- Lotterywest provides record funding to Perth
Festival with $9.5 million grant
- Perth Festival to revive and reactivate East
Perth Power Station
- New funding to assist Perth Festival in offering
affordable events
Lotterywest's
long-standing support for Perth Festival will continue in 2025, with record
funding provided for events this summer.
Perth Festival will be provided with $9.5 million in funding
to support the upcoming 2025 festival -
the biggest Lotterywest grant received by Perth Festival to date. This
continues Lotterywest's decades-long support to the organisation.
The record grant
will support affordable events to ensure everyone has the opportunity to enjoy
the upcoming festival.
It will also contribute
to the creation of community experiences such as the Karla Bidi trail and
Festival of Neighbourhoods programs, and expand existing offerings including
the introduction of a Children's Film program.
In 2025, Perth Festival is aiming to push the boundaries of traditional art
forms using ground-breaking virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality art.
The 2025-2028
Festivals will feature a number of iconic events, including:
KARLA BIDI: Karla Bidi, meaning "the campfire
track" in Noongar language, will be a large-scale light installation that
illuminates sites of significance and community gathering along the Swan River
from Guildford to Fremantle. The beacons will herald the arrival of Perth
Festival from the opening night and remain lit every night of the festival to
remind the community that the season is upon us.
EAST PERTH POWER
STATION: Perth Festival
will revive and re-activate the historic East Perth Power Station site as a
creative hub that will be home to major programs featuring First Nations visual
art as well as contemporary and world music. The venue will come to life with
Casa Music – a family-friendly and free alfresco music stage, an outdoor contemporary
music venue, and home to Boorloo contemporary visual arts projections that will
light up the building for the duration of the festival as a major installation.
Perth Festival's
2024 season welcomed more than 214,800 people across 129 events, showcasing 827
artists. Lotterywest's multimillion-dollar funding support now seeks to build
on these audience numbers through ambitious, large-scale community programming.
Over more than 30
years, Lotterywest has provided almost $170 million in grants to Perth
Festival.
Comments attributed to Premier Roger Cook:
"Every
year Perth Festival finds new ways to create incredible moments for Western
Australians.
"Perth
Festival's work to provide WA audiences with access to shows they wouldn't
otherwise see is what makes this festival so special.
"My
Government is proud to support the 2025 festival through Lotterywest, which plays
a vital role in helping Perth Festival to transform our city into a vibrant
community space ever year."
Comments attributed to Tourism Minister
Rita Saffioti:
"The East Perth Power Station is an amazing
site with so much history and it will be open to the public as a key part of
the Perth Festival 2025.
"It's going to be incredible and of course,
in the future, a great tourism icon."
Comments attributed to Culture and the Arts
Minister David Templeman:
"Perth
Festival is a wonderful annual celebration of culture and the arts and
something that I always look forward to.
"I
am particularly excited about the use of the East Perth Power Station this year
in what will be a very special activation.
"Every
year, the artists and all the people who work on the festival deliver memorable
and thought-provoking works that enrich our lives. I am sure this year will be
no exception."
Comments attributed to Perth MLA John
Carey:
"The
Cook Labor Government has always considered the East Perth Power Station site
for tourism opportunities, given its location close to the Perth CBD and
proximity to existing amenities – including Optus Stadium.
"It's
brilliant to bring the iconic Perth Festival to the East Perth Power site, as
our Government continues to drive revitalisation of our city and is investing
hundreds of millions of dollars to create jobs, economic activity and attract
more people to the Perth CBD."
