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.

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

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

Download the full list of Open Studios and Exhibitions here:

Open Studios and Exhibitions Full 5.1 Mb PDF

Open Studios and Exhibitions Small Booklet 1.6 Mb PDF

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.

Waking the dead is their specialty, so don’t be surprised if you see apparitions in the rafters and shadows come to life, as The Black Diamond Band sparkles.

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.

SNAP SHOTS
Workshops for primary schools at Castlemaine Library, with Lisa D’Onofrio
10.30am & 2pm, Thursday 7 March
Participants will use images from the Verey collection of historical local photographs as inspiration to write their own poetry potraits. These pieces, generated by a number of poem-making techniques, will be displayed as ‘transparencies’ on the Castlemaine Library windows during the CSF alongside the the photos that inspired them.

Enquiries: Castlemaine Library, ph. 5472 1458 or castlemaine@ncgrl.vic.gov.au

Bite is an exhibition of new work by higher Degree and Honours  students from the Bendigo and Mildura Campuses.

These five selected artists have responded to the Festival theme exploring public space, memory, text, excess, living materials, the animal human nexus and  notions of  uncertainty.

Geoffrey Brown
Michelle Day
Philipp Pahin
Catherine Shields
Candy Stevens

Having debuted at COME OUT Festival in March 2011, this fast paced and visually layered story uses a delightful swag of mixed media to bring the characters and stories to life; puppets, projection, lighting, pantomime, song — even drag. Mostly performed in English, the play also incorporates Tiwi language, song and dance.

This multi-artform delight will whisk all audience members far away into the stories of one of the world’s most unique and ancient cultures. Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui was the talk of the 2011 Darwin Festival — regarded by many as the crowning jewel of the entire program.

Produced by Darwin Festival
Written by Jason De Santis
Directed by Eamon Flack

Designed by Bryan Woltjen
Puppetry direction and audiovisual imagery by Sam Routledge
Lighting designed by Richard Vabre
Composed by Jeffrey ‘Yellow’ Simon
Performed by Kylie Farmer, Kamahi Djordon King, Natasha Wanganeen, Jaxon De Santis and Jason De Santis
Scenic painting (set) by Raelene Kerinauia
Scenic painting (puppets) by Pedro Wonaeamirri, John Peter Pilakui and Linus Warlapinni

‘De Santis is a real talent: mischievous, poetic and assured’
THE AUSTRALIAN

three murdered women
three untold stories
wandering the underground for the rest of time

The Old Castlemaine Gaol could not be a more perfect venue for Chants des Catacombes, a gripping story about three forgotten murder victims — a showgirl, a courtesan and a surgeon. In this macabre musical theatre performance, the innocence of each woman has been stripped away, leaving them as entombed creatures from a strange time. History has turned the page yet these women continue to restlessly walk up and down the dark corridors of the catacombs, intermittently remembering and forgetting.

Poignant and eerie, Chants des Catacombes is an immersive and multi-sensory, promenade theatre experience. The audience is led through the gaol by an unfolding narrative. Lyrics are like bent fairytales, whispered, commanded, serenaded, shouted. Contemporary songs by artists such as Portishead, Nirvana and Laura Marling are adapted and given enchanting or horrific twists, transformed into the unique and the timeless.

Brought to us by Present Tense Collective, the historic Old Castlemaine Gaol will once again breathe and heave to a strangely familiar theme.

Chants des Catacombescomes to Castlemaine in 2013 after winning the 2010 Short+Sweet Cabaret Festival and sell-out seasons in Melbourne, and at the 2012 Adelaide Fringe.

Directed by Bryce Ives and Nathan Gilkes
Performed by Anna Boulic, Laura Burzacott and Zoe McDonald
Music performed by Nate Gilkes, with collaborating artists Xani Kolac of The Twoks and Mark Leahy
Choreography by David Harford
Design team led by lighting and space designer Nicola Andrews

‘…a powerful emotional catharsis. This highly original and dramatic production is not for the faint-hearted, but it promises a truly memorable theatrical experience’
ADELAIDE ADVERTISER, 5 stars