Overview
The Auckland Fringe Festival serves as a place for creatives and performers to bring their harebrain ideas to life. This year's programme is a prime example, with two wall-to-wall weeks of creative treasures and unzipped performances taking place across the city. Look beyond your average night out at the movies and explore everything from a dance show with real life cats, the worst DJ in the world, a floating theatre, a black-comedy led by a gang of teenage STDs, and a supermarket apocalypse puppet-thriller.
CATACULAR
The description for Catacular simply reads, "It's a cat show. There's cats. (also some snazzy dancing)" Created by Unitec Dance graduates Sarah-Louise Collins and Caitlin Davey, the show is a crazy cat lady's dream come true featuring 30 minutes of contemporary dance and performance art with a roll call of four-legged fur balls, in the flesh. Audience interaction is also highly encouraged when the cats aren't cooperating. The ticket price includes an additional 20 minutes of cat cuddles once the show has come to an end. Dog people also welcome.
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (IS TRAPPED IN A SUPERMARKET)
It's the second time Ben Anderson has presented his play about a man who misses out on the apocalypse, becoming trapped in a supermarket as the only human left on earth. Anderson realized his theatrical vision while working a job at a supermarket alone and feeling confronted with solitude and loneliness. The journey of the trapped man is to face his fear of aloneness without avoiding the pain, which is an experience universal to all of us. While the theme appears dark, Anderson's use of handmade puppets tells the story with a degree of fun absurdity, retracting some of the heaviness to add a dimension of light humor around such a morbid concept.
February 21-25 // Q Theatre - The Loft // $18-24
THE FLOATING THEATRE
New Zealand's first ever Floating Theatre will sail into Auckland for two weeks in two spectacular locations. With room for just 22 people per show, the intimate floating space sparkles with light and projection as the live performance unfolds. Each 60-minute show can be watched from inside on undulating waters or on-land as a shadow-play through the luminous walls. For its New Zealand debut, the Floating Theatre will set sail at Avondale's West End Rowing Club between March 1 - 4 and the Viaduct Marina between March 8 - 11.
March 1-11 // West End Rowing Club, Viaduct Marina // $20
CRAP MUSIC RAVE
During its last few visits Crap Music Rave has conquered dance floors with horrid abominations that some people call songs. It also accidentally cultivated something called a 'sex pit'. The rave was started by the self-proclaimed "worst DJ in the world", Tomás Ford. If you didn't gather by the title or have the pleasure of attending the last one, here's how it goes down. No good music is allowed. All requests are welcome, so long as they're crap. As well as the brilliantly awful music, expect DIY rave video projections, balloons, hardware store disco lights, glowsticks and hyperactive DJ antics.
March 4 // Galatos // $15-22
COMPOSURE
Created as a student project in 2015, Composure is an improvised practice which uses movement, dance and voice alongside elements of space, choreography, sound, and relationships of others present. It's not your average dance show. The work seeks to challenge the usual modes of performance by taking place over a whopping 12-hours. While audience members are welcome to stay for the long haul, they're encouraged to come in and out of the space as they please, observing and contributing to the endurance piece.
February 25 // Samoa House // Koha
INFECTIOUS
A teenage gang of STDs – Gonorrhoea, Syphilis, Chlamydia and HIV – escape their parents and enter a new urethra. But their partying ways are soon curtailed when they are stalked and killed, one-by-one, by a hideous monster. Is it the body's white blood cells? Or is it something far more sinister? Infectious is described as a "black-comedy, teen-slasher musical where Friday the 13th meets Inside Out meets High School Musical."
February 21-25 // Basement Theatre // $18-25
REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN
For her directorial debut Virginia Frankovich is tackling Alice Birch's theatrical assault on language, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Responding to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's provocation that "well-behaved women seldom make history", this series of wrecking-ball vignettes shatters the invisible power of language in shaping the world around us. Exhilaratingly wild, fearless and playful, this is feminism at its messy edge.
February 15 - March 11 // Basement Theatre // $25-45
RUSHES
Disciplines combine in Rushes, an experience where live music meets art gallery meets theatre, dance and film. Directed by Malia Johnston in collaboration with Rowan Pierce and live music from Eden Mulholland, the work features over 25 dancers and performers from across New Zealand, as well as visual imagery, lighting and sound. Heavy on the interaction, Rushes asks audience members to choose their own adventure and design their own experience through a series of explorational performance spaces.
February 21-25 // Aotea Centre // $20-42
THE EPIDEMICAL EXISTENCE OF A PERSONAL MALFUNCTION AT THE AGE OF TWENTY SOMETHING
This Fringe, fledging theatre company The Sunlight Liquid Collective will introduce themselves to the creative scene with The Epidemical Existence of a Personal Malfunction at the Age of a Twenty Something Artistic. Director Georgina Silk hopes to explore life's less than squeaky-clean side in the show, exploring the highs - and complete pits - of trying to navigate one of the most ambiguous periods of our lives: our 20s. The show's long-winded title also plays into what it means to be a twenty-something. You can throw a lot of words at it in order to create some depiction of meaning. But at the end of the day, we are all just making shit up as we go along.
March 2-5 // Garnet Station // $15-20
SEA CHANGE
Wet Hot Beauties is a contemporary water ballet troupe made up of more than 80 water ballerinas. The collective's new show, Sea Change, is described as "A splash-tacular water ballet championing grrl power! A metamorphosis of mermaids! A war cry of water ballerinas! A flotilla of femininity!" Through dance and dazzling aquatic kaleidoscopes it explores the roles women play in today's society, the challenges, demands and expectations placed on modern women, and their resilience, courage and power— all set to a pumping sound track of legendary divas.
February 21–26 // Parnell Baths, Parnell // $30-40