SITU-8, the site-specific dance and music collaboration between STRUT Dance and Tura New Music is returning with a very intriguing new venue at the centre of the new work.

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After 25 years lying dormant, STRUT Dance and Tura are throwing open the doors to The Liberty Theatre and inviting audiences to explore the labyrinthine Gold Rush era building.

Standing quietly on Barrack St, nestled within the heart of Perth City, this stunning example of Art Deco architecture is bursting with untold stories, charming character, and limitless potential.

The theatre was Perth’s first art house cinema opening in 1954. The architectural firm Sheldon & Krantz (the principals of which were Jewish refugees) was engaged to transform the first floor of a Goldrush era building into an intimate contemporary cinema with the express purpose of screening foreign-language and art house films from Europe.

As a speciality ‘European’ house it lasted less than a decade, but it endured screening a variety of film genres until the early-1990’s. By this time, it had been renamed the Kimberley Theatre and was showing Chinese martial arts films. It was closed in October 1997 joining the long list of empty cinema spaces in Perth’s city centre.

Now audiences will have a rare opportunity to explore the forgotten space, while experiencing some cutting-edge music and dance works.

Eight exciting, vibrant, new creative teams assembled by STRUT Dance, occupy, transform and reimagine this historic site and the memories within it, leading audiences in a promenade performance and on a journey through spaces old and new.

Each work in SITU-8: CITY has been created in response to a key element from a film, reimagining it to speak to the artists’ identities, contemplating the world that they want to live in now and in the future.

Curated by Sofie Burgoyne and Timothy Green with assistance from Ashleigh White, the works in SITU-8: CITY are the result of rigorous, new partnerships between exceptional Australian choreographers and composers selected by STRUT Dance and Tura.

Through their diverse range of responses to this provocation, these eight dynamic works examine how stories, bodies, voices and characters have been included and excluded from The Liberty Theatre, and the history of cinema.

“It is so exciting to see this group of artists pushing boundaries and pursuing big ideas. I can’t wait for audiences to experience SITU-8: CITY, The Liberty Theatre is the perfect creative inspiration and setting. These works are fearless, dynamic, gutsy, and not to be missed,” Burgoyne and Green said.

SITU-8: CITY will feature new performance works by Antonio Rinaldi and Celina Hage, Bobby Russell, Daisy Sanders, Olivia Hendry and Kimberly Parkin, Sam Coren, Sarah Aiken, Talitha Maslin, and Tom Mullane; with original compositions by Alice Humphries, David Stewart and Nonie Trainor, Em Burrows, Eduardo Cossio, Felicity Groom, Louis Frere-Harvey, Peter McAvan, and Randa Khamis.

The season will run from 1-11 November, although there will be no performance on 7th November, with two sessions each night. Get tickets now. 

OIP Staff

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