After years of having no fixed abode, Castlemaine Theatre Company has finally secured a new base to call home.
Last week marked the final big shift of wildly assorted props, costumes, sets and equipment to the former Castlemaine College campus at Etty Street.
For years these items have been scattered about, stored in members’ garages and in two large shipping containers at Chewton after the theatre co was forced a decade ago to vacate its former home base – an old Chewton church building – due to safety issues.
“In 2011 the council shut down the old church building we had been using because the roof was falling in and we got booted out,” CTC committee president Kate Stones says.
“We’d also been using the Old Castlemaine Gaol to store some of our items and at about the same time the Gaol was sold and we had to get out of there as well.”
Fortunately, the former Castlemaine Secondary College campus, currently still owned by the education department and leased by Mount Alexander Shire Council, recently presented the opportunity CTC had been waiting for.
“The Castlemaine Hot Rod Centre has leased part of the site from council and now they’re (in turn) leasing some space to us,” Kate says, describing the arrangement as “very affordable” for the theatre company, which boasts 300 members on its mailing list.
“It’s very exciting. We’ve got an upstairs rehearsal studio, an office, and we can use a meeting room as well.”
There’s also ample storage space available for all the wild and wonderful props and pieces, which any theatre company that’s been running since the 1950s might be expected to have amassed.
After months of delay, they’ve also finally managed to collect a new lighting rig to install in the new upstairs rehearsal space, which previously served as the secondary college’s drama studio.
“We’d received council partnerships funding last year, together with Three’s A Crowd and Rotary, to buy the lighting rig but due to COVID lockdowns we hadn’t been able to pick it up until now. It had been just sitting in a warehouse in Melbourne,” Kate says.
The new rig will now be put to good use as CTC rehearses for its upcoming January production titled Walk With Us: Untold Castlemaine.
Lead artist for the production Mark Penzak says the innovative production will take its audience on an hour-long walk through Castlemaine CBD to catch five different short performances along the way.
“There are five different writers and five different directors for each of the five minute performances,” Mark says.
