[Raspberry sauce with a side of body horror] Jessie McCall’s latest choreographic offering I Get So Emotional Baby demonstrates the inexhaustible vocabulary of the human form. Palpable female emotion collides with references to the male gaze in an engrossing and stimulating work. The movement focused I Get So Emotional Baby offers a tightly woven series of images and motifs pertaining […]
[Timeless and timely] Empty of performers, the main stage at Basement is adorned with eye-catching intricacies to represent a living area and kitchen – there’s a sumptuous green velvet couch, colourful map of Haiti and a potted plant… with browning leaves. After house lights dim, our central characters Jo (Layla Pitt) and Flo (Estelle Chout) enter with varying states of […]
It may be one of the strongest images in our collective pop culture consciousness: Frankenstein’s monster rising from the operating table – the product of a young man playing god now set to wreak havoc on the world. The ‘creation scene’ in Emily Perkins’s The Made happens not at the beginning but roughly the halfway point. Scientist Alice (Alison Bruce)’s […]
Playing at The Court Theatre, the Ōtautahi debut of The Māori Sidesteps is a contemporary evolution of the Māori showband featuring performers Erroll Anderson (Ngā Puhi), Cohen Holloway (Ngāti Toa Rangatira), Regan Taylor (Ngāti Kahungunu – Te Arawa), Jamie McCaskill (Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāti Rangi, Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Tuwharetoa) and Jerome Leota. The production riffs on classic songs from both Aotearoa […]
[Experiment in Empathy] Access is an interactive, durational art performance presented by Hamish Annan. Created in collaboration with Katie Burson and Rob Byrne the piece invites the audience to both witness and experience an array of emotions. The piece is formed from a few simple elements: two chairs are set facing each other from opposite ends of a rectangle marked […]
[Questioning Reality] The Writer by Ella Hickson is a play full of provocation. It asks questions it cannot answer. It challenges the dominant modes of theatre (and society) while still existing within them. What are we to take away from that? The back side of some set pieces sit on the stage. We can see right into the wings, where […]
[Gonzo! The musical] Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) refers to specific audio-visual stimuli which cause an individual to experience a tingling sensation around the head and the back of the head. Outside of youtube recommendations and advertisements, I have almost no experience with ASMR. That ignorance was hammered home about 0.5 seconds into the show when creator/performer Amy Atkins asked […]
[Laughing Through It] Grief, sex and race are not only three distinct words that sum up the themes and talking points of this comedy-musical, but the show also amalgamates them together to describe a unique experience and state of mind: the grief-sex-race. Creators and performers Jess Karamjeet and Sophie Gibson share fragments of their lives with us, centred around their […]
Dawn Raids by Oscar Kightley was first staged by theatre collective Pacific Underground in 1997, 20 years after the national outrage. The play’s snapshot of the illegal raids on Pacific people under the guise of cracking down on overstayers would have hit home for everyone who experienced it — everyone whose families and friends had faced not only the violation […]
Opening night, and the mood is celebratory as Basement studio visibly fills up with queers and allies. The tag line for Joni Nelson’s new play screams ‘lesbian apocalypse,’ so I’m mentally prepared for an over-the-top zombie style attack, wondering how the narrative will unfurl. The stage before us is plain, laid with white polythene. After the house lights dim, our […]
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