Perth Festival Launches 2018 Program

This summer, the 2018 Perth Festival invites you to see art in a different light and revel in a feast of captivating experiences to suit every taste and budget.

The Festival welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors from 9 February to 4 March as more than 700 of the planet's best and brightest artists and entertainers descend on Perth for one of the world's most magnificent multi-arts celebrations.

From our free opening event that heralds the rise and fall of the sun along St George's Terrace to the soul- explosion finale at Elizabeth Quay, the festive spirit will arouse all the senses across 24 glorious summer days and nights.

Celebrating 65 years as Australia's oldest arts festival, the third annual program announced by Artistic Director Wendy Martin on Thursday night again promises to be an essential Perth summer experience.

Living up to our global reputation for diversity and excellence, the 2018 Festival includes nine Australian exclusives, two world premieres, five Australian season premieres, two commissions and a dizzying array of more than 230 music, theatre, dance, literature, film and visual art events - many of them free.
"For 65 years, Perth Festival has been at the heart of our city," Wendy Martin says. "In this singular and remote place on the edge of Australia, we welcome the innovative and visionary artists who bring their dreams and their endless capacity to surprise, entertain and provoke us."

Major highlights include: the dazzling theatrical magic of Robert Lepage's The Far Side of the Moon, the epic Taiwanese drumming and martial arts spectacle Beyond Time, an exhilarating collision of street art and mystical Sufi music and dance in Syria's White Spirit, thrilling French circus from Compagnie XY at the Regal Theatre, South Korean visual art star Kimsooja, an extended Writer's Week program featuring Helen Garner, Kim Scott and Alan Hollinghurst, and a feast of bangers, ballads and brilliant nights at Chevron Gardens with the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Neil and Liam Finn, Mogwai and Perfume Genius.

The joy of ancient and modern rituals, and art's power to bring people together run through a Festival whose 2018 official scent Damask Rose will pervade venues and influence drinks and dishes in restaurants and bars across the city. The scent is inspired by a tiny bottle of Persian rosewater donated to the Museum of Water to tell a Perth immigrant's story of arrival and acceptance in a new land.

The 2018 Festival begins with an epic ritual of wonder and delight as the female voices of Siren Song descend from the sky to encompass the city. As the sun sets to open the Festival on 9 February, a Noongar smoking ceremony reaches its climax in St George's Terrace and the canyon of commerce softens to feminine sounds broadcast from loudspeakers atop city buildings. This seven-minute serenade to the sun by sound artist Byron J Scullin and curatorial duo Supple Fox brings people together every dawn and dusk to see their city anew for the first ten days of the Festival.

"As with the spellbinding spectacle of music and movement that opens the Festival, the 2018 Program is spun with magic moments that present a diversity of perspectives on the world," Wendy Martin says. "I encourage you to dive in fearlessly."

The award-winning Museum of Water, a popular hit of the 2017 Festival, culminates in 2018 with a fun, interactive installation of hundreds of bottles and Western Australian watery stories of life, ritual and leisure gathered by artist Amy Sharrocks as she towed her trusty, rusty trailer "museum" around the State.

Extraordinary experiences abound in a spellbinding and emotionally rousing 2018 Theatre program. In a must-see Festival highlight, Nigerian-born playwright Inua Ellams returns to Perth with the Australian premiere season of The Barber Shop Chronicles after a sell-out season at London's National Theatre. Audiences get to share a rollicking and heart-warming night of laughs, music and barbed banter with a bunch of men in six different barber shops across London and Africa as they watch a televised soccer match on the same day. From Russia comes the Australian exclusive of Farewell to Paper, a beguiling one- man show by acclaimed poet and director Evgeny Grishkovets who poignantly and hilariously bids adieu to the material that has served humanity so ably for centuries. Legendary Canadian theatre icon Robert Lepage graces Perth once more, 12 years after the wild success of his epic The Dragons Trilogy, with another career-defining production, The Far Side of the Moon. Performed by Yves Jacques to a score by Laurie Anderson, the witty one-man production about two estranged brothers explores interplanetary mysteries, drawing inspiration from the US-Soviet space race and dazzling with its theatrical magic. Direct from an award-winning season, the Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour presents his audacious unrehearsed theatre event Nassim in which a series of guest actors each night grapple with the hazards of a new language.

The Festival places in-demand international theatre-makers alongside celebrated local talent. A Festival highlight and world-premiere Festival commission in partnership with BLACK SWAN State Theatre Company and DADAA is You Know We Belong Together, part of the Festival's commitment to breaking down barriers in disability arts. Co-created by Perth actress Julia Hales and BLACK SWAN Artistic Director Clare Watson, You Know We Belong Together is a celebration of love, living with Down syndrome and Hales' lifelong dream to appear on the Australian TV soap Home and Away. In The Second Woman, audiences are invited to step in and out of a 24-hour live performance and cinema spectacle as Sydney's Nat Randall repeats the same short scene 100 times with a revolving door of 100 Perth men volunteering as her co-stars. Replaying a scene from John Cassavetes' cult film Opening Night, The Second Woman is compulsive viewing as it fashions new meanings with each partner and blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

One of the world's greatest circus companies leads a 2018 program for the young and young at heart. Making their Australian debut, the 22 performers of France's renowned Compagnie XY present a triumph of giddy, heart-in-your-mouth acrobatics in Il n'est pas encore minuit (It's Not Yet Midnight). This tender, thrilling celebration of human solidarity features astonishing five-tiered human towers, catapulting bodies and the uplifting groove of a 1920s jazz club. Indonesia's Papermoon Theatre and Melbourne's Polyglot Theatre join forces for Cerita Anak (Child's Story), an immersive adventure on the high seas for children aged 2-7 and their adults. Combining puppetry, song and shadow imagery, this sensual and captivating experience is inspired by Java's seafaring history and a true tale of a small boy's arrival to Australia.

As the 2018 Artist in Residence, fifth-generation master in the Chinese tradition of glove puppet theatre Yeung Fai dazzles Perth with the Australian premiere of his acclaimed autobiographical show. Combining traditional puppetry with modern multimedia effects, Hand Stories is a madcap masterpiece which tells the moving tale of his family of famous puppeteers who fell victim to the Cultural Revolution. Born in China, Yeung was exiled as a refugee and now lives in France, the base from which he creates and tours work all around the world, keeping the ancient art form alive. While in Perth, Fai will tour a new Festival commission, The Puppet-Show Man, across the city to schools and community groups and lead workshops co-hosted by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre.

In 2018, the Dance program invites the world's most brilliant choreographers and dancers to Perth. From Taiwan's award-winning U-Theatre explodes Beyond Time, a glorious mix of martial arts, dance, thundering taiko drums, music and multi-media. Created from a 50-day walking meditation across Taiwan, this Australian exclusive is a timeless journey into the awe-inspiring moments in life. Vessel is an extraordinary new work from in- demand Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet and renowned Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa, which wows as seven dancers test the limits of human movement on a stage flooded with water. With a score by composer Ryuchi Sakamoto and Marikho Nara, Vessel was hailed a masterpiece at its Japanese premiere in January and has its first international outing in Perth before a European tour. Britain's wild child of dance Michael Clark and his award-winning company make their Perth debut with the Olivier Award-nominated to a simple, rock'n'roll ... song, a potent dance and music cocktail set to a stunning soundtrack by Erik Satie, Patti Smith and David Bowie. Australian dance luminaries Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek and Dancenorth form a dream team with Indonesia's powerhouse music duo Senyawa to create Attractor, a trance-dance odyssey that invites audience members on stage to share a ritual of ecstatic abandonment.

Direct from war-torn Syria's Umayyad Mosque comes the Australian exclusive of White Spirit, a profound sensory and spiritual experience in which Sufi music and mysticism collides with Tunisian street art. Led by the stirring voice of Noureddine Khourchid, seven religious singers perform exquisite invocations as three Whirling Dervishes of Damascus hypnotically spin on a stage made thrillingly vivid through the live illuminated calligraphy of Tunisian street artist Shoof. The West Australian Ballet returns with its much- loved Ballet at The Quarry to present the world-premiere of Milky Way, a ground-breaking collaboration with Gary Lang NT Dance Company and opera artist Deborah Cheetham that retells Lang's mother's Yolngu Milky Way creation story.
Extending in 2018 to seven full days and nights of festivities, Writers Week is a celebration of Australian storytelling today, curated by William Yeoman. Words and ideas swirl like a storm around The University Club of Western Australia - the new hub for international and Australian writers, storytellers, musicians, artists, architects and theatre-makers - as well as extending out into libraries, bars and the streets of Perth.
A truly exceptional opening event pairs Australian literary giants Helen Garner and Kim Scott as they shine a spotlight on the importance of literature in Australia today. Further national literary luminaries include WA author Tim Winton, who previews his new novel, The Shepherd's Hut, a powerful meditation on lost boys and the riptide of toxic masculinity, before its global release; and a closing address from Chinese-Australian artist and born storyteller William Yang, who uses words and image to share a moving series of encounters including his uncle's murder, a friend dying of AIDS and his Taoist philosophy. These renowned guests are placed alongside the brightest new voices in Australian literature, including WA's Claire Coleman who identifies with the South Coast Noongar peoples and presents her black&write! fellowship-winning debut Terra Nullius, as well as hot international talent including highly acclaimed English novelist Alan Hollinghurst and Lena Dunham-approved, Shanghai-born American short-story writer Jenny Zhang.

As glorious summer sunsets coax our imaginations into the evening, bring a picnic and sit back with friends and strangers alike to share cinematic dreams full of new voices, new stories and new ways of seeing the world under the stars. Lotterywest Films launches on 27 November with a specially curated selection of Western Australian premieres and award-winning international cinema. With screenings at UWA Somerville and ECU Joondalup Pines for 20 weeks, audiences will share a cinematic journey under a perfect Western Australian night sky. Our opening is the delightful odd- couple documentary Faces Places. Join Agnès Varda, a sprightly 89-year-old hero of cinema, and her young pal, star photographer and street artist JR as they take their mobile photography lab around rural and working-class France. Borg vs McEnroe gives us an inside look into one of the greatest sporting encounters ever seen at The Wimbledon tennis championships in 1980. Shia LeBeouf plays a terrific McEnroe in a role that plays off his controversial off-screen persona. From Britain, a dinner party from hell in Sally Potter's The Party, old friends gather in honour of Janet, recently appointed a Shadow Health Minister. As politics and personalities collide the celebrations turn to chaos and secrets spill out over the vol-au-vents. Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki takes on a topic that couldn't be timelier and adds in some super-droll Scandi humour in The Other Side of Hope; and intoxicating first love meets cool thriller in the spine-tingling Thelma, the Norwegian nomination for the foreign language Oscar.

Perth celebrates the return of Chevron Gardens, presenting dozens of electrifying acts with a mantle to make you move or be moved. This showcase of exhilarating contemporary music spans UK grime, cinematic pop, Afrobeat punk and Australian hip-hop, to name but a few. Highlights include pioneering English grime kingpin Dizzee Rascal; dapper British rockabilly siblings Kitty, Daisy & Lewis; renowned American piano-pop maverick Ben Folds; Adelaide electronic soul aficionados Electric Fields; Australian hip-hop duo A.B. Original, a fiery collaboration between MCs Trials and Briggs; Antipodean treasures and songwriting legends Neil and Liam Finn; Pitchfork-endorsed, sonic glam pop hero Perfume Genius; Ghanaian Afrobeat soul queen Jojo Abot, equal parts Erykah Badhu and performance artist; famed Scottish doom rockers Mogwai; and American soul living legend Lee Fields who closes Chevron Gardens with Sunday Forever - A Soul Explosion. These late-night grooves are complemented by the sunny afternoon performances at Fremantle Arts Centre that make up our series of Sunday Music, family-friendly musical adventures from across the Indian Ocean and beyond.

The 2018 Festival Classical Music program rouses with two performances by the Catalan early-music maestro Jordi Savall. For one night only, Savall teams up with Spain's extraordinary early music specialists Hespèrion XXI and Mexico's Tembembe Ensamble Continuo in the Perth Concert Hall for a rousing program of dance music that masterfully mixes 15th and 16th century European and Latin American sounds in contemporary improvisations. Savall, playing viola de gamba, also joins English harpist Andrew Lawrence-King to explore the delicacy and nuance of their ancient instruments in the intimate surrounds of Government House. In an Australian exclusive, France's award-winning, prolific pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet marks the centenary of the death of Claude Debussy with a four-hour celebration of the French composer's pleasure-filled music. From closer to home, the Festival welcomes the leaders of the renowned Australian Chamber Orchestra plugged in at the Astor Theatre as the electro-infused spin-off band, ACO Underground, with Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie and Midnight Oil guitarist Jim Moginie. Fremantle Arts Centre's annual cross- genre program Soft Soft Loud features American composer, singer and bandleader Ted Hearne to present the Australian exclusive of Katrina Ballads, his acclaimed and deeply moving work inspired by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

The evocative 2018 Visual Arts program takes on the most urgent issues of our times - globalisation, migration and climate change. For the first time, Australian art-lovers can immerse themselves in the work of celebrated South Korean multimedia artist Kimsooja in a 30-year overview of her site-specific installations, performances, sculptures, videos and photographic works. >From New Zealand, Lisa Reihana presents Emissaries, one of the big hits of the 2017 Venice Biennale. This ambitious animated panoramic video returns imperialism's gaze with a critical, speculative twist on the historical accounts of Captain Cook's Pacific exploration and disrupting notions of beauty, authenticity and myth. Acclaimed Australian artist Pilar Mata Dupont's Undesirable Bodies examines legacies of colonisation in the Pilbara in a bold new series of photographs and video installations. The exhibition Human Nature by distinguished Yemen-born London-based artist Zadok Ben-David features two bewitching installations that present miniature objects in epic formations to contemplate humankind's relationship to nature. In a world premiere, Banjawarn is Perth artist Christopher Charles' investigation into the bizarre Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, which bought an outback WA pastoral station, 800km north-east of Perth, two years before their deadly chemical attack in a Tokyo subway. Known for her stoic performance art, Australian artist Latai Taumopeau presents Repatriate, which expresses the devastation of climate change on Pacific Island communities as a traditional dance performance inside a Perspex box that slowly fills with water.
Pre-sale tickets are available now for Friends of The Festival.

Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday 13 November, 9am AWST. For more information visit perthfestival.com.au.