The Fringe Festival is happening from now until March 9! This is exciting! There are approximately six zillion shows happening, and while the ‘ista is covering as many as it can (and thank you for your invites, producers, we appreciate them!), we do all have day jobs and are all only human, except for Tom […]
The New Zealand Fringe Festival presents emerging artists in a festival of weird and wonderful performances around Wellington. The shows are are reasonably priced (or free) and are held in venues all over the city. The programme is full of shows, conveniently divided in the programme into genres – Comedy, Dance, Music, Theatre, or Visual […]
…well the stage itself will be lit up like a Christmas tree but the bar and exteriors will be lit by candles for Earth Hour.
Saturday is the closing night for Pick of the Fringe at Downstage, if the whirl of Fringe and the New Zealand International Arts Festival has passed you by this year you can still catch two outstanding shows at Downstage.
Theatre is an experience to be shared and both shows on offer are really accessible as well as being ‘Fringe’, so you could take you sister or your boyfriend or your work colleague. You can see both shows for $40 which is very reasonable.
back/words is a piece of documentary theatre with performances that focus on being completely faithful to the source of the story. The source being in this case, filmed interviews with people that have been loosely framed around important ‘firsts’. Out of hours and hours of footage they have shaped a theatre length show full of humor and emotion.
… but Fringe ’09 is just a week away, and there’s a lot to get excited about. We may have missed out on the chance to see some Aristophanes under the wharves, but here’s a couple of other things that we have our eyes on.
Lies and Other Stories Before Bed had a sneak peak/fundraiser event at Mighty Mighty last week, and it looks to be a riot. It will combine film and animation with live performance in the cozy surrounds of the Southern Cross, and with a plot that involves scary hallucinatory children, swingers’ parties and a European seductress it seems like just the sort of realistic kitchen-sink drama that we can all relate to. Or maybe that’s just me.
The musical line-up looks strong this year, too, and there are plenty of acts worth salivating over, but … oh my circuits: We Are The Robots! Disasteradio and TVDisKo will be familiar to many of us, but when you add in Hamilton’s most charismatic exports, The Trons, you know it’ll be a night of mechanical mayhem to savour. More info and YouTubular goodness over on Mukuna. I’m not normally a fan of garage rock, but when the band looks as if it’s actually been built in a garage, that’s another story.
Update: there’s been a slight change of line-up for We Are The Robots, with Heat Like Me replacing Disasteradio.
Just a quick update on what’s going down in Fringe Festival Land over the next couple of days… If theatre’s your thing, try Origin 7 down at Frank Kitt’s amphitheatre. “Two people, a man and a woman. Both in pursuit of childhood dreams of becoming astronauts awake to find themselves stranded on an unknown planet. […]
Wellington’s Fringe Festival is up and running, and the one event we highly recommend you get along to see is the extremely complicated-sounding multimedia and performance extravangza which goes by the very simple name of ‘Box’. Doubtless there will be many more events of quality and acclaim, but when you put dozens of dancers, musicians, […]
A Beautiful Harmony of Theatre, Music and So Mush Spore. I loved the novel format of storytelling that ‘Concept for a Film’ delivered. The scene opens with Max Barton, sitting at a desk that faces the audience, reading out the script for a film. These readings are intermittently dispersed with many disruptions including phone calls […]
Produced by ‘Woman’s Move’ from Switzerland and co-directed by choreographers Elsa Couvreur and Iona D’Annunzio. The Sensemaker starts as a clever and understated comedy that uses dance, movement and sound as its main devices. Theatre like this is at its best when minimal and perfectly timed, which is a key strength of The Sensemaker. The […]
The Fringe Bar is packed to the gills for Best on Tap Stands Up, a little out of the ordinary for a Sunday crowd, but this is a Fringe show and this is a Fringe crowd, and Best on Tap are an excellently well-established performance company, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. More well-known as […]
Reviewed by Nadia Freeman Photo credit: David Vagg This is no typical dance number meant to distract and delight you with sparkles and clap-along numbers. Limits sits in the realm of theatre that is to challenge its audience and give them a chance to view what it might be like to step into the shoes […]