A Message from our Creative Director,
Myoung Jae Yi ​
Welcome to Headland Writers Festival 2024.
Across three days and five venues including our live-stream programme, Headland brings you conversations, forums, workshops, spoken word, poetry and music performances. In the Tathra Hall we bring you in-depth conversations with Gina Chick, Markus Zusak and William McInnes whose memoirs celebrate our interconnectedness through nature, animals and language.
Headland performances featuring local artists include The Grief Monologues, a shake up of society’s depictions of grief performed by actors Marti Keefer and Chum Ehelepola and Voice: A (De)construction in 13 Movements, a performance of poetry and music by Rae Kennedy and Robyn Martin.
The festival hopes to enrich our understanding of the world and of each other. I invite you to join us in creating an open community of readers against the backdrop of the traditional lands of the Djiringanj people in all its sublime beauty.
SATURDAY EVENING EVENTS
HEADLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2024
MAGIC LANTERN SHOW
6:30PM TATHRA HALL
Tickets to the Saturday evening shows are not included in the Weekend/ Day Passes & can be purchased separately at checkout.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the towns of the South East were regularly visited by travelling entertainers. Decades before the movies, they projected ‘beautiful dissolving views’ through magic lanterns powered by limelight. Audiences were enthralled as, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark, they experienced the suspense, pleasure and laughter of pictures painted on glass mysteriously transforming one into the other.
The Magic Lantern Show uses a magnificent mahogany and brass biunial magic lantern for this contemporary show. Through it, we manipulate, animate, and project authentic hand-painted and photographic slides from the period. Accompanied by musicians, performers, artists and surprise guests we will give you the same experience audiences of all ages had back then.
You will be overwhelmed by the intensely pulsating psychedelic colours generated by mechanical chromatropes. You will thrill to melodramatic stories told through word, image and sound. You will experience local history and the local environment in a whole new light. And you will personally bring back to life the 150-year-old laughter of comic slides such as Man Eating Rats where, well, a man eats rats!
Our travelling team of collaborators has previously performed at the Cellblock Theatre, Powerhouse Museum, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and many other festivals and venues around Australia. Now we have arrived in Tathra.
MORE INFO HERE
VOICE: A (DE)CONSTRUCTION IN 13 MOVEMENTS
8:30PM TATHRA HALL
Tickets to the Saturday evening shows are not included in the Weekend/ Day Passes & can be purchased separately at checkout.
This is the melody of our identity.
This is the rub that plays us like a symphony.
This is medicine. This is a weapon.
This is every cell in the body, listening
Voice: a (de)construction in 13 movements is a fragile, poetic and intimate exploration that weaves together spoken word, music, movement, sound and imagery to pick at the threads of the stories we tell and the silence we carry.
This debut performance piece is a collaboration between songwriter/musician, Robyn Martin, and poet/storyteller, Rae Kennedy. Both artists live and create on Djiringanj land, in Candelo NSW.
Rae Kennedy is a poet, storyteller and visual artist. Originally from Canada, Rae has been making home and community in the village of Candelo, NSW since 2013. Her creative practice and work are deeply informed by the ordinary stories of the people, objects and land she resides amongst and within.
In recent years Rae’s work as poet/storyteller has found her working as Creative Producer, Scriptwriter and Narrator of the podcast series Candelo Roadshow Radio Hour (2021); co-developer and poet for Songs from Yuin Country project at Four Winds Festival (2021 and 2022); as well as creating and performing original work for live performances including Four Winds Festival; Candelo Village Festival; Blue Skies Music Festival (CAN). Her poetry has been commissioned for recorded audio and film projects such as Home Stretch (Film - 2022) and Hope Loss Resilience (Podcast - 2023). In 2023, her first collection of poetry titled I Read Your Poems Out Loud – a collaboration with her father/poet Stephen Kennedy - was published by Jackson Creek Press (CAN) as a limited-edition chapbook.
Robyn Martin: As a child in regional South Australia, Robyn Martin could be found either shrinking in quiet shyness, on the corner of a stage playing bass with the family band or singing her heart out on the back of a ute. Having completed a Bachelor of Music & Education at Southern Cross University, Robyn became a sought after bass player, touring with many acts to festivals and venues across the country.
Since moving to Candelo on the NSW south coast in 2005, Robyn has become known as a singer-songwriter, bass player, guitarist, producer, performer, choir facilitator and educator in the region. In 2021, Martin’s songwriting was recognised with her releases with alt-country trio, The New Graces, as a semi-finalist in the International Songwriting Competition and nominated for a Golden Guitar. She was a collaborator on the Candelo Roadshow Radio Hour Podcast (2021), and was a songwriter & musician as a part of the Songs From Yuin Country project at Four Winds Festival (2021 & 2022). In Spring of 2023, Robyn released her debut album, Milk & Honey.
