Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: Tuwhare (2006) & T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. (2010)
Today's images are brought to you by the letter T: first, Tuwhare, the concert tribute to the great New Zealand poet Hone Tuwhare. Following on from Baxter in the 2000 Festival, songwriters were invited to create a new work using one of Tuwhare's poems, and an album and concert were created from those.
It was great to see - and hear - some of the country's best paying tribute to Hone, and it's interesting to note the longevity of some of the songs. (I'm pretty sure, when Don McGlashan & Dave Dobbyn played Sydney recently, they each did one - Dave's Song Of The Years from Baxter, and Don's Rain from this show.)
T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. - easier to say than type - was another in the great theatre lineup at the 2010 Festival, this one from Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna - neither easy to type, nor say. Visually amazing, I was glad to have a chance to photograph it, even for a short period one afternoon during a tech rehearsal.
One thing that struck me about it was, being at the TSB Arena, it was a very contrasting use of the space to the show that preceded it, The Sound of Silence. While the design of the Latvian show was quite shallow and wide, running across the front of the seating block but having very little depth, showing a series of small apartments next to each other, this was the opposite - incredibly deep, and fairly narrow (as I recall it), neither of which is something you see often on stage in New Zealand.
It's interesting to wonder what some more flexible theatre spaces in NZ would bring out in terms of set & lighting design; and it's surprising to see what designers in other countries think is going to be easy to tour!