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Winter Blooming Festival
August 18, 2023 @ 6:00 am - August 20, 2023 @ 4:00 pm
WINTER BLOOMING IS A FESTIVAL THAT CELEBRATES FIRST NATIONS, MULTICULTURAL, LGBTQA+ ARTS, CULTURE, COMMUNITIES AND ALLIES. THE FESTIVAL IS AN INCLUSIVE EVENT THAT SUPPORTS DIVERSITY AND IS OPEN TO ALL.
Scroll down to purchase festival passes, on the way also grab your Dumplings and Beer ticket and book into one of the Winter Blooming workshops.
FRIDAY 18TH
5.00pm – 7.00pm
Opening Night Fluid Flax
Fluid Flax features six artists who identify as queer and/or non-binary, working with traditionally perceived ‘feminine crafts’ such as crochet, embroidery, weaving and textiles. The exhibition interrogates how these craft techniques are used as explorations of identity and storytelling.
7.00pm – 10.00pm
It’s the prom event you always dreamed of!
Time to put together a fabulous outfit, grab a date or a group of friends or strut solo to New England Regional Art Museum for Queer Prom. DJ Betty Bilby will be in charge of the music, there will be a pop-up cash bar, nibbles… and glitter!
Queer Prom is a 16yrs+ event. Queer Prom tickets are sold separately to your Winter Blooming Festival Pass
SATURDAY 19TH
10.00AM – 1.00 PM
Panel 1 – 10.00 – 11.00am
Queer Pasifika: What Does Creating Community Within Community Look Like?
Panelists: Amao Leota Lu, Ella Ganza & Leki
Join Samoan fa’afafine elder and lifelong advocate, Amao Leota Lu, and her collaborators Ella Ganza and Leki in exploring community building from the perspective of Queer People Of Colour from the Pasifika diaspora. The panelists will share a 30 min documentary film, “The Alexander Ball”, starring two panelists Ella Ganza and Leki and the ballroom Meanjin collective The House Of Alexander.
The documentary illustrates and presents an insight into the importance of creating safe spaces and the beautiful essence that is grounded in culture when we create work that’s connects communities. The panel will then discuss how they navigate and create safe spaces for our selves and community implementing our cultural practices into their work.
Panel 2 – 11.00am – 11.45am
Working with community, centering lived experiences – strategies for allies and co-conspirators
Moderated by Christina Kenny. Speakers: Kage Gold, Jinny-Jane Smith & Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Allyship is often something we think of as being between communities and identities – perhaps most commonly between cis-heterosexual and LGBTQAI+ folk. But allyship is needed within LGBTQAI+ communities as well. This panel is a space to think about how we can be better allies, co-conspirators and collaborators across our diverse identities – First Nations, multicultural, multifaith communities as well as neurodiversity and disability.
Join this panel of leading community advocates and allies to explore how to practice and build allyship in advocacy and in our communities.
Panel 3 – 12.00pm – 1.00pm
Space for expression, change and complexity – supporting the trans and gender diverse community
Moderated by Budi Sudarto. Speakers: Merrin Wake, Ruby Mountford & Sujata Allan
Trans and gender diverse identities are attracting a great deal of attention in the media and in violent political contestations. This panel will discuss gender affirming care, and building supportive families and communities for trans and gender diverse folk. The panel also reminds us that we are all more than our gender, and explores the complexities our our intersecting identities.
1.00PM – 2.00PM
LUNCH BREAK – Dumplings and Beer
2.00PM – 5.00PM
Workshop Sessions – workshop tickets sold separately (not included in your festival pass)
Still-life and Sex Toys Drawing Workshop with Kim Leutwyler 2.00pm – 5.00pm
Join artist Kim Leutwyler as she takes participants through still life drawing with a twist. Engage with the classic elements of still life composition and explore the unique colours, shapes and textures of the sex toys interspersed between the pots, bottles and flowers. This workshop is guaranteed to be pleasurable, no matter your current artistic skill level.
Wild Flowers Workshop with Liam Benson 2.00pm – 5.00pm
Join Fluid Flax exhibiting artist Liam Benson for an experimental textile workshop that allows for creative play with bead and sequin embroidery, where there is no right or wrong way to sew a sequin.
Using memory and intuitive response, Liam guides a process of experimentation with colours, textures and pattern to create a small, embroidered artwork that reflects our relationship with nature.
Express Drag makeover with Xixi 3.00 – 4.30pm
Express Drag makeover is a fun makeup makeover workshop with Sydney drag queen Xixi. Watch Xixi block the brows, contour the cheeks and snatch the entire face, all in 90 minutes. The best part is it won’t be Xixi getting the makeover, it’ll be someone from the audience! Come along the drag journey and learn tips and tricks from Xixi as you cheer on one lucky audience member as they find their inner Glamazon.
Queering the archives: insights to recover and reinvent queer biographies and biofiction 3.00 – 4.30pm
In this hour-long workshop, historical fiction writer and librettist Dr Ariella Van Luyn and musician and composer Dr Paul Smith will draw on their on-going research and creative practice to give participants ways to tell queer stories in sound and text. We think about ways we can imaginatively engage with the archives to recover and reinvent history in diverse artistic forms including opera, the novel, and film score.
Poles & Holes with ACON 3.00 – 5.00pm
Poles & Holes is dedicated to creating an inclusive safe space where we can discuss sexual health outside of traditional gender binaries through a fun and interactive workshop that celebrates bodies, gender, and sexual diversity.
Learning to Include: more than a rainbow 3.00pm – 4.30pm
This interactive and thought provoking workshop for clinicians, educators, workers, peer workers, will explore the links between engagement and learning linked to development and brain science. It will challenge the heteronormative and binary lens we offer to gender and will break down the binary models that cause pain and harm. Audience: clinicians, educators, workers, peer workers.
7.00pm – 9.00pm
Winter Blooming After Dark (included in your Winter Blooming Night Ticket or Festival Pass)
Join us after dark for a social and cultural event that will allow festival participants to continue their conversations and share their festival inspired ideas and works in an open gathering. Enjoy drag, music, and performances, meet and mingle with new people, pop by our pop-up bar, and celebrate our diverse community and culture.
PERFORMERS: more to be announced
- Bob Blair – Didgeridoo
- Amber Rose – Drag
- XiXi – Drag
- Rocky Bottom Girls – Music
- YK, MISSION GANGSTA & SKATE+BENNY – Music
SUNDAY 20TH
Queer Brunch 10.00am – 12.30pm
Social meet up for the LGBTAQ+ community at the Six Counties at NERAM. Tickets for Queer Brunch are free but limited. Brunch purchased on the day from the Six Counties menu. Enjoy a big brekkie or sip on a coffee.
Get Tickets
Leaning In: the impact of affirmative love and care 11.00am – 12.30am
This workshop is for parents, family members, carers, community members, and offers a lived experience lens of being a parent of a trans young person. The workshop reflects on the past, current and future narratives defining the lives of our trans and gender diverse young people. Audience: parents, family members, carers, community members.
Get Tickets Select the After Dark option.
Open Mic Creek Walk 12.30 – 2.00pm
Walking along a waterway being present with nature can be a healing practice, but how we understand that healing depends on how we’re relating to the place (and vice versa). Being grounded, outside, attentive to place is not a neutral experience, especially not in a settler colonial country on stolen Indigenous land, where our journeys to and experience of the place, and our own bodies, desires and identities are all different.
Winter Blooming has been Produced in collaboration with the University of New England, Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council, and ACON and has been supported by Create NSW and Aurora.
Winter Blooming is sponsored by:
