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?

Imagine this … it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern the difference between the present and the past, between what is familiar and what is foreign. Events that took place just minutes ago are being constantly erased, while memories that you have been able to keep at bay for decades now come rushing towards you. KAGE, in partnership with Alzheimer’s Australia, invites you into this mystery.

Despite the explorations of poets, novelists, doctors, scientists and philosophers, the realm of memory remains a great mystery. And Sundowner’s Syndrome remains an unanswered question. Why is it that just as the sun goes down, so many of those with Alzheimer’s become particularly disorientated and confused?

This breathtaking performance traverses sorrow, fears, humour and dignity. Through the eyes of three generations, Sundowner tells the story of so many Australian families. Ultimately, it is a story of love: love of family, love of history, and love of life.

Featuring renowned Australian actress Helen Morse, with music by Kelly Ryall, Paul Kelly and Megan Washington, and an appearance from the Tivoli Lovelies (dancers from the original Tivoli Theatre), Sundowner is a major new performance work combining dance, drama and original composition.

Director Kate Denborough  Writer David Denborough  Cast Helen Morse, Gerard Van Dyck, Michelle Heaven, Stuart Christie  Tivoli Lovelies Betty Arnold, Vicki Charleston, Verlie Whittaker, Jackie O’Neil, Dot Lanphier, Lil Paranos, Lila Wells, Julie Obst  Lighting Designer Damien Cooper  Set Designer Dan Potra  Costume Designer Paula Levis

Within the intimate surrounds of each Pandemonium Pavilion you can choose to either howl to the chorus line of original gothic country songs with ‘Underdog and the School of Obedience’ or taste ‘melting moments’ whilst sharing in exclusive interviews, stories and exceptional acts with the girls at the CCWA (Castlemaine Cultural Women’s Association). Then you can gavotte ‘til you drop with Ensemble Systolica and rock with the raucous as clowns get a drubbing in the Clown Master Class. Acrobats, shadow mechanics, bike inventors and shambolic makers invite you to a Pandemonium Pavilion world, to discover the cultural wealth of our region and our top-notch illustrious festival creators.

The Pandemonium Pavilions, located around Castlemaine’s central Market Building and extending into Victory Park, will blend the best of local cultural talent with sideshow pizzazz to create a unique gathering place for family, friends and Festival visitors throughout the opening weekend of the Festival.

Co-producer Punctum

Car-cophony is a stereo-symphonic expression of our obsession with automobiles. In acknowledgement of Castlemaine’s reputation as street rod capital of Australia, Car-cophony is both a celebration of the car and of our relationship with it. Using the drivers and stereos of 12 local cars, this unique work will transform the ordinary vehicle into a ‘wall of sound’. Over three distinct movements, Car-cophony’s ambient drones and guitar loop motifs will be threaded with warning signals, driving instructor voices, car crunching sounds, crash test results and familiar pop hits, culminating in an exhilarating ‘doof-doof’ and a tongue firmly planted in the cheek.

Vaughan Springs has a long history of playing host to major community celebrations, from the Chinese New Year events of the mid 1850s to full orchestral and community dance events a century later. And now, Vaughan Springs the hostess is back, as the acoustics and atmosphere of the superb little gorge at the entrance to Vaughan Springs will resonate with the car stereo symphony that is Car-cophony.

Described by one listener as ‘just like going to a Pink Floyd concert, but without the flying pig!’, Car-cophony has to be heard to be believed.

Matthew Timmis’ Carcophony is supported through Country Arts SA’s Local Stages and Arts SA’s Last Minute Presentation Fund.

Famous wins, the games of the diggers, double headers, where it is played these days, and whether cockatoos are still used to watch for the police, will all be discussed. You will receive your own ‘kip and two pennies’.

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.

In the heart of Carman’s Tunnel in Maldon, a space that was made to mine gold but now is a venue known for its exquisite sound and unique atmosphere, four leading poets will read works developed from the essence of experience.

This very intimate series of poetry readings will include works concerned with environment, relationships, family and the epiphanies that have changed the course of a life.

Sarah Day has been described as ‘one of the most considerable of modern Australian poets’ and her work as ‘the poetry of vivacity: language leaping off the page’ (Sydney Morning Herald).

Bronwyn Lea’s most recent work The Other Way Out won the 2008 Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Grounded in the immediacy of the physical world, her poems are humorous, heated and redemptive, yet always keenly alive.

In his most recent book The Ambrosiacs, Les Wicks explores a sequence of endpoints: spiritual exploration, suburbia, rural escapes and travel … all with his typical raw honesty, humour and rage.

Andy Jackson and Rachael Wenona Guy’s Ambiguous Mirrors is a unique fusion of puppetry, poetry and music, which is deeply moving and thought-provoking. This intimate theatrical piece explores living with physical difference and the role of family on the formation of identity.

The winner of the inaugural 2011 Castlemaine Poetry Prize, sponsored by Elliott Midland Newspapers, will be read during interval.

All the way from Toronto, Canada, the critically acclaimed Beyond the Pale has been making a distinctive brand of boundary-busting Eurofolk fusion for over a decade. Earning critical acclaim as one of Canada’s most innovative world roots ensembles, they mix Klezmer, Balkan and Romanian styles with an eclectic range of North American influences, including blues, reggae, jazz and funk. They have received awards from the Toronto Independent Music Awards, Ontario Council of Folk Festivals Songwriting Competition and have recently been awarded ‘Instrumental Ensemble of the Year’ and ‘Pushing the Boundaries’ from the 2010 Canadian Folk Music Awards.

The band has performed at festivals, theatres and clubs, across Canada, the United States and Europe, including New York’s Carnegie Hall as well as the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Poland. This concert will mark the beginning of their first Australian tour. Beyond the Pale’s exuberant live performances range seamlessly from energetic dance rhythms to intricate chamber-folk dynamics, taking audiences on an invigorating musical ride with thrilling arrangements and stunning instrumental virtuosity.

Mandolin: Eric Stein,  Bass: Bret Higgins,  Clarinet: Martin van de Ven,  Accordion: Dejan Badnjar,  Violin, viola: Aleksandar Gajic.

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.

Established as one of the world’s leading oud performers and composers, and a virtuoso of amazing diversity and sensitivity, Joseph Tawadros dazzles audiences worldwide with his brilliant technique, his passionate musicianship and his joyous style of performance.

With seven albums to date, Joseph has been responsible for expanding the oud’s notoriety in mainstream western culture as well as receiving great recognition in the Arab world. Always willing to push the boundaries and challenge traditional musical forms and rhythms, his efforts have led him to many collaborations with Slava and Leonard Grygorian, Neil Finn, Tim Freedman, Katie Noonan, Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, among many others.

In this concert, Joseph is joined by three of Australia’s finest virtuosi — his prodigiously-talented brother James Tawadros on Egyptian percussion, celebrated jazz pianist Matt McMahon and Greek clarinetist Dimitri Vouros, in an extraordinary collaboration that will transport you to an entirely new place. Combining Egyptian, classical and jazz music, Joseph has created an astonishing and unique musical language that defies categorisation.

Victoria Welsh Choir is a traditional Welsh male choir that has been performing in Victoria, interstate and overseas since 1980. Singing in four-part harmony and with at least a quarter of its musical range sung in Welsh, the choir has a wide repertoire, singing popular tunes, Broadway melodies, operatic arias, Afro-American spirituals, Welsh hymns and folk songs. The Victoria Welsh Choir members come from all over Melbourne and a thriving contingent comes from Bendigo.

Under the exceptional musical direction of Welsh-born Faleiry Koczkar, the choir has performed at prestigious venues, including the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Albert Hall in London, Docklands Stadium during the Rugby World Cup, and ANZAC Day Services at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.

Program 1 includes a wide repertoire of the choir’s much-adored Welsh and English choral tunes, opera choruses, spirituals and popular songs from musicals.

Program 2 is a specially-created response to the 2011 Castlemaine State Festival’s focus on storytelling. The choir will draw inspiration from the story of the Welsh in Victoria, in particular The Diary of a Welsh Swagman by Joseph Jenkins. Readings from the diary will alternate with specially chosen Welsh folk tunes and hymns.

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