ENTERTAINMENT
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ARIES: While you’re busy taking the lead this week,
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s r a t S with Lilith Mercury finishing its first retro transit for 2016 brings last-minute opportunities to fine-tune plans before next week’s forward surge…
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don’t make the mistake of competing with any Leos. Or Capricorns. Play it smart and keep reactions under control. Magnetise rather than polarise. Be charming, because current astro-conditions offer possibilities for forging important business alliances and getting valuable collaborators onside. TAURUS: This week’s grounding influences help balance the eccentric, at times incomprehensible, behaviour of the sun in Aquarius. With your planetary ruler Venus moving into earthy Capricorn suiting Tauran social style, don’t be shy to take advantage of this ambitious energy to boost business mobility and broker professional benefits. GEMINI: With this week’s star mix stimulating a travel itch, you’re probably fretting to escape mundane issues around home, family or your base of operations. Good news: Mercury moving forward this week helps clarifies misunderstandings and ease the process of peace-making so you can finally start locking in those exciting deals…
CANCER: Pluto’s continuing presence in your relationship zone ushers in endings – which of course make space for new possibilities. This week calls attention to joint ventures, issues of give and take, what’s fair and what hasn’t been. Mars in your hothouse of glamour’s the sweet spot, insisting on dressing up and having fun.
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SAGITTARIUS: As Mercury moves forward, recent intrigues and mysteries begin to clarify and unravel – though there’s plenty more in store during the coming month of perplexing Uranian behaviour. Don’t waste time and energy this week trying to figure out why. The better question is how – as in how you’ll deal with it.
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CAPRICORN: Venus joining Mercury turning forward in Capricorn, all aligned with Pluto in your sign, signifies a week of peak potential. It’s also a trinity designed to uncover hidden truths or information. Your challenge is to avoid either/or, right/wrong thinking: to explore the quantum playing field to your heart’s content.
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LEO: Your majesty’s popularity has certainly been peaking lately, with admirers multiplying and treating you like royalty. So far, so fabulous. This week recommends a return to earth and attention to details, because little things could cause no small amount of frustration. Expense too, if they’re incorrectly dealt with. VIRGO: This week arrives with a sense of freshness, spontaneity and exploration. Mercury’s forward move gets people back on a workable wavelength again, communications resume and, despite residual stubbornness, rigid thinking begins to give a little. Midweek Virgo moon could have you rethinking recent decisions if breaking information rearranges the goal posts. LIBRA: The sun’s move into liberating, livewire, airy Aquarius launches a month of social whirling and swirling – and with your boss planet Venus in ambitious Capricorn, networking frenzy. Friday’s double-booked Libra moon has your dance card so jam-packed you’ll be forced into the exquisite torture of having to choose the best offer.
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SCORPIO: The present theatrical planetary combination can be dramatic – and with Mars in your sign, so can you. This week’s astroblend features Aquarius sun, three planets in Capricorn and no-one willing to give an inch. All of which simply means you’ll achieve more by radiating warmth than applying force…
AQUARIUS: From the full moon lighting sparklers to celebrate your birthday month, through Mercury’s liberation from retrograde bad moods to Friday’s Venus-friendly moon, this week has your name on it. The Aquaverse is buzzing and your personal cup runneth over with verve, vivacity and joie de vivre. Go, Aquirkians!
PISCES: More than any other water sign you like to go with the flow, which won’t be totally easy with some of this week’s inflexible people refusing to budge or bend. But just as water wears away stone, you’ll suss out a way to negotiate through stubborn attitudes or rigid resistance.
CULTURE
LUIS TAMANI’S AMAZON VISIONS THERE ARE MANY WHO B E L I E V E T H AT T H E J U N G L E HAS MEDICINE FOR THE W H O L E WO R L D.
WHEN YOUR BOOMERANG WON’T COME BACK After a successful debut in 2013, Boomerang Festival, held as an independent event on the Bluesfest site, was nominated for the Best New Event at the 2014 Australian Events Awards and Best Indigenous Tourism for the 2014 NSW State Tourism Awards. The festival includes dance, weaving, carving, talks and ideas, workshops, music, and authentic cultural exchanges between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal people. Despite resounding critical, industry and audience acclaim, Boomerang was unable to secure funding in order to present in the same format this year. Recognising the importance of this ground-breaking event, Bluesfest director Peter Noble and his team have been working with Boomerang Festival director Rhoda Roberts to ensure it survives and thrives despite a temporary obstacle, and invites audiences and the wider community to join them in celebrating and supporting this wonderful local event.
To this end the Boomerang Festival is in its final weeks of a crowdfunding campaign and is hoping the northern rivers public will contribute.
the short courses and weekend workshops we have planned so far including printmaking, drawing, screenprinting, encaustic and abstraction.
Byron Shire mayor Simon Richardson has just joined with Archie Roach, Paul Kelly, and Troy Brady in doing a video of support.
BSA’s dedicated and talented teaching staff have plenty in store for 2016. Please visit the BSA website for more information. www.byronschoolofart.com
Boomerang festival organisers are asking the progressive, forwardthinking leaders and members of our community to support them in their mission to make the NSW northern rivers leaders in this positive change for all Australians. www.indiegogo.com/projects/ boomerang-indigenous-artsculture-festival
SCHOOL OF ART IS WHERE IT’S AT
Byron School of Art (BSA) is very excited to be launching into 2016 with not one, not two, but three year-long courses There are still a few places left in the second- and third-year courses, so if you have some experience or previous study in the arts and would like to delve deeper, get in touch ASAP. If you’re wanting to get down and get creative without such a big commitment, check out all
North Coast news daily: www.echonetdaily.net.au
Whether it is the immense wealth of medicinal plants, its powerful ability to sequester carbon from our atmosphere, its biodiversity of plants and animals, or a spiritual destination where travellers reconnect with the divine in nature, the Amazon is a global treasure filled with inspiration. This wisdom is conveyed in explosive colour with sublime representations of real and other-worldly creatures in the artwork of Luis Tamani.
Luis’s paintings are an encyclopaedia of mystical wisdom – incorporating plants, spiritual deities, and swirling energies in An hour spent in the company a rich, lush jungle-scape full of of Dave Hughes has one of the waterfalls, colourful birds, and highest laugh rates per minute you elders in ceremony allows the will ever experience at a standup viewer to step into another world. comedy show. Tamani studied Art at the Eduardo Meza Saravia Escuela Superior de If you haven’t seen Dave onstage yet, you would definitely have seen Formación Artística located in his native city of Pucallpa. Meza was him as a host of Network Ten’s one of the great proponents of The Project and Before The Game neoamazónico, figurative, surreal and this year you can see him as and shamanic styles of painting. the new host of Nine Network’s During five years of attendance, Australia’s Got Talent. Luis received both rigorous It’s an accepted fact that Dave academic training and training Hughes is a bloody funny guy in the techniques of the master but you’ll never know how funny after whom the school is named, until you see him live. Hughesy is including synthesising reality unbeatable onstage, mic in hand, through metaphor and symbols on telling joke after joke to the rooms the canvas. he fills across the world. He’s never Luis is also influenced by the sacred been better than he is right now. ceremonies and medicinal plants In Byron Bay for one night only! of the jungle – by merging his own Byron Bay Theatre this Saturday, visions with art, he is able to show 7pm – $35. the interconnectedness between humans, plants, and animals. CONTINUED P 36
WE LOVE YOU, HUGHESY
He also brings reverence to the deep cultural traditions that have been preserved in the shamanic traditions of the region. Luis and his art play a shamanic role in modern society, awakening us all to the divine by invoking wonder. Somara Shamanic Medicine Forum is hosting Peruvian artist Luis Tamani over 2–7 February at Starseed Gardens, Byron Bay. Attendees of Somara 2016 will have a rare opportunity to see Luis Tamani paint live and can participate in an exclusive three-day arts intensive over February 2–5. Places are limited. Visit somara. org/tickets to book tickets. Follow Somara on facebook.com/somara.org to receive live updates.
Short Courses & Weekend Workshops -----------------------------------------------------------------------Rene Bolton The Hundreds: A Drawing Project 4 weeks 28 January – 18 February
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Michelle Dawson & Zom Osborne Life Drawing 8 weeks 2 February – 22 March
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Christine Willcocks Printmaking Session I 7 weeks 23 February – 5 April (held in Mullumbimby)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------James Guppy Drawing & Painting the Face 5 weeks 29 February – 4 April
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Michael Cusack The Language of Abstraction 4 weeks 11 March – 8 April (held in Mullumbimby)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Kat Shapiro Wood Working with Encaustic Weekend Workshop Sat 20 & Sun 21 February
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Emma Walker Experimental Drawing Weekend Workshop Sat 27 & Sun 28 February
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Anne Leon Introduction to Screenprinting Weekend Workshop Sat 27 & Sun 28 February (Mullumbimby)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Michael Cusack The Language of Abstraction Weekend Workshop Sat 30 & Sun 31 April BYRON SCHOOL OF ART WWW.BYRONSCHOOLOFART.COM
The Byron Shire Echo January 27, 2016 35