• The Dance Project
• Arts and wellbeing
• Branching Out
• Material Girl
• Tasmanian Youth Portraiture Prize
• Rural Broadband Campaign
• Open Your Eyes

Projects

Open Your Eyes a resounding success!

Tasmanian Regional Arts' wonderful cultural tourism showcase event - Open Your Eyes - was a resounding  success. Held over the period 16-18 September, the concept of self guided arts experiential tours proved a hit for those of an arty,adventurous nature and the host communities alike.

Creative Producer Jaspa Wood has taken an interesting approach to documenting and marketing the event.  For those attending, or those that missed out, you can get a humorous and irreverent snippet of the program from the two roving writers, Poet Duncan Hose and Performance/Installation Artist Tristan Stowards who toured the region's sights and events and have concocted these wonderfully funny online vignettes of the program.

You can access their wit via youtube by following the links below:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jlD8Khwh3U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAZPEg1X3hk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJXDgvmOKx8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRLpRAAENgE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43urc9cFcy0&feature=related

Many thanks to all the artists and the communities who took part - we trust that those that took part will well and truly have their eyes open to the creative potential of the state's south.

South Australia looking forward to the National Regional Arts Australia Conference in 2012

Country Arts SA is looking forward to hosting the next Regional Arts Australia conference in the historic river port of Goolwa in 2012.

Coinciding with the selection of Goolwa as the South Australian Regional Centre of Culture in 2012, the conference is a perfect opportunity to explore, celebrate and challenge notions of creativity and culture and their impact on the regions.

Goolwa 2012 will look at the idea of resilience and what impact the arts can and should have, whilst showcasing projects from across the nation.

Goolwa is at the mouth of the Murray River on Lake Alexandrina, 83 km south of Adelaide and 19 km from Victor Harbor. Like many river towns, Goolwa is today a tourist destination with a number of boats operating from its historic wharf. Gateway to the internationally significant wetlands of the Coorong National Park and the mighty Murray River and lakes system, the river port of Goolwa is a perfect place to explore the notion of resilience and the role of the arts.

If you are interested in the development of the program join their facebook page here

The DANCE PROJECT
... where the past, present and futures connect

COLLABORATION

Tasmanian Regional Arts (TRA), is leading The Dance Project in partnership with Mature Artists Dance Experience (MADE) Bust a Move and Tasdance. The Dance Project will engage three Tasmanian regions, in the North East, North West and in the South to evolve three new dance events from the heart of each community.

In the North East of the state working with primary and secondary school students from Winnaleah, Scottsdale, Bridport and Ringarooma; P&P Committee's, and Friends Groups in the North East. Various dance groups and community organisations in Burnie, Devonport and Ulverstone on the North West and in the South - Hobart: Calvary Hospital Hospice Workers and Association residents and families, The Dance Project proposes the development and presentation of a cross-generational, multi-media, community dance project in association with local, and national collaborators.

These core project partnerships provide an exceptional creative and nurturing environment for the project's incubation. Tasdance, Bust a Move, MADE and Tasmanian Regional Arts have considerable experience and credibility, across Tasmania and interstate, in working with communities and in the creation and presentation of contemporary dance. In addition, The Dance Project is working in association with ABC Open who will create a series of short films that focuses on dance and the significance it plays in people's lives.

VISION AND FRAMEWORK
The Dance Project offers a theme and framework to stimulate and nurture creative responses within communities. Participants will be enabled to select from an eclectic mix of media to form a performance mosaic (image, music, movement, text) they feel would best represent their ideas and responses.

‘Heritage' is ever present in Tasmania. It is inscribed in and across the landscape, impinging upon individual and community-based relationships, connections and often circumscribes a sense of place, identity and community. It's the essence of the stories that are passed on from our elders, and the theme on which we will build: where the past, future and present connect. The Dance Project offers communities an alternative, creative means of commenting on, imagining, or reinventing aspects of their community. It gives scope to examine the myth and the reality in our sense of place, community and identity It is the process of revoking the past, understanding the present and imagining the future.
The Dance Project: where the past, future and present connect offers a framework that will act as an open-ended stimulus for communities to explore specific topics and issues that emerge as critical to them.
Whether that be health and wellbeing, ageing population, sustainable living, technology, concern about drugs and alcohol abuse, the environment ... with all the occasional conflicts and contradictions that might emanate when pasts, present and futures connect. It opens-up the possibilities of multiple readings or interpretations, offers potential for irony and humor, and provides scope for more sensitive considerations of specific issues communities might elect to adopt as their focus.

PARTNERSHIPS
The Dance Project is comprised of three Key Project Partners. Mature Artist Dance Experience Inc, Tasdance and Bust a MOVE. The three organisations will both steer the overarching project management as well as creatively engage their designated regional communities in making three new dance works - unique in their approach - and yet united in the concept: past present, future.

Mature Arts Dance Spencerian -MADE
In 2010 voluntary hospice workers approached MADE with a proposal to collaborate on a performance work that would communicate to the broader community some of the issues around death and dying. Their primary concern was the removal of personal power or controls that many individuals face when confronted with their own terminal illness.

The inspiration for the community dance project Family is to realise the vision of these hospice workers and in the process provide both them and audiences with a profound experience; an experience that will support people in confronting myths and misinformation about death and engender a greater understanding and valuing of death as an essential component of life.

Family is the dance theatre element of a two-part project, An Almost Perfect Death. A sound and performance installation will form the second installment of the work featuring recordings of the stories of the hospice workers and/or their patients. In early 2011 MADE will commence regular movement workshops offering participants a broader appreciation of the potential of dance and movement as a communicative medium.

Bust a MOVE
A Job for Generations: Uncovering the movement of the local community in everyday actions as captured and choreographed by local grade 6/7 students.

This project seeks to assess the relationship between young people and their community and help guide them through the transitionary phase of primary school and high school. The access point into the wider community will be through a close working relationship with the grade six students of four local primary schools: Winnaleah, Ringarooma, Scottsdale and Bridport. These students, armed with skills in dance, choreography and new technology, will capture the movement of their local community and work towards a dance event in phase 1 - 2011, and a polished dance work in phase 2 - 2012, working with the students graduated into their respective high schools.

Many families have lived and worked on the same land for generations. We will look at the inter-generational family business and how industries have changed over time, through new technologies, social trends and the change of our economy within this Tasmania. We will research our family trees; what brought our ancestors to North East Tasmania and their occupations. The North East of Tasmania is known for its fertile soil and forest work, but over recent years the area has suffered significant economic decline due to loss of major industry. The changing landscape of this area will be an integral point of reference to the work developed by the communities.

Tasdance
The aim for Dance Marinara is to engage people of all ages in thinking about dance and its significance in their lives, initially through remembering and talking and then through participation in a series of workshops that will transform these movements, music and costumes of the dance remembered and shared into a dance experience. Through the workshop process we intend to identify through self-selection a group who are keen willing and able to work with the two choreographers to develop a performance for sharing with the communities of the North West.

This project will be documented through photography and recorded conversations in audio and video, and these elements will also form part of the performance's visual and sound score. An exhibition or expo showcasing the diversity of dance styles and participants is another outcome being explored, along with the desire is to activate community halls as dance venues for a wider variety of styles, building on the tradition of the old time community dance.

The North West Coast of Tasmania has almost half the population of Tasmania in three key regional cities and towns. Workshops will be held in three key areas of Devonport, Ulverstone and Burnie will precede a creative development process with the identified group.

Commencing in 2011 The Dance Project has developed its own web presence: www.thedanceproject.com.au where images and videos of the project to date have been uploaded. For more information about the dance project contact Angie Abdilla, Creative Producer on 0422 740 954 or via angieabdi...@tasregionalarts.org.au

Branching Out

In 2009 commenced a two year project to investigate and support social enterprise development in Tasmania through the Arts.

Funded through the support of the Westpac Foundation, Branching Out intends to equip regional Tasmania's community arts organisations with skills and expertise to generate their own resources, placing less emphasis on grants and more on economic self - sustainability.

Branching Out is a project that saw Tasmania's peak community arts organisation, Tasmanian Regional Arts work with two pilot groups on establishing social enterprises. This project has seen a collaboration between business, government, the arts and community to look at the opportunities of social enterprise to increase sustainability and capacity of non profit and volunteer arts organisations.

The Institute for Regional Development (UTAS) worked with TRA to implement an action learning process that provided the opportunity to record, reflect and respond to the needs of the pilots. Based on this work UTAS then sourced Kylie Eastley as research assistant in the UTAS baseline study into social enterprise in Tasmania in an extension of the initial two-year funded project which concluded in 2011.

The Branching Out project identified the challenges for those organisations without the capacity, resources and reserves to invest in the set up and management of a social enterprise. It also identified gaps in the services currently available to those in the social enterprise and non profit sector. In response to this TRA developed an innovative coaching approach that saw significant outcomes for the pilots and broader Tasmanian social enterprise sector.

Branching Out has been the catalyst for a broader conversation about social enterprise in Tasmania. TRA aims to build on this work to explore the potential for it's own organisation as well as the future opportunities of social enterprise facilitation throughout Tasmania and further afield.