Audition
Concrete Echoes by Ta'alili
STRUT Dance is holding an online audition for Concrete Echoes, a world premier by Ta’alili (Aloali‘i Tapu and Tori Manley-Tapu) for Perth Moves as part of the Perth Festival 2026.
Concrete Echoes is the split in time that beckons together people in their ceremony – rupturing the concrete of Forrest Place – becoming arable in the cracks, moving as both fracture and bloom. An offering in the heart of Boorloo where stone and dance meet, beneath the weight of the city, the ground softens for gathering.
Brought together by Ta’alili and STRUT, performers’ arcs will converge to find their way as one in the songs and dances that have carried them through times of significance, rupture, and unease. They carry with them the soil of other landscapes, the heat of other suns, and languages of many tides. Each stride presses open a seam between what has been and what yet lives, and begins the voyage together toward a reimagined paradise.
Image – Ta’alili: Ken Vaega, Manu Malo 2023, photographed by Pascal Schmidt
The Audition Process
Phase 1: Audition by online application, including video submission – due 1st Sep 2025. Successful artists will be informed by 7th September 2025 and invited into phase 2
Phase 2: On invitation, selected artists will be invited to an online conversation with Ta’alili sometime between the 8th – 19th Sep 2025
Notification:
Local (Boorloo/Perth) applicants will be notified and confirmed by end of September 2025.
Regional, interstate and international artists will be notified of their successful application by December 2025, due to pending funding.
The Project
19 Jan 2026 – 28 Feb 2026
Creation will be held at King Street Arts Centre
Performances will be at Forrest Place
Elibility
We encourage dancers from any and all backgrounds, styles, forms, experiences, and trajectories to audition:
You do not need to have attended previous Ta’alili or STRUT Dance Workshops
You must be 18+
You will be required to become a STRUT member if you are successful in your audition.
You must be based in the Indo-Pacific region (living there for at least 6 of the last 12 months) and at the time of the project will be travelling from and back to somewhere within this region. For the purpose of this application, we define Indo/Pacific as including Oceania, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia.
Pending funding, STRUT will support up to 5 regional, interstate and international artists with return travel to Perth, accommodation and per diems for the duration of the project, to be confirmed by December 2025.
“…we return to an origin that is un-defined
A paradise of old in chaos
A desire for intimacy within a world that is shifting while it is forming
We scythe the worlds for a restart where time grows within language and face.
A tempest of worlds envisioned by the people…
…The group of individuals choose and form the present —
configure community and nature to not repeat its dying self.”
– Ta’alili, 2020
