Ten Days on the Island

A special opportunity awaits the delegates to the 15th National Rural Health Conference – in a happy coincidence of the Conference with Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania’s biennial international arts festival. With its 10th festival in 2019, Ten Days is exploring a new model – a 10-day adventure over three weekends in three regional heartlands of Tasmania.

Delegates who are able to travel to Hobart for the weekend prior to the Conference will enjoy: world premiere productions of contemporary dance (Dust) and theatre (The Mares); extraordinary music in charming venues (Breathtaking, Compassion, A weekend in the life of a piano); provocative exhibitions on aging (Eyes as Big as Plates) and community health (Pandemic); an excursion into the bush to ‘experience’ life after death (Bushland); and a suite of films documenting the lives of the amazing Women Of The Island. See the full program in and around Hobart at http://tendays.org.au/south/  

Those who have the luxury of time could come to Tasmania a little earlier – perhaps to the North East on the weekend of 15 – 17 March for a program of theatre and music for young people, to experience the glories of Handel in a vineyard setting, and/or to immerse themselves in a program of “big ideas in small places”.

The Trojan Wars, rituals of life and death, colonial violence in Tasmania, and modern history are some of the themes explored in Intimate Epics, a series of small-scale works of epic ambition presented in pop-up performance spaces across the North East – like readings of Homer’s timeless Iliad by Greek/Australian actor William Zappa, Sonja Lifschitz’s Stalin’s Piano or Robert Jarman’s The Protecting Veil which reflects on religion, life, death and the importance of tea and cake. Go to http://tendays.org.au/north-east/ for more detail.

And if you have ever thought about exploring Tasmania’s beautiful North West landscapes, the long weekend of 8-11 March is the time to do it. Ten Days offers a program that includes something for everyone - the video installation created by Maori artist Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] which cleverly reimagines the pre-colonial travels of Captain James Cook around the Pacific in a disused industrial site in Burnie, a gravity defying physical theatre performance from Australia’s best in Out of Chaos … at the Burnie Theatre and the award-winning Acoustic Life of Sheds produced by Big hArt, which takes audiences on journey through gorgeous landscapes to hear exceptional music in spruced up barns and swept-out sheds. Here is the program in detail: http://tendays.org.au/north-west/

Ten Days is a very special festival – one that revels in the distinctive places and unique island cultures of Tasmania. From its inception the Festival has examined, explored, commented on, celebrated, profiled and promoted the extraordinary regional diversity of the state, and in 2019 this has been thrown into even sharper focus with our program of events that are almost exclusive to each region.  
 
In 2019 Ten Days celebrates the contribution of Aboriginal Tasmania through mapali DAWN GATHERING the opening event on International Women’s Day at the Mersey Bluff in Devonport, an exhibition focusing on the beaches from which Lola Greeno, Tasmania’s internationally renowned shell artist, gathers the shells for her beautiful necklaces, and the closing conversation for Festival 2019 for which Festival Producer and Cultural Practitioner Sinsa Mansell leads a distinguished panel in a conversation on themes for the next generation of First Nations creative leaders in Tasmania.

We look forward to welcoming you to our Festival.

Jane Haley is CEO of the Ten Days on the Island festival, 8-24 March 2019. The 15th National Rural Health Conference will be held in Hobart on 24-27 March 2019.