2017 Ten Days on the Island festival promises a cultural feast from Moonah to Milabena and Moltema

TASMANIA’S homegrown artists talents and our creative connections to the world will both be celebrated when the Ten Days on the Island festival returns in March.

TASMANIA’S homegrown artists talents and our creative connections to the world will both be celebrated when the Ten Days on the Island festival returns in March.

The biennial event, which has been entertaining audiences since 2001, will return to its original name after being rebranded as the Tasmanian International Arts Festival for the 2015 instalment.

Running from March 16-26, Ten Days 2017 will feature 80 events at 38 locations across the state, from Moonah to Milabena and Moltema. More than 720 performers and artists from 15 countries will be involved, including 56 Tasmanian artists and arts companies who will premiere 23 new works.

Trevor Jamieson stars in Nathan Maynard’s new play, The Season, which will be part of next year’s Ten Days line-up.

Launching the program in Hobart tonight, Ten Days artistic director David Malacari said the festival aimed to provide audiences with a range of experiences — from the entertaining and joyful to the provocative and transformative — that might not otherwise be possible.

“The festival has been a catalyst for creativity and the arts in Tasmania for more than 15 years and the 2017 Ten Days on the Island festival will again provide Tasmanians around the state with unforgettable creative encounters,” he said.

“We are connected to a world of intense and entertaining arts, so finding projects for 2017 wasn’t the problem — however choosing from an exciting array of creativity was agonising.”

The program’s international component is headlined by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre’s theatrical production White Snake, which combines traditional imagery and music with multimedia techniques for a modern retelling of an ancient Chinese legend.

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre’s theatrical production White Snake combines traditional imagery and music with multimedia techniques for a modern retelling of an ancient Chinese legend.

Dutch artist Nick Steur will perform his surprisingly dramatic live show FREEZE! free for audiences across the state, showing that concentration can be an art form as he balances odd-shaped rocks on top of one another.

German globetrotter Volker Gerling has walked more than 3,500km over the past 13 years, compiling his human encounters into a series of old-school flipbooks for his show Portraits in Motion, which he will present in Whitemark, Deloraine, Franklin, Swansea and Hobart.

Award-winning Canadian musician, writer and actor Hawksley Workman will play all the characters and instruments in his one-man “wine-soaked rock n roll cabaret” show The God That Comes;whileveteran French fusion band Paris Combo will bring their cosmopolitan mix of gypsy jazz, French pop and Middle Eastern rhythms to Tasmanian dancefloors for the first time.

Canadian musician, writer and actor Hawksley Workman.

Other international musical acts will include Canadian folk-rocker Martha Wainwright — daughter of Loudon Wainwright III and sister of Rufus Wainwright — and the Axoum Duo, featuring marimba-playing French-Polish percussionists Gabriel Collet and Elwira Slazak.

Highlights from local artist and companies will include the premieres of durational sound performance Babel, which will fill a disused office space in the Hobart CBD with more than 30 of the different languages spoken in Tasmania; and indigenous Tasmanian playwright Nathan Maynard’s play about mutton-birding on Dog Island, The Season.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre will bring playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s You and Me and the Space Between to life in Hobart and Launceston; while Blue Cow Theatre (Frida and Derek) and the Tasmanian Theatre Company (E-Baby) are also featured on the program.

Terrapin’s production of You and Me and the Space Between. Picture: PETER MATHEW

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra will join forces with the Australian National Academy of Music to perform Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and also present an Ode To Nellie Melba; and last year’s popular Acoustic Life of Sheds series of concerts will return to the state’s North-West Coast.

Tasmanian contemporary dance companies Stompin and Tasdance will present new shows; and acclaimed Tasmanian-born choreographer Graeme Murphy will collaborate with MADE on the dance theatre work The Frock.

Ten Days also coincides with the three-week Hobart Spiegeltent season (March 9-April 1), which will be headlined by disco-fuelled circus cabaret show VELVET, starring Marcia Hines.

For bookings and more information, go to www.tendays.org.au or phone [phone].

— Get your Ten Days program in the Sunday Tasmanian.

Originally published as 2017 Ten Days on the Island festival promises a cultural feast from Moonah to Milabena and Moltema