0 - 2017 - Theatre Scenes: Aotearoa New Zealand Theatre

REVIEW: Contrast (Footnote New Zealand Dance)

November 3, 2017

[Right Direction] Contrast presents works from two choreographers of significant national and international standing: Switzerland-based choreographer, dancer and teacher Emma Murray, and Creative New Zealand’s Choreographic Fellow 2017-2019 Sarah Foster-Sproull. Potentially, the season was named before the works were created – they share similar general concepts but strongly contrasting realisation. In Murray’s work Participation, four dancers enter into a trance-like, […]

REVIEW: Looking for America (The Basement)

October 28, 2017

[Blink and you missed it…] Looking for America appeared at the Basement for a one only late night performance within the theatre’s upstairs green rooms. It has been on a small tour around living rooms, cafes, offices and communes across Auckland. Written and performed by Indigo Paul and directed by Katie Burson, Looking for America is a slow burning solo […]

REVIEW: Rēka (AUĒ Dance Collective)

October 27, 2017

[Totems and Taboos] Rēka grew from the short work AUĒ that won the Risk Taker Award at Short + Sweet Dance 2017. The original was reviewed as being restricted by the ten-minute time limit, and suggesting a longer work to come. True to the original, Rēka aims to be controversial and elicit a response from its audience; programme notes describe […]

REVIEW: The Winterreise Project (Unstuck Opera)

October 26, 2017

[Equipment for Living] An excuse to perform Schubert or an exploration of our Post-Trump age? Unstuck Opera’s newest work, The Winterreise Project, pits the subjects of Franz Schubert’s grim song cycle against the backdrop of the Trump presidency. In searching for connections between the two, director and performer Frances Moore presents the show to us as a form of personal […]

REVIEW: The Vultures (Tawata Productions)

October 20, 2017

[A Carrion Call For Honour] Sibling relationships always provide great live theatre and playwright-director Mīria George’s insightful play The Vultures dredges up all the reasons why some relatives form factions and others follow their own path. The premise of the show, picking over the bones of a recently deceased estate, is familiar to many and the issues that are revealed […]

REVIEW: Finding Temeraire (The Basement)

October 18, 2017

[A Ghost Story] Written and directed by Stanley Makuwe, Finding Temeraire is an extremely dark and disturbing look at the debris of a relationship, but its most incisive critique is left unsaid. The play is a two-hander about Primrose (Sandra Zvenyika), who returns home after a long prison sentence for killing her child, intent on confronting the man, Temeraire (Tawanda […]

REVIEW: Everything is Surrounded by Water and A Public Airing of Personal Grievances (My Accomplice)

October 13, 2017

[Everything is Surrounded by Storytelling] This week Uther Dean performs two of his solo shows at The Basement. Written by Uther Dean and Hannah Banks, and performed and directed by the former and latter respectively, Everything is Surrounded by Water is a journey of quarter-life crisis soul-searching. Fortunately, Dean has an acute awareness of and philosophical regard to the content of his […]

REVIEW: Pleasuredome: The Musical

September 30, 2017

[A Long Way From Home] It’s one of the most audacious and head-spinningly ambitious theatrical endeavours ever mounted in New Zealand. Promising to transport us to 1984 and the notoriously hedonistic underground New York clubs (the last hold-outs from the disco era), audiences arrive in Henderson and enter, via a subway station portal, a NYC wonderland. You walk a block-long […]

REVIEW: Soft Tissue (The Basement)

September 27, 2017

[Madonna/Whore] Wrapped in cloth gauze, a modified hijab of virginal white, Ella Gilbert plummets around the stage in bold and often uncomfortable movements. Imagine an alien shapeshifter forced to become a woman on Planet Earth, to operate under the complex and contradictory behaviours of femaleness. That’s what Gilbert embodies here. A body horror of female sex at war with itself; […]

REVIEW: Velvet (Auckland Live International Cabaret Season)

September 25, 2017

[Everybody Dance!] This show is awesome, this show is great, this show made me want dance like a loon. So much of my love for this show boils down to two things. The first is the totally awesome soundtrack, jam-packed with disco classics, from Chic’s ‘Le Freak’ to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and The Tramps’ ‘Disco Inferno’. The second […]