Another night out at the International Arts Festival

Last night my friend and I went out to a couple of Arts Festival events. Much like a film festival, it’s pretty much pot luck whether what sounds great on paper is going to be mind blowing, so darn strange you don’t know what you just saw, or so tedious that you want to go home at half time. Which was it this time?

First off, we went to an installation called Future Playground. Playground because the idea is to actually play with the technologies, and Future because they were, well, futuristic; the future of story telling.

Image Source, Festival website

The first thing we had a go at was a virtual reality simulation. Pop on goggles and headphones, and there you are inside a VR taxi, travelling around and seeing what’s happening in all directions. It was rather fascinating, except that after a couple of minutes I started to feel really motion sick and after about three, I pulled out. Kay was a bit stauncher, and lasted nearly the whole five minutes.

After finding somewhere to sit down for a while, and recover our equilibrium, we wandered around and checked out what else there was. There was a special audio meditation that you could listen to, to go into delta, but there were quite a few people waiting, so we flagged that. Most of the other things were VR as well, and although they looked fascinating, neither of us had the nerve to try anything else. I especially liked the look of one where you experience being a tree, starting out as a seed and growing.

Something called an infinity room sounded intriguing as well, but one glance through the door as someone else went in was enough!

Ok, so you can call us pikers, but after 15 minutes, we headed back out and strolled along the waterfront, then sat out in the fresh air till our next event.

The other event was a dance program called Rushes. This featured live musicians and about 35 dancers spread over a number of spaces. The audience was encouraged to visit and revisit each space as often as we liked over the following hour, with the final ten minutes all together in the central space.

We were also encouraged to take photos and upload them to media. This is very unusual for something in theatre, so I didn’t have my camera with me (idiot!) and had to use my phone. Since I never take photos with my phone, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and the conditions were a bit tricky, so the photos are a bit rubbish. But they will hopefully give you some idea.

The dance pieces were more organic than choreographed, as far as we could tell. The bones of the structure had been put in place, but the actual moves appeared to be more improvised, and interactive, as different dancers moved between the spaces and interacted in different ways.

The first room we went through had dancers standing unmoving in starting positions.

As we moved through the next few spaces, they were more like corridors with peep holes into either spaces where dancers were moving, or into things more like kaleidoscopes. At one point, we were moving through strips of white paper, sometimes meeting dancers going the other way. For a while, things were quite puzzling, and not much seemed to be happening.

Before too long, I found myself back in the lobby and realised there was another whole upstairs area. This had spaces that were more open and we were actually in the rooms the dancers were in.

The momentum was also building by this time, and it became more mesmerising and engaging. I spent quite a bit of time in the upstairs rooms, especially the one with couches!

This is a dreadful photo, that I wouldn’t have used, except that Deirdre Tarrant is in it. She was the only older dancer amongst a very young cast, and is a dance teacher and choreographer who has made a huge contribution to dance in New Zealand. You can read a little more about her here.

After a while I went back through all the spaces, and this time found my way into the central downstairs space, which previously I’d only peered into through peepholes. This was where the live musicians were, and more of the dancers started coming into the space, so we figured it was leading up to the finale.

There were a series of themes and patterns in the finale, which we engaged with more than in a usual performance as they were so close. At one point, they were all spinning, and as each spin came to an end, would get an audience member to push against a hand to send them spinning off in another direction. For the last movement, the audience were invited into the central space, to sit on the floor, while the dancers danced on the outside of the circle.

In summary, it was a very unusual performance, but was ultimately very engaging and mesmerising. If you’re in Wellington, and get a chance, do check it out. Last performance is on Monday.

You can read more about Rushes here – in fact, I think they explain it a lot better than I have!

Thanks for reading

Images by myself, unless otherwise stated.

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