Jackeys Marsh Forest Festival 2012

My last foray into Jackeys Marsh was around 25 years ago when I was on work experience for The Examiner newspaper. I was sent with a reporter and photographer to cover the front line protests. It was a harrowing experience as I stood in the rain, sinking into the mud in my 80’s court shoes, watching people literally jump on the bulldozers. The anger, passion and desperation from both sides was palpable and left an indelible print on my memory. This is a festival that has been built on a foundation of forestry activism.

CYGNET 3D ART TRAIL

A cartwheel on the beach, yellow flowers, car engines under bonnets, teapots and teacups are the focus of Huon Valley’s young people in the photography project ‘Cygnet’s Art Trail – snap shots of life in 3D’.

For the month of January 2012, you could borrow 3D glasses and an Art Trail map from Balfour House or Re-Find, and cruise the main street, where 3D images placed in shop windows would jump out at you: swans on green pasture, an attractive woman with flamboyant beehive hair-do, an artichoke.

Forest Festival

Usually when we cover a festival there is a team of us, however small, to bring a varied response to the art and performance we are about to see. But this time it is just me. I've driven up from Hobart and am now sitting on the riverbank at Deloraine. Kids are making the most of the last week of holidays, jumping into what looks like very cold water and the town has grown with an influx of people sporting impressive hair styles and squeezing the final supplies into their slightly (or very) rusty subaru's and VW's.
While the focus for me will be on the arts program, particularly the art trail, the festival provides the perfect vehicle to showcase a collection of Tasmanian artists. Some I have seen before at events such as the Junction Festival, while others will be completely unknown.
The Getz is packed with tent, torches, tarps, new season apples and many layers of clothes to accommodate any climate including my all terrain sandals. (If they can cope with mud pools in Borneo, they can do anything)

And I am thrilled to not only be experiencing a world of art in a beautiful environment, but to be out of mobile range for a few days. Yippee! Not so good for posting, but great for focusing on feasting of music, food and art. Bring it on...More about the art later. Wish me luck!

BOFA 2011: That's a wrap!

This is a striking ensemble piece, executed brilliantly through slick production, magical storytelling and the love of cinema…


With over forty feature films, six masterclasses, two Big Ideas debates, fifteen shortlisted films in the digital SLR short competition, three award winners, one major photography and film exhibition, six opening-, during- and after- parties, a ten by ten metre outdoor screen, a Tassie food and wine festival, a red carpet opening and twelve of Australia's leading directors and producers sharing their expertise over five days of film festival, BOFA lived up to every expectation of providing "new horizons and food for thought".

Masterclasses: The challenges of writing for Tasmania; and Tasmania, the perfect location

Jonathan auf der Heide, Vicki Madden and Stephen Dando-Collins; Vincent Sheehan and Bradley Patrick
BOFA 2011

“How can you know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve come from?” Jonathan auf der Heide

It’s been two years since Jonathan auf der Heide’s first feature film Van Dieman’s Land screened and he’s still paying off the debt. Now the 32-year old Director is working on a horror film shot in Tassie, “a sort of zombie film with Tasmanian devils. It sounds tacky, but it will sell to Americans.”

Burning In The Sun

Directed by Cambria Matlow

BOFA 2011

I would like to think that there is something within us, within all of us; a sense of purpose to our lives that ensures we could make the world a better place. A simple idea that suggests that we can contribute something with our lives that will be built upon and learned from to ensure the peace and prosperity of those who will be born into what we leave behind. This kind of idea of course has one direction; forward.

Simple. Or at least it should be.

But for reasons too numerous and too complex to mention there are still places in the world where clean drinking water is scarce, where education is, at best, an opportunity, and electricity to power a single light bulb is a fantasy beyond reach.

Jeffie Was Here

Director Todd Edwards
Winner – 2010 San Francisco United Film Festival – Best Feature
BOFA 2011

“I told you not to promise adventure.”

Broke would-be novelist Alan Mangold (Peter Bodgood) is about to drive 2,813 miles over five days in an old bomb of a car with his girlfriend, Amanda (Alexis Raben), whom he doesn’t know is pregnant, and an obnoxious 30-something year old student, who isn’t what he appears to be, to get to his grandmother’s funeral. What could possibly go wrong?

Van Dieman's Land

Directed by Jonathan auf der Heide
Written by Jonathan auf der Heide and Oscar Redding
BOFA 2011

"Hunger is a strong silence."

If Jonathan auf der Heide wasn't such an incredibly brilliant film-maker, Van Dieman's Land would be a much easier film to watch. To say that it is confronting is an understatement and I have to admit upfront to leaving the cinema after the fifth killing because I found it too disturbing to watch. Well, I knew it was going to end badly, in any case.

The Fall

Directed by Tarsem Singh
BOFA 2011

Los Angeles. Once upon a time.

Can storytelling save your life?

The Fall is set in a 1920s Californian hospital where movie stuntman Roy Walker is recovering from a fall that has left him paraplegic. Fellow patient Alexandria, a young girl who is also recovering from a fall, befriends him, and Roy begins to tell her the story of six mythical heroes on a quest to kill their common enemy, the hideous Governor Odious. Through Alexandria’s vivid imagination we are transported to exotic worlds and surreal encounters as the six comrades-in-arms begin their heroes’ journey for salvation.

But whose lives are the heroes really saving?

The Guard

The Guard
Written and Directed by John McDonagh
BOFA 2011

There are times when one reaches a fork in the road at BOFA. Both destinations are equally enticing but ultimately a decision has to be made about which road one will take to get where they need to go. One way or the other, I was going to a film. My problem was that they were both playing at the same time. As you can imagine this presents a number of challenges and after making my decision I am now faced with a whole new set of challenges. I want to write so much but give away so little.

Breath of Fresh Air (BOFA) Opening Night Party

5.30pm Wednesday 23 November 2011
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery

Spring is fluttering her wings as I head towards the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery at Inveresk for the BOFA Opening Night Party. Ahead in the warm afternoon glow and sea of people I glimpse red carpet, black tie, a white marquee and a woman in an iconic backless green dress, alchemical colours that are transforming the grassland of the familiar industrial site into a celebration with the magic of party favours.

This Unchartered Hour

Theatre Royal
Written by Finegan Kruckemeyer
Produced by Tasmania Performs
Directed by Robert Jarman

I have been reliably told that when you lose your child you never get over it, you just get on with it.

A simple black stage with a lone cellist opened This Uncharted Hour by Finegan Kruckemeyer and the characteristically melancholy notes issued a warning to the audience – this is not going to be light and breezy. The story of a still-born child and the lingering grief of both parents led the audience through the rugged territory of pain and loss that cuts keenly long after the event. The performances by Jane Longhurst and Ben Winspear deftly conveyed the damaged beings that emerge from the fog of grieving, going on to have another child who is forced to carry that burden through his own life. It is a tough subject and Kruckemeyer shows an uncanny level of empathy in conjuring up that great black hole that death presents.

Death by Television

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. – Groucho Marx

In a week where mass media reported on the authenticity of Beyonce’s baby bump along with the imprisonment and lashing of an Iranian actress for her role in an Australian film, Death by Television was a reminder of the absurd and dehumanising nature of television. Don’t get me wrong, I am one of the 96% of Australians who own at least one television, but it’s a bit like that third or fourth glass of wine; you know that it’s bad for you but you still partake.

LOVE

Terrapin Puppet Theatre ,

The Theatre Royal , Hobart.

Sept 16-18

Terrapin's new show Love is an amazingly multi-layered piece of visual theatre. It could even be one of those rare shows that burn brightly forever in the memorys of the young children who are lucky enough to see it, for there is much here that is memorable.

Packed full to bursting with wacky larger-than-life-characters, stories and imagery, Love weaves between moments of scintillating live action, transformative physical and digital animation, and concise puppetry.

Beginning in the kitchen of puppet-narrator Oslo and his wacky, community-minded, storytelling Mum, the strikingly simple retro, domestic set expands and transforms before our eyes; from city-scape to countryside, from small town to graveyard and more.

There

“I’m here, you’re there. What does that make me?”

There are many boundaries in life, real and imagined. There are personal boundaries, relationship boundaries, divides between the genders, the mind and body, between maker and viewer. The arts love to play with these boundaries, to test them, to cross them, to highlight them, to create and eliminate them, because artists intuitively understand that there is reward in moving through them.

As reviewers, we slip between the boundary of viewer and maker, ferrymen between worlds, our passage, story, our trade, ink. But there are moments in productions when we lose our place, when the performances are so powerful and sublimely believable that we don't want to cross over. Elbow Room's There was one of those productions for me. It has stayed with me (or perhaps I have stayed with it) as a striking piece of original work.

Crocheted Chocolate: sweet as

It’s easy to miss the sweet offering in the window of Nannas Coffee + Vintage because they look so deliciously real.

In fact, an unmentioned colleague of mine went specifically to view the installation by Margaret Barlow and other local artists and came back disappointed because “they weren’t there”. (Mind you, the same unmentioned colleague also insists that Barry Morgan is an organ salesman and actually has an organ superstore in Adelaide. But that’s for another review.)

But a second glance and you’ll notice gran’s woven shopper made out of recycled sweetie wrappers displaying its twinkling boxes of Turkish delight and 1950s biscuits, jars of knitted crocheted truffles and a knitted mug of hot chocolate with its woolly marshmallows. Taking pride of place next to them is an Alice-in-Wonderland three-layered cake stand (which you wouldn’t dream of being anything other than red with white polka-dots) flaunting its white, milk and dark felted bonbons with embroidery for piping, sparkly beads for sprinkles and frilly multi-coloured paper-cases.

Nannas is the perfect setting for this pop-art virtual reality installation. With its vintage clothing, quirky objets trouves and all things polyester, melamine and formica, the crocheted sweets sit happily next to Nannas’ real treats of coconut slice, raspberry bites and choc peanut biccies.

Crocheted Chocolate is reminiscent of one of my favourite installations of Junction 2010, The Knitting Room, albeit on a micro level. Both projects are participatory and collaborative, involving the community in arts that historically have been just that. It’s rich and whimsical and, well, sweet, and one of the delights of this year’s Festival.

Perfect, even if you don’t have a sweet-tooth.

Wendy Newton

Barry Morgan’s World of Organs

I should start this review by admitting that after seeing Barry Morgan perform on the ABC’s music quiz-show “Spicks and Specks”, this show was high on my list of must-see performances for this year’s Festival.

And I pretty much got what I expected.

The “Magician of Tuition” and “Musician with a Mission” played to a capacity crowd of ‘shoppers’ Friday night in Launceston’s Town Hall Reception Room, which had been theatrically transformed into a somewhat sleazy jazz lounge, thanks to some clever staging and lighting.

There, in front of the black velveteen curtains and spotlight, Morgan, with his trademark safari-suit, man-wave, 1970s moustache and cheesy over-the-shoulder smile demonstrated the versatility and joy of his Hammond Elegante organ - which was also for sale at a “never repeated price”.

And there is the hook of his comedic performance. The flamboyant, big-smiling (yet slightly creepy) organ salesman with the turtle-neck and tacky jewellery mixes up a skilled musical performance of original, honky tonk, classical and theme music with his pitch to sell you his organ – and much of that includes some rather tired innuendo. (If one of the shoppers takes home his organ tonight, Morgan will throw in a year’s membership to the Organ Lovers League of Australia, an organisation that gets together each year to play with their own and each other‘s organs.)

As a character, Barry Morgan is funny and loveable in the way Mark Trevorrow’s Bob Downe or TV’s Kath and Kim are, and he certainly kept the family crowd entertained throughout the hour performance. There was also some delightful engagement with the audience, as Morgan’s discerning salesman eye selected shoppers who might be persuaded to take his organ – and ubiquitous steak knives - home for the special price of $9,999. However for me, disappointingly, Morgan’s one-pony trick-and-shtick humour wore a little thin after awhile.

If you’re going to Barry Morgan you know what you’re going to get. Is that a bad thing? Not if you consider the arts are as much about entertainment as anything else. While I like to be surprised by a performance and taken somewhere I can’t find or imagine myself ever going, some people just like to know what they’re getting for their money. For those people, Barry Morgan’s World of Organs is definitely a deal never to be repeated.

Wendy Newton

That's a Rap!

When reviewing artwork of any kind, often the biggest dilemma is that you think of so much more after you have posted your article. It’s a bit like ordering off the menu, looking at what someone else has ordered and wishing you had made a different choice. But it’s too late to change your order.

Festivals such as Junction provide access to so much art in only a few days. For the general punter this is paradise; meandering from exhibitions to shows, to interactive experiences to the bar, back to a show... experiencing the excitement and diversity that is a festival.

The Chordwainers

In the closing hours of the festival The Chordwainers assembled on stage, under the canopy of JAF’s vibrant heart, The Junc Room. Every time I have seen these wonderful players I can’t help but feel as though these are privileged individuals, the chosen ones. Naturally curious of not only performance but also audience, I scanned the room. Over there, some heads nodding; a bit closer, the index finger of one half of a conversation subconsciously drawing the air as he points and explains to his partner, while a cluster of friends shuffle for a spare plastic seat in the D around the stage.

To the best of my observation, there are three things commanding attention here. Firstly, the musicians, secondly the magnificent leather instruments, and thirdly the unique and delightfully surreal music produced. I say surreal, because to me, there is a familiarity to the sound but something is decidedly different. These instruments of course are the exquisite sculptural leather creations by the late great Garry Greenwood. Formed from imagination, passion, and masterful artistry The Chordwainers wield Greenwood’s creations that would not be out of place leaning up against the wall of a muso’s home in Hobbiton. Simply said, they are gorgeous.