Summer Nights at The Blue Room Theatre returns for another year of award-winning performance art!
The Blue Room Theatre will transform into a futuristic swamp, oozing with parties, poetry and performance with their Summer Nights Festival 2024. With 15 curated shows to choose from, plus 10 new short works as part of 600 SECONDS, the festival will be getting back to its late-night artist-bar roots, kicking off with Housewarming, a free opening night party.
With art, drinks, DJs and shows in every performance space, dive headfirst into The Blue Room Theatre’s techno-swamp surprises for a night to remember.
Housewarming – Friday night, 19 January – free entry – till late.
Explore new and radical performance works during these balmy summer nights, enjoy a drink at The Blue Room Bar, ready to be immersed into: queer AI love stories, anti-racist PoC musicals, doom-scrolling stand-up philosophy, pseudo-archaeologists, experimental music and much more late-night performance art.
“This year’s festival is not afraid to get a bit spicy and a little slimy! There is the edgy and hilarious side Summer Nights is known for, married with the organic, the beautiful and the absurd. More than ever the programme weaves together the diverse threads of identity that connect us, so come in and cool off or turn up the heat with a festival that’s got something for everyone.” Briannah Davis, The Blue Room Theatre Producer says.
This year Summer Nights includes. . . Two out-of-town shows, 'The Mermaid’s Table', an interstate collaboration between Melbourne based Turkish Australian director Görkem Acaroğlu and playwright Kit Lazaroo. While The And Theatre, a physical theatre duo hailing from Ukraine, make their Perth debut with 'Dead End', a surreal journey to the edge of existence.
Image © Cole Baxter
600 SECONDS returns with powerhouse curators and mentors, STRUT Dance Artistic Directors Sofie Burgoyne and James O'Hara, and Ofa Fotu (Hot Brown Honey/Odette Mercy and Her Soul Atomics). Artists span a range of performances including theatre, storytelling, WAACKING and ballet subversions.
With two one-night-only shows be sure to mark the dates. 'The Edge Of Reality', a collaboration with The Definitives, Jenny Hickinbotham, Plyanci and more, challenges what performance can be with their experimental blend of music and spoken word from the unseen and unheard. In the Centre For Stories’ 'Saga Sisterhood', South-Asian storytellers share their heartfelt tales of love, friendship, family, identity, and belonging. Be moved, charmed, and inspired.
But that’s not all, 'Perfect Animals' looks at the future of dating with an AI love robot romance set in 2123. '<3 love song' is a queer love poem laced with experimental music, radically challenging the conception of romantic love. While 'The Hole' explores the closeted stories of people caught at an impasse between the lives they profess, and the fantasies they hide.
Experience the glamorous chaos of 'SplashZone', as an adult film team embarks on a desperate journey into the world of reality TV, blurring the lines between authenticity and entertainment. In 'XxHornySlug69xX', you’ll find out what slimed-up sex clowns discover as they work their way through every crevice of cyberspace. 'Sweaty Girlz' brings Boorloo’s hottest oink-a-licious fast-fashion retailer to our stage in a sweat-soaked dance theatre spectacle.
Image © Cole Baxter
Would the internet be better if we did it together? Let Henry Boles' 'DOOMSCROLL' guide us through the invisible systems of power that quietly govern our everyday lives. While 'CRUSH' allows the audiences to chart the glorious highs and devastating lows of having a crush, that, for better or worse, we can all relate to.
'Intertwine' is a poignant, angry, laugh-inducing dance theatre work, examining what it means to be Chinese in today’s globalised era. In 'Imelda', Maria Clara interrogates the Filipino diaspora identity, carrying the grief of eroding her motherland from her personhood to keep up with the expectations of assimilation. 'Pseudo-archaeologists believe that Vikings made it to Australia' comedically explores history and place, who we are and who we become when we visit different spaces.
Last, but certainty not least, you won’t want to miss the timely and outlandish musical comedy 'How the KKK Saved The Day', or the cutting-edge satire 'The Late Great Andrew Tate', a parody of toxic masculinity.
The Blue Room Theatre will again be home to some of the most exciting and absurd performance works Perth has to offer. Travel beyond binaries, expectations and limitations as you float through a Summer Night dream of ideas, squish in as many stories as possible and continue chats from the black box at the balcony (and back again).
Summer Nights is on at The Blue Room Theatre (Perth), 19 January-10 February.
