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 […]