Sense of Place Projects
Sense of Place Projects often include:
- Hands on land based practices such as indigenous revegetation, or organic vegetable growing.
- Training, and rehearsal onsite with the performers
- A high level physical theatre performance exploring the site’s history or ecology.
- An on site schools performance and workshop program.
- An on site community workshop program.
Current projects
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Catering Service Garden Project
Previous projects
A Ritual For Reinhabitation
The Ceres Harvest Project is a collaboration with Ceres Community Environment Park in Brunswick, Melbourne. The project will culminate in a sublime and lively performance that weaves together multicultural farming stories and sensitive, spirited responses to the local landscape. The process brings site-specific physical theatre to an urban organic community vegetable farm. The performance will take farming stories from the diverse cultures of participating artists and workers at the CERES farm and situate them in the context of the vegetable field on the banks of the Merri Creek in urban Coburg. We will grow a contemporary creative language that; opens new ways of seeing, inspires and enriches urban vegetable growing activities, and connects audience members and participating artists to the local landscape.
Local organic food production and greater connection to, and care for, the local landscape are pro-active and life affirming responses to global and local environment problems such as global warming and species extinction. The individual acts which make up a sustainable life, such as local food production and care for the local environment, can become beautiful acts rather than dutiful acts if they are contained within a culture of sustainability; gestures, songs, images, stories, phrases, ways of seeing, and ways of being which all reinforce a sustainable world view. Theatre, and our model of site specific performance making in particular, are uniquely placed to create this culture of sustainability. Theatre is both an optic, a way of looking at the world, and a way of constructing alternative views and different options. Our site specific theatre is multi-sensory and immersive, and facilitates a range of focuses and consciosness states during the performance, and the performance making period, opening the way for greater connection to and identification with the site. The role of our theatre project is to create compact, memorable, and transmissible patterns and knowledge forms which give our lives in our local place greater meaning, and a greater degree of sustainability.
This performance is part of a growing number of projects and activities that join art making with agricultural activities; Min Tanka’s ‘Body Weather’ Farm in Japan, The American film ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John’, Canada’s ‘Caravan Theatre’, South Australian Artist/Farmer James Darling to name a few. Linking theatre with food production is ancient; harvest rituals, hunting rituals and countless other examples throughout human history. There is of course an extensive history of outdoor site specific work in Australia and overseas. Australian examples include some of the work by Dequincy Company, Urban Theatre Projects, PVI Collective and many others. The site specific process used to create In The Field is unique in that it involves engagement with the performance site through farming, training, and performance making on site over an extended period. The performance making model used by Sense of Place projects has been developed during previous site specific works, most notably 1803 (2005) which was developed and performedon the banks of the Yarra River in Collingwood. This project united community with the land through indigenous revegetation activities, site-specific training and performance making, community movement workshops, and a performance about the history of the site. 1803 was supported by Parks Victoria, The City of Yarra, and the Collingwood Children’s Farm. This show had many sold out performances and a fully booked school program.
The Ceres Harvest Project will be performed in March 2008 in conjunction with the Ceres Harvest Festival. Farming at the field began in mid 2007 and rehearsals, and workshops will begin in January 2008.
A second phase of the project will begin in August 2008, and will culminate in a performance season in November 2008.
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Catering Service Garden Project
The ROOTS community garden and arts project is a collaboration between Sense of Place Projects, The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre(ASRC) Catering Service, and Slingshot Community Enterprise and Employment Centre (SCEEC). The project is based at the SCEEC centre in North Fitzroy, Melbourne.
The aims of the project are to:
- Provide local organic produce to SCEEC, ASRC catering service, and Sense of Place Projects
- Increase the sustainability of all three organizations
- Create opportunities for community building between young people from SCEEC, ASRC volunteers, and asylum seekers.
- Build confidence & empower participants through active engagement in the project.
- Offer some therapeutic outcomes using horticulture and the arts for participants that have suffered from past traumas.
Previous projects
1803 is a unique outdoor physical theatre performance on the banks of the Yarra River at The Collingwood Children’s Farm in Abbotsford. The work is a subverted re-enactment of the first Europeans to come up the river in 1803.
During the rehearsal period there was regular indigenous revegetation work on the banks of the river, and Sense of Place exercises at the site with the director, the dancers and a broader group of workshop participants.
The performance contains a critical and playful examination of how these first Europeans saw the landscape (through the lenses of Enlightenment Science, and Romanticism), how they interacted with indigenous people, and how the journals they kept wrote the landscape into the European Imagination. Other themes are; how our current view of the land is informed by the approaches of these first explorers, the nature of colonial exploration, the types of narratives in explorer’s journals, and some of the ways which early European men in Australia related to this place (through damaging and exploiting the land, through drunkenness, and through aggressive and/or sexual interactions with the indigenous population, amongst others.)
The work was first staged in 2003 and then again in 2005.
The show was supported by The City of Yarra, Parks Victoria, The Children’s Farm, and Parks Victoria. There were many sold out performances and a fully booked schools program.
View images from the 1803 performances (PDF file)
LaFamilia( r )
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‘It is a challenge to the artist to study and portray knowledge in a compact, memorable, and transmissible form…and to re-integrate such art with science and with society and its functions and needs.’
Bill Mollison, co-developer of Permaculture
