Ten Shows, Installations and Parties to Get Amongst at Auckland Fringe Festival 2019

For those keen to keep working after hours and keen on becoming the king pin of their offices one day, Boss of the Office is your kind of interactive, Fringe Festival experience. Through the miracle of modern theatre and technology, Boss of an Office is an immersive office cubicle experience and computer game where you become the apex office worker for one small window of time. What you do with that power is entirely up to you.

Respected Kiwi playwright Duncan Sarkies (known for his work on Scarfies and Flight of the Conchords) is bringing the 2019 Fringe Festival his one act play Lovepuke, a commentary on love, sex and relationships.

The play promises to be an “intense romp through the triumphs and pitfalls of the dating scene”, which we can only imagine will feature everything that is the New Zealand dating scene: one night stands after a few too many beers or Cruisers or Aperol Spritzes (depending on what age and income bracket you fall into), the best (which are literally the worst) stories from the RSI-inducing dating app called Tinder (or I guess Bumble for those who’ve stepped up slightly), awkward friend to partner transitions, some successful and cute stories about partnering up with a good one, and a dissection of the general air of loneliness that gets spritzed and projected onto those who happen to be single. But that’s just our guess. You’ll have to see his play to get his take on it.

As best put by the show’s creator Jaya Beach-Robertson, PSUSY is a “women-led, nsfw, comedy web series made in Aotearoa”. Co-starring Jaya Beach-Robertson and Aria Dehar, the web series goes ovaries deep into the rankest, cringiest, most perplexing and screamingly funny parts of being a twenty something grotty as hell, low-functioning female in the land of the long white cloud. It’s the kind of comedy that only a woman could write.

Get into a car with a stranger and leave with a different slant on life. The Ride by Artsense Productions, is a personalised Fringe Festival experience where the production company links you up with an expert on a topic you’ve always been interested in learning more about — anything from microbiology to plumbing to poetry to astrophysics to cooking — and organises for the two of you to ride around the streets of Auckland to talk about it.

For those who were fans of the Goosebumps choose-your-adventure series growing up (or the new Black Mirror Bandersnatch movie), Mistranslation Laboratory is your kind of Fringe Festival performance. Audiences of no more than twelve per sitting will be offered a free set of three miniature performances, which will have been selected by the audience from ten, made-to-order options offered by the Mistranslation Laboratory‘s somewhat unreliable  “choreographic scientists”.

Mary’s Room is an immersive dance experience based on the philosophical thought experiment that you can’t truly know another person until we experience being them.

The thought experiment was invented by Australian analytic philosopher Frank Cameron Jackson, who was looking to find a way to argue against the phisicalistic idea that ‘everything is physical’ and that there is nothing ‘over and above’ the physical. Instead, Jackson wanted to show that there were certain unmeasurable subjective qualities exist that can only be discovered ‘through the conscious experience of an individual’. That even when we are in the exact same environment at the same time with the same information about it, our experience of what is happening will be different from someone standing next to us and that we have no idea how the other person experienced it.

The visual dance performance was created by Slovenian dance artist Neža Jamnikar, in collaboration with dancers Deborah Fletcher and Evie Logan.

Auckland’s Town Hall is turning into New Zealand’s epicentre of K-Pop on Saturday, February 23 as part of the Auckland Fringe Festival. K-Pop — which is a blend of worldwide musical influences such as hip hop, gospel and electronica — emerged in South Korea in the early 90s, but didn’t take on its ‘idol’ culture until boy band H.O.T. became popular in 1996. These days, K-Pop is defined as more than just a musical genre, but rather an all-encompassing aesthetic. The French National Audiovisual Insitute describes K-pop as a “fusion of synthesized music, sharp dance routines and fashionable, colourful outfits.” The genre’s ‘idol culture’ is also incredibly important. Training and grooming a K-Pop star/’idol’ under one of the big record labels costs about US$3 million, according to a 2012 The Wall Street Journal article.

K-Pop Party will be curated by Rina Chae, known for dancing with Beyoncé and Justin Bieber as well as choreographing for AOA, Cosmic Girls, SF9 and Monsta X, the K-Pop only, all ages dance party will feature the most current K-Pop hits, guest dance performances by Rina Chae, Street Candee, 603 and Jua.

Only Bones v1.0 is an award-winning production by New Zealanders Thom Monckton and Gemma Tweedie, and Finland’s Kallo Collective. Monckton’s stage is one metre. There’s a chair, a lamp and a circle painted on the floor. With its quirky, low-tech aesthetic and using just his bendy, wiggling hands and seemingly uncontrollable face, Monckton creates an exquisite piece of micro-physical theatre unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Only Bones premiered in Lapland before becoming a hit show astounding audiences at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe. It has featured in an art museum in Mexico City, a converted prison in French Guiana, and 13 different countries around the world. From the maker behind The Pianist and Caterpillars.

Movement of the Human is an all encompassing show which blends dance, music and light performances into an experience which is part party, party gig. Created by Malia Johnston, Eden Mulholland & Rowan Pierce, who were also behind the multi-award winning Auckland Fringe hit Rushes and the well received Meremere, Movement of the Human pulls together artists from across New Zealand to create an unmissable fusion performance.

Pussy Riot broke headlines in 2012 when three of its members, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich were imprisoned for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for one of their performances inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Human rights groups like Amnesty International called the women prisoners of conscience, arguing that their imprisonment was a breach of their freedom of expression. The performers have since served their prison sentences and Maria Alyokhina has written a memoir called Riot Days, which talks about her experience.

The tour is a fusion of a recital of said memoir, their punk performances and documentary footage. The Guardian called Riot Days “more than just a gig – it’s somewhere between a gripping piece of Putin-skewering musical theatre, an urgent jazz-punk book recital and a film screening that unfurls like a nerve-shredding thriller.”