Rise and Shine at Perth Festival

Welcome to Perth Festival 2024 – a Festival radiant with stories from here and around the globe that celebrate our shared humanity under the same sun.

To close Artistic Director Iain Grandage’s five-year cycle, audiences are invited to gather with leading international and local artists under the 2024 theme of Ngaangk. Our star, the sun and also the Noongar term for mother, Ngaangk nourishes everyone and everything that grows and thrives on Noongar Boodjar.

Warm summer nights will light up from 9 February to 3 March in an exciting Festival program energised by diverse new voices and major stars. For more than three extraordinary weeksin between, audiences can relax, revel and reflect in equal measure at a Festival made for everyone, anywherefrom indoor theatres, galleries and concert halls to sun-kissed beaches and parks, suburban streets and even a subterranean food court and public pool.

Dance highlights are as follows:

The esteemed Akram Khan Company returns to Perth with a spectacular Rudyard Kipling retelling through dance, theatre, music and animation in Jungle Book reimagined. Jungle Book reimagined speaks to all generations as a step to remind, to relearn, to reimagine a new world together. 

Groundbreaking dance and theatre collective The Farm returns to Perth with their genre-bending Stunt Double stepping inside the power dynamic of a 1970s Aussie action-flick. It is one of many thrilling new Festival commissions across the program, including Mutiara, a brand-new Broome-Malay dance and theatre collaboration by the much-loved company Marrugeku. Additionally, West Australian Ballet’s ever-popular Ballet at the Quarry returns to the Quarry Amphitheatre.

After the success of Perth Moves in 2023, STRUT Dance is back to celebrate movement, music, connection and community at its free 10-day dance hub. In Wayfinder an inflatable set and kilometres of coloured thread feature in Dancenorth Australia’s explosion of dance, music and visual art created with three-time Grammy-nominees Hiatus Kaiyote and Japanese-Australian visual artist Hiromi Tango.

Perth Festival also hits the road again to share their Touring WA program of dance, music and films with audiences from the Great Southern to the Pilbara, including Dancenorth Australia’s Wayfinder in Albany, Bunbury, Geraldton and Karratha.

Artistic Director Iain Grandage says: ‘Our 2024 Festival will be filled with light, life and love. This Festival will bathe us in warmth like our nearest star and have us celebrating our shared lives under the same sun. We celebrate not only our shared humanity, but also Ngaangk’s effect on the Earth and the botanical marvels that grow here.

‘Our Festival speaks to the life-giving sun above and the energy that radiates within us all. We cannot wait for you to join us – we hope to make your faces shine.’

Visit perthfestival.com.au for bookings and festival info.