Fear or Love
You Choose
Then take a step…

Precipice is a play about two characters balanced right on the edge, hovering, held in the moment before inevitable change. It’s about recent times — the tensions between anxiety, threat and compassion. About a society where some desperately want to raise the barricades, while others weep as they feel humanity slipping away.

It’s about the bridges between us. About how powerful and how fragile they are. The Tasman, the Westgate, the one over your favourite creek bed in a childhood memory. How deeply these engineering marvels, these sites of suspension, imagination and tension are stamped in the Australian psyche. And it’s about how potent, but often how seemingly insignificant and mundane, the chasms that divide us can be. And the awakening of the discovery that we may not just be simply divided after all.

Mel is a 40-year-old single working mother, struggling but strong, trying to maintain family, job and herself in a harsh world. A potent childhood incident has left her suffering from chronic vertigo, which she is only able to relieve by running. Al is older, a compulsive reader of death notices, and an obsessive attendee of the funerals of strangers. Through interior monologues and far-reaching conversations they reveal their pasts, presents, inner worlds and differing levels of consciousness as their lives converge.

Writer AWGIE Award winning playwright Catherine Ryan  Director Green Room Award winner Laurence Strangio  Producer Castlemaine State Festival  Set & lighting design Uli Radchevich & Jens Milbret  Sound design Jacques Soddell  Cast Bev Geldard, Tammy McCarthy, Tiffany Raae & Ian Scott

Winner of the 2009 George Fairfax National Playwrights Award

Developed in the Melbourne Theatre Company Hardlines
Affiliate Writers Program

Joint Winner of the 2009 Inscription Regional Script Award

I found Catherine Ryan’s play PRECIPICE to be well-written and provocative, and I am highly supportive of its being produced.
Edward Albee, Legendary Playwright, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Simone (!) is an intimate 90-minute journey into the life of French radical, philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil (1909–1943).

During Simone Weil’s brief life, and in the 60 years since her writings began to be published, this young Frenchwoman has constantly amazed, infuriated, perplexed and endeared herself to people with her profound thinking and uncompromising behaviour. The essential drama in the play is the struggle between Simone’s deep engagement with society and her growing relationship with her God; a struggle which works to destroy her self and her vivid connections with the world.

Enmeshed in the political and social upheavals of the 1930s, and
the calamities of war, Simone’s compulsion for justice and the paradoxes of her living and dying are enlightening and disturbing. Simone Weil’s story is one of the most intriguing of the last century, and her writings are as lucid and disconcerting as ever. On her gravestone is written, ‘My solitude held in its grasp the grief of others until my death’.

Simone (!) is passionate and nourishing theatre. Simone’s own words have been used by Lorender Freeman to create a powerful one-woman show performed with great sensitivity and intensity by Samantha Bews.

Performer Samantha Bews  Writer Lorender Freeman  Director Mandy Smith
Lighting designer Tim Preston

The Festival welcomes the participation of all lovers of music, whether accomplished or simply inspired. In these free after-school workshops, you will have the rare opportunity to create your own panpipes, hand drums, boing pipes and okarinas.

Then, following each session, Victory Park’s autumn twilight hours will be acoustically lit up with community jams led by local percussionist and musical director Justin Marshall, who, together with amateur and professional musicians, will explore Klezmer, Celtic, Latin and African musical genres.

Building on the Castlemaine Festival’s historic tradition of a Children’s Parade, the 2011 Schools Program and after-school instrument-making workshops will culminate in the Children’s Day Parade and Picnic on Saturday 9 April in Victory Park, at which instruments created and pieces learnt at the community jams will be performed.

Download Jam Music here:
Jam Music in B flat
Jam Music in C
Jam Music in E flat

IRISH CELTIC — Monday 4 April
Allan Evans is an exciting young musician from Taradale who is at the forefront of the young Celtic music scene in Victoria. He plays Irish flute and Celtic harp and is a member of the award-winning band Shanachie. Allan has chosen a couple of traditional Irish tunes for the jam session and parade. Bring your fiddle, whistle, flute, guitar and mandolin. There will also be parts for horns and percussion.
The Lark’s March (Ireland)

SOUTH AFRICAN KWELA — Tuesday 5 April
Andy Rigby will lead the jam session with this swinging Southern African style of township jive. The lead instruments are often pennywhistles, but all instruments are welcome. Horns, guitars and percussion set this style up as great parade music. Andy leads the Kwela Street Band at the National Folk Festival, Canberra. Kwela Medley – (S.A)

KLEZMER — Wednesday 6 April
The Castlemaine Klezmer Kollective will lead us through a couple of tunes from this popular Eastern European style of Jewish cultural music. Violins, clarinets, accordions, mandolins, guitars, percussion, horns; all are welcome. Happy Nigun – (Klezmer)

BRAZILIAN SAMBA — Thursday 7 April
Wendy Rowlands from Newstead has led many Latin music ensembles and brings a classic Brazilian song to this community jam experience. From the home of samba street percussion, this is bound to have a big energy. Parts available for all instruments. Asa Branca (Brazil)

This year the Castlemaine Festival’s Schools Program will again involve over 1500 primary-aged children from the 18 local primary schools in the Shire. Children will be engaged in an extraordinary range of multi-arts and cultural events, including traditional local Indigenous Dreaming dance workshops and ‘Saltbush’, an internationally acclaimed Italian/Australian interactive multimedia dance theatre piece.

Children will attend informative artists’ talks by exhibitors selected for the 2011 Castlemaine Visual Arts Biennial, and experience hands-on art-making with leading national and international artists, including special guest — world-renowned sculptor/printmaker Heri Dono (Indonesia).

This is history at its best —  a ripping yarn with tales of happiness and tragedy, oppression and rebellion, humanity and racism, and our relationship to this land.

Funny, mesmerising, poignant, inspiring, unexpected — four nights of brilliant storytelling from people it really did happen to. Guests include celebrated actress Helen Morse, Tivoli Lovely Vicki Charleston, beloved singer–songwriter Shane Howard, perceptive playwright Hannie Rayson, Indigenous historian and author Tony Birch, novelist and raconteur Shane Malony, columnist Mark Dapin, Victorian Opera musical director Richard Gill and radio journalist Elly Varenti. Together with surprise guests, Festival artists and Castlemaine’s own local identities, such as hot rod specialist Larry O’Toole and Sudanese Chan Nyok, these true life storytelling sessions will celebrate the elemental power of the spoken word.

Stories from Backstage

The show behind the show — the unseen world of theatre as experienced by the artists themselves. For one night only, you’ll be privy to the world of work, machinery, anxieties, egos, disasters and triumphs, as played out behind the proscenium arch and beyond, as some of our brightest stage stars step up to the microphone to tell it like it is.

Featuring:

Hannie Rayson

Hannie Rayson is one of Australia’s most important playwrights and an award-winning author of 11 plays, including Inheritance and Hotel Sorrento. Inheritance has played in Melbourne and Sydney, won two Helpmann Awards, and was adapted as a four-part radio play for ABC Radio National in 2007.

Vicki Charleston – Tivoli Lovely.

The Tivoli was the major venue for variety theatre and vaudeville in Australia for over 70 years. The circuit grew to include Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth by the turn of the century, promoting both local and international musical, variety and comedy acts. It featured a broad spectrum of vaudeville acts including dancers, acrobats, comedians and ventriloquists and the Tivoli was famous for its scantily-clad chorus girls, who were colloquially known as “Tivoli Lovelys”.

Helen Morse

Helen Morse has worked with many companies including Melbourne Theatre Company, The Ensemble, The Independent, Nimrod, Marian Street, Sydney Theatre Company, Hunter Valley Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, Harvest Theatre Company (South Australia) and the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Her notable screen performances also include roles in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and the television miniseries A Town Like Alice (1981).

Massimo Scattolin

Massimo Scattolin is widely regarded as one of the finest classical guitarists of our time. He specializes in performing the most challenging concertos for guitar and orchestra. Italian, Massimo will share stories from his richly varied life as a performer which has included performing with the original Buena Vista Social Club. See Festival program for details of Massimo’s performance.

How I Got Here

The roadmap to where you are now is the sum of all parts —  the roads travelled, divergent, intersecting, well trod or newly discovered. From choices made well or regretted, to events that have been entirely out of their hands, these are the unpredictable paths that led tonight’s storytellers to a location, a moment, a realisation…

Shane Howard

In 1982, Shane Howard’s massive anthem “Solid Rock” from the album “Spirit of Place”, (recorded with his legendary band “Goanna”), reverberated across the airwaves and still does today. A prolific songwriter, he and his songs continue to champion the cause of the underdog, provide meaningful insights into the human spirit and interpret the Australian landscape in a way that has helped to build a bridge between Aboriginal and non Aboriginal peoples.

Neil Boyack

Neil Boyack was born and adopted in 1967.  Married in Las Vegas.  Plays music in local hillbilly-rock band Jim Crow.  He writes, and writes, and writes. Transactions, his last short story collection, through The Vulgar Press, saw critical acclaim. New story The Battles appears in Torpedo Volume 5.

Carolyn Neilson

Glasgow born, underpaid ‘Ranga’ mother of three boys, Caroline is passionate about not losing the natural art of storytelling and its place around the dinner table.

Jida Gulpilil Murray

Jida Murray-Gulpilil is working with the Castlemaine State Festival as the cultural representative of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. Through his father – David  Gulpilil, he is also descended from the chief dancers of the Thunder and Lightning people of the Northern Territory.

A Sense of Home

A dream, an idea, a set of plans, a place, a refuge: any way you construct it, home is where you find it. Come and listen to some unforgettable accounts of what’s lost and found in the process.

Terry Jaensch

Terry is an Australian poet/monologist/actor. His first book of poetry, Buoy, was published in 2001 by Five Islands Press. In 2004/05 he collaborated with Singaporean poet Cyril Wong to produce Excess Baggage & Claim, which was launched in 2007. He has been broadcast and interviewed on radio (notably The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine) and in 2004 was commissioned to write and record 15 monologues based on his childhood in a Ballarat orphanage for Life Matters, ABC Radio National. Recently he was awarded first prize in the Melbourne Poets’ Union International Poetry Competition for his poem Galah.

Jarnil

Jarnil is a refugee from Afghanistan. He arrived alone in Castlemaine, where the townsfolk held a fundraiser to assist his return to Afghanistan to collect his family. He and his family now live in Castlemaine where he has a market stall at the Wesley Hill Market.

Chan Nyok

Chan Nyok did not get the chance to go to school until he was 15. When the war came, he had to leave school; the schools were closed and many teachers were killed….
Chan’s story is a story common to many African Australians living in Castlemaine.

Tony Birch

Tony Birch is a Koori historian who teaches Indigenous History at the University of Melbourne. From 1997 to 1999 he held a part-time position as Senior Curator, Indigenous Cultures Program, at Museum Victoria. He is a widely published writer of poetry, fiction and history.

Elly Varrenti

Elly Varrenti has been in the performing arts world for many years. She has also spent the past 15 years as a freelance radio broadcaster for ABC 774 and Radio National and continues to make features and write opinion and think pieces for Radio National and The Age. Her book This is Not my Beautiful Life was published by Penguin in 2008 and a collection of her essays is due for publication late 2011. She is currently the Coordinator of Professional Writing & Editing at Box Hill Institute where she specialising in teaching memoir and short story.

You Wouldn’t Believe It

But it’s all true, and tonight you’re going to hear it from the masters. Unbelievable coincidences, hair-raising suspense and plain old hilarity preside tonight in our final session of It Happened to Me. Make sure you’re there for this unrepeatable night of tall tales.

Jarad Henry

Writer of gritty and “hard boiled” Australian crime novels drawn from his ten years of experience in the criminal justice system.

Shane Maloney

Shane Maloney was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 for his Murray Whelan novels.

Larry O’Toole

Established in 1977, Graffiti Publications is a family business committed to publishing a range of magazines, which promote Street Rodding as a hobby and business. Larry and Mary O’Toole are dedicated rodders whose passion and enthusiasm drive Graffiti!

Mark Dapin

Irreverent Good Weekend columnist, ex-editor-in-chief of Ralph magazine, winner of the Ned Kelly award for his “explosive, gritty, hilarious” fiction thriller King of the Cross and accidental Australian sumo champion.

Originally created by Barking Owl Theatre, Movement Zone,
unqualified, People Pictures and loads of local young people, COUCH went off (was successfully sprung) at the Castlemaine State Festival in 2009. Since then, COUCH has been an invited guest of festivals in Launceston and Melbourne.

With some new faces and new locations, the Castlemaine State Festival is ReCovering COUCH for 2011. We’re opening our living rooms and putting our sofas on the street. Old couches will be transformed with our vibrant artwork and dynamic energy, in our own town. So look out for random couches scattered around Castlemaine — places for hanging out, dancing, storytelling, or just watching the world, catching a rest and reflecting on the meaning of home.

Barking Owl Theatre conceived COUCH in 2009 in response to hearing stories about young people’s homelessness and couch surfing. COUCH asks questions about where we feel comfortable, safe and secure. COUCH asks us where we feel at home.

So get comfy and get involved — come and hang out with us on the COUCH and show us where you belong.

Speak Percussion is one of Australia’s most diverse percussion collectives whose activities span a wide variety of contexts and genres. Beyond percussion ensemble and new music practice, Speak Percussion works to create an evolving and hybrid art form.

In this concert, percussionists Eugene Ughetti, Peter Neville, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Leah Scholes will present an eclectic program to celebrate a diversity of acoustic languages on the vibraphone. In a program of predominantly virtuosic pieces by Australian composers, Speak Percussion will present the ultra-complex work of Richard Barrett from his mammoth chamber work Opening of the Mouth and the first-ever recorded vibraphone work from the vaudeville era, the infamous Aloha Oe.

The program will also feature the world premiere performance of Surface Given Radiance by Luke Paulding, a brilliant young composer who is gaining notoriety for exploring unconventional timbres and extremes of playability. Paulding’s work augments the vibraphone with 80 microtonally tuned aluminum tubes, creating tightly woven textures with explosive force and the blazing resonance of metallic overtones.

This exhibition showcases a selection of key works resulting from Australian Print Workshop projects with artists from Aurukun (Qld); Bathurst Island (NT); Fitzroy Crossing (WA); Kalumburu (WA); Melville Island (NT); Moa Island, Torres Strait Islands; Ngukurr (NT); and Oenpelli (NT).

Since the early 1990s, Australian Print Workshop has worked collaboratively on projects with Indigenous artists and communities throughout Australia.

Over the years, Australian Print Workshop has developed important on-going partnerships with artists from as far afield as the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, the Tiwi Islands, Central Australia, Torres Strait Islands, Cape York Peninsula and south eastern Australia.

Australian Print Workshop frequently travels to remote communities in these regions to work on site with artists, often setting up a ‘bush workshop’ to enable artists to engage with the print medium for the first time.

As interest in the print medium has grown, artists have embarked on more ambitious projects, often visiting Melbourne specifically to work at Australian Print Workshop to produce more complex work.

Works produced as a result of Australian Print Workshop collaborations have been exhibited widely throughout Australia and overseas, and are represented in important collections around the world, including in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, British Museum (London) and Musee du quai Branly (France).

Mimih Figures — Susan Marawarr, Jimmy Njiminjuma, Kevin Djimarr, Mick Kubarkku, John Mawurndjul, Jimmy Bungurru, Jimmy An.gunguna, Owen Yalandja and Crusoe Kurddal

Figuring the Earth brings a focused integration of works of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian artists whose images and sculptural objects attest to the enduring power of the land to shape who we are as people and how we think. Figuring the Earth suggests that artists are simultaneously depicting — configuring — images related to the world, and in doing so are trying to ‘figure it out’; to come to grips with landscape, its mysteries, our place in it, our organic connection to the earth and other species with which we share. Judy Holding and John Wolseley have long-established practices of working directly in remote landscapes to absorb and evoke something of the primal force and beauty of places. For the various Arnhem Land artists in this exhibition, the land is formed and inhabited by spirit ancestors brought into material reality as a community of profoundly moving sculptural objects.

The Artists Rooms are a series of site-response works. Local and international visual artists stretch the contemporary art boundaries through performance, installation, prints, film and paste-up.

Emily Floyd’s knock-out installation The Temple of the Female Eunuch owes as much to great literature as it does to trends in modern sculpture. There are over 60 inscribed wooden meccano-like pieces of a meandering beauty, which explore constructs of feminism and concepts from the lexicon of modern thought.

Aleks Danko and Jill Orr are both highly regarded in contemporary art practice for site-response and performance work. Danko’s lyrical nonsensical and hard-hitting ‘words’ tell of another way to exist as artist. ‘What’s the point’ is a droll classroom spoof, or is it? An accompanying Aleks Danko performance will undoubtedly raise the consciousness of those who skipped class and always wondered what they missed. Orr grapples with the balance and discord that exists at the heart of relations between the human spirit, art and nature. Helen Vivian wrote ‘Jill Orr is a fiery artist and her work expresses the beauty, power and spiritual depth that is her trade mark.’

Local artists and editors of TROUBLE magazine, Melissa and Steven Proposch, make an entrance into the hallowed hallways and stairwell with disparate and surreal papery images of Hedony and her Hounds. Working from the Steven Proposch narrative, collages form the basis of the monotype etchings and collagraph paste-ups by Melissa Proposch.

A parallel performance will accompany the installation
by Aleks Danko Saturday 2 April 11.30am-12.30pm

William Kentridge (born 1955, lives and works in Johannesburg) is one of the most critically acclaimed and widely popular artists in the world today. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in major museums across South Africa, Australia, Europe, Canada and the United States. He has developed a highly distinctive art practice, where the hand and the body of the artist are constantly evident in drawing, printmaking, sculpture, performance and the animations — or what he calls ‘stone-age filmmaking’ — for which he is famous.

This selection of Kentridge’s works draws on several recent series that demonstrate the breadth of his research and visual enquiry. From the colonial and apartheid histories of South Africa, the experimental art and music of the early 20th century Russian avant-garde, to intimate images of himself and his studio, Kentridge is an artist whose images are acute observations of the world and his place in it. They are poignant, humanist, mysterious and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

Kentridge is preoccupied with the ways people see. His studio and exhibitions could be considered as a type of laboratory, where image fragments and ideas converge to propose a new way of seeing and understanding the transient state of things, or the marks, scars and
signs that we leave behind us.

Kentridge delves into political events using powerful poetic allegory. His drawings, prints, performance and animation have inspired generations — once seen not easily forgotten.

Indonesian-born Heri Dono is one of South-East Asia’s most innovative and prominent artists, with a multi disciplinary practice, including performance, installation, painting, printmaking, sound and sculpture.

Cultural change in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto in 1998 enabled greater freedom of speech and expression for a new wave of artists. Heri Dono’s particular social and political commentary has played a leading role in what is recognised as a ‘New Internationalism’ in recent South-East Asian art, fusing aspects of tradition and cultural specificity — in Heri Dono’s case Javanese culture — with images and ideas drawn from the seemingly globalised world.

Heri Dono’s recent work melds the drama and humour of the
traditional puppet form wayang kulit (Indonesian shadow puppets)
with cartoon animation and the 3D dolls used in wayang golek (Indonesian rod puppets).

The Castlemaine State Festival is delighted to host Heri Dono as a special guest artist of the 2011 Visual Art Biennial, in association with
the Castlemaine Secondary College.

Heri Dono will be in residence at the Artists Rooms for several weeks and will conduct a series of workshops for art and Indonesian language students from the Castlemaine Secondary College, in a unique partnership co-funded by the Castlemaine State Festival and the Castlemaine Secondary College.

Pressing Issues — The Exhibition is the Visual Arts Biennial flagship exhibition representing artists who have an association with central Victoria. The artists have been invited to interpret the theme of Pressing Issues as a response to contemporary, traditional, personal, political, social, global, environmental, biological, relationship, gender or cultural issues. Pressing Issues may evoke serious, subtle, overt, religious, political, scientific, symbolic and even humorous ideas. It is an open-ended concept that was chosen to allow for maximum creative interpretation. Underpinning this theme is the notion of print media, which includes, but is not limited to, artist-made prints, linocuts, wood engravings, collagraphs, screen-prints on paper, textiles, wood, photography, moving image, collage, artist-made books and installation.

Exhibiting artists have expanded, stretched and developed the idea of printing to incorporate pasting, stamping and stencilling, alongside traditional printmaking techniques of etching, lithography, wood engraving, digital printing and site-response works.

Fittingly, Rose Nolan’s artwork is sited in the Castlemaine Phee Broadway Theatre foyer, traversing the divide between the grand and the intimate, the theatrical and the bookish, the public and the personal.

A thought provoking point of entry to Festival theatrical performance between acts, Rose Nolan’s grand scale striking red and white banners drop from the gods and make a statement. Read or not, you cannot ignore their presence

The Union Studio is proud to present an exhibition of lithographs by some of Australia’s best known artists in this new gallery in the heart of Castlemaine. This is the first time in over 30 years the complete Bodfford Terrace folio has been exhibited.

This folio of eight lithographs, printed in 1978, has significance in the history of the Australian Labor Party and in Australian art. John Brack, Len French, Frank Hodgkinson, Franz Kempf, Clifton Pugh and John Olsen, all of whom had been known nationally for some time, were joined by two younger artists, George Baldessin and Les Kossatz, to produce the unusually long ‘run’ of prints.

The brainchild of Peter Redlich, then President of the ALP Victorian Branch, the purpose of the project was to purchase and develop Bodfford Terrace as the new party headquarters. Architect Evan Walker identified the terrace in Drummond Street in Carlton as a suitable building for the purpose, and it provided a headquarters for the branch for many years. The name of the folio commemorates the building.

Peter Redlich asked Judith Pugh to run the fundraising project, and she managed everything from commissioning the artists and printers to arranging the launch by Sir Richard Kirby, President of the Arbitration Commission, at an exhibition at Melbourne University Gallery.

Exhibition Launch
by Judith Pugh
Sunday 3 April 2pm

Rhyll Plant is well known for her humorous turn of phrase and Escher-like interpretations. Rhyll will demonstrate the very fine art of wood engraving and printing of blocks on a small press. There will be a number of free original Rhyll Plant prints given away.

Merit.Fear.Desire.Responsibility.Privilege.Greed.Sacrifice.Contribution.Self Esteem.Belonging.Pressure.Places of Value.Individuality.

IN THE ANNEXE
Your moment: an evolving interactive installation using sound, photography, text and the moving image. Visitors will be invited to contribute.

IN THE MAIN GALLERY
The Artists’ moment: a Festival Salon that invites various artists to consider issues they find integral