Giant dancing bee clock confirmed for Orange CBD

The $176,000 permanent exhibit will comprise 1.8 metre LED screens installed along the outdoor tiling at Orange Civic Theatre in the CBD. Installation is planned in 2024.

"I'm reimagining a town hall clock ... it's going to be a clock with a difference," Wollongong-based artist Zanny Begg said at an announcement on Wednesday.

"It will keep perfect time, but obviously reading it is not going to be like 'Oh, that's two o'clock'. It'd be like, 'oh, that's Blue Banded Bee o'clock' ... it will be a little bit of a puzzle."

Design plans for "Dancing with Bees" have not been confirmed in full, but high-resolution photographs of real dead critters taken at the Orange DPI will be paired with slow motion footage of residents dancing while dressed in bee-inspired costumes.

"The hour hand - the face of this clock - is going to be the bees, but the minute face of this clock is going to be dancers from the local Orange area who are going to evoke the colour and movement and look of bees," Ms Begg said.

"When we look at our watch or our phone we think that's time, when really that's just a way in which we compartmentalise time. There is this other time which is seasonal and bigger than the modern human edifice that we've layered on to time.

"The idea is to get people engaging with the clock and ... finding ways to read the time through it, which won't be immediately apparent. It is to think about deep time ... about the way that we connect with the natural world.

"It will be really beautiful because bees are absolutely stunning ... And it will get people to think about really tiny things that are so important in our local environment and that maybe we just might pass over on a busy day."

A vast and historic insect collection at the Department of Primary Industries in Orange partially inspired the work. Bee photographs are taken on site, with almost 1000 exposures painstakingly stitched together for each to create an spectacularly high resolution composite.

Casting for dancers is now open, with Orange City Council promising willing residents will be "immortalised" by the clock. Choreographer Larissa McGowan and costume designer Alexi Freeman have been brought onboard for the project. Filming is scheduled to take place in November, 2023.

"It's an open call to people of any age or gender, because bees, we think of them as a female ... but a lot of them are solitary and so they can be male and female," Ms Begg said.

"Really, the casting call is for anyone of any age, of any background, or body type. We don't have anything in mind, we're just looking for people who love to move. The sort of dances that the honeybee does is like a twerk actually ... the bees have very cute little fairy butts."

Ms Begg said live broadcasting bees onto the clock may be considered in the future. The equipment required costs about $2000 per day and funding is not currently available.

Total costs for the project as approved are estimated at $176,000. The majority comes via external grants, with Orange City Council contributing $23,000.

"There's not going to be another artwork like it anywhere in the world," Bradley Hammond - director of Orange Regional Gallery, which is collaborating on the project - told the Central Western Daily.

"I think we've been really fortunate to have really high quality artists engaging with our city or our natural environments and offering us things to think about.

"We're seeing a different way of approaching a public art project ... with challenging, interesting new ideas that ask us to think differently about civic spaces and our natural world as well.

"All of them are dealing with the public space, whether it's ... rivers which used to flow into the city and the original pathway of rivers, or getting us to think differently about the structure of a building.

"I think it's also worth pointing out that we're working with a lot of women artists to know the history of public arts and most of much of the world and particularly in Australia and Europe, has always been male artists only."

Councillor Steve Peterson distanced himself from the project in a social media post prior to the announcement.

"This was approved by the previous council and the majority of the cost is covered an external grant," he said.

"None-the-less we have had public art projects recently in McNamara Lane and with the Golden Balls with a variety of opinions on this. I personally don't see public art as an expenditure priority. I guess we will see community opinion on the project when installed."

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