Wendy Martin has unveiled her second Perth International Arts Festival, under the banner, “imagination with no borders.” More than 700 artists will descend on the WA capital in February next year, staging over 180 events — including five world premieres — across Perth and the surrounding areas. Martin has woven a number of political undercurrents into 2017’s offering, which touches on themes such as immigration, accessibility, empathy and the environment.
As with her inaugural program earlier this year, 2017’s Festival will kick off in spectacular style with a major outdoor event, similar in scale and ambition to 2016's phenomenally successful opener, Home. Billed as an “epic celebration of landscape, culture and community,” Boorna Waanginy: The Trees Speak is a collaboration between the creative team behind last year’s opening spectacle, led by director Nigel Jamieson, and the local Noongar elders as well as artists and scientists from across Australia. Staged in Perth’s Kings Park, the event celebrates the wealth of biodiversity in WA while also offering a chance to reflect on humanity’s capacity to cherish or trash it’s natural environment.
Next year’s music program at the Chevron Festival Gardens features an eclectic mix of acts from avant-pop to Americana to South Korean alt-rock. Highlights include gigs by Warpaint, Kurt Vile and Explosions in the Sky.
In addition to the two already announced headline events – Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, which plugs into the political zeitgeist of the American presidential circus, and The Dark Mirror: Zender’s Winterreise, featuring British tenor Ian Bostridge singing Schubert’s musical monodrama – PIAF will welcome some of the major stage works touring Australia’s festival circuit next year.
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These includes Back To Back Theatre’s Lady Eats Apple, which opened to mixed reviews at the Melbourne Festival last month, and Theatre Complicite’s smash hit The Encounter, which will also play at the Sydney Festival in January followed by a Melbourne season at Malthouse before it heads West. Other international highlights include Opus No. 7 by the Russian experimentalists of the Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, which explores the oppression of Jews in Stalinist Russia, Argentinian director Lola Arias ode to the complex social and political history of Chile, The Year I Was Born, and British composer Martin Green’s epic collaboration with a supergroup of world-class artists, combining live music and animation, Flit, which is a PIAF co-commission. India’s answer to School of Rock, Roysten Abel’s The Manganiyar Classroom, promises to be one of the major crowd pleasers of next year’s program, as does contemporary circus from Nouveau Cirque du Vietnam: A O Lang Pho.
Martin showed with her first PIAF program in 2016 that her years working at the forefront of contemporary dance, first at the Sydney Opera House and then at London’s Southbank Centre, were being put to good use in her curation of the Festival, and 2017’s selection also reflects her affinity for cutting edge choreography. Headlining the dance program is Canadian dancemaker Crystal Pite’s Betroffenheit, which has earned rave reviews all over the world since premiering in 2015. South African dancer Gregory Maqoma celebrates his ethnic heritage in Exit/Exist, and the annual Ballet At The Quarry program will feature a trio of both world and Australian premieres by Colombian-Belgian Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Canadian Eric Gauthier and West Australian Ballet’s Christopher Hill.
Cinema will also feature heavily at next year’s PIAF. The Lotterywest Festival Films program will include works by Rolf de Heer, Molly Reynolds, Pedro Almodovar and Jim Jarmusch.
Full details of the 2017 Perth International Arts Festival are available now.
