“So ‘The Building Still Lives” which is on Friday the 14th October is a multi arts performance. It’s been a really exciting journey as we started off collecting peoples stories and memories about the buildings and the buildings themselves are fairly historic. It’s the old Lismore High school which is now the Conservatorium, the old primary school. It was 2NCR, the Sister Web Circus. It was the Young and Powerful School, the first Linc TV, the Women’s Media Centre. Art Wise came out of this. It has such a rich history and we don’t want people to forget about the stories that have created this town.
We were inspired by the people that came to us and told us their stories so we decided to make a project and the project is called ‘The Building Still Lives’. We’ve been collecting people’s stories, memories, photographs and interviewing people. People have sent their stories by post, by postcard, recordings on phones, from here and overseas including England and France.
One of the stories that came out from Lismore High School was the story about Harry Crethar and across the board I would have to say there was an overwhelming love for Mr Crethar and The Wunderbar. People refer to it as the happy days, a place where it was safe and they had a real sense of pride in it. Harry knew everybody and when we interviewed Harry we decided who was the best musician to team him up with.
The ‘Building Still Lives’ is about taking stories and interpreting them through music, dance, puppetry and projections. Mike Smith who has a love of music, is a musician and is also blind has a real love of people and was a perfect match so during that process Mike listened to all Harrys interviews and made notes on his braille machine. He came up with the idea to sing about the milkshakes in Harry’s Wunderbar. Mike worked with Whitey and Julias, our musical directors so there are horns, violins and a whole lot of instruments playing behind. Mike will be singing. There’ll also be projections and dancers. A lot of the stories are from people who are 60 plus. We want to capture all these stories and we want to bring them to a new generation”.