Just In: Perth Festival Has Dropped Its 2026 Line-Up

The line-up for the 2026 Perth Festival has dropped, with 10 new commissions, 21 world premieres and nine Australian premieres.

It’s the second festival from artistic director Anna Reece , who joined the team last year and made a splash with her inaugural festival by activating the East Perth Power Station and Perth Town Hall.

Her second festival raises the bar yet again.

“Perth Festival is our city at its best. Curious, connected, creative and completely alive,” Reece said in a statement. “For four weeks in summer, we open as many doors as we can and invite everyone in. We don’t just put on shows, we take over the city.”

There will be a headline performance of A View From a Bridge , a global short film series by British artist Joe Bloom. The film series has popped up in various cities. It happens organically with people walking past an old-school phone anchored on a bridge and shares something about their life and their view on the world as an obscured camera slowly zooms out.

Theatre lovers are well catered for with a series of inventive and creative pieces. WA-based creative The Last Great Hunt will return to the stage with “ a faux foreign film ”, which is performed in an invented language and subtitled. LACRIMA will play for five nights at the Heath Ledger Theatre. LACRIMA was created by Caroline Guiela Nguyen and the Theatre National de Strasbourg, with French critics likening the drama set in a fashion house to a prestige television series. Australian-born cabaret performer Meow Meow will add to her fairytale anthology with a performance of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes.

Lost and Found Opera is mounting the Australian premiere of Philip Glass’s opera The Trial , based on the novel by Franz Kafka. Fittingly for a tale about the maze of bureaucracy, the opera will be performed in a CBD office tower. The West Australian Opera is putting on a Secret Opera in a location which will be announced on the day. This year, they performed an opera in an abandoned basement, and the 2026 location is set to be equally unusual.

Reece and her team continue the theme of staging performances in unexpected places with Ballet at the Quarry, performed by the West Australian Ballet. The East Perth Power Station will be activated once again. Casa Musica, a free, family-friendly precinct by the river will return, as will Boorloo Contemporary, which sees works from Indigenous artists dance over the facade of the power station. Other sets at the power station – which have previously escalated into full-scale raves – will include performances from Max Cooper, Bleak Squad and Baker Boy.

The full program is available online.

www.perthfestival.com.au
@perthfest