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Icing on the home-baked cake
The new Festivals Australia Regional Residencies program
By Tricia Fitzgerald
Festivals Australia Regional Residencies is a new Australian Government cultural program. It supports regional and remote communities to tell their stories and the stories of their communities through art, literature, dance, music and other media.
The new program funds community and regional arts organisations and local councils to host artists-in-residencies of up to five weeks.
The artist or arts group will work with regional and remote communities to develop a local or regional story into an art form that will be presented at a festival or community event.
Marcus Canning, the director of the Western Australian arts organisation, Artrage, chairs the Festivals Australia Committee.
He sees the new Regional Residencies program as an exciting extension to the ‘celebratory cultural support' that the existing Australian Government Festivals Australia program already offers to communities.
‘The Regional Residencies will provide great opportunities for people in regional and remote areas to work with professional artists to explore and interpret stories of significance to local identity.
‘Having artists of any medium working in a community through a residency is one of the most effective ways to ensure that the contact is real and that the new skills and ideas that are developed stay in the community.
‘And having the work created during the residency celebrated at a local festival or community event is the icing on the home-baked cake. It will create something that's there for all to enjoy.'
Applications for Festivals Australia Regional Residencies projects commencing after 1 February 2006, must be submitted to the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts by 30 September 2005.
In the following years there will be two new grant rounds with closing dates in February and July.
Visit www.dcita.gov.au/festivals_residencies for more information on the new Regional Residencies program.