Drink beer, support the arts with Garage Project Ghost Light beer

Wel­ling­ton based inde­pend­ent brew­ery Gar­age Pro­ject has released a new beer to sup­port NZ theatres and live per­form­ing arts. Work­ing in con­junc­tion with Wellington’s BATS Theatre, Auckland’s Base­ment Theatre, Christchurch’s Little Andromeda and oth­er inde­pend­ent theatres around the coun­try, the Ghost Light beer has been designed to ref­er­ence a tra­di­tion in the arts, and be […]

Preview: Ecology in Fifths

Award-win­n­ing dir­ect­or and per­form­ance design­er Sam Trub­ridge is bring­ing a bold new per­form­ance to Te Whaea this August. Tak­ing inspir­a­tion from H Guthrie Smith’s ‘Tutira: The Story of an NZ Sheep Sta­tion’ (1921), Eco­logy in Fifths enacts this obsess­ive account of NZ eco­logy — now a recog­nised clas­sic in envir­on­ment­al sci­ence world­wide. Piece by piece, the […]

Review: Dance me to the end

Dir­ect­or Car­rie Thiel is seek­ing to “cre­ate con­nectiv­ity using mul­ti­me­dia, motion cap­ture and vir­tu­al real­ity tech­no­lo­gies in a theatre set­ting.” Work­ing with pro­fes­sion­al dan­cer Laura Jones, sound design­er Chris Winter and 3D180 VR film­maker Ed Dav­is, she’s brought togeth­er some­thing that’s quite spe­cial.  The per­form­ance itself is short and is designed as a ‘proof of […]

Review: STUPID BITCH wants a puppy

This is a ‘tune up’ of 2018’s STUPID BITCH which played in a dance stu­dio above Cuba Street in the Fringe Fest­iv­al. As a work in devel­op­ment it garnered actor/writer Claire Waldron nom­in­a­tions for Out­stand­ing Per­former in the Wel­ling­ton and Duned­in Fringe Fest­ivals. This time around it’s at BATS Theatre in The Hey­day Dome. Waldron […]

Festival time!

Late Janu­ary 2020 and the sum­mery weath­er is here. I finally feel like I’m wak­ing up in 2020  – which is a bit awk­ward giv­en I’ve been back at work for a few weeks…but enough about work!  Brace yourselves for a busy the­at­ric­al start to the year. We’ve got three Fest­ivals com­ing our way in […]

Preview: Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God

‘Peggy Pick­it Sees the Face of God’ by Roland Schim­melp­fen­nig is open­ing at Circa Theatre next week. A New Zea­l­and premiere appro­pri­ate for our mod­ern lives, this play exam­ines colo­ni­al­ist atti­tudes over freshly baked bread, and dis­cusses quar­ant­ines and vac­cin­a­tions while shar­ing drinks – it’s irony, of a sort. Are we doing enough to help […]

Review: Ideation

A team of ‘man­age­ment con­sult­ants’ are recalled from their pro­ject over­seas in order to work on an urgent pro­pos­al. The ques­tion in front of them – if there was a deadly vir­us that killed the car­ri­er and eas­ily infec­ted oth­ers, how would you con­tain it without alarm­ing the com­munity? As they start to work through […]

Review: Digging to Cambodia

Sar­ita So revis­its her Toi Whakaari solo show, turn­ing it onto a longer explor­a­tion of mak­ing memory and his­tory telling. “Through words, move­ment and songs from Cam­bod­i­a’s 1960’s rock era – Dig­ging to Cam­bod­ia is a let­ter to her past, present and future self, it asks us all “What is worth remem­ber­ing?”” So wears a […]

Review: Windigo

Wow, did I mis­un­der­stand the mar­ket­ing for this show. “Fierce and vis­cer­al, Windigo res­on­ates like a scream, the vibrant echo of a long his­tory of hu-man ran­sack­ing and destruc­tion, a viol­a­tion of a land and its cul­ture.” I went in bra­cing myself for the emo­tion­al equi­val­ent of a hur­ricane. This is not that. For me, […]

Review: The Weekend

Lara has only the week­end to track down her part­ner as she tra­verses the world of pub­lic hous­ing, drug deal­ing, and addic­tion. The Week­end is based on a situ­ation that first time play­wright that Hen­ri­etta Baird (from Kuku Yalanji/Yidinji coun­try in Queensland’s Far North) exper­i­enced. From this she’s writ­ten an extremely funny, emo­tion­ally hor­ri­fy­ing one-woman […]