Merry Christmas Gary | October 2019

We get a lot of great reactions about our newsletters. They obviously have an impact and show the power that marketing can have as a positive force in the world.

“The references to the occult and ritual practise,was in my opinion, offensive and convoluted, tasteless and written to fulfil what objective. I reccomend your copy writer strongly consider getting a few pointers, prior to sending off such material again. I found the impact factor to be 0. I'd like to know, what the motivation for disseminating a communique such as I received, is intent on achieving. Can you please clarify?”

Well Gary, thanks for your feedback. Our copywriting staff are currently milking the goats but when they get back up to the main shed, we’ll have a good long chat to them.

You know, this is the kind of feedback we treasure at The Farm because it’s all too easy to get cut off and isolated in our opinions these days, especially out here where the air is thin and the mountains sing your name deep into the dark and wild nights.

Furthermore Gary, your question is spot on, why do we bother to write these newsletters? What's the point? Well we did some serious soul searching in between copy writing debriefs and came up with an answer...shameless self promotion! Isn't that what motivates everyone these days? Or have we somehow missed the point of social media?

So in the interests of shamelessness we are writing our Christmas Newsletter now to get ahead of the competition....

OK, it's early, we admit it, but we're feeling pretty festive because we just won something, and like all modest small to medium arts organisations struggling for brand recognition in an increasingly competitive funding environment, we feel the need to quietly announce it.

WE WON A DROVERS AWARD!

FOR TOUR OF THE YEAR!

FOR COCKFIGHT!

This prestigious national award (that hasn't been won by anyone else this year) goes to The Farm along with our dance partners Performing Lines, NORPA and Arts on Tour (yes that’s how many arts organisations it takes to win something these days). We’re pretty stoked. They’re pretty stoked. Together we’re a bunch of really stoked people hanging out and congratulating each other.

And we do feel Christmassy when we win awards and are widely regarded as being the best thing the arts has to offer so far this century, but we don’t take our success lightly. We know that to stay at the top we have to work at it. It’s not like Santa has time off after he’s finished working his one day of the year, does he?

No, no, no. Here on The Farm we take art seriously, just ask Gary.

So we’ve been as busy as a bunch of elves stuffing Santa’s sack, doing the hard stuff, the unglamorous side of the arts:

Marketing.
Planning.
Budgeting.

And then we had lunch and made this:

That was our PACS pitch for Throttle. People laughed and said it just confirmed to them how cutting edge, yet accessible and incredible The Farm is. It was embarrassing… but rewarding also.

Other Christmas news sees our naughty little youth ensemble becoming disrupters at HOTA. They won’t be getting any presents from Santa this year if they keep up their crazy antics but then again they don’t really care because they think he’s a crock of patriarchal shit.

We had the first development for a new work called Glass Child as part of HOTA's Creative Development Program, starring our own lovely Farmers Kayah and Maitreyah Guenther. It’s a sibling story that has everybody talking.

““Beautiful”
“Evocative”
“Confronting”
“Real”.”

They’re a few words we just thought of but they sound good and are probably pretty spot on too! Look out for this one at HOTA next year.

Also on Santa’s list of who’s naughty or nice is Grayson, Gavin, Josh and Todd who are creating a Sanctuary at HOTA for men to cry in. It’s an installation built with the Men’s Shed organisation and will open in the Basement Space in November.

And that’s life on The Farm. Every day is like Christmas to us because we love presents and hot cocoa by the fire and Santa’s sack (must stop using that term) and we also love commercialisation and mass marketing. We love Coca Cola and their patented image of Santa because they’ve figured out how to corner their market and reduce a national holiday to a bottom line figure.

Which is precisely what the arts needs. A Coca Cola mentality.

So in the spirit of Christmas and mass marketing campaigns, we’ve decided to patent two words; The Farm. I know that sounds kind of tough, especially if you’re from a rural area and live on a (henceforth to be known as) large bit of land used for growing and rearing stuff. We feel for you. We do. Especially because our show Throttle is targeting your regional and remote communities for future touring. We really understand how you feel and will happily come to your “landholdings” and talk about it. We’ll even bring Santa’s…um…big bag of presents to make you feel better.

Love from The Farm
The term “The Farm” is copyrighted and legislated. Anyone caught using it in any other purpose than to refer to the famous and multi-award winning dance-theatre company from the Gold Coast will henceforth be summoned and questioned by none other than Santa himself (or herself, let’s get up to date on that score).