Women’s voices will descend from the sky and swell through Perth’s business district at sunrise and sunset for 10 days in the large-scale sound installation Siren Songs, the cornerstone of 2018’s Perth festival, which will take over the city in February.
But the festival’s program reveal on Thursday night was marred by tragedy.
On Tuesday Roger Corbin, the Tasmanian helicopter pilot who was to be a major part of Siren Songs, was killed in a crash at Hobart airport. He is survived by his wife and children.
Corbin had a central role in the work when it premiered at Dark Mofo in Hobart this year. A local hero and aviation expert who had been honoured for his involvement in hundreds of search-and-rescue missions, he was obsessed with emergency sound systems, which he collected. When he was approached by the sound artist Byron J Scullin and the curatorial duo Supple Fox to be part of Siren Songs, it was as if the art project had been waiting for him.
“Roger just went above and beyond,” Tom Supple, of Supple Fox, told the Guardian in June. “He completely engaged with the idea from the get-go.”
In Hobart, the seven-minute recording – “part keening, part opera, part dirge and part call to prayer” – was broadcast by 450 speakers affixed to local buildings and a single voice sounding from Corbin’s helicopter, which mesmerised onlookers as it dipped, lifted and circled over the city. Guardian Australia described the experience as “eerie, dark and beautiful”, and the Perth festival artistic director, Wendy Martin, was one of many onlookers who showed up for it every morning and night.
Perth festival is yet to announce whether a helicopter will be part of the second iteration of Siren Songs, but the work will go ahead with more than 400 speakers taking over St George’s Terrace in the city’s business district. Added to the recording are new voices from women who represent the multicultural makeup of Perth, including Tara Tiba, a singer who migrated to Perth from Iran.
“This space [of St George’s Terrace] is very male, and it’s going to be taken over by the voices of women – I love that,” Martin told Guardian Australia at a briefing in October. Siren Songs, she says, sets the scene for a festival that will be “full of ritual – both traditional, and contemporary”.
Dizzee Rascal, Ben Folds, Perfume Genius and Mogwai will headline the music program at Chevron Gardens, with Helen Garner and Kim Scott opening Perth writers festival, which has been extended to seven days.
Highlights of the festival’s arts program include Canadian theatre-maker Robert Lepage’s contemporary classic The Far Side of the Moon; the master of Chinese glove puppet theatre, Yeung Fai, who will be the festival’s artist-in-residence; the Nigerian-born playwright Inua Ellams’ new work, Barber Shop Chronicles, which follows a sell-out season at London’s National Theatre; and the Australian debut of France’s acclaimed circus company Compagnie XY, who are performing Il n’est pas encore minuit (It’s Not Yet Midnight).
“I’ve never seen people go up so high without being on safety ropes,” Martin says of Compagnie XY. “Quite a bit of it is actually done with no music whatsoever. You can feel the collective holding-of-breath of the audience, because it’s so terrifying to watch. It’s also really, really beautiful.”
In one of nine Australian exclusives, Syria’s Umayyad Mosque are bringing their production White Spirit, which combines Sufi music, Tunisian street art, religious song and the hypnotic whirling dervishes from Damascus in a “sensory and spiritual experience”. In another, Taiwan’s U-Theatre’s Beyond Time will mix martial arts, taiko drums and dance for a visual spectacular the company created during a 50-day Buddhist walking meditation across Taiwan.
Beyond Time joins a particularly strong dance program, which includes Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek and Dancenorth’s acclaimed work Attractor; the Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet’s collaboration with the Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa, Vessel, in which dancers merge and move together to create new forms; and the contemporary choreographer Michael Clark’s To a Simple Rock and Roll ... Song, which is soundtracked by Patti Smith, David Bowie and Eric Satie and includes “the most exuberant, thrilling piece of dance I’ve seen in a long time”, Martin says.
Among the Australian theatre lineup is Nat Randall’s acclaimed durational piece The Second Woman, to which the Guardian gave five stars last month. In the 24-hour work, which premiered at Next Wave festival in 2016, Randall performs a single scene on loop, 100 times in a row, opposite a different male actor each time.
While the actors follow the same script, they each bring something different and unpredictable to the scene – a confidence, perhaps, or a cruelty. “You can tell a lot about these men, even though they’re doing the same thing,” Martin says. She stayed until 1.30am on the first night – but couldn’t sleep when she got back home to her hotel.
“I woke up at 5.30am and started thinking about it. I was like, ‘I can’t lie in bed.’ I went straight back to the theatre ... it’s just riveting.”
The other local production Martin highlights is a work she co-commissioned. In You Know We Belong Together, the Perth actor Julia Hales explores her “experiences of love as a daughter, actor, dreamer and person with Down syndrome” – but it also explores her lifelong dream: to appear in Home and Away.
Hales, Martin explains, is obsessed with the show. “She’s dreamt up this character that she’s had for many years, she’s got her name and her age and her back story – she’s someone’s long-lost adopted daughter,” Martin says. “So all her dreams are going to come true on the stage.”
• Perth festival runs from 9 February until 4 March 2018. The full program is online now
