It’s 6pm in Perth, the sun is setting and our team is in dire need of a drink. We’re closing this live blog now (having belatedly noted that the date on it was wrong – ahem, it’s clearly not 2013) but before we go, here’s a final post: a piece from the Perth theatre company Barking Gecko about their new show onefivezeroseven. To research it, the writer and director Suzie Miller and John Sheedy spoke to teenagers all around Australia about their hopes and aspirations, and came up with a top 10 which may surprise you.

So that’s it from us – thanks very much for reading, and thanks to Perth for having us – we’ve had a hoot. We’ll be back in Adelaide covering their festival in a couple of weeks – please do join us then.

There’s an intriguing art exhibition at Freemantle Arts Centre called Bali: Return Economy, which explores the relationship between Bali and Australia. The Indonesian island is actually closer to Perth than Sydney or Melbourne so it’s of particular significance to Western Australians, thousands of whom go there on holiday per year.

Van Badham (again!) has reviewed the show here, picking out the work of Australian photographer Toni Wilkinson and Indonesian artist I Wayan Bendi as particularly worth of investigation. Van writes of the whole show:

The work assembled is uneven but, as an exhibition that speaks to the phenomena of a cultural relationship between Australian hedonism and Balinese material needs, this is to be expected. The curators have gathered enough high-craft pieces for the show to have artistic validity while other pieces furnish its sociological conversation.

Her review also includes a mention of this song.

One of the world’s most celebrated flamenco dancers, Israel Galvá, is in Perth dancing La Curva. The busy Van Badham has reviewed it here. She was knocked out by its aggressive attempts to wrest the spirit of flamenco from the tourist crowd.

In case the audience may have missed his loathing of export-issue flamenco, Galvan spends the next 80 minutes smashing things, dancing with a leather jacket over his head, suggesting the patrons try the calamari and rolling around in dirt before concluding his performance in a romantic pas-de-deux with an old man.

You can watch an excerpt below.

You just can’t keep Jane Howard away from those cabaret fringe shows. Here’s her review of Between the Cracks, a one-woman show by Sarah Ward, who spends the first half clad in not a lot more than a layer of blue paint as washed-up singer Yana Alana. However, the show is more about soul-baring than the other kind.

Self-indulged and self-important, she is innately unlikeable – and yet performer Sarah Ward treats her character with such heart the audience can’t help but do the same. As Yana reaches the apex of her breakdown on stage you suddenly realise the extent of her emotional – and physical – exposure and you can’t help but feel sympathetic.

About 18 months ago I had a mind-altering experience watching Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s five-hour opera Einstein on the Beach, still arguably the pair’s signature work. Now Wilson, last seen directing Lady Gaga at the MTV awards, is in Perth not only directing but performing Samuel Beckett’s play Kraft’s Last Tape. Van Badham interviewed him yesterday and is now the proud owner of a boarding pass scribbled on by the great man to illustrate how he worked on Einstein on the Beach.

Wilson says something very interesting about the parallels between Kraft’s Last Tape and our current urge to document every aspect of our lives on social media:

This guy in love with his tape recorder – his partner, the machine. It’s so curious, I haven’t done this play for some time but the last time I did it was six or eight months ago and although they told people to turn off their cell phones there was everyone texting ... maybe not that different from what’s happening on stage here with the tape recorder. Beckett’s picked something very timely, with all these kids out there, typing away.

We’ve just posted the latest instalment of Hannah Kent’s excellent journal of the Perth Writers Festival. She’s been listening to Margaret Drabble – which in turn has made her vow to read the Drabble books she’s been missing out on – and Richard Flanagan, who spoke about the “vast labour” involved in writing a novel. Both sound like great value, but it’s Drabble who has the best line. Hannah writes:

When asked why she had not further developed the lives of certain secondary characters, Drabble, 74, dryly responded: “I didn’t really have the energy.”

Alex Needham here. I went to see the Academy of St Martin in the Fields play Perth Concert Hall last night – a fantastic 60s venue with the kind of architecture and interiors that Wallpaper magazine would once have slavered over. The music being performed was even bettwe, though the audience were a bit perturbed when the musicians started leaving one-by-one towards the end of their performance of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony (though the clue was in the name, really). Here’s my review.

The Academy were augmented by the 27-year-old violinist Matthew Barenboim (son of Matthew) who was the star of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 4. Here he is playing a different Mozart concerto, but one which gives more than a flavour of what an exciting musician he is.

A fact, according to Australia’s top feminist, Anne Summers: a 25 year old postgraduate woman leaving university in Australia will earn $1m less than a man in the same situation over the course of their working lives.

More from the writers festival:

The Perth crowd seems very keen on upright behaviour. I was silently tweeting, and was sternly told by the woman next to me, “that is distracting!” When I started to write, silently, in my notebook, she hissed: “that is ALSO distracting”. There was an intake of breath when Scott Ludlam said the word “crap” - he was quoting Tony Abbott on climate change. And a woman’s coughing fit drew such disdain from other audience members that I thought she was to be hounded from the building. Is it the heat?

Guardian Australia’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner is at the Perth Writers Festival, currently taking place in the lovely surroundings of the University of Western Australia. She writes:

The university club theatre was absolutely packed to hear Ross Garnaut, Scott Ludlam and Guardian Australia’s David Marr try to answer the question: is Australia going backwards on climate change?

It was an entertaining hour, with Garnaut providing the facts, Ludlam the fury ... and Marr the funnies. Ludlam said he believed that the government’s anti-environmental stance is not ideological but in fact a pragmatic strategy to protect the coal and gas industry. Garnault said that the upcoming WA senate repeat election was “a crucial vote not just for Australia but for the world”, because Australia is such a big polluter and the senate balance so precarious. Marr said, “We need to pray for an absolutely horrific drought - so that Australia can finally snap out of it.” And perhaps the line of the day: “This government is committed to straight marriage, copper wires and a hot planet.” It is VERY hot outside.

While their shows for adults have become ever darker (and, judging by The Drowned Man, which I saw in the UK last June, more confusing), Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre pieces for children still have the ability to weave a potent spell. Designed for young children, The House Where Winter Lives invites its young viewers into the house of Mr and Mrs Winter – where they turn out to need their guests’ help. It was originally shown around Christmastime in the UK, but our reviewer Jane Howard says that mounting it in 30-degree heat works.

Here, the creation even takes on subtle hints of Australia: on bookshelves sit tomes about Western Australia; as we walk further into the Winters’ world, the distinct smell of eucalyptus sits in the air above the snow-covered ground. In a world where magic happens, this juxtaposition feels right.

Do also read Jane’s interview with the people behind the show.

Miles Martignoni has made a great audio slideshow about the artist William Kentridge’s all-encompassing installation The Refusal of Time, currently on show at Pica in Perth. As well as taking images and sounds from the work, he’s interviewed viewers about what it meant to them. The end result is absorbing and surprising.

We’ve just posted an absorbing interview with Martin Amis, who has travelled to Australia for the first time in his 64 years to speak at the Perth Writers Festival. A vaper rather than a smoker now (modern or what?) he talks to Geordie Williamson about the insanity of the gun laws in his new home, America, the viciousness of the British press, and his memories of his stepmother, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, who died last month.

Amis says:

“I was averaging an O level a year. I was a real mess – not druggy or anything like that – just adrift, alienated in a non-combative way. And then Jane got me going on literature. She gave me a reading list and began leerily with Pride and Prejudice and, after an hour I went and knocked on her study door and said: “I’ve got to know: does Elizabeth marry Darcy?” I expected her to say, “Well, you’ll have to finish it to find out but she said [perfectly imitating an aristocratic swoon]: “Yes!”

We’ve just launched a fantastic behind-the-scenes gallery by Tanya Voltchanskaya of the stars of Bianco, a circus show that originated in Wales, where the audience walk around a specially-made big top while the performers swing around over their heads, and where all the workings of the show usually hidden away - harnesses, pulleys, stagehands – take place in full view. You can read Jane Howard’s review here. In the mean time, here’s a taste of the gallery.

We’ve just posted a new article by Jane Howard. She has met the people behind the three immersive theatre shows here in Perth: Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, Punchdrunk’s The House Where Winter Lives and Look Left Look Right’s You Once Said Yes, who discuss the constant evolution of show where the audience becomes an integral part of the show, which wraps itself around them, very rarely in a theatre venue.

Rimini Protokoll’s Helgard Haug says that after seeing her show: “to be confused is very productive. After half an hour leaving this building and being confused is perfect. Being exhausted is perfect. Needing a cup of coffee and a deep breath to then find your own skin again is just a very good thing to do with that content.”

Anyone who has ever witnessed a parent, filled with incredulous fury, picking over the wreckage of that iPad, dress, new trainers, will recognise the refrain. And This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things is about exactly that: the inability of Gillian Cosgriff to have proper grownup things without ruining them: see, lipstick, mobile phone etc. Jane Howard went to see this charming cabaret fringe show, which she gave a three-star review. You can read the review in full here, or here’s a short extract.

When two people leave during her first five minutes – presumably a theatre mix-up in the multi-venue Noodle Palace rather than an irate protest – she immediately incorporates it in the song. This is why she can’t have nice things: she puts on a cabaret show and people leave during the first number.

She balances her songs with an easy patter with her audience and stories that capture the joys and anxieties of your mid-20s. “I’m not just a person who does embarrassing things,” she tells us. “I’m a person who does embarrassing things, writes them into songs, and then performs them in front of people. And calls it my occupation.”

Here’s a song from a former Cosgriff show, Waitressing ... And Other Things I Do Well.

Vicky Frost, festival coverage head honcho and my companion in the Guardian Perth office (a balcony) writes:

It’s the final episode of our festival podcast, and we headed out to the glorious gardens of the University of the Western Australia for the Perth Writers festival. Author Hannah Kent drops by to discuss writing her novel, Burial Rites, that went from PhD thesis to a much-hyped and very well-received first book, nominated for awards, in the space of a couple of years. Hannah discusses being “the kid from South Australia” whose book is now being made into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, and getting the creative headspace to write her second novel.
We also asked our critics to give us their favourite festival moments – from Punchdrunk to Situation Rooms, to Richard Bell’s Embassy.

You can listen to the podcast here – or subscribe via iTunes. We’ll be back with more next month from Adelaide festival.

Yesterday Van Badham reviewed You Once Said Yes, a promenade theatre piece which involved a walk around Northbridge, Perth’s part-arty, part-studenty area. Van wasn’t too taken with the work, but Stuart Edgeworth has made a fantastic film about it which you can see below. Check it ...

Morning, this is Alex Needham reporting for blogging duties. Last week I spoke to Nick Allbrook, the frontman with Pond, a loose collection of musicians from Western Australia with an interest in making music that’s so far out you need a telescope to see it. They’re supporting Arctic “invoice me for the microphone” Monkeys on their forthcoming tour of Australia, but more urgently are playing here in Perth tonight, supported by a few other bands on the same label, Spinning Top.

Quoth Allbrook on why he’s in Pond when he’s already done time in other bands including Tame Impala:

I suppose the communal joy of sharing each other’s creativity and company is something that none of us can make by ourselves. The quality that comes out of the music, like a combination of everyone’s taste mashed together, just makes something far more eccentric and loveable. If we try too hard and get caught up in the intellectual side of songcraft and predetermined ideas it gets stale.

I also very much enjoyed this gif of him wowing Alexa Chung at SXSW.

It’s another beautiful day and we’ve got interviews with two cultural titans coming up – Martin Amis and legendary theatre director Robert Wilson – plus reviews of all the latest shows, Hannah Kent’s books festival diary, a chat with local space cadets Pond, the last of our podcasts and plenty more besides. But first, a recap of what we posted yesterday when we weren’t tussling with technical problems.

• An interview with artist William Kentridge about The Refusal of Time
  
• Van Badham gave fringe show Squidboy a four-star review
  
• Katharine Viner went to see Romeo and Juliet set to the music of Radiohead
  
• We headed out onto the streets of Northbridge for You Once Said Yes
  
• Richard Bell told us that “Asylum-seeker policy is a manifestation of Australian racism”
  
• We wondered whether narrative can ever be as important as gameplay when it comes to video games
  
• Alex Needham reviewed Ólafur Arnalds and Sophie Hutchings at Chevron festival gardens
  
• We bought you episode four of our podcast from Cottesloe beach
  
• Hannah Kent shared her second writer’s festival diary with us