PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL LAUNCHES 2016 PROGRAM

Embargoed until 7pm WST (10pm AEDT) 4 NOVEMBER 2015 PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL LAUNCHES 2016 PROGRAM 11 FEBRUARY – 6 MARCH 2016 Perth Internat...
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Embargoed until 7pm WST (10pm AEDT) 4 NOVEMBER 2015

PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL LAUNCHES 2016 PROGRAM 11 FEBRUARY – 6 MARCH 2016 Perth International Arts Festival Artistic Director Wendy Martin today launches her first program with an invitation to join us on a big, bold adventure. “Perth International Arts Festival provides a unique moment in our year to engage with artists from across the globe,” she said. “Visionaries, mavericks and dreamers – it’s through the lens of their imaginations that we get to see, understand and re-imagine our world. Dive into the program and discover daring projects made by some of the world’s most brilliant creative minds.” The 2016 Perth International Arts Festival program delivers a cultural adventure for arts lovers of all ages and tastes, living up to the Festival’s global reputation for daring and excellence. This summer, around 800 of the world’s most visionary artists inhabit and enrich Perth, transforming the city with projects bold and beguiling. In a quintessentially Western Australian experience, the 64th Festival spills across unique venues and glorious, outdoor spaces including the Festival’s new home at Elizabeth Quay. Under Wendy Martin’s artistic vision, the 2016 Festival welcomes audiences from WA and further afield to experience an exceptional collection of international artistic experiences. Perth International Arts Festival is the longest running annual multi-arts celebration in the Southern Hemisphere, and the jewel in the crown of Western Australia’s cultural life. The $17.6 million Festival is the first of four Festivals under Wendy’s artistic leadership and brings innovative new work to Western Australia. The 2016 Festival opens with Home, an epic celebration of the landscape, culture and community of Western Australia. Directed by grand public-performance magician Nigel Jamieson in collaboration with Noongar elder and artist Dr Richard Walley, Home is part concert, part visual arts installation, and features a roll call of Western Australia’s most evocative and imaginative artists including The Triffids, The Drones, The Panics, Pigram Brothers, The Waifs and John Butler; writers Kim Scott, Tim Winton, Robert Drewe; and Shaun Tan. An exciting event for the whole family, it is a testament to the incredible talent of Western Australian artists and the powerful sense of place in their work. In 2016, the exciting hub of the Festival has a new home, in the north-west corner of Elizabeth Quay. Each night, the Chevron Festival Gardens is the place for festival-goers to gather, eat, drink, share stories and participate, enjoying a diverse, quality program of free events that connects and activates the city. The 2016 Theatre program is equal parts philosophical, raucous and haunting. In a must-see Festival highlight, Simon Stone – one of the most in-demand directors on the international scene – thrills with his fearless re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic story of family dysfunction and deception, The Wild Duck. The fierce, heartbreaking Belvoir production

makes its Western Australian premiere following smash hit sold-out seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Vienna and Holland and comes direct from Belgium. Further Australian highlights include Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid, from the genre-bending ‘kamikaze cabaret’ diva which subverts Hans Christian Andersen’s underwater tale of teen selfsacrifice, salvation and seduction into a glittering spectacle of contemporary cabaret, and the second part of Meow Meow’s Malthouse Theatre Little trilogy of fairy tales gone rogue that began with Little Match Girl. Western Australian artist James Berlyn performs for an intimate audience of 16, with the world premiere of I Know You’re There, a gently profound meditation on suicide and depression tracing three generations through storytelling, dance and conversation. Inviting world-renowned talent to Australian shores, international Festival theatre highlights include Refuse The Hour, a phantasmagoric chamber opera from inimitable South African artist William Kentridge. Interweaving live music, projections and dance, Kentridge takes centre stage, leading a mesmerising investigation into time itself that journeys to the edge of science, theatre and art. A roaring success since opening in Denmark, The Tiger Lillies Perform Hamlet sees cult British band The Tiger Lillies present their anarchic take on Shakespeare’s classic. Crafting a macabre, absurdist feast of sumptuous song and opera grotesque, they catapult Hamlet into a world of Weimar punk cabaret with new songs and an ensemble of actors, circus artists, giant puppets and video projections. These two theatre highlights are both exclusive to PIAF. From the UK, the Australian exclusive of Common Wealth’s No Guts, No Heart, No Glory is a raw and courageous production devised from real-life stories. Taking over the Queen Street Gym, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory riffs off its high-energy setting to explore the dreams and realities of life for young Muslim women through boxing. American actor/illusionist/inventor Geoff Sobelle unpacks our relationship to everyday items in The Object Lesson, a hilarious and heartbreaking solo performance/junk-pile-installation that invites audiences to poke about and delight in Sobelle’s immense, chaotic, richly crafted storage space before it comes to life. Britain’s Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe bring the Australian premiere of their wildly acclaimed Every Brilliant Thing, a touching, humorous play about depression, which celebrates all the little things that make life worth living. In 2016, the Festival’s Dance program dazzles with dynamic work from some of the world’s leading choreographers and dancers. From one of India’s most important dance-makers, Aditi Mangaldas, comes the Australian exclusive of Within, an emotionally complex group work that employs the phenomenal speed and precision of Kathak technique, juxtaposing the contemporary and the traditional. Performing in Perth for the first time, Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui uses the multiple languages of the body to ignite and illuminate the great religious and philosophical texts in Apocrifu. In this Australian exclusive, Cherkaoui contrasts colliding universes, performing with classical ballet-dancer Yasuyuki Shuto and contemporary dancer and circus artist Dmitiri Jourde, against the choral backdrop of the Corsican ensemble A Filetta. The Perth International Arts Festival 2016 Artist in Residence, Claire Cunningham, brings her work to Australia for the first time with two highly acclaimed shows: Guide Gods and Give Me A Reason To Live. Rejecting traditional dance techniques, Cunningham’s performances communicate powerful perspectives on disability and faith as the Glasgow-based artist considers her own physicality through delicate movement, which incorporates the crutches

that have been a part of her since aged 14. From Toulouse’s Compagnie 111, Plexus depicts a female warrior entrapped by 5,000 cords – a breathtaking forest of brilliantly lit strings – in this Australian exclusive. Plexus was created by visionary Aurélien Bory for dancer Kaori Ito, who moves puppet-like, defying the laws of gravity to conquer her environment. From Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues comes the Australian exclusive of Pindorama: 11 naked dancers move between a plastic tarp and water in a bare room in a visceral and sensory dance experience. The West Australian Ballet returns with its much-loved Ballet At The Quarry summer season, presenting five works under the stars, headlined by acclaimed British choreographer David Dawson’s On The Nature of Daylight – a rapturous pas de deux to the music of Max Richter and 5, a tour-de-force for five dancers. The Festival creates extraordinary arts experiences for all audiences with many works dedicated to the young and young at heart. The Australian exclusive of Kazuko Hohki and Andy Cox’s The Great Escape (A Borrowers Tale) is an immersive work of magical, participatory theatre that leads children aged 6-11 on a detective hunt through interactive installations, storytelling and music, inspired by Mary Norton’s beloved tale The Borrowers. Enjoying its third year, Screenkids expands in 2016 to host a free interactive exhibition of playful digital innovation, together with two Australian-premiere programs of Europe’s best animated short films for children, curated by the Netherlands’ Cinekid Festival. To commemorate the 40th birthday of The Snake Run – Albany’s gnarly downhill skate park and the oldest community-funded skate park in the world – The Snake Run Project is a free gathering of contemporary dance, freestyle skateboarding, street art and live music. Children rub shoulders with their literary heroes at the Perth Writers Festival Family Day, a free day of interactive performance, public art-making, storytelling with Lucy Cousins and Maisy Mouse, and more. The 2016 Festival Classical Music program journeys the spectrum from ancient choral delights to glorious baroque, spirited ragtime, bebop, and contemporary orchestral jazz. Wynton Marsalis – one of the world’s great jazz musicians and composers – brings his renowned Jazz At Lincoln Centre Orchestra to Perth to perform Swing Symphony for the first time, his homage to the evolution of swing, together with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra at the Perth Concert Hall. In a dedicated series of 18 stellar events over three days, the Chamber Music Weekend rejoices in Mozart to Messiaen, Back to Bartok, Liszt and Ligeti, plus a day dedicated to Schubert, inside the stunning acoustics of Winthrop Hall and its grounds. Making its world premiere, Soft Soft Loud: Blood on the Floor is the intricate chamber ensemble version of English composer Marc-Anthony Turnage’s 1996 deeply moving masterpiece, the latest in Fremantle Arts Centre’s annual program of crossgenre collaborations. In an Australian exclusive, the all-male Corsican sextet A Filetta perform original compositions full of soaring vocals and heavenly harmonies influenced by their island’s strong vocal traditions. The singers and musicians of Italy’s Concerto Italiano, one of the world’s most revered early music ensembles, use seventeenth-century instruments to perform Claude Monteverdi’s vibrant baroque masterpiece Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610 (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin). Over 25 nights, Perth showcases an eclectic selection of the most exciting contemporary music spanning poetic folk, electronica, dub, African rhythms to Balkan gypsy-swing. Highlights include philosophical American singer-songwriter William Fitzsimmons; sublime Icelandic contemporary composer Jóhann Jóhannson; revered American, feminist punkrockers Sleater-Kinney; Swedish Grammy-Award winner José González, 21-year-old rising

London rapper Little Simz; Afrobeat stars Seun Kuti & Egypt 80; Pitchfork-endorsed, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Natalie Prass; Indigenous Australian living legend Kev Carmody, the “New Zealand Elvis” Marlon Williams, and a roof-raising, Australian exclusive show from the UK’s House Gospel Choir, who invite you to join them to sing and dance together for the closing weekend of the Festival The 2016 Visual Arts program is studded with diverse voices who transform contemporary mythologies into experiential art. Renowned artist Bharti Kher from India presents her first solo exhibition in Australia, In Her Own Language. Featuring figurative sculptures, wall panels built from her signature bindis and sari works this exhibition offers a window into her richly textured practice. Sweden’s Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg create a netherworld of strange delights and encounters through sculpture, light and sound in the surreal and sensory The Secret Garden. In Black Sun Spanish Australian artist, Dani Marti combines woven textures and film in his seductive and confronting portrait tributes to humanity and intimacy. Screenings of the fast paced and ecstatic visions by Ryan Trecartin are on offer at the State Gallery while at John Curtin Gallery the exhibition Face to Face shows mesmerising works by acclaimed artists Shaun Gladwell, Carsten Höller and John Tarry. Over four days, the 2016 Perth Writers Festival brings a superb program of international and Australian novelists, activists and contemporary philosophers to Perth. In an unmissable evening and Festival Special Event, Richard Dawkins, one of the most influential thinkers of our time, takes to the stage at the Perth Concert Hall to reflect on a lifetime of tireless intellectual adventure. An illuminating opening address by cultural thinker Roman Krznaric on the power of empathy to fundamentally transform our lives, and a closing address on the artist’s portrayal of issues central to our humanity from US neuroscientist and best-selling author Lisa Genova (Still Alice; Inside The O’Briens) bookend an incredible weekend of literary events and discussions, with further writers attending including British author and journalist Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman; The Men Who United The States); Canadian Booker-Prize nominee Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers; Ablutions); Russian and American author, activist and prolific political journalist Masha Gessen (The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin); and New York Times best-selling novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton; Fates and Furies). Fine cuisine and food writing combine in the Festival special event From Paddock To Print, a cultural feast exploring the explosion of interest in food blogging, politics and storytelling around eating that connects food lovers like editor Valli Little (Delicious Magazine), blogger Michelle Crawford, (Hugo And Elsa), UK food creative Anna Jones, who has worked as Jamie Oliver’s food stylist, and many more. The Lotterywest Festival Films presents a handpicked selection of the world’s best new films in a uniquely West Australian cinema setting, with screenings under the stars at UWA Somerville and ECU Joondalup Pines. For the first time we offer two seasons of films to ensure audiences get the latest and finest films from around the world. Season One launches today and features five Australian premieres, including the highly anticipated Dheepan, director Jacques Audiard’s 2015 Palme D’Or winning story of a Tamil warrior who flees Sri Lanka for a new life in Paris. Other Australian premieres include Italian director Piero Messina’s mesmerizing drama The Wait, starring Juliette Binoche as a single mother in shock following the death of her teenage son, and In Harmony, director Denis Dercourt’s simmering romantic drama set in the golden fields of rural northern France.

Season Two launches on January 18, 2016. Check our website perthfestival.com.au for upto-the-minute information. And with the Festival’s Tix for $36, you can afford to be fearless in your choices. Visit perthfestival.com.au and check out all the brilliant shows on offer for just $36. Our website offers a wealth of information, images, blogs, videos and more. BOOKINGS AND FESTIVAL INFO: 08 6488 5555 – perthfestival.com.au – Ticketek outlets For further information, interviews or images please contact: WA MEDIA: Rania Ghandour +61 8 6488 8618 / 0403 025 535 [email protected]

NATIONAL MEDIA: Miranda Brown +61 3 9419 0931 / 0411 568 781 [email protected]

Perth International Arts Festival Founded in 1953 by The University of Western Australia, the Perth International Arts Festival is the longest running international arts festival in Australia and Western Australia’s premier cultural event. The Festival has developed a worldwide reputation for excellence in its international program, the presentation of new works and the highest quality artistic experiences for its audience. For 63 years the Festival has welcomed to Perth some of the world’s greatest living artists and now connects with an audience of over 1 million. Wendy Martin is the Artistic Director 2016 - 2019