Auckland Live's Fringe Town

Overview

The Auckland Fringe serves as a place for creatives and performers to bring their ideas to life. This year's program is a prime example, with two wall-to-wall weeks of creative treasures and unzipped performances taking place across the city.

Auckland Live's Fringe Town provides the perfect opportunity to unleash yourself from the norm. The week-long festival within the festival features seven strange, brave, tearfully beautiful and exceptionally brilliant events throughout Auckland Town Hall. From February 25 to March 1, festival-goers can experience everything from te reo Māori metal to high calibre dance throughout every nook and cranny of the historical building.

Headliners of Auckland Live's Fringe Town for 2020, thrash metal trio Alien Weaponry will take the stage in the Great Hall on Saturday, February 29. Since releasing their debut studio album Tū, the band has claimed several NZ music awards and performed at festivals in Europe and North America.

Elsewhere in the music department, Outsider Sounds is back for 2020. The free concert series on the top floor of the Auckland Town Hall features six days of eclectic and multidisciplinary artists. Melbourne-based songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick will also perform her 'terrifyingly loud masterwork', The Queen Who Stole The Sky, live on the Auckland Town Hall organ. The epic instrument produces enough air to push an elephant 200 metres.

The Auckland Town Hall's Concert Chamber will feature the premiere of light installation Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle?. Created by lighting designer Rachel Marlow, the multi-sensorial experience draws influence from the classic Brothers Grimm tale. The magical light-filled space will be performed every 20 minutes.

From The New Zealand Dance Company and The Conch comes This Fragile Planet, a dance theatre work inspired by the delicacy of our ecosystems, our impact on Mother Earth, and the beauty of art and nature intertwining. Two intimate performances will take place on the floor of the Great Hall with standing room for 100 people only.

Pasifika theatre company Tales from a Kava Bowl presents Burning Opinion, a bilingual piece performed in Tongan and English. Set in 2006, in Nuku'alofa Tonga Tapu in the lead-up to the riots of Black Thursday, the stage show reimagines Tongan movement, dance, song and spoken word.

Wrapping up Auckland Live's Fringe Town for 2020 is Taurite. The in-development Māori dance work will make its premiere in the Concert Chamber courtesy of Hawaiki TŪ — the only Auckland-based professional company of Māori artists specialising in haka theatre. The piece embodies the dual nature of being: action and reaction.