Aquarius Earth Dreaming: Field Report

CultureLab have landed at the 30th Anniversary Celebrations of the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. Here's a quick slideshow of photos from the first week plus some random bits of news.

Reaching for what is possible: rapt dancer at Channon Markets

Always ready for a new deal: the Cultural Speculators (nice couple, eh!)

Sitting in a circle: Black Allan and Robyn Frances find a moment of peace

This striding to the heart of hippy country was inspired by the (honorific) Graeme Dunstan who encouraged us to language the story of peace and eldership in the context of reflection on 3 decades of Aquarian dreaming. Two weeks in Nimbin mixing our magic with the lumniaries whose lifetimes have breathed the very essence into today's avant-culture, perma-culture, and counter-culture scenes in Australia? Yah, we thought it sounded like a good plan.

Combining trajectories and dreamlines, weaving the singularity of this event into the Lab's ongoing creative casserole:

• Corpus Australis: Going into the country, to a place, and finding the stories from the land, how the people live them, how the land is changed by the people, how that relationship shapes community and cultural practice. Perform this as theatre so the people more clearly see themselves.

• Last Travelling Medicine Show / Creative Medicine: There is a method toward self-healing in one's body. Now step a scale larger (through a holon). In the community body, the actor is allowed to practice healing methods through the medicine of theatre. An ensemble comes to town with dubious advice and cures for the common despair. Caveat emptor of course. But the ensemble's action itself is a point of demonstration that the unreal is yet real, and thus the exercise redeems itself as inspiration for a discerning audience. Those who cannot be healed by any other means: they are witness to creative manifestation . . . in the moment of an actor's small death, or in the painter's still hand. Go into the streets and spruik this creative medicine.

• CommunityFoods: Food is our one completely shared daily connection with the land. Local food builds a sympathetic context into us at a cellular level. Go into community and plant the seeds that will grow people together through local food.

• Extensions of the Dimensions of Death and Dying: What is the Elder's role, in service to the family and community, as they journey through their final understandings.

The story so far . . . see slideshow of photos from the first week