Anna Reece and Perth Festival 2025: A moment in space and time

Over the last seventy years, Perth Festival has flown under a few names—the Festival of Perth (FOP), the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF)—before settling on its current concise monicker. In a literal sense, with its new artistic director, Anna Reece, the first Perth-born person to hold the position, it may finally embody its original title and truly become a Festival OF Perth. It’s a bit like the old adage about returning to the place from which you started only to see it properly for the first time. In part, that is Reece’s aim over the next four years.

On a deeper cultural level, the changes in the festival’s direction over its history reflect the evolution of this city’s complex relationship with the arts, essentially a shift from consumer to creator. The fact that a Perth-born-and-bred person finally has the cred to land the city’s premier arts job also means the city has now fully come into its own.

The seeds of this apotheosis were planted by Reece’s predecessor, Iain Grandage, who, although not born here, came of age as an artist in the Perth scene. Through the overarching theme of Grandage’s five festivals, he explored the city’s place in the world of culture, effectively shifting the emphasis from the outside world coming in to the inside world reaching out. No longer was Perth Festival primarily a forum through which the citizens of our vast state could experience the best art the world has to offer and instead became a cauldron of creation and collaboration where many of the brilliant artists living here could work directly with those from elsewhere.

Granted, the Festival has always fostered conversations between local and international artists and also has a long history of commissioning work by prominent WA creatives, but that is different from commissioning work in which local and international practitioners collaborate as equals on a single piece. That shift may well be Grandage’s primary legacy as festival director.

Although Reece thinks the notion of a festival arc is a bit old school and instead regards each one as an individual ‘moment in time that gives people the opportunity to reflect,’ the overriding aim for her tenure is to take Grandage’s process one step further and turn the very fabric of the city into the canvas for the presentation and creation of new arts events. Over the next four years, many special, often hidden places within the city and its surrounds will be activated, their myths, secrets, and unique character exposed and explored through new, original, and often free works of art.

Once again, this is not the first time the hidden gems of the city and broader state have been exposed by arts events. Lake Ballard and the Gormley statues (2012); the Boya Quarry and Peter Brook’s dusk-to-dawn production of The Mahabarata (1988); the Canning Highway to Hell (2020); to mention but three from past Perth Festivals.

Similarly, Artrage, Fringe World, Awesome, and the Perth International Jazz Festival have all utilised different spaces within the city for the presentation of new work. But, with the exception of the few Perth artists for whom activation of the city space is central to their practice—the poet/producer Mar Bucknell and, to a lesser extent, the choreographer Chrissie Parrot, to name but two—in the main these places have been utilised as either appropriate to a specific show or born of the need for accessible and affordable venues. Reece’s aim is to conduct a more conscious city-wide exploration of place. It is in this sense that the four festivals of her tenure promise to be festivals OF Perth.

Before exploring this activation further, it is important to understand Reece’s background and how she came to this role.

Anna Reece is a Freo girl, born and raised. She comes from a cultured family. Her father, Bob Reece, is a historian, while her mother, Lesley Reece, was the founding director of the Children’s Literature Centre housed in the old Fremantle gaol. Anna grew up in a house where, not only art and culture were the mainstay, but many artists literally came to stay. Conversations around the dinner table focused on the big themes of society and culture, and those speaking had a deep and direct understanding of the key issues.

At John Curtin High School she was cast in the music and theatre stream. More significantly, though, she took a side course in stagecraft established and run by legendary Perth theatre technician Jake Newby. This course introduced students to the broader issues of arts production, the behind-the-scenes work that makes it all happen. Anna’s curiosity was fired, and, as she says, it was this curiosity that drew her into the arts.

The Festival of Perth always loomed large in her orbit. At the age of sixteen, the Somerville films and the Watershed, director Sean Doran’s festival hub, first captured her fancy. She went to many mind-expanding shows on the WA Art Gallery forecourt where Doran’s bespoke amphitheatre was set up.

On graduating from high school, she began a BA at UWA but, like many an arts student before her, found herself spending more time with the University Dramatic Society than on her studies. After two semesters, she realised that theatre, not anthropology, was her true calling. She withdrew from her course and fell into the Fremantle arts scene. After acting in a show for Deckchair Theatre, she became a part of the company. She worked on Uglieland for the City of Fremantle as well as the Deckchair/DAADA co-pro Exile that explored the colonial history of the Fremantle Arts Centre. Through these shows she was again drawn behind the scenes into production.

Deciding to take her interest in the nuts and bolts more seriously, she applied for and was accepted into the production course at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA). At the age of 19, Reece left Perth for Sydney.

The three-year production course at NIDA is a broad degree. As well as equipping students with the requisite technical skills, it exposes them to a bit of everything about the production process—administration, raising money, and, crucially, the people management skills necessary to unite a diverse team into the creation of a single cohesive work. Reece credits the course with turning her into a creative thinker rather than a creative artist, an essential trait in her subsequent career as a production manager, producer, and ultimately festival director.

On graduating from NIDA, Reece became a freelance production assistant and manager, primarily working on festivals while moving across the country. She was engaged in every Sydney Festival between 2003 and 2009. In the winters of 2007 and 2008, she travelled for two months to Scotland to manage the Aurora Nova venue for the Edinburgh Fringe. This giant old church contained three performance spaces as well as a café and hosted a vibrant program of daily rotating acts, as venues in the Edinburgh Fringe do.

In 2009, Reece was finally drawn away from the big city to work on a Yirra Yaakin touring production in the Northern Territory. Touring with Muttacar Sorry Business throughout the regions blew the big city out of her head and showed her a different side of theatre production. From there she moved onto the Darwin Festival, where she remained for six years, beginning as production manager, moving onto general manager, and finally becoming co-CEO.

Her tenure at Darwin Festival coincided with a period of transition that saw the establishment of The Lighthouse and Festival Park, two places of possibility and adventure that gave the festival a stronger focus in the heart of the city. The NT experience also consolidated Reece’s production skills and enabled her to fully appreciate the possibilities of arts festivals as vibrant centres of culture within a city. As she says, “Darwin needed the Darwin Festival just as Perth needs the Perth Festival. Both are core to the cultural life of their host cities.”

Throughout her time in Sydney and Darwin, Reece would regularly return to Perth to catch up with family and friends. She and her sister, another ‘exile’, would often take in the sunset from Leighton Beach and reflect on their deep love of their hometown. With the sea, the sand, and the vast blue sky so deeply etched into their beings, they would wonder why they no longer lived here.

Reece finally had the opportunity to return home in 2014 when she was engaged by Perth Festival to work on The Giants project. This led her into her appointment as the festival’s executive director, the crossover from production and management into program coordination. She held this position under artistic director Wendy Martin and for the first two years of Iain Grandage’s tenure.

Indeed, Grandage acknowledges the importance of Reece’s guidance when he took on the role, having come to it from the artistic side of the profession. She left the festival in 2021 to become CEO of the Fremantle Arts Centre but returned in 2024 when she was appointed Artistic Director.

As well as the Festival and the Fremantle Arts Centre, Reece closely followed the works presented at the Blue Room and, before it closed, The Bakery, Perth’s centre for indie music. Both of these venues were key cultural generators that nurtured new and often alternative work in theatre and music. She was also enamoured of Fringe World. Indeed she sees the two festivals as being tightly interconnected, much as the famous fringe and main festival are in the French city of Avignon. Like Siamese twins, it is now hard to tell the two apart and separate them.

Reece has many plans to activate new places within the city over the four years of her tenure with Perth Festival. The three most prominent projects in 2025 are Karli Bidi (fire trail), which transforms the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) into an illuminated pathway from the hills to Fremantle, the pillars of light evoking the Noongar campfires that once punctuated that serpentine waterway; Casa Musica at the iconic East Perth Power Station, a program of both outdoor and indoor concerts; and ‘The Embassy’, the transformation of the Perth Town Hall into a late-night cabaret venue emulating the dance halls that peppered the city from the 1930s to the 1970s, in particular the legendary Embassy Ballroom that once cornered the Esplanade at the foot of William Street.

These three programs run for the duration of the Festival and celebrate, respectively, the ancient, the recent past, and the present life of our city, key moments in time embodied in specific spaces.

Ironically, deactivation of space is also a feature of the 2025 festival that will carry over into the two following. The Perth Concert Hall (PCH), once the jewel in the crown and home of Perth Festival, closes at the end of this year for major structural renovations and is scheduled to be offline until February 2028 (project overruns willing). Back in the 1960s, the then Festival of Perth was the principal advocate to build a concert hall. The city did not then have a venue suitable for the presentation of international orchestras and classical music concerts in general. Winthrop Hall at UWA, the principal classical venue at the time and home of the WA Symphony, was too small and acoustically limited.

Losing the Concert Hall for the next three years has impacted the festival program. Although there are many smaller, hybrid classical music acts in 2025—Secret Opera, Jessica Hitchcock & Penny Quartet, and Water Song, to mention but three—there are no major orchestras or international chamber ensembles in the program. Classical music was once the cornerstone of the Festival, particularly during David Blenkinsop’s tenure. The program next year will be a challenge for those addicts of classical music who look forward to this time of year for their greatest musical fix.

A classical music fan herself, Reece is aware of the issue but was too busy bringing other spaces online to address the problem this year. Looking ahead, though, she plans to activate different locations along the river where classical concerts can be presented. Hopefully the PCH renovations will stick to schedule, and the reborn venue will be launched during her final festival in 2028.

Reece has other long-term plans to revitalise elements of the Festival’s program.

The popular Writers Weekend is to be reworked in 2026 to become a literature festival held in spring. The aim is to break the traditional formula of literature festivals around the world in which touring authors promote their current book by debating the key themes and instead present a unique event that both encompasses the Indian Ocean rim and responds deeply and directly to the culture of Perth.

Similarly, under the guidance of festival film curator Madeleine Bates, the Somerville film season will be gradually transformed into a film festival proper. Although deeply loved and hugely popular, in recent years the Somerville has become little more than an outdoor cinema, the films screened rapidly moving to longer seasons on the arthouse cinema circuit. Once you could only see these films at the Somerville; now you can catch them a week later at Luna.

Moreover, the Somerville program has never been a film festival proper with directors, auteurs, and actors attending to premiere their new work and engage in active debate with critics and cinephiles. This change will take time but is starting this year with the Summit-Ville program, a week of multi-award-winning documentaries by artists, activists, and journalists that explore global issues and complement the Festival’s Summit at the Embassy.

There is much more besides novel spaces and new platforms within the 2025 Perth Festival. It is a rich and varied program of both international and local work. There is a strong emphasis on music, in particular that which mixes the genres and crosses over between the popular and the rarefied. In general, this will appeal to younger, more progressive audiences.

There is everything from the left-field rock of PJ Harvey, through Veronique Serret’s Migrating Bird, reminiscent of the early music of Laurie Anderson, and the spellbinding Fado-goddess Mariza, to the genre-bending piano works of Hania Rani. With Ali Bodycoat and the Embassy Big Band resident in the Town Hall, there is something for all lovers of music, the listeners to the dancers.

The dance program is similarly rich with international works: Larsen C and C A R C A Ç A set against Perth Moves and the ever-popular Ballet at the Quarry.

The theatre program includes a once-in-a-generation Indian production of The Mahabharata, this time running from mid-afternoon to midnight in the Maj with a break in the middle for an Indian meal, along with the political thriller Is This A Room, and Night Night, the new work by inspirational Perth company The Last Great Hunt.

The visual art program is also rich and varied, with site-specific Indigenous works at the East Perth Power Station, Alice Guiness and Mervyn Street, a photographic celebration of the work of the Middar Dance Group, Middar Koora ba ye, among many other individual, Indigenous, international, and local exhibitions.

With talks and interviews and other explorations of art and the everyday lives, the three and a half weeks from February 7 promise to be a wild and wicked ride, with many moments for Perth arts patrons to reflect on this time in our city and culture. Everyone should be invigorated, challenged, and excited by the great platter of art and entertainment on offer.

Anna Reece is to be congratulated on what promises to be a stunning debut as festival director.

IAN LILBURNE