By Deborah Jones A conventional production would have been the safe way to go when staging the first Swan Lake in West Australian Ballet’s 70-year history. Artistic director Aurélien Scannella had other ideas. His company is based in Perth, a city strung along the Swan River in Noongar country. How might local Aboriginal stories and
By Deborah Jones In 1964, social critic and academic Donald Horne wrote a book about Australia called The Lucky Country, a term he did not intend as a compliment. It was more dumb luck than anything more elevated that enabled the nation’s success, he argued. The phrase, however, caught on here and is used by
By Rhys Ryan While most of Australia’s dance scene lay dormant, Perth Festival took centre stage early in 2019 with an ambitious line-up of local and international works. It was the country’s largest and most diverse festival programming for dance in recent years, outdoing east coast counterparts in Sydney and Melbourne. A festival headliner was