For the Festival’s opening night dance pageant, you are invited to bring a seat and slip on your street shoes. You’ll be tapping your feet as we celebrate the abundant dance and musical talent of our region. Then as the show moves into the whirling climax of a street dance fiesta, you’ll be swinging with the street beat.

Part show ride, part street procession, and all danced, the Opening Night Pageant draws upon our long history of show parades and processions, and melds it with the spin of a ride, the dynamics of dance and the spirit of a country street.

Beginning with a Wominjika welcome to country, and a dance specially created in collaboration with Jaara Jaara elders and hip hop dancers, more than 150 central Victorian dancers will be joined by Rocco Grimaldi and his Pandemonium Band.

Motorists, street sweepers, road crossing supervisors, cyclists and exceptional dance makers, will create a sparkling procession of dance moves infiltrated by street pandemonium, and a grande finale that will bring everyone to their feet … dancing.

Co-producer Punctum

Dance moves and marvels from our legendary makers, the acme of beat, motor magic from our street, and processions and pandemonium in the sweep of feet

Building on the Castlemaine Festival’s historic tradition of a children’s parade, the Children’s Day Parade will kick off featuring the Migration Marching Band; a foot-stomping, street orchestra of the musicians and children who have developed their instruments and pieces during the previous week. Playing their instruments, wearing costumes and carrying the puppets they have made, children and adults will take part in this unique Victory Park event, created by them for the enjoyment of all of us.

Everyone involved in the Parade is to meet at the Victory Park marquee at 11.00am on Saturday 9 April. All welcome.

Then stick around for the Festival Picnic and help make Castlemaine’s biggest ever picnic rug. Enjoy your BYO picnic lunch or some of the delicious food available in the park. There will be short performances, roving characters and lots of other surprises planned for the afternoon.

There will be space to store your picnic rug and food on the day if you and your family are involved in the parade! The Picnic will begin at approx. 12.30pm.

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).

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.

This year, Global Gardens will wrap up the Festival with a full day devoted to music, dance and food from around the world. The event will celebrate Victoria’s diverse cultures with strong representation by exceptional artists living and working in central Victoria.

There will be two main performance areas: a main stage featuring bands and musicians, and a dance workshop stage hosted by dance leaders who will conduct performance workshops in traditional and contemporary dance styles.

The wealth of global influences on central Victoria’s food and wine industry will be reflected in the breadth of fare available, including scrumptious morsels from Castlemaine’s famous Farmers Market.
Bring a picnic and settle into a day of complete festive pleasure.

The Global Garden is a free event for all ages.

MAIN STAGE

11-11.45am: Louie Prez – Latin Jazz

12.45-1.30pm: George Kamikawa & Noriko Tadano – Japanese blues

2-2.45pm: Musiki Manjaro – West African

3.15-4pm: Carlito’s Way – Cuban/Latin

4.30-4.45pm: Grace Vanilau Samoan Body Percussion

4.45-5.30pm: Bombay Royale – Indian/Bollywood

DANCE WORKSHOP STAGE

11.45-12.05pm: Didge Fusion

12.05-12.15pm: Jida Indigenous dance welcome

12.15-12.45pm: Crow dreaming dance workshop

1.30-2pm: EACC Sudanese dance workshop

2.45-3.15pm: iDance Latin dance workshop

4.00-4.30pm: Singh Sisters Indian dance workshop

ACOUSTIC STAGE

Morning: Chinese lions & drummers

12, 1 & 3pm: Joseph Bromley – Celtic harp and accordion

12.30, 1.30 & 2.30pm: Sayon Souare (bolon) and Molly Souare (gongoma)

2 & 3.30pm: Grace Vanilau – Samoan Body percussion

The MASC Youth FReeZa crew will present an exciting event at the Castlemaine Skate Park and Western Reserve, featuring COUCH ReCovered, skateboarding and BMX riding competitions, dance and singing workshops, local food and business stalls, street art, parkour, and live bands and performances, including headline acts Diafrix and Massive hip hop choir from Melbourne.

Diafrix mixes traditional African rhythms with funk, reggae, soul and hip hop in their urban music that they call Positive Hip Hop, which has a cultural bent and a no swearing policy. They use their flow to entertain and raise awareness of the African–Australian experience. Diafrix have established themselves over the last seven years as one of Australia’s most exciting and original live acts.

Massive, Australia’s first hip hop choir, offers young hip hop composers, producers and performers the opportunity to work with choir director Andrea Khoza and beat facilitator Momo from Diafrix, to reinterpret their hip hop tracks into contemporary arrangements for mass voices. Over the last year they have given Melbourne audiences a taste of their growing repertoire and now Castlemaine will have the great privilege
of experiencing a first-time-ever performance of Massive and
Diafrix together.

Come down and support the dedicated and enthusiastic members of FReeZa who meet weekly to plan for young people’s events in the Mount Alexander Shire. Don’t miss your chance to be a part of FReeZa FEVER!

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.

SUPPORTED BY
APHIDS
PUNCTUM
IAN POTTER FOUNDATION

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.

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