How a year-round festival programming plan aims to offer arts workers greater job security

By rolling out a range of special projects year-round, Perth Festival aims to provide more secure longer-term contracts for staff while also building the cultural tourism market.
Perth Festival. Digital projections of bandicoots are shone onto a red-lit avenue of trees. A large crowd makes their way down the path between the trees.

Expanding Perth Festival’s cultural footprint from one signature event to a series of events spread out across the year, including this week’s EverNow, will enable the Festival to offer greater job security and longer-term contracts for many of its staff, according to Perth Festival Executive Director Nathan Bennett.

Creating more events spread across Western Australia’s cultural calendar ‘gives more job security to people, and means that we also find economies of scale in terms of everything that we might need to purchase, from technical equipment to media space,’ Bennett explains.

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Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's former National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the 2019 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in early 2020. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association in 2021, and a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Photo: Fiona Hamilton. Follow Richard on Bluesky @richardthewatts.bsky.social and Instagram @richard.l.watts