Perth Festival has announced its 2022 lineup. This year’s festival will run for three weeks from 11 February – 6 March, 2022, and celebrates the theme of Wardan (Ocean) across music, dance, theatre, visual arts, film and writing events.

With Western Australia’s borders situation still uncertain, Artistic Director Iain Grandage has designed a festival that has deep connections to the land and the water of Australia’s west coast, with the state’s vibrant arts communities, and with the Noongar people.

As Grandage writes in his Directors Note introducing the festival, in Noongar belief systems, “constellations sink into the ocean as life and souls enter the world. These are the beginnings. And as the sun sets into the ocean, as the river releases into the sea, as souls leave the world – these are the endings. River before, and stars after. The ocean is the present.”

Panawathi Girl, appearing at Perth Festival 2022. Image credit © Daniel Carson.

The festival’s centrepieces are two large-scale, immersive, family-friendly works. On the opening...