The Festival welcomes the participation of all lovers of music, whether accomplished or simply inspired. In these free after-school workshops, you will have the rare opportunity to create your own panpipes, hand drums, boing pipes and okarinas.

Then, following each session, Victory Park’s autumn twilight hours will be acoustically lit up with community jams led by local percussionist and musical director Justin Marshall, who, together with amateur and professional musicians, will explore Klezmer, Celtic, Latin and African musical genres.

Building on the Castlemaine Festival’s historic tradition of a Children’s Parade, the 2011 Schools Program and after-school instrument-making workshops will culminate in the Children’s Day Parade and Picnic on Saturday 9 April in Victory Park, at which instruments created and pieces learnt at the community jams will be performed.

Download Jam Music here:
Jam Music in B flat
Jam Music in C
Jam Music in E flat

IRISH CELTIC — Monday 4 April
Allan Evans is an exciting young musician from Taradale who is at the forefront of the young Celtic music scene in Victoria. He plays Irish flute and Celtic harp and is a member of the award-winning band Shanachie. Allan has chosen a couple of traditional Irish tunes for the jam session and parade. Bring your fiddle, whistle, flute, guitar and mandolin. There will also be parts for horns and percussion.
The Lark’s March (Ireland)

SOUTH AFRICAN KWELA — Tuesday 5 April
Andy Rigby will lead the jam session with this swinging Southern African style of township jive. The lead instruments are often pennywhistles, but all instruments are welcome. Horns, guitars and percussion set this style up as great parade music. Andy leads the Kwela Street Band at the National Folk Festival, Canberra. Kwela Medley – (S.A)

KLEZMER — Wednesday 6 April
The Castlemaine Klezmer Kollective will lead us through a couple of tunes from this popular Eastern European style of Jewish cultural music. Violins, clarinets, accordions, mandolins, guitars, percussion, horns; all are welcome. Happy Nigun – (Klezmer)

BRAZILIAN SAMBA — Thursday 7 April
Wendy Rowlands from Newstead has led many Latin music ensembles and brings a classic Brazilian song to this community jam experience. From the home of samba street percussion, this is bound to have a big energy. Parts available for all instruments. Asa Branca (Brazil)

This year the Castlemaine Festival’s Schools Program will again involve over 1500 primary-aged children from the 18 local primary schools in the Shire. Children will be engaged in an extraordinary range of multi-arts and cultural events, including traditional local Indigenous Dreaming dance workshops and ‘Saltbush’, an internationally acclaimed Italian/Australian interactive multimedia dance theatre piece.

Children will attend informative artists’ talks by exhibitors selected for the 2011 Castlemaine Visual Arts Biennial, and experience hands-on art-making with leading national and international artists, including special guest — world-renowned sculptor/printmaker Heri Dono (Indonesia).

Renowned for her spell-binding stage presence and emotional expression, Belgian chanteuse Micheline inhabits the poetry and passion of Jacques Brel’s music, singing in French, Flemish and English. Rather than just performing them, Micheline inhabits each of the songs.

Belgian-born Brel, one of the 20th century’s greatest chansonniers, died in 1978. He channelled the light and dark of the human soul, writing memorable songs such as Ne Me Quitte Pas, The Port of Amsterdam, Seasons in the Sun, Mathilde, Marieke, Bruxelles and many others.

Micheline has played to packed houses at the Edinburgh Festival and the Sydney Opera House, has had two sell-out seasons at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and in 2009 completed a 60-day European tour with Jacques Brel’s nephew, and keeper of the flame, Bruno Brel.

Behold this Belgian diva; whether in French, English or Flemish, she communicates with a livid sensual force that has the listener transfixed.

Micheline is accompanied by Australian jazz guitarist Ben Hauptmann.

Below stairs is a world of differing speed
Morning . Noon . Night
She eats . . . . . . . . . . blackout
Peas
He craves . . . . . . . . . peas
A tall short tale where taste may equal . . .
Blackout

Enter the unique world of one of Australia’s most intriguing dancers and independent choreographers, Michelle Heaven.

Reminiscent of an old silent film in its style and execution, this bizarre and beautiful work sees Michelle in an unforgettable ‘pea de deux’ with the inimitable Brian Lucas. Disagreeable Object will be encased within Ben Cobham’s distinctive design and beautifully accompanied by Bill McDonald’s original sound score.

Choreographer/performer Michelle Heaven  Collaborator/performer Brian Lucas  Collaborator/designer Ben Cobham / Bluebottle  Composer Bill McDonald  Costume designer Louise McCarthy  Production manager Bluebottle.

Join one of the oldest continuous brass bands in Australia as they open the Band Hall door to share not only their artistry, but also their oral legends.

She — a widow, a seamstress, a liar and a sly grog seller. He — a celestial traveller, poet, prospector, herbalist and grower of cardoons.

This is an imagined account of an uncommon marriage, drawn from historical sources, as played out on the goldfields of 1850s Victoria. Themes of love and loss, distance and collision, and cultural difference are experienced in a series of spaces as the story unfolds. Part installation, part performance, Phoenix Vixen Crinoline is a multimedia re-imagining that will engage all the senses.

Writer Kathrin Ward  Performers Kathrin Ward & Emily Sanderson  Director Kirsty Babbage  Lighting designer Helena Read  Lighting operator Leslie Thornton Sensory effects & foley Forest Keegel & Glendon Blazely Projection Jilli Rose

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.

Ashley MacIsaac, fiddling virtuoso from Nova Scotia Canada, learnt to play the fiddle the Cape Breton working-class, pub-stomping way; fast and furious, with phenomenal precision. He is a passionate traditionalist with a great fondness for experimentation. Crossing boundaries of Celtic, folk, electronica, punk, garage rock and grunge, Ashley has unarguably put his own spin on the sounds of his past. Growing up listening to AC/DC, Ozzie Osbourne and Canadian fiddle masters Angus Chisholm, Winston ‘Scotty’ Fitzgerald, and Buddy McMaster, Ashley was touring by the age of 14 and recording his first album at only 16. In 1995, he burst onto the worldwide scene with the triple-platinum Hi, How Are You Today? He has played with Philip Glass, the Chieftains, Paul Simon, the White Stripes, and recently performed at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Opening Ceremony.

Performing with Ashley is ‘one of the best Celtic guitar accompanists in the world’ 15-year old prodigy Quinn Bachand from Vancouver Island, Canada. With his hard-driving strumming, inventive voicing and powerful rhythmic effects, Quinn joins Ashley in adding a truly contemporary edge to traditional Celtic music.

Fiddle Ashley MacIsaac  Guitar Quinn Bachand

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.

Formed in 1997, La Compañia performs music of the Renaissance and early Baroque. Directed by Danny Lucin, the ensemble brings together Australia’s leading specialists on period instruments. The group follows the 16th-century performance practice of ornamentation, diminution and embellishment. Their vibrant musicianship combined with their improvisatory skills has established La Compañia’s reputation with audiences and critics for presenting innovative programs and dynamic performances.

From the intimate to the exuberant, La Compañia will present a program of tender love songs and lively dance tunes — exciting soundscapes from the courts of Italy and Spain featuring an ensemble of cornetto, shawm, dulcian, sackbuts, percussion, lute and voice, with music by Adrian Willaert, Matheo Flecha and Francisco Guerrero.

Soprano: Siobhan Stagg,  Violin: Rachael Beesley,  Cornetto: Danny Lucin,  Shawm, dulcian: Mitchell Cross,  Sackbut: Glenn Bardwell,  Sackbut: Julian Bain,  Vihuela, guitar, lute: Rosemary Hodgson,  Percussion: Christine Baker.

Melbourne pianist/composer Benjamin Martin regularly captivates listeners in Australia and internationally. Identified by The Australian as ‘the best young talent for the new millennium’, he is an artist of exceptional versatility and subtlety of expression. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Benjamin has been described as ‘the consummate artist’ and as a composer who is  ‘distinctive
and arresting in style’.

He has appeared as a pianist regularly with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and his compositions have been performed in Australia, Europe and the United States.

Benjamin Martin will perform a beautiful program combining well-known piano repertoire with his own compositions.

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