How melodrama became the theme running through the 2026 Perth Festival
- Written by: Jonathan W. Marshall, Associate Professor & Postgraduate Research Coordinator, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University
Theatre academic Peter Brooks championed the rise of melodrama as a popular form replacing tragedy. Melodrama, he said, tends to be explicit and hyperbolic in its representation of emotional and moral values.
Such a tendency within the arts to depict extremes of emotional life, and to do so overtly and with clarity, was in evidence at the 2026 Perth Festival.
In Lacrima, actors perform on-stage beside projected filmic close ups and clips. Aakash Odedra’s Songs of the Bulbul, by contrast, is a solo dance accompanied by a pre-recorded, sweepingly Romantic score.
They are nevertheless alike. Both chart a tempestuous narrative. From the beginning, we know these stories will conclude in the psychophysical breakdown and self-immolation of the protagonists.
Lacrima’s central character is the much put upon head of a couture studio (played by Maud LeGrevellec). She is caught between impossible deadlines, her resentful underling/husband (Dan Artus), and their daughter’s growing mental collapse.
In Songs of the Bulbul, Odedra is a songbird, denied light and blinded by its owner, so it would sing more plaintively and exquisitely.
Both productions deploy overwrought physicalities to convey their message. Sharply raised voices, outright shouting and tense, aggressive posturing are an omen of the final physical collapse in Lacrima. We witness the increasingly anguished twirls and twisted trajectories of the dancer for Odedra. Grand gestures coincide with climaxes of dramatic intensity.
The Red Shoes offers a less serious approach to over-the-top emotion and character.
Melissa Madden Gray uses her blowsy diva persona Meow Meow to send up herself and convention.
Clambering across a mountain of detritus, assembling and disassembling costumes, and expostulating about Hans Christian Anderson, the piece ends with the cast arrayed across the front as in the marriage-finale of a Shakespearean comedy. Here, a more self-conscious and comedic melodrama of collapse and uncertain revival.
The weird and the loud
The Last Great Hunt’s new work begins with the absurd proposition of staging a “faux foreign film performed live each night”.
Featuring complex filming set ups rapidly installed on stage, Lé Nør (The Rain) is performed entirely in a fabricated, faux-Norwegian language within a fictional world modelled on colourful 1980s video, costuming and make-up.
Romantic friendships and entanglements are unearthed, broken and reconfigured in a series of quick-fire revelations before the cast comes together for a blurred on-screen orgy.
A great example of skilled, hyperbolic silliness.
U>N>I>T>E>D by Chunky Move.
Gianna Rizzo/Perth Festival
A personal favourite was Chunky Move’s U>N>I>T>E>D, a spectacularly weird and loud cybernetic mime featuring dancers moving in and out of darkness while Indonesian industrial music from Gabber Modus Operandi pulverises the space.
The performers are attired in quasi-cybernetic modular exoskeletons, taking on a spidery appearance. The dramatic arc leads to its characters being physically sacrificed to a techno-primitive god.
It doesn’t make much sense, but it is thrilling in its dramatic jumps from one tableau to another.
The Tiger Lillies are, in many ways, similar to Chunky Move: what you see and hear was basically what you get, dialled up a notch in this case by the addition of lyrics about knocked-about wicked souls and moments of rhythmic intensity.
The trio’s amoral ditties about life on the street are rendered through episodic lyrical sketches instead of Brecht’s complex psychological and political poetics.
Reaching for the tragic
There were meditative and tragic works within the festival.
The demise of Joseph K at the conclusion of Philip Glass’ operatic adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial is telegraphed from the beginning. But the opera’s narrative and Glass’ alternation of blocks of repetitive music gives plenty of time to watch him struggle. K is rendered musically and dramatically akin to an insect writhing on its own specimen pin.
The Trial by Lost & Found Opera.
Chris Canato/Perth Festival.
I was particularly enchanted by Jaha Koo’s intimate study of migration, alienation and the ambivalence of memory in Haribo Kimchi.
The set is modelled on a Korean outdoor restaurant, where Koo charts his journey from Korea to Berlin to Brussels.
Spoken word alternates with short films and animations shown on screens to either side of his modest kitchenette.
Koo relates how the bag of pickled kimchi cabbage his family pressured him to take to Berlin exploded, its scent and juices permeating his apartment block. This taught him the immigrant’s shame.
Yet kimchi represents home, as do other delightful dishes Koo cooks live and distributes to curious audience members.
Koo also describes a return trip to Korea where he visited an eel farm and helped capture several slithering escapees. On screen, a high-pitched, singing, animated eel tells us how eels are birthed in the centre of an ocean, but mature in inland waterways: eels do not have one home, they have many.
We also see a snail which Koo found in his lettuce, kept for a while, and then released; and a Haribo gummy bear enmeshes Koo’s simple narration in fantasies which arise out of daily reality.
This wistfully melancholy piece is almost the inverse of melodrama. The only bodily collapse here was mine, as I quietly shed a tear for the eel’s song.
Cross-culturalism, Boorloo style
The BhuMeJha Project was an evening of performance and food mounted by spiritual arts and culture organisation Saraswati Mahavidhyalaya.
Performed within a circle of aged gums near to the river, just getting to the location as the sun was setting was moving.
Music includes Carnatic violin and vocals from musical director Hariraam Lam; Malaysian violin and frame-drum from Mohammad Hisharudy; Indian tabla by Sivakumar Balakrishnan; and, most strikingly, the songs, clapstick and authorised Australian First Nations choreography courtesy of Yolngu songman Daniel Wilfred.
Dance and song is provided by a largely female ensemble, drawing on Indian classical gestures.
The BhuMeJha Project by Saraswati Mahavidhyalaya & ChitAmbara.
SMV/ChitAmbara.
Reflecting diverse levels of training, groupings and poses tend to be loose — although teachers Sukhi Krishnan and Aarthi Kamalesh are both facially engaged and physically sharp.
Quite what dramatic exchange the dancers are enacting remains obscure until Wilfred joins to perform a brief mime of fishing on the Arnhem land coast with a long spear, mirrored by the larger group.
Wilfred’s vocals cut through the musical blend with sharp force and intensity.
The BhuMeJha Project is not polished, but it is highly affecting.
Of the shows I saw, only BhuMeJha was inescapably of Boorloo-Perth. Ironically, this was true because, like Koo’s eels, it indirectly alluded to global histories of displacement and settlement. As a result, it paid little attention to melodramatic imperatives of legibility or scale.
The BhuMeJha Project and Haribo Kimchi are big in their modest summoning of multiple locations and the emotions played out at them. We need more shows like that.
Authors: Jonathan W. Marshall, Associate Professor & Postgraduate Research Coordinator, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University
