A Feast of Fun - July 14 Festival update
Posted on Monday 10 Aug, 2009
It's only a matter of a few months away! We've been busy behind the scenes selecting an incredible line-up of shows. The full festival programme is launched in early August but we'd like to whet your appetite with a couple of programme highlights.
Featuring in the theatre programme is the North Island premiere of New Zealand writer Dave Armstrong's new play Le Sud. It sold out at its world premiere season in Wanaka!
Picture this: the South Island (Le Sud) has been colonised by the French and is a prosperous socialist country ... while the North Island (North Zealand) is English, in permanent recession and starved of much-needed electricity. North Zealand sends a delegation to Le Sud to persuade their rich neighbours to help out.
We are excited to also present The Butler - a production which uses drama, dance, music and circus to create a visually stunning and socially challenging feast presided over by an austere and unusual butler. Featuring trapeze, acrobatics, slapstick, unicycles, tight wire, aerial hoop and other circus tricks its jaw-droppingly visual, satirical and very funny.
And at the TVNZ Crystal Palace we'll have Australian music/comedy act The Kransky Sisters. This trio of unlikely entertainers with their oddball music gather a cult following wherever they tour. Accompanying themselves on 60’s reed keyboard, tuba, musical saw, kitchen pot, toilet brush and fervently shaken, duelling tambourines, The Kransky Sisters bring a new twist to well-known songs from artists including Nana Mouskouri, The Carpenters, SugaBabes, Pink, Steppenwolf, ACDC, Eurythmics and Talking Heads.
Also hailing from Australia, and returning for the 2009 Festival, is musician, instrument-maker and composer Linsey Pollak with his new solo show, Passing Wind.
Linsey has become a regular at the Festival - in 2007 he brought Professor Squealy Deetbum to life in Cycology and in 2005 he presented The Lab.
In Passing Wind he takes a quirky look at how wind instruments are made and played using very unexpected materials - from pan pipes to irrigation pipes, harmonic flutes to feather dusters, watering cans to carrot clarinets and 'Mr Curly', a contra-bass clarinet made from a garden hose!
We're also staging a photographic exhibition of people of the Bay. It's an interactive exhibition and people get the chance to have their portrait added to it during the course of the festival. And the popular writers' programme will feature topics as diverse as food, travel, gardens, globalisation and family; while street entertainment takes the Festival out of the theatre and onto the streets of the city over Labour weekend.
Put the dates in your diary now and start preparing for some serious festival enjoyment. Tickets on sale August 6.
Featuring in the theatre programme is the North Island premiere of New Zealand writer Dave Armstrong's new play Le Sud. It sold out at its world premiere season in Wanaka!
Picture this: the South Island (Le Sud) has been colonised by the French and is a prosperous socialist country ... while the North Island (North Zealand) is English, in permanent recession and starved of much-needed electricity. North Zealand sends a delegation to Le Sud to persuade their rich neighbours to help out.
We are excited to also present The Butler - a production which uses drama, dance, music and circus to create a visually stunning and socially challenging feast presided over by an austere and unusual butler. Featuring trapeze, acrobatics, slapstick, unicycles, tight wire, aerial hoop and other circus tricks its jaw-droppingly visual, satirical and very funny.
And at the TVNZ Crystal Palace we'll have Australian music/comedy act The Kransky Sisters. This trio of unlikely entertainers with their oddball music gather a cult following wherever they tour. Accompanying themselves on 60’s reed keyboard, tuba, musical saw, kitchen pot, toilet brush and fervently shaken, duelling tambourines, The Kransky Sisters bring a new twist to well-known songs from artists including Nana Mouskouri, The Carpenters, SugaBabes, Pink, Steppenwolf, ACDC, Eurythmics and Talking Heads.
Also hailing from Australia, and returning for the 2009 Festival, is musician, instrument-maker and composer Linsey Pollak with his new solo show, Passing Wind.
Linsey has become a regular at the Festival - in 2007 he brought Professor Squealy Deetbum to life in Cycology and in 2005 he presented The Lab.
In Passing Wind he takes a quirky look at how wind instruments are made and played using very unexpected materials - from pan pipes to irrigation pipes, harmonic flutes to feather dusters, watering cans to carrot clarinets and 'Mr Curly', a contra-bass clarinet made from a garden hose!
We're also staging a photographic exhibition of people of the Bay. It's an interactive exhibition and people get the chance to have their portrait added to it during the course of the festival. And the popular writers' programme will feature topics as diverse as food, travel, gardens, globalisation and family; while street entertainment takes the Festival out of the theatre and onto the streets of the city over Labour weekend.
Put the dates in your diary now and start preparing for some serious festival enjoyment. Tickets on sale August 6.