Review: Hudson and Halls Live
Hudson & Halls Live!‘s Wellington season at the Hannah Playhouse began with an usher welcoming crowds to the performance, assuring them the theatre had been certified quake-safe, and explaining that some years after the time in which the play was set, one of the protagonists would die of cancer and the other would take his own life. […]
Floating Above Cuba Street
James Smith Market’s Float Well offers submersion into a space that’s been a site for relaxation, meditation, and consciousness-experimentation throughout the 20th Century. The Wellingtonista takes a dip. In Ken Russell’s barmy 1980 sci-fi thriller Altered States, William Hurt plays a psychologist whose hunger for third-eye-candy takes him on drug trips, indigenous vision-quests, and ultimately into the […]
Review: A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse
It’s a common grievance in 2016 New Zealand that, even with cack-handed dunderheadry in the ascendent and stupidity neck-and-neck with malice in a race to the bottom, nobody’s bothering to satirise this outrageous shit. Prime Ministerial candidates launch campaigns stood atop visual props, yet where is our Veep? Wither an Antipodean Iannucci to harvest all this buffoonery, craft Godzone’s […]
Review: Dust Pilgrim
A dizzying physical poem of theatre, dance, and stagecraft, Red Leap’s Dust Pilgrim comes at you with intriguing immediacy and lingers like an ingenious, puzzling dream. Devised by the company and directed by founding members Kate Parker and Julie Nolan, the show takes audiences on the journey of Panuelo, a girl whose arrival foreshadowed the disappearance of water […]
Review: The Elephant Thief
An exuberant onstage cartoon, Indian Ink Theatre Company’s The Elephant Thief begins in a jail cell and ends in… space, or the afterlife, or some other such vague spoiler. It’s an outsized feast of imaginative staging and potential pachyderm puns, anchored by a winning performance by company newcomer Vanessa Kumar. The show’s setting is a […]
Towards Tangi-te-Keo
Up the back of Newtown — past the hospital, past New Zealand’s first branch library, past the community display-window where the Conscientious Objectors’ memorials absent from Pukeahu Park quietly underscore ANZAC celebrations — runs a narrow path marking the spine of Tangi-te-Keo (later Mt Victoria). Māori knew the spine of Tangi-te-Keo as Te Ranga-a-Hiwi, the Ridge of […]
A new taonga for Ngā Taonga
The 2014 amalgamation of our Film, Television and Sound Archives into Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision saw its nomenclature justified this week with the unveiling of an aural taonga for the ages. On the 35th anniversary of Wellington Access Radio’s arrival on air, broadcast material dating back throughout the station’s lively history has been added […]
Snakes and Shadows: History as Poetry in Chris Tse’s Year of Snakes
Cross Tory Street heading toward Aro; banish the Carrilon’s long shadow behind the white-and-teal Bible Society on your left, Nurse Maude’s mosaic gaze upon your right shoulder. Point your nose toward Tara-Ngaki Street – “shining mountain-peak” – and feel Haining Street incline beneath your feet as Tory’s constant woosh recedes into urban din. The senses […]
Review: A Collection of Noises
There aren’t any noises to speak of in A Collection of Noises. The play concerns the mental breakdown of an awkward young woman and claims Lynchian influence, so obviously there’s lots of archly deployed old-time rock ’n’ roll; but every metaphor is visual. The central image is a bank of black and white photographs taken […]
Review: Richard Meros Salutes the Southern Man
“Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” muttered Laurence Fishburne in 1999, proffering a pill-toting hand to lead us through the impending eschaton. Another decade, another looming ontological singularity, and whose palm are we to grasp? A glance down Courtenay Place offers the obvious answer: beckoning on the threshold, a towering Gandalf with more storeys […]