Illuminate Stage 1 – Wakool Shire

8 Oct  – 23 Dec 2012

Artists:

Angela Frost – Artistic Director

Richie Hallal – Production Manager and Video Documentation

 Project Partners: Mallan Public School, Tooleybuc Central School, Barham Public School, Barham High School, Wakool-Burraboi Public School, Wakool Shire Council, Golden Rivers Theatre Group.

Outback Theatre for Young People’s Illuminate is a celebratory theatre project designed to bring young people together from the isolated townships of the Wakool Shire of NSW.

Resilience has become a key theme in rural communities all over Australia, and the Wakool Shire is no exception. The Wakool Shire stretches across 7550 square km in South West NSW with 4300 residents spread across 10 small villages and many farming properties. The shire has been hit successively by drought, flood and the closure of industry due to forestry legislation. The six schools participating in ‘Illuminate’ are extremely small.

This project will work with participants to create art that reflects the strengths, and encourages the resilience, of the communities they belong to. We will explore the strengths and virtues of people in their own communities and of the young people themselves. We will express personal and collective storytelling using the themes of courage, identity, history, belonging, community, hope, home and happiness as part of the overarching theme of resilience. This theme will be explored through skills-based program in storytelling, drama, shadow puppetry, and digital communications.

Each two-week intensive will create its own distinct outcome, but also generate ideas, themes and frameworks for a large-scale visual theatre work, which will be produced at the end of the second stage in 2013; and will see each community feeding into one performance outcome that will tour the communities in the Shire.