Paying homage to the ocean, this year’s Perth Festival looks out across the horizon and into our hearts.
By Ara Jansen
Some days it’s easy to forget we actually live on an island. Granted it’s a big one, but we’re still surrounded by ocean. Living in Perth, our collective psyche is very much attached to the water – the river, the odd dam and swimming pools, but most significantly, the beach and that blue ocean.
As a child, Perth Festival director Iain Grandage remembers summers of peeling skin, endless days at the beach, the Rottnest ferries that rocked and rolled and the cleansing afternoon breeze. Then there’s the feeling of sitting under an endless blue sky, watching the blazing sun set and how at the close of a hard day an ocean swim can refresh and replenish the spirit like nothing else.
It’s what makes the theme of the third part of the elemental cycle of Perth Festival 2022 not only perfect but multi-faceted. This year, the festival celebrates wardan, the ocean.
“The ocean is many things – peaceful respite and calm or a place of danger or barrier,” says Grandage. “I’ve always found it a place of freedom and play, but for many migrants it’s water which can prevent a new life beginning. That great expanse to our west is full of mystery and the unknown depths – we stare at it with wonder.”
That richness includes a program which looks at the ocean in a literal sense through to those vast internal oceans, littered with shared experiences, traumas and triumphs.
This year’s festival once again showcases and celebrates WA talent as well as some national and international visitors working alongside locals offering fresh perspective, new energy and mutual learnings.
In this festival, Grandage is particularly proud of the big community event Noongar Wonderland at Perry Lakes, which at the time of publication was due to close the festival. Unfortunately, the opening event, Escape in Fremantle, was cancelled due to COVID.
Noongar Wonderland is a multisensory experience guided by the stories of country and ocean. As ancient meets the future, audiences are invited to wander between the lakes and take part in a dance party or sit with an artist and handcraft something age-old and new.
Grandage says the closing event will allow people to fully celebrate the Noongar stories of the ocean in
a very tranquil way.
Other works and events in the festival celebrate the ocean in overt and more subtle ways from the Strangers on the Shore exhibition using artefacts from the WA Maritime Museum and the WA Symphony Orchestra and WA Youth Orchestra debuting Become Ocean to the world premiere of Panawathi Girl by David Milroy, Meyne Wyatt in City of Gold, and Mary Stuart, adapted by WA playwright Kate Mulvany and starring Caroline Brazier and Kate Walsh.
“This festival program also seeks to recognise the profound longing and difficulty of being separated from loved ones that has marked these COVID times. The ocean has kept us safe but also distanced us. We hope what we’re building helps recognize the strength of our community here because in the end, hope is what we hold onto and helps define our future,” Grandage says.
ED: Perth Festival events were correct at time of publication but are subject to change due to COVID.
For all event details: www.perthfestival.com.au