MUMBAI: Laya Project Live!, a live production of EarthSync, a Chennai-based music label, has been invited to perform for the opening ceremony of the Perth International Arts Festival, scheduled for 13 February 2009.

Laya Project, a personal and collective tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, and is dedicated to the survivors of the 26 December 2004 Asian tsunami. Laya Project Live! A spectacular celebration of life and music, 25 musicians interpret the music from Laya Project, an audio-visual journey through six Asian countries. Laya Project Live! showcases unearthed talents from around the region truly collaborating on stage, and has toured to huge acclaim in India and abroad.

Laya Project Live! musicians interpret music from the six Laya Project countries: from a spiritual atmosphere to an explosive show of percussions, Buddhist chants and folk music, Sufi singers and Carnatic sounds, traditional instruments in an electronic mix and much more, the Laya Live! concerts are unique experiences.

Laya Project has won various awards (Founder's Choice Award at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, Best Film Award at the Byron Bay Film Festival, Special Juror's Choice Award at Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania and the Audience Award at Imaginaria Film Festival in Italy) and is being screened at international film festivals in places such as Los Angeles, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Kuala Lumpur. It is also being broadcast worldwide on the National Geographic Channel.

The Perth International Arts Festival is the oldest annual international multi-arts festival in the southern hemisphere and annually offers some of the world's best theatre, music, film, visual arts, street arts, literature and free community events. No single art genre, concert, performance or exhibition series can cover the breadth of intellectual and imaginative territory of the Perth Festival, nor reach as broadly into the community. For two generations of locals, summer in Perth without the Festival is simply unimaginable.

The Perth Festival has grown in the past 55 years to become a festival of major international standing with an enviable worldwide reputation in the arts for its innovative development, presentation of new works and provision of quality arts. The Perth Festival is committed to placing local works of excellence in an international context, to raising the national profile of the arts, and to being informed by the cultural and environmental context of Western Australia including Indigenous culture.

For over 50 years the Festival has welcomed to Perth some of the world's greatest artists. The three-week long Festival, in February of each year, attracts more than 300,000 patrons to events in Perth as well as in the Great Southern region.

The repertoire that is planned for the Festival this year is set to offer connoisseurs a wide range of experiences, right from the retelling of a Shakespeare epic to the story of 20th century Japanese migration, to theatre-makers and musicians whose seminal works have affected everything since. The experiences they offer range from bloody tragedy to absurd humour, the pathos of loneliness and the joy of transcendent beauty.