Baker Boy; Haribo Kimchi; Philip Glass’ The Trial; Scenes from the Climate Era
In a glass room that resembles a half-abandoned industrial office space, people dressed in black move with purpose. But everything about them is just a little off. They’re dressed too warmly for this Perth weather: suits, long coats and scarves, and their clothes are somehow outdated.
A man in a bowler hat climbs a small staircase leading to a three-foot cliff, turns around and throws his arms in the air. A woman sits on a chair and looks intensely at her hands. Nearby, an orchestra is preparing to perform; A large gong hangs on one side and musicians have been flocking to the venue for the last 10 minutes.
The audience isn’t quite sure how to take this; after all, the show hasn’t officially started yet. This is the Australian premiere of Philip Glass’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s opera. Hearingand the line between performance and reality began to melt before we even walked through the door. Along with the tickets were instructions on how to find the venue, which can only be described as (sorry) Kafkaesque.
We pass through the cavernous space to the far end of the room, past a makeshift corridor of plastic sheets. When the show begins, it fills the space thoughtfully and completely. Projections play on the walls, a glass-walled office turns into a bedroom, then an artist’s studio. Bright lights shine and the cumulative effect is surreal and disorienting; It suits the story of a man on trial for a crime that is never explained.
In her second Perth Festival as artistic director, Anna Reece consolidated what she had achieved with her first; An event that is ambitious and wide-ranging, but also intimate and contemplative. The festival, which lasts about a month and ends on March 1, brings together music, theatre, dance, opera, visual arts and a few things in between, defying definitions.
For me, what tied every work I saw together was how easy it was to fully immerse yourself. Inside HearingYou spend two hours locked in a world that takes strange and ever-renewing truths and reflects them back to us through a funhouse mirror.
Jaha Koo’s Haribo Kimchi It sees Koo cooking for two audience members, peppering the show with anecdotes and the occasional singing snails. On paper it looks extremely chaotic; In practice, this is a work that challenges my ideas about what home really is and how you can continue to exist when what you consider home is gone forever.
Rampies are sarcastic Thania Petersen’s (2022-2026) work is a work of art that fills the entire room with scent; the far wall is lined with small organza bags filled with citrus leaves and infused with frankincense. A bench in the middle is surrounded by speakers playing jieker (2026) A work of art that sheds light on the connection between the Yolngu people and traders in South Sulawesi. As you sit and listen, your mind begins to look for patterns in the leaves, and soon the thought turns into feeling.
We all have walls in our minds. Little by little, brick by brick, they are created from experiences, from assumptions, and eventually become structures that tell us what we like and what we don’t like; What we think is valuable or not. When left unchecked, walls become so heavy and towering that we can no longer see above or around them, narrowing our view of the world as a result. An arts festival is an opportunity to take a sledgehammer to those walls and challenge yourself. Not only take the risk of experiencing something new, but also challenge yourself to question assumptions and challenge your worldview. This is an opportunity to push our own boundaries beyond what would otherwise be possible.
You can stop watching a tech-inspired dance work overnight (U>N>I>T>E>D) to a dance battle in the street, Snotty Nose Rez Kids and then Baker Boy at the otherwise disused East Perth Power Station, which has been transformed into a spectacular live music venue for the festival, before karaoke at City Hall.
David Finnigan Scenes from the Climate Era It was one of the most unexpectedly impressive works I saw in my festival photography. There’s a tendency to shut down out of self-preservation or exhaustion when the word “climate” is mentioned, but if the show started at a disadvantage because of this, it soon overcame this.
Presented by the West Australian Youth Theater Company, the show delivers on what it promises: a series of scenes set in the past and future, all linked to the theme of climate. However, this is neither pessimism nor false optimism. Instead, it’s an impressive 70 minutes of clever, thoughtful, and sometimes unexpectedly funny moments. If you ask me what the most heartbreaking thing I saw in theater this year was, my answer would be a man playing the last of his kind, a frog. As the show continued, a couple sitting in the front took turns looking at the little boy sitting between them.
Art isn’t just a way to distract you; they are a way of being part of something bigger. In a world where it can be easy to feel silenced, where it can feel easier to let our walls become calcified, art and festivals like this are pushing back against that. Not by preaching or serious argument, but just by showing you what else is out there, that there are other ways of thinking and being.
Elizabeth Flux traveled to Perth as a guest of the Perth Festival
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