Perth Festival represents the best in global, Australian and First Nations creativity and curiosity.
Perth Festival is Australia’s oldest arts festival, running since 1953 – but this program is far from old fashioned or traditional. 2025 offers a vibrant and evolving curation, and while it seeks to push boundaries, it’s thoughtful and curious rather than aggressively provocative.
The Festival sprawls across a month and a vast landscape, with venues scattered from Perth to Fremantle. The immense program pulls you around the world and to far-flung corners of the state, through fantastical visions tucked behind curtains, immersive audiovisual experiences, reclaimed urban spaces and into the deep time of old country and ceremony. From a global program of films, theatre, music, arts and activity, it manages to encompass manifold parts and draw them together.
Perth Festival
- Month-long festival, 07 February – 03 March
- Over 100 events
- More information here
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Boorloo Contemporary
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Much of the art feels grounded in place, both the choice of venues and the creative pieces themselves. Boorloo Contemporary is a festival commission of art, installations and cultural experiences of Aboriginal and First Nations creators, stories where place and people are closely tied together. In Burndud Ground, painter Alice Guiness creates beautiful repetitions of form, over and over in ceremony. The soaring curve of the Burndud, an important ceremonial site of the Yindjibarndi people, is shown in chromatic variations of bright points and sweeping lines, the same essence passed through generations of symbolic act, recorded in paint and film and glowing neon, transcribed far away from the site. Not an extraction, but a connection.
The landscape becomes a character itself in the art of Mervyn Street in Stolen Wages at the Fremantle Arts Centre. Wide, panning scenery in vibrant colour is painted across long canvases, on cowhide and cattle skulls. The warmth in these portraits of tough existence is more poignant in the context of his court victory for the stolen wages of Kimberley cattlemen. It’s small details within the vast vistas: pictures of his mother’s house, vignettes of the cattleman life, details of saddle, bridle and spur, tiny licks of flame, a dusty wind, a wash of rain.
The Great Kimberley Wilderness VR experience
The Kimberley takes a lead role in The Great Kimberley Wilderness VR experience at the Western Australian Museum. Soaring sky-high 360 degree views across one of Australia’s most vast and varied areas of wilderness reveal waterfalls and plateaus falling away into sweeping valleys, blue seas and reefs, alien and otherworldly rocky towers striped with curious strata and remnants of ancient seas withdrawn long ago. The land is both sparsely populated and deeply known, as Traditional Owners talk through the country, stories, ancestors and the millennia of cave paintings. In a mere half hour, you’ll see worlds within worlds.
The Mahabharata
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The festival features ambitious works reclaiming and reinterpreting culture. The Mahabharata by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre is truly epic. Based on the immense, ancient Sanskrit text dealing with a revenge tale between warring clans, it’s a three-part one-day theatrical experience. You might think that’s exhausting, but the masterful storytelling captivates you utterly. The play jumps lightly from tale to tale, from the simplicity of words spoken around a fire and the arresting charisma of its performers to complex audiovisual displays and multi-camera live broadcasts with cinematic soundscapes. It encompasses art forms such as digital projections, classical opera, traditional dance and physical feats of martial arts.
In the dance of Shiva the destroyer, a one-person performance represents one billion deaths in battle while the dialogue of the characters continues around them. The intermission, Khana and Kahani, is a shared meal with audience members at communal tables where a dialogue on stage invites you to step back and find wisdom in the complex narrative and the concept of dharma: “Don’t be confused by the plot.”
CARCAÇA
CARCAÇA, by choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira and 10 dancers, entwines multiple Portuguese identities to create new dance forms. Heart-pumping and exhilarating to behold, they perform with increasing power and dynamism, showing tricks of footwork and balance that seem like impossible feats. Bringing traditional dance into present forms and ideas of diverse Portuguese communities, the vernacular expressions of hip hop and folk dance merge. The past is not at odds with the present, but they embrace each other and it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
East Perth Power Station
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The variety of artistic forms at Perth Festival can become dizzying. East Perth Power Station, a ruin reclaimed for the arts, is painted with light projections by Noongar artists telling alternative stories of the land and river. You move from hot evenings on the Casa Musica lawns and their program of performers from Perth to Peru around back to the main stage and superstar headliner sets, with Electric Fields and Röyksopp opening the festival weekend. Crowds of ravers swarm beneath the wide sky and hanging moon, light shows coruscating over corrugated iron, showing the industrial ruin as a towering cathedral of illumination.
Astral Weeks
Then, find peace in the secret DJ sets at Astral Weeks, where one Saturday sees Eno Williams of Ibibio Sound System playing vinyl to a crowd chilling over vino in the Chinatown listening bar. Have an interlude in the calm of PICA, pushing through red velvet curtains into a trilogy of audiovisual pieces by Laure Prouvost, Oui Move In You. Beginning by lying down in the womb-like room while women and water whisper, you move into a childhood, a field of suspended objects and a surreal story of a flying grandmother tumbling joyfully through the air. Upstairs, the works of seven artists explore mothers, maternity and cultural or artistic motherhood for In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy.
The festival is a network of stories that trace paths through cities and landscapes, firing like synapses and sudden inspiration, both here and far away. A weekend in the sun-drenched heat with a spirit of exploration is still not enough to reach it all. You don’t leave satiated, but hungry to experience more.
For more information, head here.
