Ramble Seedpod Amplified

Part surrealist tour, part monologue, part absurdist experiment, RAMBLE is a walking performance which begins at sunset at the Castlemaine Botanic Gardens and investigates the histories of the town.

Botanic Gardens represent a nineteenth century desire to categorise and control the forces of nature. By further colonising the landscape through the ordering of species and the regulation of plant growth, the Victorian planners hoped they could create crisp Cartesian spaces which would create crisp Cartesian people. It was an attempt to’ tame the wildness’ of both inside and out. The colonial imagination proposes Botanic Gardens as a sort of regulatory gardening project; a bastion to repel the wild rhizomes of ‘the bush’. It is a space meant for calm, ordered contemplation, civilised walks, polite perambulation, evening constitutionals.

But what happens if we resist this ‘protestant walk ethic’ and RAMBLE?

Performance maker Mish Grigor has researched the Aboriginal and colonial histories of Castlemaine and combined this with her irreverent and absurdist approach to performance making to create a walking performance that investigate the interface between geographical and sovereign spaces, the official histories of the land along with the idiosyncratic, the personal and the untold, the arcane and the fabricated, the serious and the funny.

Mish invites you to RAMBLE in a sunset performance that will walk the limits of culture and nature, night and day as it recontextualises how we walk through the land, how the histories of the land create and produce who we are and what we can be, and how weird we look when we wear blankets on our heads. Warm blankets provided.

It is intended that RAMBLE will live on after Mish’s residency with Punctum providing a framework for future performances exploring the liminal places where colonial spaces attempt to control nature.
This project has been developed through Punctum’s Seedpod residency program and with the kind assistance of many people in Castlemaine, the Shire of Mount Alexander and the Sidney Myer Fund.