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 […]
Review: Over My Dead Body: Little Black Bitch
This is the world premiere of the play by Jason Te Mete. The script shared the Adam New Zealand Play Award for Best Play by a Māori Playwright in 2018. It is a theatrical representation of one way depression can manifest. It starts with a mihi from Te Mete (also director and musical director) welcoming […]
DocEdge preview: The Silence of Others
DocEdge kicks off in Wellington on 13th June (running to the 23rd) and we’ve been fortunate enough to preview some of the films that will be showing. First up… The Silence of Others Directed by Almudena Carrucedo and Robert Bahar María Martín pins up her long grey hair with gnarled hands, then struggles with a […]
Review: Public Service Announcements — Indignity War
Judith Collins is on the warpath, Parliament is in chaos, and Simon Bridges is leading choreographed dances in this iteration of PSA — Indignity War. As David Seymour tables a bill to halve the amount of MPs in Parliament, all the major parties are panicking about who they’ll have to let go. Jacinda has the […]
Review: Uther Dean’s Elevation
This is a show somewhat about the hit U2 song “Elevation” (which I still haven’t heard) and somewhat not at all about that song. From the Fast and the Furious films to fights in Burger King, new partners and the cinematic classic Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Dean spins a verbose tale of coincidence, ennui and […]
Review: Absolute Monster by Alice Sneddon
Absolute Monster, guest reviewed by Lena Beets. It’s quite hard to write a review for a comedy show that has a medium to large bombshell admission in the middle that changes the context of all the jokes told thus far, but I’ll try my best because Alice Snedden’s Absolute Monster was great. I’ve been a […]
Review: Space Couch
Tim Batt and Disasteradio’s Space Couch is a synthwave Communist talkshow, and I don’t think those words have ever been uttered together in a sentence before. Things go like this. The titular pink Space Couch — sent into space by the Soviets in the mid-70s — has fallen back to earth and decided to host […]