Brought together by Ta’alili x STRUT Dance and premiering at Perth Festival 2026, Concrete Echoes became a site responsive, time stretching, relation-scape created for Forrest Place, the heart of Boorloo.
Performers of Concrete Echoes converged to find their way as one in the stories and dances that have carried them through times of significance, rupture, and unease. Panels of dance and story shared by the artists were woven into a collective tale of relationships across intersecting realities, approaches to dance and lineages.
Pulled in from across the Indo-Pacific; powerful, considerate artists brought with them the soil of their landscapes, the heat of their suns, and languages of many tides. Each stride together stitching the seam connecting what has been and what yet lives, and beginning the voyage together toward a reimagined dream.
From Ta’alili;
The team of Concrete Echoes are a group of many cultures and languages that revel in each other’s stories and histories. On our first week of creating Concrete Echoes, we attended an Invasion day rally in Forrest Place where an attempted act of terror was made towards First Nation elders and those present to recognise that Australia always has been and always will be Aboriginal land. We learnt that Forrest Place, before being a concrete amphitheatre, was once a place of gathering for local mob, a source of water and life. A place of unique memory and ecology. Filling in land with concrete, building towards the sky may change the silhouette of the landscape but never the real history, we aimed to acknowledge that history and respond to our position as guests within it.
Concrete Echoes asserted our co-existence and intersecting realities. It championed the reimagining of Forrest Place to be a place of echoed dreams and life from the nature beneath the concrete. Together we cast the dreams of our friends and artists we’ve collaborated with, to the place around us. In hopes to re-condition spectators to listen, and pay close attention to the dances and stories of others, to celebrate each other.
Thank you to our incredible collaborating designers, artists and choreographers Izzy, Cam, Angie, Ian, Bridgette, Gabi, Seb, Mani, Peni, Samara, Benny, Hannah, Chloe, Kate and Fale- it is a true honour being in the company and timeline of greats. Thank you to our mum Liz without whom we couldn’t move through the world as parents/artists like we do. Thank you James and Sof and the wider STRUT team for your alofa and support over the past three years. Thank you to the Performing Lines team, Perth Festival and all those involved in creating Concrete Echoes.
