At BATS Theatre:

Start­ing this week is an encore sea­son of Onstage Dat­ing by per­form­ance artist Bron Bat­ten. Watch as she goes on first dates on stage. (These are actu­al first dates with a stranger, not with a per­form­ing audi­ence plant.) Wit­ness the vul­ner­ab­il­ity, thrills and heart­break of the dat­ing exper­i­ence up close, as Bron Bat­ten facil­it­ates, inter­rog­ates, decon­structs and glee­fully des­troys the rituals of con­tem­por­ary romance. Every­one I talked to who saw this show in the Fringe Fest­iv­al raved about it. Don’t miss it.

Photo cred­it – Priscilla Northe. Striped trees pro­duc­tions.

Dido and Aeneas: Recom­posed con­tin­ues to 13 April. It’s a delight­ful ver­sion of Henry Purcell’s clas­sic opera with a few extra music­al samples mixed in. (Includ­ing some from Alex Taylor, music­al dir­ect­or and per­former on the even­ing.) We get right up close as they take us through the theatre spaces. The meas­ured pace of Baroque music is con­tras­ted with the energy the per­formers and musi­cians bring to their per­form­ance. Warn­ing: you may need tis­sues at the end due to the extraordin­ary vocals from Amy Jansen and the mar­vel­lous reac­tions from Rhys Hing­ston, Tam­syn Match­ett and Bar­bara Pater­son.

 

Improv shows Play­shop live and Late Night Knife Fight are on Fri­day and Sat­urday respect­ively.

 

Else­where…

Long Cloud Youth Theatre presents Desire Caught by the Tail by Pablo Picas­so start­ing tonight at Whitireia Per­form­ing Arts Centre. Picas­so wrote the play in 1941 as a response to Ger­man forces occupy­ing Par­is, and the des­pair, fear and star­va­tion that fol­lowed.  Under the dir­ec­tion of Brett Adam Long Cloud has taken this rarely per­formed play (often dis­missed as impossible to stage, mean­ing­less and incom­pre­hens­ible) and cre­ated a the­at­ric­al exper­i­ence that aims to be chaot­ic, beau­ti­ful, humor­ous and proph­et­ic.
Tak­ing their per­son­al feel­ings about their place in the world and their hopes for the future as their start­ing point the four­teen mem­bers (aged from fif­teen to twenty two) of the Long Cloud ensemble have cre­ated a wild and bra­cing piece of theatre that ulti­mately offers us all hope in dark and over­whelm­ing times. They have dis­covered in Picasso’s text a cau­tion­ary tale about power, dis­trust, ambi­tion, and of course, desire.

 

Circa Theatre has the final week of Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill dir­ec­ted by Susan Wilson. It stars Car­mel McGlone, Jane Wad­dell, Irene Wood, and Ginette McDon­ald as three old friends and a neigh­bour. A sum­mer of after­noons in the back­yard garden, drink­ing tea and chat­ting, lots of gos­sip, lots of idle chit chat, cas­u­al con­ver­sa­tion becomes a pool of radi­ance defi­ant of the ter­rible dark­ness out­side. They’ve added an extra mat­in­ee show.

The Beat­girls’ 21st: All Grown Up fea­tur­ing Andrea Sanders, Kali Kopae and Car­o­lyn McLaugh­lin cel­eb­rate 21 years of great cos­tumes, sassy cho­reo­graphy, and humour with a selec­tion of audi­ence favour­ites.