Perth International Arts Festival 2015

As part of the line-up for the $22.4 million festival, World War I themes feature prominently, with giant puppets set to roam the streets and the stories of Indigenous soldiers presented on stage.

In total, more than 1,000 artists will feature in the festival's 63rd year.

"We're very fortunate this year that almost everyone we wanted to come to the festival has said yes, so actually the scale of it and the intensity of it is increased by the fact that people around the world, artists around the world really want to come and play in Perth," festival director Jonathan Holloway told the ABC.

"It's by far the largest festival Perth has had."

This is the fourth and last year Mr Holloway will sit as director of the festival, before handing over the reins to a yet to be announced successor.

His first festival included the grand spectacle of Place Des Anges, which saw high-wire performers dump nearly two tonnes of feathers on ecstatic crowds above St George's Terrace on a hot summer night in 2012.

He said while Perth audiences have always been "incredible", there was a courage and willingness to engage with performances that had emerged during his four years at the helm.

"We've seen them really engage in unusual and unexpected ways of connecting with arts," he said.

"Whether that be through iPads, or under feathers or on the beach at dawn, whether that be rolling about with death in wheat, or breaking bread with deaf-blind Israeli performers, it's been an audience all along that's really taking creative risk

A Word from the Director:

My four Festivals as Artistic Director in Perth have been about two things – stories and experiences

The stories have spanned millennia and have explored who we are, where we have come from, our current situation and where we might be going.

They are stories about this land, between the desert and the sea, defined by and beholden to both. Stories of our relationships with each other and with the rest of the world. The truth of our digitally complex, environmentally conscious, culturally diverse world and how we reconcile with it.

While the stories are intellectually complex, it is the visceral experiences that have the power to transform and define us.

Curating experiences is less straightforward than telling stories. No two people approach a Festival moment in the same way, and no four people will agree on the meaning – or indeed value – of the experience they just shared.

No two Festival journeys will be the same, and our hope is that your travels through this Festival will include experiences both intimate and epic. Experiences that whet the appetite and stimulate all five senses. Moments that allow us to remember something we all knew as children – that the map is not the territory, that the best discoveries are made by straying from the path or committing to a fantastic voyage.

Stories and experiences in perfect collision can propel us around the world in one Festival. In our constant search for and celebration of the extraordinary, we have looked far and near, seeking out ever new ways to harness the greatest talent from around the world and nurture the best artists from Western Australia.

Perth International Arts Festival is a beautiful and much loved thing, and I have been honoured to spend half a decade getting to know its character and its desires, and to have guided it to new places.

And so we come to another crossroads, and the beginning of our next great adventure …

Bon voyage.

EVENT DATES - 13 Feb–7 March 2015

Find out what is on at the Perth International Arts Festival 2015 at the official site