Award Winning Summer Nights Returns
We’re thrilled to announce that after a year off, Summer Nights will return in 2022. Because what is Perth/Boorloo’s scorching feverish festive season without Summer Nights?
This award-winning program of theatre, movement and storytelling features twelve red hot shows from some of Boorloo’s best up-and-coming, established, and experimental artists.
The 2022 Summer Nights program is a coming together of utopian dreams with dystopian nightmares. You’ll find water skiing surreally staged in the heart of Northbridge. Visceral and raw theatre lit by audience torchlight. There’s an angsty teen musical set in Perth’s golden triangle and a transportive dance and movement work that exhausts and ruins the performers.
Our fresh Program Manager, Rose Kingdom-Barron, says you can expect fierce, fun and thrilling performances from the 2022 Summer Nights cohort, with artists that are pushing the boundaries to make new work. The shows face into what it means to desire and to be desired. What it means to come from a place when places disappear. What is means to know ourselves when identities blur and sharpen.
“We’re extremely excited by the stories these artists are sharing. Stories that are messy, stories with fight, urgent stories that sit in discomfort, and playful stories with humour refreshing as an ice bath. Our festival provides a home for the theatre die-hards as well as opening up the venue for other curious folk to dip their toe in. We’re honoured to bring people in and share the experience of live performance this summer, in its power, intimacy, challenge, and joy”
says Kingdom-Barron.
It might be getting warm out, but Summer Nights is going to be anything but a stuffy night at the theatre. We can’t wait for you to drop in, grab a ticket, and a toastie. Catch a show. Catch all twelve? Enjoy the cool night air on our balcony as you chat with mates and new friends about what you’ve seen and done.
But get planning now! Discounted Early Bird tickets are available for a limited time.
Book ahead, lock in your must-sees, and take a chance on a few others. You might surprise yourself. And pop Friday 21 January into your diary because everyone is invited to Housewarming, Summer Night’s free opening party, which will see us team up with RTRFM 92.1 and local party starters House of BOK.
It all would not be possible without our community who rallied together to Bring Back Summer Nights, raising $30,665. A special callout to our major donors Ian & Jill Green, who matched donations. We’re so excited to share our Summer Nights with you!
Thank you also to our Sponsors and Partners, including the the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, City of Perth, Boston Brewing Co., RTRFM 92.1, Alex Hotel, Scott Print and Terms of Service.
The Blue Room Theatre has presented 283 works and supported over 2,500 artists over 11 festivals since 2010 and as a FRINGE WORLD registered program from 2012 – 2020. In 2022, Summer Nights will evolve again, seeing our festival run entirely independently once more.
Here what your Summer Nights will be made of:
Ground-breaking new Australian play
From playwright-to-watch, Tinashe Jakwa. A white man seeks refuge in a black family’s home, unable to flee and fearing discovery. Haunting sounds and a terrible stench permeate the family’s house as the lines between black and white are blurred.
Angsty feminist punk rock musical
Breakfast Club meets Spring Awakening – except it’s teen girls of colour waiting for the bus in the Golden Triangle of Perth’s western suburbs. Written by Michele Gould and directed by Daley Rangi.
Will a fish always be a fish?
A series of ‘choose your own adventure’ style dark comedies that activate democracy and provoke deep reflection upon human existence. The is the debut professional play from First Nations artist Helah Milroy.
Multiplicity and contradiction explode in movement
A group of daring WAAPA graduates serve up the multiple identities that one woman wants to inhabit at the same time, ripping open female contradiction and shredding oppressive patriarchal ideologies.
Music, dance, storytelling – expect every card in the deck!
Facilitated and directed by Henry Boles, your nightly line-up will bang heads and seek to create a work that exemplifies the exquisite space between them, with no two nights ending up the same.
Dance-theatre about virus, sickness, sex, and shit
Created by independent theatre f**kfaces Andrew Sutherland (Squid Vicious) and Joe Paradise Lui (Renegade Productions) this is a “dance of the 7 veils” that eventually exhausts and ruins the performers in their attempt to unravel their utmost desires.
The Complete Show of Water Skiing
A feel-good play about a forgotten sport
Summer. Perth. 2022. Armed with her late grandfather’s copy of ‘The Complete Book of Water Skiing,’ and the power of friendship, Jenny and her mates set out to compete in the grand water skiing championships.
Live music and strip tease
Created and performed by Phoebe Sullivan (Beginning at the End [of Capitalism]) and Joe Paradise Lui (Unsung Heroes), performance art meets cabaret in this complicated, writhing mess of sex and nudity that questions what and how we define ‘desirable.’
Live music, mess, family photos, and dragged-up parodies
Noemie Huttner-Koros invites you to rake what your mumma gave you in this queer and unruly family gathering, a party and a communal grieving for all that is being lost and everything that is still left to fight for.
Queer joy and hot rage
A new solo tour de force by unpredictable antidisciplinary artist Daley Rangi, the piece unearths the shadowy events of one fateful night out, an attempt to ‘just be yourself’ which ends in a cruel act of control, a journey of identity fraught with peril.
Who are you when you strip it all away?
Told through personal storytelling, movement, songs and poetry, Leo/Taurus/Taurus is a glittery, energetic, moving journey through our search for meaning, and the tools we use to figure out who we are; from astrology to Myers Briggs, Buzzfeed quizzes to IQ tests.
Raw, visceral, postmodern theatre
Amir Musavi is presenting his first play in Western Australian as writer and director. Born in Afghanistan and arriving in Australia just two years ago, Utopia is a work of anger, insight, despair, and resilience … an urgent expression from a young man watching horrors unfold in his homeland and across the globe.