StoryLines Festival showcases landmark minority stories

bAKEHOUSE Theatre Company in association with Tamarama Rock Surfers & Parade Theatres is set to present StoryLines Festival 2012 – a four week celebration of diversity that challenges Australian art and theatre by providing a powerful, creative voice to minority cultures whose stories often go unheard.

It will be built around a season of three plays by Justin Fleming including a restaging of bAKEHOUSE’s critically-acclaimed production Coup d’Etat (Islam/Malaysia), and the one act plays A Land Beyond the River (African Refugees) and Junction (Indigenous). It will also feature art installations, dance, and live music from Sydney’s African Refugee, Islamic, and Indigenous communities.

The festival will feature performers from South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Malaysia, Japan, the Philippines and regional & remote Australia.

At a time when the colour of the arts in Australia is being hotly debated, this richly layered multi-disciplinary arts fest celebrates diversity, promotes cultural unity and fosters a sense of identity and belonging.

The need for this belonging is sharply felt within the festival program. Indigenous artists from the stolen generation’s Kinchela Boys’ Home will choose to exhibit under their institutional code numbers (to illustrate their objectification as children) while artists from Villawood Detention Centre will be forced to exhibit by number to suppress their identities.

StoryLines 2012 runs July 31 to August 6 at Parade Theatres Kensington before transferring to the Bondi Pavilion Theatre August 8-25 as part of the Tamarama Rock Surfers season.

For more information about this landmark arts festival visit www.storylines2012.blogspot.com.au