Arts festival presents premieres on stage and screen
Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
A Seventh-day Adventist arts festival has staged and screened two Australian premieres to critical and popular acclaim during its annual celebration of faithful creativity.
Avondale staff members and students star with Michael Taylor (centre) in Searchlight Theatre Company’s co-production of Chariot: the Eric Liddell story. Credit: Colin Chuang.
Chariot: the Eric Liddell story and Hell and Mr Fudge both featured at the Manifest Creative Arts Festival, which Avondale College of Higher Education hosted on its Lake Macquarie campus, March 20-23.
The former tells of a British Olympian who is asked to run in the games for his country on his Sabbath. It starred David Robinson and Michael Taylor of Searchlight Theatre Company. The United Kingdom-based drama troupe staged the production with eight supporting actors from Avondale. The cast members “contributed to making this an engrossing and very human story,” wrote Ken Longworth in Newcastle’s The Herald.
Almost 1000 people saw Hell and Mr Fudge at screenings presented by Manifest and Adventist Book Centres in Melbourne, Sydney, Cooranbong and Brisbane. The period, faith-based feature film is based on the true story of a preacher called Edward Fudge who questioned his church’s belief in an ever-burning hell—and what those questions cost him. Executive producer Pat Arrabito introduced the film before each screening. She spoke to more than 400 people at Springwood Seventh-day Adventist Church, which had sent letters of invitation to more than 200 contacts. Fudge’s emphasis on grace and how he came to understand the immortality of the soul impressed senior minister Pr Travis Manners. “Hell and Mr Fudge highlighted the importance of using story to communicate a message,” he says. “Jesus used stories. Why don’t we use them more, too?”
The screening at Avondale followed Manifest’s first major event, the Breath fine art exhibition. Curator Shelley Poole used works by 22 Adventist artists to tell the story of creation. Associate Professor Daniel Reynaud opened the exhibition by noting how the concept of breath—from descriptions of the Holy Spirit to God giving life to man—is embedded in the story, which is fundamental to Adventist identity. “Despite our long history of not quite knowing what to do with the arts, the breath, the creative spirit is core to our existence.”
This is particularly true for the recipient of the Gabe Reynaud Award, which Manifest names after the pioneering Adventist filmmaker. Avondale alumnus Graeme Frauenfelder, a casual academic, a storyteller and a trainer who is best known for his clowning, dedicated it to the everyday creatives who will never receive an award.
Manifest awarded others for excellence in faithful creativity. Teacher Blake Robinson won the Avondale Choral and Instrumental Music Prize for his composition, “Sky Passage.” “I wanted to listen to this over and over,” said judge Aleta King, Director of Avondale Conservatorium. “It awakened my imagination.” Melbourne-based tertiary student Jayneen Orwa won both the Institute of Worship and Psalter Music Prizes for song composition. Brothers Karl and Nick Lindsay each received a prize, Karl the Avondale Fine Art Photography Prize and Nick his second Hope Channel Prize for best entry in the filmmaking competition. Writer Linda Brooks won the Signs Publishing Prize.
The festival closed with a cathartic concert. Despite singing his songs and appearing on the cover of one of his albums, vocalist Sally Hilder and contemporary Christian music pioneer Robert Wolfgramm had never performed on stage together. All My Friends Are Sinners, which doubled as the launch of three re-released albums from Galilee Records and a new book about the label, reunited the artists for the first time in 35 years.