Review: The Aliens
If I’m honest, I walked into The Aliens last night with a certain amount of cynicism. I wasn’t expecting what I got – a thoughtful, gentle exploration of friendship and self in a homogenous world. Annie Baker writes slow subtle plays about people, and their personal journeys, and that could be stupifying in the hands […]
Sex Workers of Aotearoa: A Day in the Life of
Sex workers and artists have gone hand in hand for hundreds if not thousands of years. Think of basically nearly every nude woman in a classic painting by a white dude, or Moulin Rouge, or ‘Victoria’ or countless other examples and you get the idea. Oh sure, they’re muses. But what if we didn’t centre […]
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: The Barber of Seville
The Barber of Seville is a very silly opera. Last night’s opening performance at the Opera House took that silliness to extremes, mostly to good effect. While very silly, there’s no doubt that it’s also very good. Orchestra Wellington delivered Rossini’s classic under the graceful guidance of Wyn Davies, and the addition of a Fortepiano […]
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: Cellfish
As part of the Kia Mau festival this year I got to go and see the opening night of Taki Rua’s show Cellfish, brought to Wellington after a season in Auckland last year. Cellfish is intense. A two person show, featuring Carrie Green and Jason Te Kare, Cellfish is set in a Shakespeare class at […]
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 […]
DocEdge preview: Honeyland
Honeyland Directed by: Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska Dressed in a high-necked yellow blouse, mottled long skirt and patterned headscarf, the leathery Hatidze Muratova negotiates a mountain ledge to find a remote hive where she extracts just the right amount of honey so that both she and her bees thrive. Back home in her ancient stone […]
Review: Pōhutu
Pōhutu is a multidimensional contemporary dance piece that thrives in liminal space. Drawing parallels between Choreographer Bianca Hyslop’s grandmother’s diagnosis of Alzheimers and the geothermal landscape she grew up in, it’s an unsettling and utterly beautiful work. The beginning and end sequences draw gasps from the audience. The middle sequences contain some of the most […]