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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.
 

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.

Students have been mentored by local filmmaker Miles Bennett to build the necessary skillset among students for the production of a film that is ‘developed by youth for youth’ creating a greater resonance with this audience.

Your review may be played on ABC Local Radio Central Victoria.

Bookings essential: Jane Curtis, 5440 1739 or curtis.jane@abc.net.au.

All ages welcome. Bring a notebook and pen, and a laptop (optional).