting for the bombs to explode.
Then he closed the door.
I put on my headphones again for Logue Lake: a strange horror film by Perth natives Georgie Crawley and Elise Wilson, set in a cabin in the woods where four friends spend the weekend and a mysterious fifth appears.
Smoke fills your nostrils as you descend towards the set: a house without walls, located in the center of the theater floor. By switching between five radio channels, actors move around rooms and around audiences following the dialogue and inner thoughts of the character they like. This is truly a choose your own adventure as you try to solve the mystery before they do.
While there will certainly be more site-specific and interactive works this year, “there’s a long history of audiences willing to take risks at festival time that they won’t necessarily take during 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, in-the-moment works that you will always remember help define the festival,” he says.
He’s talking about the 2020 Highway to Hell, which takes over Canning Highway; He says bands on flatbed trucks rolled by playing AC/DC covers to a crowd of 100,000 people. “You can’t go through a certain section of highway again without remembering when 10 groups arrived. YouGrandage says now.
The pandemic has changed the way festivals are programmed; At least that’s how it was for Perth. He says WA’s strict border controls have “made us fall even more in love with this place”.
“We were asked to slow down, we weren’t getting anywhere, so we started digging deeper… and you ask more questions about the world you walk on and the stories that come from that world.”
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This is particularly reflected in the festival’s deepening commitment to Noongar artists, particularly at an organizational level: a Noongar Advisory Circle has now been built into the festival’s charter, and Graindage says this is his proudest achievement at the helm. (A close second: Björk coup.)
This year the Perth festival featured 11 works and exhibitions led by First Nations artists; these included the Noongar opera Wundig Wer Wilura, which took pride of place at Her Majesty’s Theater on its opening weekend: “a work of immense beauty”, Grandage says, “has been delivered”. at the highest level”.
“The biggest privilege was the connection with Noongar-Whadjuk [land] It was offered by Noongar trustees. “This is related to falling in love with the place.”