Theatre, Ritual, Dynamic Dialogue About Climate Change

Xris Reardon has contacted us about a new ‘Theatre for Living’ experience – all about empowerment, people being the experts in their own lives and being able to use theatre as a means of creating change.

Congrats to Xris’ Takin’ UP Space project / Third-Way Theatre for being selected as one of the first 10 resident arts businesses in the Auspicious Arts Incubator. (See info below).

A Second Dynamic Conversation

This will be a seeding project: stimulating ongoing CREATIVE exploration, and ACTION AROUND CLIMATE CHANGE. Objects, theatre games, image making exercises, and our collective reflections will be used to explore our connection, and disconnection, to the land on which we live…a creative exploration for anyone interested in exploring community fears and hopes.

Please bring along images, poems, or natural object.

“Culture degrades, then the literal mind loses its bearings, forgetting its debt to the body and the breathing earth.” David Abram

By DONATION only. (Proceeds to Friends of the Earth)

Date: Sunday April 20th
Time: 1.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Venue: Chalice, 251 High St, Northcote.

REGISTRATiON BY April 15th
Contact: theatre@vic.chariot.net.au
or chris.rowntree@optusnet.com.au

FACILITATORS:
Chris Rowntree Rehearsals for Life. attends to the issue of climate change through the art of ritual. In collaboration with communities, Chris engages diverse art forms to create community rituals.

Xris Reardon Taking Up Space Project / Third-Way Theatre.
Xris has worked extensively with communities locally, nationally and internationally using theatre as an innovative means to address culturally sensitive issues.

Xris Reardon can be contacted through www.thirdwaytheatre.org or 04 2829 3008,
03 93888 014.

Launch of the Auspicious Arts Incubator

Auspicious Arts announced its Business Skills Development Program in February ’08. Ten resident companies have been selected and are now ‘plotting the course’ for their sustainable arts businesses.

CEO John Paxinos has spent more than 20 years ‘offering advice to the obsessed’ – mentoring and coaching hundreds of arts projects, arts organisations and independent artists.

Federal Funding – Building Entrepreneurship In Small Business Program

The Auspicious Arts Business Skills Development Program will provide business skill training and mentoring for 282 arts businesses over the next two years. Partners in the project are:

• City of Melbourne
• Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
• Australia Business Arts Foundation
• Biz Arts Makers

Project supporters are:

• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts

Auspicious Arts Incubator will be ‘dry dock’ for the creation and re-engineering of businesses in the small / medium sector of the arts industry.

The Incubator will help build creative businesses in three ways.
1. Residents in the program will be provided with offices, seminar rooms, a presentation space and meeting rooms for up to 18 months.

2. They will receive training, mentorship and coaching from industry and business experts.

3. Most importantly they will be part of a group of like-minded artists each developing a new business or re-engineering their existing practice. Artists involved with the Auspicious Arts Incubator will be able to move out of the isolation that has been identified as a real problem for independent artists developing their own work.

The initial resident participants are:
Chris Bendall – Theatre@Risk
Moira Finucane & Jackie Smith – Finucane & Smith
Phil Heuzenroeder – Club Wild
Derek Ives & Azaria Universe – The Candy Butchers
Sharon Jacobson – Off the Map
Margot Knight – Shy Tiger Productions
Matt McConnon – Easy Tix
Xris Reardon – Takin’ UP Space project / Third-Way Theatre
Christian Schooneveldt-Reid & Casey Douglas & James Brown – This side up
Gerard Veltre & Simon Green & Minerva Draeger – Phunktional
Carla Yamine & Gabrielle Barton – The Town Bikes