When Perth festival opens on Friday, it will be a very different program to the one announced in November, with five major shows cancelled or postponed due to Western Australia’s Covid-19 border restrictions, including the festival’s free opening weekend event.
The event’s executive director, Nathan Bennett, said the decision to cancel Escape, the opening weekend event, was made after management ruled the production could not go ahead in a Covid-safe way.
A celebration of the culture of the Noongar people, Escape would have been staged in various parks, wharves, warehouses and beachfronts this weekend.
“An event of that scale has unrecoverable costs and we were very keen to ensure that we could honour our commitments to suppliers even though we’re cancelling the event,” Bennett said.
Despite the cancellations, the festival’s management and board nevertheless considered themselves to be in a fortunate position, he said.
“We’re the lucky ones because we’ve been in a position where we are able to plan a festival and do so with full knowledge that we might have to adapt our plans, change, or cancel things altogether,” he said.
“That’s far better than what would have been the least risky decision, which would be to not plan a festival at all. I think that would have been an even worse outcome for the artists that we’ve managed to keep employed.”
At least six productions and events at risk of cancellation have been salvaged, after a number of performers from outside WA secured special dispensation from the state’s chief health officer, allowing them to cross the border and complete a two-week quarantine before taking to the stage.
Among those to receive exemptions are singer Katie Noonan and comedian Oliver Twist, who are both arriving with shows fresh from this year’s Sydney festival.
Members of the Queensland-based dance and theatre collective The Farm have been granted entry, in comfortable time for The Ninth Wave – their joint work with Perth troupe The Co3 Contemporary Dance company, to go ahead in early March.
Melbourne-based artist Joel Bray has been granted entry in time for his one-man show Daddy. The immersive theatre installation Patch’s Lighthouse and dance work And the Earth Will Swallow Them Whole will also proceed as planned.
But Fremantle concerts by Melbourne band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and Sydney rap artist Barkaa have been cancelled, while the West Australian Opera’s performances of Carmen, the festivals’s flagship opera, will not go ahead on 25 and 26 February
Launching the 2022 program in November, festival artistic director, Iain Grandage, said at the time he was hopeful border restrictions would be lifted by early February. The following month the state premier, Mark McGowan, flagged a 5 February reopening of WA’s borders, six days before the festival’s opening night.
But McGowan backtracked in late January, announcing that the borders would remain closed to quarantine-free travel due to the spread of the Omicron variant, and would remain so until at least mid March.
Bennett said the total cancellation of the Perth festival was an option canvased by the board as early as April 2020, when lockdowns and border closures began sweeping across the country.
“There’s been so much uncertainty to navigate, but our board took a very clear, swift view that we needed to carry on and we needed to carry on in a safe way. The option of not planning a festival at all was ruled out very quickly,” he said
