This is a show which originally premiered in 2022, to an audience of 30 people, when New Zealand was in lockdown due to the omicron variant of Covid-19. It’s only now getting a release in a larger venue – St James Theatre. It’s part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts. We got tickets and went along.
It was an early 7:00pm start, so we decided to go for dinner at old favourite Mr. Go’s. As usual we had their Korean chicken wings, typhoon prawns and some pork dumplings. Excellent as ever.
St James Theatre is but a skip and a jump away across Taranaki Street and we were there well in time for the start. I activated the tickets on my Ticketbastard app, and…for the second time in two goes, they failed to scan. Ticketbastard have implemented this new technology where there are moving lines on the QR code, presumably to prevent fraud. It’s all very well installing this new technology, but it’s no use if the bloody thing doesn’t work! Anyway, the usher said “I’m sure it’s fine” and waved us in anyway, which is kinda what you’re not supposed to do.
We were near the front at the end of a row so didn’t have a full-on view of the stage. It did, unfortunately, mean we were right on the angle of some of the lighting effects, which somewhat blinded us. The premise of the show is that it fuses music, light, and dance with aerial acrobatics, using hoops, silk, ropes etc. There wasn’t as much of the aerial manoeuvres as I thought there would be, and it took about 15 minutes to even get going, really...which for a one-hour show is quite a lot. The accompanying music, some of it live, either vocal or violin, was very moody, occasionally straying into electronica. The lighting effects and hazing machine were such that what you saw was mostly shadows and silhouettes, with very few instances of the subjects being well lit. Whilst I’m sure this was intentional, it did mean that you couldn’t really see what was going on, for the most part. It felt to me that they had around half an hour’s worth of material, and they’d padded it out to one hour.
I think this one gets filed under “interesting”, and also under “don’t bother with again”.
No comments:
Post a Comment