Search results for: fringe

On the fringes

The Fringe Festival is happening from now until March 9! This is exciting! There are approximately six zillion shows happening, and while the ‘ista is covering as many as it can (and thank you for your invites, producers, we appreciate them!), we do all have day jobs and are all only human, except for Tom […]

NZ Fringe Festival 2012 into week two

The New Zealand Fringe Festival presents emerging artists in a festival of weird and wonderful performances around Wellington. The shows are are reasonably priced (or free) and are held in venues all over the city. The programme is full of shows, conveniently divided in the programme into genres –  Comedy, Dance, Music, Theatre, or Visual […]

Pick of the Fringe by Candlelight

…well the stage itself will be lit up like a Christmas tree but the bar and exteriors will be lit by candles for Earth Hour.

 Saturday is the closing night for Pick of the Fringe at Downstage, if the whirl of Fringe and the New Zealand International Arts Festival has passed you by this year you can still catch two outstanding shows at Downstage. 

Theatre is an experience to be shared and both shows on offer are really accessible as well as being ‘Fringe’, so you could take you sister or your boyfriend or your work colleague.  You can see both shows for $40 which is very reasonable.

back/words is a piece of documentary theatre with performances that focus on being completely faithful to the source of the story.  The source being in this case, filmed interviews with people that have been loosely framed around important ‘firsts’.  Out of hours and hours of footage they have shaped a theatre length show full of humor and emotion.

All of the cast wear ipods which are playing the dialogue as they perform it, venquilitrist theatre if you will.  This device works but the stories themselves are what draw you in as the actors switch from elderly couple, to gay man, to eight year old girl, to bogan with true commitment and skill.
 

No, I will not make a pun about “fringe benefits”…

… but Fringe ’09 is just a week away, and there’s a lot to get excited about. We may have missed out on the chance to see some Aristophanes under the wharves, but here’s a couple of other things that we have our eyes on.

Lies and Other Stories Before Bed had a sneak peak/fundraiser event at Mighty Mighty last week, and it looks to be a riot. It will combine film and animation with live performance in the cozy surrounds of the Southern Cross, and with a plot that involves scary hallucinatory children, swingers’ parties and a European seductress it seems like just the sort of realistic kitchen-sink drama that we can all relate to. Or maybe that’s just me.

The musical line-up looks strong this year, too, and there are plenty of acts worth salivating over, but … oh my circuits: We Are The Robots! Disasteradio and TVDisKo will be familiar to many of us, but when you add in Hamilton’s most charismatic exports, The Trons, you know it’ll be a night of mechanical mayhem to savour. More info and YouTubular goodness over on Mukuna. I’m not normally a fan of garage rock, but when the band looks as if it’s actually been built in a garage, that’s another story.

Update: there’s been a slight change of line-up for We Are The Robots, with Heat Like Me replacing Disasteradio.

More Fringe Action

Just a quick update on what’s going down in Fringe Festival Land over the next couple of days… If theatre’s your thing, try Origin 7 down at Frank Kitt’s amphitheatre. “Two people, a man and a woman. Both in pursuit of childhood dreams of becoming astronauts awake to find themselves stranded on an unknown planet. […]

Box @ Fringe Festival

Wellington’s Fringe Festival is up and running, and the one event we highly recommend you get along to see is the extremely complicated-sounding multimedia and performance extravangza which goes by the very simple name of ‘Box’. Doubtless there will be many more events of quality and acclaim, but when you put dozens of dancers, musicians, […]

Review: Everything That Happened at Number 68

Have you ever considered flatting in Melbourne? Wondered what to look for in a flatmate? What are the red flags, green flags, rainbow flags to look for? Grab a tea and a blanket and cosy up for Nick Robertson’s Fringe Festival adventure, Everything That Happened at Number 68. As Nick shares with us, “Sharehouses come […]

Ten Years in Pōneke – Part 2 (a very long walk)

In 2015 I was living at Weir House. It was my first year of study and the first time I’d spent any longer than two weeks away from my parents. I was mooning over a girl who didn’t like me back, bad at being a person and making connections and pretty sure I wasn’t into […]

Dream a Little Bigger with This Year’s World of Wearable Arts

United States designer Grace DuVal (and seven time WOW finalist) has taken the Supreme WOW Award this year with her piece Curves Ahead. Built of bright orange road netting, road signs and bedecked with a mohawk of traffic cones, this piece is a blazing bright beacon amongst the rolling sea that is Dream Awake – […]

Review: The Transgender Agender

I’m here on the ground at Wellington’s Fringe Bar to catch a show at the tail end of the 2024 New Zealand International Comedy Festival – The Transgender Agender. This lineup of fabulous trans and/or non-binary comedians made much merriment on the last Saturday of this year’s NZICF, much to the joy of their sold-out […]