ON Friday night, thousands of people gathered in Perth’s Supreme Court Gardens for the opening of the Perth International Arts Festival. Artistic director Shelagh Magadza had invited Spanish theatre collective La Fura dels Baus to produce a celebratory, awe-inspiring show.
Like Canada’s Cirque du Soleil, La Fura dels Baus began as a group of street performers and has since become an international production outfit. Unlike the slick Canadians, however, La Fura has an anarchic energy that rattles the gates of the permissible. the group emerged from the spirit of liberation that took hold after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, and which also produced the hysterical, slightly kinky aesthetic of Pedro Almodovar’s films.
La Fura’s show on Friday night was a one-off created for Perth, although elements had been staged elsewhere. it involved industrial noise and drumming on steel barrels, modern flamenco to a techno beat and an enormous steel chariot on which a crazed driver sat, throwing flour bombs. Watch out anyone who got in the way as the chariot cut its path through the crowd.
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Most spectacular were those acts involving a construction crane that rose over the assembly and lifted performers high into the air: first a solo, industrial-age angel, then an enormous hamster wheel kept turning by its aerial crew, and finally a human curtain of some 50 souls suspended from a scaffold who performed an aerial dance.
While the hour-long performance had longueurs amid the thrills, La Fura showed that an outdoor celebration can be exciting and fun and have an element of controlled danger: a running of hornless bulls. all power to Perth for making it happen; anything is better than a routine entertainment for a passive crowd.
Indeed, audience participation – the sort of thing that can strike fear and loathing in the heritage arts – is a touchstone of Magadza’s third PIAF program. While this is in keeping with a democratisation of cultural festivals elsewhere, Magadza says it also taps a spirit in Perth that is reclaiming public spaces and revitalising urban life.
“All those ideas of interaction, expression, giving people a space to express their own ideas, are really vital,” Magadza says. “That is one of the transformative things that is happening around Perth.”
Magadza and PIAF chairman Michael Smith say Perth has the highest rate of participation of any festival in Australia.
Last year PIAF recorded 328,817 attendances, indicating that one in five Perth people took part in some way.
It is a greater level of involvement than in Sydney and Melbourne, whose most recent festivals had participation rates per head of population of 14 per cent and 17 per cent respectively. Adelaide has the greatest rate of participation, however, with 41 per cent of people attending festival events. (Figures for Brisbane were not available at the time of writing.)
“Given our population size and the number of tickets we sell, there’s a really high level of engagement with this festival,” Magadza says.
“We are very conscious of our ticket pricing to make it possible for people to do three things in the festival: don’t just do one, do three.”
A show such as Etiquette at the Art Gallery of Western Australia cafe depends on participation; in it, cafe patrons become the performance. a willingness to participate is also part of the interactive installations of Danish artist Jeppe Hein, whose work opens on Friday around the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Hein is a former assistant to Olafur Eliasson, whose present exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is similarly about the creation of immersive, perception-altering environments.
But participation – in which the art is fully realised only by one’s active engagement with it – is perhaps most evident in the children’s program and the work of visiting Toronto-based company Mammalian Diving Reflex.
Its performance piece, Haircuts by Children, is exactly what it says: people allow eight and nine-year-olds to cut their hair in an exercise of trust and responsibility. Another of the Canadian group’s projects, the Children’s choice Awards, involves a team of child judges who will assess performances and exhibitions in the festival and award prizes at the end. the project, organisers say, is intended to be interventionist: the children’s presence in the theatre, among the adults, is part of the art experience.
Magadza’s programming choices reflect her desire to bring international acts to Perth that demonstrate new ideas in world arts practice, as well as to present local and, in particular, indigenous stories.
Her festival program includes, for example, the Maly Drama Theatre from Russia with Life and Fate, an adaptation of the novel by Vasily Grossman; Rupert Goold’s production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, a radical reimagining of Luigi Pirandello’s influential play; and Aurelien Bory’s Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (The Seven Boards of Skill), a mesmerisingly beautiful display of large geometric forms and human ingenuity.
Australian plays include Grace, based on a novel by Robert Drewe, Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender, directed by Matthew Lutton, and the upbeat revival of Tony Briggs’s the Sapphires, the story of an Aboriginal, Motown-inspired girl band on tour in Vietnam.
The music program ranges from contemporary to classical, with a nightly program at Becks Music Box, Britten’s Peter Grimes with the Australian Youth Orchestra, New York band Antony and the Johnsons with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble.
Magadza has programmed fewer Perth exclusives this year and has relied on shows that are touring elsewhere, such as Six Characters, already seen at the Sydney Festival, and Enda Walsh’s play the Walworth Farce, travelling to the Adelaide Festival and other cities after Perth.
“This year, being an Adelaide year, there’s a greater opportunity to share productions,” Magadza says. “I think all of us [festival programmers] since last year have been a little bit more economically cautious.”
The Perth International Arts Festival continues until March 1. Matthew Westwood visited Perth as a guest of PIAF.
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Tags: artistic director, court gardens, fura dels baus, la fura dels baus, shelagh, street performers