Chronicles: Searching for Songlines
Now performing:
6 Oct Beagle Bay
7 Oct Broome
Chronicles is a major 2-year youth arts initiative that connects refugee, migrant and indigenous young people with their own and each other's cultural histories through a series of multi-arts performances stpringing from those young people gathering and sharing their families' oral histories. The project initiated by internationally acclaimed Aboriginal singer/songwriter Kerrianne Cox and Western Edge's Artistic director, Cymbeline Buhler, responds to issues that link young migrants and refugees in Melbourne's west and an Aboriginal community in remote Western Australia.
Over 2010 and 2011 young people from Footscray, Sunshine and Deer Park have interviewed their elders for oral histories and created a performance that takes its audience on a journey. In 2011 they transformed Chronicles into a touring performance and presented it to audiences in Victoria before taking it up north to the Kimberlys.
Currently, the show is touring in the Beagle Bay Aboriginal community (WA) where the Melbourne participants have repeated the original creative process, this time working collaboratively with the young people of Beagle Bay, interviewing their elders. This has culminated in the creation of a second, complementary new work that is being presented in combination with the original Chronicles.
Please join us for the one of these performances and stay afterwards for delicious traditional food and drinks.
Performance Dates:
- Thursday October 6th at 5pm at Sacred heart School, Beagle Bay, WA
- Friday October 7th at 5pm at Lotteries House, Cable Beach Rd East, Broome, WA
FREE entry.
For bookings and information please contact Devena on 0417 533 946
About
Chronicles is a major two year project that facilitates participants to create their own ‘songlines’ or statements of identity. Chronicles will reflect the contrasting journeys that brought our many cultures to Australia and the differences in their experiences once here through the use of widely varied artistic disciplines and media. The artistic process will begin by gathering oral histories from community elders representative of the many cultures found in Melbourne’s west. The final work will be built on the principle of journey, taking its audience on a series of journeys through multiple spaces that reflect the geographical and internal journeys in the oral histories. These journeys will include invitations for audience members to share stories told to them by their own elders, family mythologies and their own experiences growing up or moving to Australia.
These will blend within the final piece, creating a tapestry effect that creates a snapshot of contemporary Australian cultural identity.
Where do you begin?
Trace yourself back through time…SHAKE UP THE PAST!
Discover layers of your identity you didn’t know about
Western Edge is developing an exciting new production that uses Theatre, Oral History, Poetry, Visual Arts and Sound Design to create an interactive performance to be shown at the Phoenix Youth Centre in November
Interview people who are significant to you. Discover through them how Australian culture became what it is. Find out where you fit in. Meet new people. Develop skills. Make something that has meaning for you.
Rehearsals are on Mondays 4:30 – 6:30. Additional rehearsals will be scheduled in school holidays.
If you think your story’s not important, you’re wrong!
Media
YouTube
View the sneak preview on youtube of the amazing work created during the first stage of Western Edge's Chronicles project in Beagle Bay (September 2011).
For more info or to sign up, contact Cymbeline on 03 909134725 or cymbeline@westernedge.org.au
