Including EH5452 and Ab Blaster 40,000, these contemporary and innovative videos provide a compelling glimpse into the politics, personality, playfulness and heart being voiced by Bindi today.

Be prepared to have your heart and mind enlarged and your worldview transformed For Such a Time as This.

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

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

“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.

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.

This recital will have something for everyone. It is a journey amongst some of Tiffany’s favourite pieces and roles, including Mozart’s Dove sono from The Marriage of Figaro, Dvorak’s Song to the Moon from Rusalka, works by Grieg and Ivor Novello.

Tiffany’s sparkling soprano voice, matched by her famously warm and engaging stage presence, will be perfectly counter-balanced by accompanist David McNicol, whose sensitive and insightful piano work sets him apart in his profession. They will perform in the home of Harvey Mitchell with David playing the famous Bosendorfer Imperial, that was made, it is believed, in Vienna in 1899. Its special sonority is due to the built quality, and the effect of the unique half-octave on the bottom end of the scale.

David McNicol is one of the most highly regarded piano accompanists in Australia, having studied the art with the late Margaret Schofield in Melbourne and Geoffrey Parsons in London.

Sculthorpe’s music draws upon influences ranging from Australian Aboriginal song, Japanese gagaku, Javanese gamelan and Western liturgical music. His music evokes contemporary Australian life, and both the timeless beauty of the Australian landscape and its destructive power — a kind of Australian gothic. The lasting metaphor for Sculthorpe is the sun, and his Sun Music series draws upon the dual nature of the sun as the giver of life and the bringer of death.

The Sun Songbook is the latest project of multi-award-winning trumpeter and composer Phil Slater. He has performed and recorded with Nigel Kennedy, Lou Reed, Sandy Evans, James Morrison, Mike Nock, Terumasa Hino, DIG, Martha Wainwright, Missy Higgins, Vince Jones, Bernie McGann, Archie Roach, Katie Noonan, Jim Black and the Australian Art Orchestra.

This ensemble performing with Phil Slater features pianist Matt McMahon (both Slater and McMahon are former students of Sculthorpe), guitarist Carl Dewhurst, bassist Brett Hirst, drummer Simon Barker and Erkki Veltheim on viola.

‘Slater’s trumpet playing is clearly out of the Miles Davis school. This is original music of real depth, worth listening to again and again.’
Adrian Jackson, Artistic Director, Wangaratta International Festival of Jazz

The music of John Dowland (1563–1626) and Henry Purcell (1659–1695), two of the greatest English musicians of all time, will form part of the program for this unmissable concert. Dowland’s and Purcell’s profound insights into the human soul, with Dowland expressing a deeply melancholic view of life and Purcell a rich theatrical extravagance, helped to create songs and music from an astonishing era.

Ludovico’s Band will bring the timeless quality of this extraordinary music to life in this concert. They will also celebrate the marvelous musical awakening of 17th century England through John Dryden’s Fairest Isle, with music of exquisite beauty and refinement.

Marshall McGuire, triple harp
Samantha Cohen, theorbo and guitar
Ruth Wilkinson, viol and recorders
Guy du Blêt, percussion
Rachael Beesley, violin
Violin Julia Fredersdorff
With Timothy Reynolds, tenor

‘…a chain of pleasures performed to a rapt, totally absorbed audience’
THE AGE

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.

Twig explores and develops the geometry of the pentagon in two and three-dimensional structures, where mathematical perfection and the imperatives of tessellation balance against natural variation and bush-litter chaos. We begin with some basic materials and some rules of combination, but where do we end up? Twig alludes to both the biological and cellular, and to the social and societal, to the connections that exist between our molecules and cells, and to those we have with each other, in networks of family and friends.

Do you twig?

Twig has been created as an integrated artwork within the Festival’s Literature Program and will be fully experienced during these special events (see Collective DNA: We Are Made of Stories, Poetry and Song for details).

Elements of the artwork can be viewed at other times during the Festival, prior to performances, during the Castlemaine Market Building opening hours 10am to 5pm.

‘…the everyday transformed into something magical and enigmatic…’
Gina Fairley, Asian Art News Nov/Dec 2008

‘This is not art… I’ve got a 7-year old daughter and she could have done this for free and done a better job…’
Oscar Yildiz, Mayor of Moreland City Council, June 2011

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

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

Enter into an evolutionary journey starting with the very first unconscious being, and progress to the present day where we (humans) live with an acute sense of self-awareness (sometimes). Be challenged about the origins of life itself. Discover a puzzling world, where the unsettling lurks just beneath the surface.

This work is quite unlike anything you will have seen before and may even be more exciting than the Danish royal nuptials.

Idea, staging, set design and lighting by Sara Topsøe-Jensen
Music and sound by Rasmus Christensen
Performance and choreography by Kristofer Krarup and Cindy Rudel
Technical management and lighting by Karsten Nisbeth
Set design by Karsten Nisbeth and Troels Lindebjerg
Voice-over by Lars Høy

‘Carte Blanche has created a totally unique and unusual performance about evolution of life. It is truly a performance of such a kind, that you only rarely can experience’.
Herlev Teater, Denmark

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.

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