Fourteen local and national artists!

Twelve premiere Festival works!

Exhibited across a range of extraordinary sites, including an abandoned car salesroom, a former police lock-up and an original miner’s cottage, Periscope explores: ruin, kitsch, abundance, alchemy, peepshows, history, projection and place.

Curated by Deborah Ratliff, the exhibition offers immersive engagement with some of the most creative individuals from the central goldfields region. Sugar from one, salt from another, mounds of spice, the artist’s mother, distilled concoctions, water, platinum, sound recordings, double adaptors, Chinese Hong Bao, plants, stoneware, discarded homewares, a reconfigured 1972 Holden Kingswood…

Compelling, complex and sometimes strange, the third Castlemaine Festival Visual Arts Biennial presents artists’ individual and collective responses to the Festival theme, Elemental.

Hunt & Lobb Building

Daniel Armstrong
Julie Collins and Derek John
Rhett D’Costa
Pia Johnson
Ben Laycock
Jessica Ledwich
Tanya Schultz
Dean Smith
Leslie Thornton
Frank Veldze
Jason Waterhouse

Tutes Cottage
Tara Gilbee

Old Police Lock-up
Clayton Tremlett

Periscope will include a Floor Talk Series and the following free participatory events:

Floor Talk Series
Enjoy a series of 30-minute artists’ talks on the Sunday of the opening weekend:
11am — Jessica Ledwich
12pm — Daniel Armstrong
1pm – Bindi Cole
2pm — Pia Johnson
3pm — Rhett D’Costa
Venue: Hunt & Lobb Building
Date: Sunday 17 March
Cost: Free

Eat! My Son
On the Saturday of the opening weekend, Rhett D’Costa and his octogenarian mum will prepare and serve a staple Anglo-Indian meal, extending the sensory and interactive experience of Rhett’s installation titled, Trade.
Venue: Hunt & Lobb Building
Date: Saturday 16 March
Time: 12.30pm to 1.30pm

The Elaboratory and the elixir of life: An apothecary’s wonderment.
Join artist Tara Gilbee at Tutes Cottage to examine the esoteric aspects of alchemy in her metaphorical laboratory.
Venue: Tutes Cottage, Greenhill Avenue, Castlemaine
Date: Saturday 16 March
Time: 2:30pm to 3:30pm

Hong Bao
Festival goers will actively contribute to Pia Johnson’s installation, Hong Bao. By adding Chinese red packets, audiences will be engaged in the traditional Chinese custom of gift giving and ancestor worship.
Venue: Hunt & Lobb Building
During hours of opening

Benjamin Law
Jeff Sparrow
Glenn Colquhoun
Lachlan Plain
Colleen Burke
Jayanthi Siva
Sabrina Zuber
Bhagya Murthy

‘Do you remember, sitting up there as a child, looking down on the world below…? And didn’t all those grown-ups and all their grown-up cares look so petty and small? You could squash them with your fingers. If only people could see things from up here, even if just for a day, how different our lives would be..!’

It is a pleasure to present the 2012 George Fairfax New Theatre Award winning play The Republic of Trees: a Tale Between Earth and Sky, a multi-artform promenade theatre adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Il Barone Rampante (Baron in the Trees).

Presented amidst the tree-scape of the historic Vaughan Springs Reserve, an intriguing story unfolds: one fine evening, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, the son of a wealthy Baron, climbs a tree in his backyard and swears never to come down.

Not ever.

And the funny thing is, he doesn’t…

Ranging from the swashbuckling to the intellectual and the amorous, The Republic of Trees is unique arboreal theatre — perhaps ‘the ultimate tree change’. A promenade twilight performance will take the audience on a travelling theatre experience through the dramatically beautiful Vaughan Springs Reserve. The action takes place as much in the trees above the audience as on the ground.

This exceptional work — 9 years in the making — is unmissable theatre.

Adapted from the original Calvino by multi-award-winning Australian author Wayne Macauley, and featuring a stellar cast of some of Australia’s circus and physical theatre glitterati, The Republic of Trees will resonate well beyond the performance itself.

Produced by Quarteracreblock
Written by Wayne Macauley
Directed and Designed by Dan Mitchell
Assistant Director – Susie Dee
Design collaborators – Rod Primrose, Matt Wilson, Geoff Dunstan, Francesca Bussey
Lighting – Gina Gascoigne
Rigging – Geoff Dunstan and Nicholas Dansin
Production Manager – Monique Harvey
Costume – Val Victor Gordon
Live music composed and performed by Chris Lewis and Jenny Thomas.
Performed by Matthew Wilson, Kareena Hodgson, Ian Scott, Nicci Wilks, David Joseph, Tony Morton, Geoff Dunstan, Kate Sherman, Freda Paten, Carl Kurrajong
Special Guests – Thompson’s Foundry Brass Band

‘How fitting that the world of wonder created by Italo Calvino, told with such charm and poignancy, should become the first recipient of this New Theatre Award. Republic of Trees, in making us look up at what floats above us, turns Calvino’s mysterious allegorical story into a living, breathing thing.’
Cate Kennedy, Author and Judge: George Fairfax New Theatre Award

Quarteracreblock acknowledges the indigenous traditional owners in all areas of Australia in which we work. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waterways and community. We pay our respect to them and their culture, and to their Elders past, present and future.

The Opening Night of the 2013 Castlemaine State Festival brings together an abundance of music maestros, stars of song and clusters of choirs, in a restaurant setting overflowing with musical offerings. Lyttleton Street becomes an outdoor extravaganza of plenty where festival goers are seated centre stage and served a profusion of festival appetisers that spill and flow from the surrounds of the street’s extraordinary buildings.

It’s a byo chair and food-to-share affair, at tables that fill the street and all enriched by a seasonal riot of Festival fare.

‘I’ll have a rare treat from the eighties with a touch of Mariachi for entree thanks, a Georgian table song for mains, oh, but wait a minute, what’s this Feast of the Mau Mau?’

A singing Maitre D’, her offsiders and staff, a restaurant band, a choir of hundreds will serve an audience of more than a thousand. A menu du jour of Castlemaine’s minstrels and stars, opera singers and street crooners, chorists and choirs, and the hottest ‘dish’ ever to grace the verandah of Castlemaine’s iconic Imperial Hotel.

Cornucopia! in song — it’s more than a mouthful of sing-a-long, it’s a feeding of the spirit.

Concept and Direction Jude Anderson, Punctum

Penny Larkins, Carl Pannuzzo, Aurora Kurth, Casey Bennetto, Mal Webb, Alana Hunt, Sofia Chapman, Al MacInnes, Brodie and Daniel Rogers, Ben Gibbons and James Cox

Plus members of the Chatwarblers, Acafellas, Castlemaine Singers, Castlemaine College Choir, Steiner School Choir, Maine Choir, 37 Degrees South, The Deborah Triangles, Mary Thorpe, Cyril Wong and Scott Sanders.

We wish to advise that tickets for Cornucopia! will now go on sale on Thursday 17 January NOT Monday 14 January.
For bookings please phone: (03) 5472 5123

Opening Night Seat Chart

Come to THE CLUBROOMS where you can warm up for an evening of Festival performances or wind down when the performances are done and dusted. Kick off, kick back and have a ball backstage at the Castlemaine Town Hall.

Sporting a rub-a-dub bar and grub, The Clubrooms have a trophy winning atmosphere and A-grade performances backstage, on stage, and beyond – warm ups, coaching, coaxing, crazy dance, cool tunes and hip moves, The Clubrooms combine live art with Allstar attitude, cabaret with locker room cheek, deep heat and Dencorub.

Featuring the Allstars, The Black Diamonds, Tuba, Flap! and guest players from the festival “bench”.

Come celebrate with the team ‘til the stars go home.

Leading the ensemble are some familiar truants — Justin Marshall (Heraldo and the Flaming Flamingo Orchestra), Dan Witton (Cosmo Cosmolino) and Eamon McNelis (Flap) are joined by some of the finest artists to be bribed with riches including Ms Terry (Flying Scribble) and Lilkoi Kaos (Caravan Burlesque)

From Swing, to Balkan Beats, Cumbia to Calypso, Afro Beat to Zombie Boogaloo, this special Festival band is ready to put on a show like no other.

Musical Direction: Justin Marshall
Performance: Lilikoi Kaos, Zoe Robbins and Skye Gellman
Musicians: Ms Louise Terry, Dan Witton, Eamon Mc Nellis, Michael Timcke, Don Stuart, Gideon Brazil, Myles White, Rory Mc Dougall, Dolan Jones.

The Black Diamonds are also performing at the Opening Night Party.

Jordie Albiston
Nathan Curnow
Elisabeth Campbell
Ross Donlon

Romy Ash
Alice Pung
Matt Blackwood
Ginger Briggs
Karen McMullan

Stanton is a highly esteemed veteran of Australian stage, film and television. Hetreads the boards regularly with ‘The Bard’ for the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies, in productions such as Macbeth, Richard III and King Lear. Stanton was lauded for his virtuoso performance as Julius Caesar in the now-famous MTC production and was nominated for a Helpmann Award for his Prospero in The Tempest for the MTC.

Pianist and composer Tony Gould AM is one of Australia’s most highly respected musicians. For three decades he has been involved in an extraordinary number of recording projects, both as pianist and composer, and has been at the forefront of music education in Australia.

Director Jill Forster starred in The Box – as twins! However, to modern audiences she is best known for her long-running role as Meredith Monahan in ABC TV’s Seachange, for which she won an AFI Award. Her most recent stage role was with the MTC in their production of Hannie Rayson’s Life After George. And When He Falls is her entree into stage directing.

Performed and adapted from Shakespeare and Marlowe by John Stanton
Original music composed and performed by Tony Gould
Sound Design by Matt Nicholson
Audio visuals designed by Polly Stanton
Photography by Matt Stanton
Directed by Jill Forster

‘Stanton is the real Shakespearean thing in a country that scarcely dreams of doing justice to the majesty or the sinuousness of Shakespeare’s language … his burnished and stony tones, the most famous voice in Australia’
THE SPECTATOR (UK)

Co-written, directed and performed by Mark Penzak and Eliza-Jane Gilchrist

“I just don’t like being told what to do” . . . “I see myself in the future dreaming” . . . “It’s a place that I can’t fully explain. Its simple’’

Five young people from the Castlemaine district throw open the doors of their imagination to create video self-portraits which take us through the wild to the wonderful, from the intimate to the downright still and quiet.. Each participant has written their own text and chosen the location and visual framework for these short films about who they are and how they experience their worlds.

‘This is Me – Now’ is a collaboration between Ranters Theatre, Adriano Cortese, Paul Lum, Max Sharam, Andrew Sully, and Ruby Benedict, Bonnie Cook-Hain, Eamon Coulthard, Holly Mcnamara and Ruby Scott.

The Mae Trio create driving rhythms on banjo, ukulele, cello and bass, interspersed with evocative violin/cello duet arrangements and the haunting sound of concert marimba. Their songs are poetic and melodic, from the lament for a lost banjo to a lyrical tribute to William Morris, and much in between.

Maggie and Elsie won the prestigious Lis Johnston Memorial Award for Vocal Excellence at the National Folk Festival 2011. Anita has performed with the successful folk band Evelyn’s Secret, and with the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club.

With disarming charm in their song delivery, and the spoken introductions in between, this trio is fresh off the blocks and utterly lovely.

Inspired by the music of Astor Piazzolla, the vocal ensemble 37° South shares a line of latitude with his birthplace in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

37° South will perform a colourful program of music composed in the European classical tradition, then taken from its birthplace and integrated into the local and indigenous culture and landscapes of European colonial settlements in the Americas and Australia.

The program highlights will include lesser-known works by familiar contemporary composers across a broad range, including Philip Glass, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Astor Piazzolla, Peter Sculthorpe and Ross Edwards.

Sopranos
Elisabeth Anderson
Andrée Cozens

Mezzo-sopranos
Kirsten Boerema
Trish Timmins

Tenors
Peter Butler
Scott Sanders

Bass / baritones
Pip Avent
Peter Hunt

Both possess a passion for songs with heart, mind and soul; for lyrics that tell the story of life as it is; songs that are poignant, funny, wise, ironic and moving. They accompany their songs with a captivating combination of guitar, accordion, flute, tin whistle, ukulele and percussion, and yarn-spinning.

Fay and Jane bring a subtlety of interpretation to their songs, a singularly ‘womanly’ perspective and the kind of depth and heart that only comes with maturity. As such they are a rare and precious addition to the community of Australian musicians.

‘When Jane Thompson and Fay White blend their voices together in glorious harmony the experience is exhilarating! They stand tall in any musical company and I cannot recommend them too highly.’
Keith Mckenry, former President of the National Folk Festival, Australia

Curated by Clayton Tremlett and created with Castlemaine Secondary College students it also features work by Anatol Knotek – Vienna based visual poet and Pat Thompson.

Lost in Tranzit was first exhibited in a specially designed “transit lounge”, constructed in three different spaces at the Substation, Newport.

Time Circus is a collective of artists who use recycled materials to build ingenious, unique, kinetic installations that are integrated with theatre and music performance. In Raildomino, Time Circus will engage in a hugely inspiring collaboration with Vossloh Cogifer Australia (steel railway ‘switch gear’ specialists), students from the Castlemaine Secondary College. Creative collaborations began months before the arrival of Time Circus in Australia, via social networking technology.

Raildomino has been an enormously exciting opportunity for local young people to work creatively with local industry knowledge leaders and artists of the highest international calibre. Drawing on the town’s famous history in steel forging and railway part production, Raildomino will result in a public sculptural installation to be built and exhibited on the Vossloh Cogifer site in Barker Street, Castlemaine. The work will be fabricated during the weeks leading up to the Festival, with some of the making process still underway during the Festival, allowing for interaction and engagement between audience and artists.

“Amazement our job, liberation our goal”
Time Circus

Cate Kennedy
Glenn Colquhoun
Cyril Wong

With Jayanthi Siva and Sabrina Zuber

Cate Kennedy
Rodney Croome
Michael Gurr
Irris Makler
Michael ‘Dan’ Mori
Alice Garner

Activities will include Dig for Victory Permaculture Design Workshops, Food Shrine creations, Seedball Sessions, Ephemeral Costume Making and more.

The Opening Weekend also features an abundance of regional and market produce surrounding The Grove and the Castlemaine Farmers Market on Sunday 17 March.

The Grove program highlights

The Living Stage

The Living Stage combines stage design, permaculture and community engagement to create a recyclable, biodegradable and edible performance space. Part theatre and part garden, The Living Stage features vertical garden walls, suspended pots and portable garden beds with edible plants. The Living Stage will house a series of experimental works that draw on the concept of regeneration, and interact with the unique design that surrounds them. The result will be part experiment and part food growing demonstration; inspiring our collective optimism about the future and a ‘how-to’ initiative that reveals what is actually possible in a world facing increasing global food crises.

By Tanja Beer, Hamish McCallum, Sas Allardice and local community members

Produce

CreateAbility (Bendigo) along with Born in a Taxi and Justin Bull (undue noise) present an ambitious new work full of budding, shooting, blooming liveliness — out of the fruit bowl and into the fresh air.

Set amongst the elements, taking cues from the living world around us, Produce grafts together sound and movement and a living, interactive theatrical space (The Living Stage). Playful and surreal, we witness growth, change, moments of unexpected generosity and the chaos of nature in this visual feast. Together we hope to find that restriction and growth are not opposites and in fact work creatively together.

The Preserves Project

What do we value most and what do we want to take into the future? Can we keep what is precious to us and share it at the same time? Dig into these questions with berni m janssen, Alison Richards and their team around the preserves table. Bring your recipes, stories, images and ideas. Discover, exchange, share, make art. Join us in The Preserves Project to add your words, thoughts, drawings, stamps and stencils to the Big Tablecloth.

Garden Chef

This our very own version of ‘Iron Chef’ meets ‘Naked Chef’, using produce from The Living Stage — two comic hosts and three hilarious judges will entertain as local chefs and food celebrities face-off for the 2012 Castlemaine State Festival Garden Chef title. Joined by the Carmen Mirandas and their entourage of little singing helpers from Castlemaine Primary School.

Mindful of Growth

Working with Eliza-Jane Gilchrist and Suzanne Kalk, Winters Flat Primary School students will create minds full of growth to decorate the park for The Grove weekend.

Long Table Feast

Using food sourced only within 100 miles of Castlemaine, community harvest group Growing Abundance brings the Long Table Feast to The Grove. Join us in sharing this bounty of local produce and celebration community spirit. $10 for a delicious vegetarian meal.

Dig for Victory
With Sas Allardice

Imagine if Victory park were an edible playground, brimming with colourful, beautiful and edible delights!
Here is your chance to dream up a public space full of your favourite fruits and vegetables.
Come along and turn your imaginings into moveable, edible, ideas to inspire the passer by. Help us create a design for an edible Victory Park which will be presented to local council.
Following the Festival we will actually work with local council to ‘dig for victory’ and grow some of our gastronomic dreamings in Victory Park!
Everybody welcome!!

EPHEMERAL COSTUME MAKING

Dress ups with a difference. Out of the dress up box comes recycled paper and card and more to get your imagination fired up. Cut, fold, paste and colour your way into a whole new persona at the Ephemeral Costume Making Workshop. Have fun building it and wearing it and then recycle or compost your costume when you have finished! Great play for anyone who likes to dress up – suitable for adults and kids alike.

BANDMOUTH: A lip-to-lung global vocal adventure with Mal Webb
Around the world and into your gob, vocal explorer and songwriter Mal Webb takes you on a lip-to-lung journey through the physics, physiology and phrivolity of all the sounds a face can make. Sideways yodeling, beat box/mouth drums/vocal percussion, harmonics/throat singing, mic technique, uvular fluttering, advanced clapping, vocal distortion (without hurting) and Inuit panting (way beyond Rolf Harris) are all explored on the way to being a band with your voice and the lead singer too.
Saturday 16 March, 11am
Castlemaine Primary School

THE WRITE STUFF with Casey Bennetto
In this workshop, Casey Bennetto leads participants through the funhouse that is modern songwriting in action. Where do we begin? How do we proceed? What lies at the heart of every great song? The group will attempt to fashion a new song collaboratively during the session, disturbed at random (and hopefully brief) intervals by the host spouting off about technique and intent and the impossibility of collaboration in songwriting.
Saturday 16 March, 2pm
Castlemaine Primary School

ALL OF WHAT WE ARE with Penny Larkins and Carl Pannuzzo
Working with our voices with respect to the physical space in which we sing and how we are feeling in a particular moment, participants will create a ‘Song of Now’. Three different sonic spaces will be our inspiration and all the sounds we can make will be our palette. All experience levels are necessary so that we can showcase a vibrant tapestry of sound representative of a slice of festival going public.
Sunday 17 March, 11am
Phee Broadway Theatre Foyer

SONGS OF SUDAN with Ajak Kwai
Ajak Kwai is the rare voice of a Sudanese woman in Australia. She has a haunting melodic voice that is distinctly African and to listen to her is to experience the continent in all its colors, rhythms and mystery. In her workshop, Ajak will take participants on a journey of beautiful traditional Sudanese women’s songs that can be sung by everyone. She will also share some of her own songs that fuse her African roots with grassroots Australian music.
Sunday 17 March, 2pm
Castlemaine Market Building

STORY AND SONG with Anne Conway
Bendigo-based Indigenous vocalist and guitarist Anne Conway was inducted into the Tamworth Hall of Fame in 1997. Her music has a strong Aboriginal heritage component and encompasses many genres. She is particularly adept at storytelling through her music and she loves singing about Australia and its people. In this intimate workshop, Anne will share stories and songs including those from her work with Aboriginal elders.
Monday 18 March, 7pm
Castlemaine Primary School

FOUNDATIONS with Scott Sanders
Local musician, choir director and composer, Scott Sanders will lead participants through a workshop introducing, and developing vocal techniques, abilities and sounds that form the foundation of speech and singing. By focusing on the fundamental elements of phonetics and exploring specific regions of the voice system, new meaning and music is created by the group by identifying, isolating and redefining the basic palette of human vocal communication.
No music reading or previous vocal experience required.
Tuesday 19 March, 7pm
Castlemaine Primary School

ONE VOICE with Stephen Taberner
Melbourne-based choir-leading guru and spookmeister Stephen Taberner comes to Castlemaine for a one-off journey into the latest things that are turning him on… body and vocal percussion tidbits, secret ditties from the Spooky Men’s Chorale and infernally funky songs. Stephen has an absurdly eclectic musical pedigree, and promises to ransack every musical area to give you a zingling tingling feeling that will linger long after the workshop has finished.
Saturday 23 March, 10am
Castlemaine Market Building

TALKIN’ HIP HOP with Jesse Lavery and Wade Kongas
Hip-hop is a grassroots movement that originated in New York in 1973. Now, 40 years later, two central Victorian hip-hop practitioners are presenting a chance to learn how to write a hip-hop/rap song. Jesse Lavery and Wade Kongas will take you on an illuminating introduction covering techniques of storytelling and writing, including some of the history of rap and hip-hop. Come along and learn how to harness your individual self-expression through this vibrant, all-embracing and passionate musical art form. This workshop will take place as part of the Generating Y youth day.
Saturday 23 March, 11am
Ray Bradfield Room

FUNKY HARMONIES with Maggie & Elsie Rigby
A workshop of songs written by Maggie & Elsie Rigby designed to give participants a chance to sing their hearts out. Songs reflect Maggie and Elsie’s infectious love of harmonies, and are in four or five parts, full of energy and beautiful melody, a bit wacky, sometimes spine tingling, and lots of fun! This workshop will take place as part of the Generating Y youth day.
Saturday 23 March, 1pm
Castlemaine Market Building

Participants will be invited to perform with workshop groups and leaders at the Festival Finale on Sunday 23 March

All ages welcome, children must be accompanied by an adult.
 

Artists include The Ulumbara Singers, Mal Webb, Ajak Kwai, Bigmouth choir and the Monster Meeting Band.

The day will also include an abundance of regional and exotic foods, and the famous Castlemaine Artists’ Market.

At the culmination of the workshops, the AYO Woodwind Ensemble and Castlemaine Secondary College students will merge to form the Goldfields Secondary Woodwind Ensemble, with a performance on Saturday 16 March.

Tamil will focus on improvisational string techniques from some of his own compositions, while Australian National Academy of Music players will work with the students on traditional classical pieces that require concentrated manuscript reading. Altogether they will prepare a special Castlemaine Town Hall concert to be presented on the afternoon of our Generating Y youth day.

The Man Who Planted Trees
Puppet State Theatre, Scotland

This beautiful theatrical adaptation of Jean Giono’s environmental classic tells the inspiring story of a shepherd who plants a forest acorn by acorn, thereby transforming a barren wasteland. As much a touching tale as a hilarious puppet show, The Man Who Planted Trees shows us the difference that one man (and his dog!) can make to the world.

The Children’s Choir
James Rigby and Jane Thompson

Harnessing voices en masse through song is a powerful, joyful collaborative experience. The sense of being part of ‘one voice’ will stay with participating children for a long time. During the first term of 2013, children will explore their own voices and their collective voice, learning and rehearsing a specially written song for the final day of the Festival. James Rigby and Jane Thompson, local and highly respected song-makers and choir leaders, will be engaging their infectious enthusiastic style, and teaching songs to share as part of the Festival Finale in Victory Park on Sunday 24 March.

Concrete Poetry
Paul Allen

Concrete Poetry is a playful and powerful communication tool for expressing ideas. Combining words, images, shapes and typography, concrete poems are often humorous and always unexpected — a pleasure for the mind, heart and eye.

Children will be taken on an adventurous journey into the world of concrete poetry, to learn about this lesser-known artform, and make poems with respected local artist and teacher Paul Allen, and fellow artists. Workshops will involve creating concrete poems that respond to the festival theme ‘Elemental’ by exploring the four elements: earth, water, wind and fire. A preparation guide will be provided to teachers at the beginning of first term so that students can familiarise themselves with this imaginative artform and language.

The pivotal feature of Video Architecture is that it is live, immediate and organic; thus it responds directly to place and community. The Trace project has responded specifically to young people in the region through a summer creative development program at PRIME ART, Castlemaine’s new Youth Arts Hub.

Video Architecture is a collaboration between Jim Coad, Gabrielle Brauer, Mandy Field and local young artists.

The day will feature singing and dance workshops, performances from young musicians, including the new XtremeInc Youth Choir, and a specially choreographed dance piece responding to the festival theme ‘Elemental’. And to top it off, the young foodies in our midst will take part in the provision of delectable dishes.