University of Western Australia: Perth Festival wraps up this weekend

The Perth community can experience the magic of the projections at City of Lights, Supported by Lotterywest over the closing weekend of Perth Festival 2021.

The Festival wraps up on Sunday 14 March, concluding a month-long celebration of our State’s most dazzling artistic voices across theatre, dance, music, visual arts, literature and film.

Founded by The University of Western Australia, Perth Festival is the longest-running international arts festival in Australia and Western Australia’s premier cultural event.

Projections at City of Lights runs each night this weekend in the Perth Cultural Centre, drenching the buildings in vivid colours that tell powerful stories of our place in the world.

Families are invited to explore a spectacular 360-degree cinematic thoroughfare and its surrounding venues. The projected works, including the Bilya Beneath tribute to our city’s waterways, run continuously from 8pm to midnight until Sunday night.

Read More: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery launches 2021 exhibition program
Among the many highlights so far have been the family day Wild Things, Perth Festival’s takeover of Perth Zoo, Tim Minchin and WASO wowing 10,000 people in Kings Park, Literature Weekend in the City, the riverside stories of Witness Stand, and the world premieres of such shimmering new stage shows as Black Brass, HOUSE, Archives of Humanity, Whale Fall, Whistleblower and Hymns for End Times.

Set to thrill audiences over the Festival’s final weekend are the dynamic dance works Structural Dependency and Slow Burn, Together, The Rechabite’s bacchanalian ART FEAST, the Noongar-led walking performance Galup at Lake Monger and The Jazz Line, a musical tour through the history of jazz at Government House Gardens.

Perth Festival Artistic Director Iain Grandage said the Festival had been a tightrope-walk in 2021- a joyous balancing act of rescheduling and reimagining, which West Australians had supported.

‘From the first moment of the Festival — which we dramatically uprooted and replanted by two weeks to ensure the shows could go on — we have seen acts of celebration, acts of community and exquisite works of art,” he said.

‘Our many Western Australian artists have brought their works of imagination, history and dreaming to us, the audiences of Perth. They have given us a renewed love for this place and what it has to offer the world.’

Perth Festival’s Lotterywest Films season continues at UWA Somerville until Easter Sunday 4 April, where The Mole Agent and Dating Amber will be shown, and will finish with an encore screening of Fist of Fury Noongar Daa.

A number of visual arts exhibitions, including Leaving LA, Everything is True, the gathering and Dislocation also continue for several weeks after the Festival.