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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

Performed more than 75 times in 12 countries, this show has received multiple awards and accolades.

entomo is a collaboration between EA&AE, the Consulate General of Spain in Melbourne and Spanish Cultural Action (AC/E) who work to promote Spanish culture internationally.

EA&AE features, Elias Aguirre and Alvaro Esteban, two contemporary Spanish dancers based in Madrid.

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.

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