This year’s Christchurch Arts Festival opens outdoors, on a cold but beautiful winter’s evening, with a pōwhiri on the banks of the Ōtākaro, the Avon River. We, as members of the public, are an audience watching the ceremony from across the river, and it’s a beautiful way to open the evening and the festival – a clear statement of intent.

During the formalities, Artistic Director George Parker indicates that this revamped festival is an opportunity to reflect upon who we are and where we’re going. Outside of the festival’s programming, which emphasises local talent and arts organisations across various disciplines, it’s also lovely to see this work in practice, as members of the community. My companion and I sit on the river banks, bundled up against the cold, watching little kids play with the eels (and, I think, the eels play with the children) while local kapa haka group Te Pao a Tahu perform.

This opening ceremony is performed along the portion of Oxford Terrace that had been known, pre quakes, as The Strip, but which has in recent years been transformed into The Terrace: a long promenade that connects bars and restaurants with a pedestrian mall and updated landscaping along the banks of the river. After the opening formalities the action comes to ‘our’ side of the river. You can see the civic potential in this space during the periods where there is a genuine carnival atmosphere marked by lights and noise and smoke, with families and performers interacting in a mid-winter street party.  

This is augmented with sound from live musical performances, which are taking place on stages at either end of the promenade, and the clips from notable Shakespearean films, which have been distorted and projected on a massive scale up the side of what was once the Rydges Hotel. This, too, gives a great sense of looking back, culturally, to look forward.

The performers include core members of Free Theatre’s company, dressed in some gorgeous white mock Elizabethan garb augmented with fairy lights, as well as circus performers and masked clowns – students from the National School of Singing and Dramatic Art (NASDA) – who are costumed with coffee sacks. They wander up and down the street, interacting with passers-by, performing burlesques that parody well known Shakespearean scenes. As with other recent Free Theatre productions, there are also some terrific, large character puppets made of sack cloth and wire, many of which are lit from within and mounted from performers’ shoulders; I’m particularly fond of a horse’s head – Richard III’s vanished mount?

This opening performance, which is being repeated the following night, offers a lot of fun and a few interesting surprises, as players pop up, or make music, from unexpected places, although the sense of energy can’t quite be sustained along the whole length of the street so at times it feels a little sporadic. We bounce along between each end of the performance area before settling first in the courtyard of a bar and then at the food trucks down one end where there are, thankfully, some braziers. It’s a warm and worthy start to a festival that hopes to light up the winter. 

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