The Banyule Kid's Arty Farty Fest

"Once upon a time right now and right here,
The hero is you, proceed with no fear,
The story is around you and not to be read,
It’s an adventure to enter outside of your head.

"Enough with the dawdling, it’s time we began,
Straight as an arrow and over the land,
Button your coat and tighten your cap,
Tie up your laces and follow this map!

"Your quest for today begins at this tower,
So pick up your game and be back in an hour!
There’s no time for dawdling or dallying or playing with strings,
Only for riddles and clues and other important things!"

In March 2010 Lachlan Plain and Colleen Burke built a castle gateway for the Banyule Kid's Arty Farty Fest in Heidelberg, Melbourne. To compliment this cardboard construction they produced a pamphlet containing a quest that lead you, through a string of Doctor Zeuss-style rhyming riddles, across the Festival grounds to it's completion to the Viking's stall. Eight hundred children and adults set out on the journey and fifty completed the quest to be awarded Thor hammer amulets. But even for those who did not complete the quest, the project succeeded in engaging children and their families in the festival grounds through an imaginative and lateral problem solving task.

Sanctum Theatre roving performances

The Water Wizard and Compost Queen :

Gardener Greg is certainly a lazy gardener. Can you teach him how to compost effectively and how to save water in the garden? Or will the Water Wizard and the Compost Queen have to show him a thing or two?Sanctum Theatre, in partnership with Sustainable Gardening Australia (SGA), presents the Water Wizard and Compost Queen, two very ancient and quite tall Australians who love attending sustainable festivals and parades with their mere mortal companion, Gardener Greg.

For more information on The Water Wizard and Compost Queen follow this link to the Sanctum Theatre website.

The MacQuails:

The McQuail family represents a distinguished lineage amongst the dwindling population of the bird-headed folk of the Wiggletail Prairy. Since the collapse of their fortune they have been forced to appear at festivals and parades simply to sustain themselves and their estate. However they do not parade their selves purely for the entertainment of humans, rather they provide an education into the intricacies of the culture of their maligned and misrepresented brethren.

For Further information on The MacQuails please follow this link to the Sanctum Theatre website.

Voice: to be seen and heard 2009

I have facilitated the CROP writing and art programs for three years now and what I value most, in the writing class at least, is the oral storytelling, the moment at the end of the class where the participants put down their pens and share the fruits of their labours with the rest of the class. There is an intimacy in this moment that can’t be replicated in front of a microphone at the annual Hot Augustine Night, (although there is a certain magic to this sort of public presentation as well.)

Last year, for the Mental Health Week exhibition out of place, we attempted to capture this intimacy in the work abode and share it with a wider audience. abode was a claustrophobic box in which one stood and listened to the voices of the CROP writers through a set of headphones. This year, in …lend me your ears…, we have collaborated with sound designer Jonathon Drews to expand upon this idea.

Clearly these recordings do not provide the same experience as sitting across the table from the storyteller and sharing a conversation with them about their writing. These ghost voices, captured in time, become something else in this context, something just as evocative.