Lift-Off
Te Auaha, Tapere Iti, 65 Dixon St, Wellington
26/02/2021 - 28/03/2021
Production Details
Kick off your 2021 Fringe festival season with a one-stop sample of brand-new work from exciting artists emerging onto the Capital’s performing arts scene. See tomorrow’s taste-makers live and firing on all cylinders at Lift-Off!
Lift-Off is a three-part showcase, bringing together the original work Felix, Flora and Emily created as part of their final courses of study last year. The now-graduates have spent the past few months developing and finessing their work, collaborating with former tutors and fellow graduates to bring new details to light.
Lift-Off highlights the talents of 2020 graduates Flora Dryburgh (musical theatre), Emily Morgan (commercial dance) and Felix Crossley-Pritchard (stage and screen).
The idea for a joint venture with recent graduates came serendipitously. “We were looking for a way to support our grads and showcase new work, NZ Fringe is the perfect home for a project like that,” explains Venue Manager Will Harris. “By working in partnership with these three newly-graduated performers, and NZ Fringe, we know they’ll get valuable industry experience and have exceptional support and advice every step of the way.”
This year’s festival boasts more events than ever before, despite the impacts of Covid-19 and its accompanying travel and gathering restrictions. Lift-Off is one of more than two dozen Fringe events Te Auaha will host this year, and venues staff are excited to welcome the eclectic wave of artists and audiences into its theatres, bar and cinema. “One of the best things about being a Fringe venue is the sense of community,” says Harris. “Festivals like this allow emerging, mid-career and established artists to work alongside and learn from each other, and it’s wonderful to play a small part in helping those connections happen.”
Lift-Off is a three-part showcase, bringing together the original work Felix, Flora and Emily created as part of their final courses of study last year. The now-graduates have spent the past few months developing and finessing their work, collaborating with former tutors and fellow graduates to bring new details to light.
Lift-Off highlights the talents of 2020 graduates Flora Dryburgh (musical theatre), Emily Morgan (commercial dance) and Felix Crossley-Pritchard (stage and screen).
The idea for a joint venture with recent graduates came serendipitously. “We were looking for a way to support our grads and showcase new work, NZ Fringe is the perfect home for a project like that,” explains Venue Manager Will Harris. “By working in partnership with these three newly-graduated performers, and NZ Fringe, we know they’ll get valuable industry experience and have exceptional support and advice every step of the way.”
This year’s festival boasts more events than ever before, despite the impacts of Covid-19 and its accompanying travel and gathering restrictions. Lift-Off is one of more than two dozen Fringe events Te Auaha will host this year, and venues staff are excited to welcome the eclectic wave of artists and audiences into its theatres, bar and cinema. “One of the best things about being a Fringe venue is the sense of community,” says Harris. “Festivals like this allow emerging, mid-career and established artists to work alongside and learn from each other, and it’s wonderful to play a small part in helping those connections happen.”
https://fringe.co.nz/show/lift-off
Graduates from Te Ahaua 2020 showing their Body of Works.
1) Flora Dryburgh £=‘Hirath’ ( Musical Theatre) ;
2) Felix Crossley-Pritchard Birdbrain ( Stage&Screen) and
3) Emily Morgan The Race ( Commercial Dance)
Musical , Commercial dance , Cabaret , Dance ,
60 mins
Special, clever, charming and mesmeric
Review by Deirdre Tarrant 02nd Mar 2021
Billed in the pink programme of all things Fringe as ‘ a triple -header of fresh emerging talent’ I am intrigued but very uninformed and still oblivious to ‘what and who’ to expect when I take my seat on a radiantly sunny afternoon in a darkened theatre. No programme or introduction so immersion is the only way!
1) A beautiful in a Kate -Winslet- Irish- Titanic – way singer steps into a world of imagination and transports us using songs we know, musicians who become part of her story, cardboard cutouts, fairy lights and love to let us smile and be transported for just a little while. Special, clever, charming and mesmeric. These are talented artists and I feel much better for seeing this work. This is what art can do in an uneasy world.
2) Next up a lounge room setting with a side table, a wedding photo and a rose, two armchairs with scarves? shawls? wraps? ready for a chilly air to pass through…. an elderly solo figure struggles in, a nurse bustles uncaringly about and we are in a rest home. Detailed and well- researched the old man displays an impish sense of humour, a helplessness and a firm resilience as we share personal moments in his memory/ mind. He feeds imaginary birds real crackers as he remembers the wife who could be actually still sitting in the chair beside him. A life well lived and clearly a life that had loving moments. A son? Enters. Mumbles. Preoccupied by technology and on his phone – there is yearning disparity, humour, pathos, tragic darkness and light in this vignette. It could have been caricature but there is skill in the acting that draws this picture of a possible and uncomfortable imagining of where we could be headed in our own lives.
3)The third work sits outside the world of imagination and is a dance work with a highly charged and aggressive vocabulary of striving and winning and pushing onwards- to what? White clad and very serious dancers use a vocabulary that provides external shapes and a lot of falls but little torso release or dynamic variance. This dance forces our focus and thrusts us away from the nostalgic and personal ‘ lift off’ of the first two works. Here , is literally physical lift off and the constant pull of gravity bringing these bodies back to earth and to the next combination of steps. A large cast pushes out into the space before a soloist breaks away from the unison and canon and finds her own relentless goal. Unresolved she is subdued back into the rather robotic and harsh edges of the team.
Well done and after the show I went on a search to find out who these performers were as they deserve full credit for a compelling hour of ‘Lift- Off’
They were :
Graduates from Te Ahaua 2020 showing their Body of Works.
1) Flora Dryburgh £=‘Hirath’ ( Musical Theatre) ;
2) Felix Crossley-Pritchard Birdbrain ( Stage & Screen) and
3) Emily Morgan The Race ( Commercial Dance)
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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