The biennial event Ten Days on the Island is set return to Tasmania from 15-24 March 2013, bringing its extensive, multi art form program to Tasmanians and visitors alike.
Australia’s only state-wide arts festival, Ten Days on the Island is a celebration of global island culture and boasts an illustrious line up of international arts experiences for all ages and interests.
With a cacophony of cultural delights spread across Tasmania from Hobart and Launceston to St Helens and Queenstown, Ten Days on the Island provides an original platform for touring the island state.
Visitors can traverse one Festival Town to the next, exploring the diversity of free and ticketed events, indoor and outdoor activities and live performances along the way. The ten Festival towns include Launceston, Burnie, Hobart, Huonville, Campbell Town, Swansea, Deloraine, St Helens, Queenstown, Devonport and Latrobe. The festival will also bring one of the highlight experiences to King Island, Flinders Island and Port Arthur.
The 2013 program features an impressive collection of theatre, dance, music, visual arts, literature, film and free events by artists from the United Kingdom, New York, Republic of Seychelles, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Ireland, Malaysia, Thailand, Iceland, mainland Australia and Tasmania’s talented local artists.
Highlights not to be missed include the Australian exclusive season of The Select (The Sun Also Rises), the highly acclaimed theatrical interpretation of Ernest Hemmingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises by New York’s most electrifying theatre company Elevator Repair Service. Audiences will be transported to the heady world of the mid 1920s, to the languid cafés of Paris and the exhilarating bullfights of Pamplona in the dusk of WW1 in this powerful and witty production.
Visitors will delight in the glorious soprano tones of New Zealand’s Dame Kiri Te Kanawa at her performances in Launceston (17th March), Burnie (19th March) and Hobart (21st March). Accompanied by her pianist, Terrence Dennis, Dame Kiri will perform a rich programme of classic and contemporary highlights from her famed repertoire a memorable opportunity to hear why she is regarded as one of the world’s most outstanding operatic singers.
The charismatic and captivating five piece group Sprag Session from Cape Breton in Ireland will be making their Australian debut at Ten Days. Described to be capable of convincing the most immobile to dance and the most melancholic to smile with their infectious tunes, Sprag Session, led by Colin Grant on fiddle, delivers music that is superbly inventive and original incorporating Celtic fusion style with funk and soul flair.
Australia’s global acrobatic sensation Circa will traverse the state performing a series of short yet spell binding circus acts in public space. Set against a ticking clock, Circa’s 21 Circus Acts in 20 Minutes furious acrobatics will leave audiences questioning the limits of physical flexibility. Fast and funny, this is a free event that all the family should see more than once.
Two of Tasmania’s most highly regarded theatre practitioners, Robert Jarman and Tom Holloway have joined forces to present As We Forgive, an absorbing premiere production about the motives, the methods and the meaning of forgiveness. This solo play has been written by Tom Holloway especially for Robert Jarman and is directed by the award-winning Julian Meyrick. The show presents Jarman in the roles of three solitary men who are injured yet enduring, grieving yet gregarious, and who must each confront the fact and act of forgiveness in their lives. The play, commissioned by Tasmania Performs, has been selected as part of the “Collected Works Australia 2013” for the Centenary of Canberra celebrations, after its national debut during Ten Days.
Little Big Shots, Australia’s only stand-alone film festival for young people, will present a delightful selection of short films that will make children laugh, provoke creativity and curiosity and inspire our little ones to imagine other worlds. This free, island themed selection of films has been curated for Ten Days and includes stories by some of the world’s best film-makers, alongside the next generation of young movie makers.
Children will also love the world premiere of Shadow Dreams, a collaboration between the Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra which tells the enchanting story of two Tasmanian boys from different worlds who discover they dream each other’s dreams. Staged simultaneously in two theatres hundreds of kilometres apart, the production uses broadband technology to stream live orchestral music and vision between the venues.
In a Festival first for 2013, organisers have introduced a creative new initiative called Beyond Ten Days. Aiming to nurture the artistic connections that only a major festival can assemble, Beyond Ten Days will use mentor relationships, master-classes, workshops, artist talks, technical secondments and more to extend the impact, benefits and legacy of the festival well beyond its ten days.
Pictured above is: In Teers, Rostrevor Estate (artist Michael McWilliams). Photo courtesy of Tourism Tasmania and Alastair Bett