From 30ft marionettes roaming the city’s streets to a teeny tiny love story played out on a miniature paper set, the Perth international arts festival is mixing up large and small in 2015.
In what will be his final program of a four-year tenure as artistic director, Jonathan Holloway says he hopes the festival will offer “experiences both intimate and epic”.
The Giants, by French street theatre masters Royal De Luxe, will tell the story of a girl in an Albany lighthouse who buoys the spirits of troops departing for Gallipoli. First seen in Liverpool, the marionettes almost didn’t make it into the Perth program but for a last-minute letter from Holloway to festival partners and a front page campaign by the West Australian newspaper that raised the final $5.4m from sponsors needed to fund the spectacle.
But it won’t be the only puppetry on show come February. The late Anthony Minghella’s final opera production, Madama Butterfly, gets its belated Australian premiere at His Majesty’s theatre, featuring the award-winning stagecraft of Blind Summit.
The Paper Architect, a tale of a model-maker whose designs come to life, will show in secret locations in Perth and Albany. And Handspring, the puppetry company behind the UK National Theatre’s international hit, War Horse, brings its South African story, Ubu and the Truth Commission, to the Heath Ledger theatre.
Also premiering at the State Theatre Centre will be The Rabbits, the long-awaited adaptation of John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s Australian picture book of the same name, adapted and directed by John Sheedy with a libretto by Lally Katz.
Meanwhile, Cut the Sky, by the Western Australian Marrugeku company, will weave the poetry of dream catcher Edwin Lee Mulligan and the music of Ngaiire and Nick Cave into a story about Indigenous land rights and our wider custodianship of nature.
Dance highlights include New York’s Mark Morris Dance Group whose Mozart Dances sets modern American choreography to the master composer’s music; Zip Zap Zoom from the West Australian Ballet at the Quarry amphitheatre; and Rising, showcasing emerging British talent Aakash Odedra, choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant and his mentor Akram Khan, most recently at Brisbane festival.
Perth has also announced a killer musical program headlined by London Grammar and featuring multi Aria-award nominated Chet Faker among an international lineup that includes Sinead O‘Connor, First Aid Kit, Mogwai, Neneh Cherry and Charlie Musselwhite.
The key draw at the Perth writers’ festival, Hilary Mantel, will appear by video link from London alongside Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert.
• Perth festival 2015 runs from 13 February to 7 March – see the full program here
