The second week of the Auckland Arts Festivals showed the versatility of the city’s spaces, even when not matched entirely correctly with shows. Sam Brooks reviews (with assistance from Shanti Mathias).

I often dismay at the lack of performance spaces we have in Auckland, and it takes something like the Arts Festival to highlight that it isn’t that we necessarily lack spaces, but lack the right things to fill those spaces. This second week of the festival was a reminder of what happens when a show meets the exact right venue, and also what happens when a show is ill-served by its space.

The first show I saw last week took me into the Herald Theatre, that flexi-form space with the steepest rake in Auckland. A deeply silly spy comedy isn’t what you expect from an arts festival show, but Skyduck delivers exactly that. The solo show, told in both English and subtitled Mandarin by Sam Wang, follows two Chinese spies who are sent to steal America’s most prized flight simulation software.

The plot doesn’t really matter too much, the show is mostly a showcase for some tech (robotics, animatronics, a massive arcade-style machine) and Wang’s completely winning charisma. He’s one of those performers who brings the characters to him instead, giving the show the kind of euphoric glee that you might expect from a kid performing in his living room to his extended family. However, most kids don’t get to play around with high tech robotics in their living rooms like Wang does (literally hopping in and driving around aforementioned arcade-style machine), and honestly, those are the best moments of the show.

While the show’s a fun ride, there’s an odd tension within it. The jokes and references are a decade old, Inception especially is less referenced to and more explicitly borrowed from, which is especially strange given the show is set over a decade before that, in the 90s. Complicating things, Skyduck seems squarely aimed at a younger audience who wouldn’t have any of these reference points within easy reach. Thus, the references feel less like jokes and more like, well, just references. A reference is nice, but it’s no substitute for a joke, and there’s more than a few instances when the former is asked to do the job of the latter.

Over at the ASB Waterfront, the exact right blend of cavernous and intimate, SandSong continued a line throughout the festival of works engaging with, and criticising, colonisation. The show, which comes from Bangarra, one of the world’s most successful and acclaimed First Nations dance companies, with a strong 30 year history behind it, is also the company’s first show to make it to Auckland in 18 years.

Bangarra created the show in consultation with the Wangkatjungka/Walmajarri Elders, and it visualises the barbaric practice where many Aboriginal people were removed from their land and forced into hard labour with minimal, if any, compensation. More importantly, it shows how those people maintained their connection to their homeland.

As expected from a dance show in the festival, it is a platter of spectacle; incredible costumes, a backdrop that looks like it should be in an art gallery, and even some genuinely impressive aerial work. I can’t help but think back to The Savage Coloniser Show last week, and how that show so expertly picked at the scabs of colonisation. SandSong, by proxy, shows how deep colonisation goes into the bone, into the marrow, and perhaps the only way to reckon with it is to make and to create your way through it.

Look, I was not the target audience for Emil and the Detectives, over at Q’s Rangatira Space. I am not a child, do not have possession of a child that requires entertaining, and lost my childlike sense of wonder during one of the lockdowns. In saying that, the best children’s shows bring out even the softest parts of the most jaded adults.

The show, adapted from a children’s book, follows Emil, a child from small-town Australia, who hops on a train to see his grandmother holding some money, and ends up being swindled out of that money. He then, of course, has to get the money back, and makes a few friends along the way.  

For whatever reason, the show missed the mark for me. Perhaps it was the choice of the Rangatira space at Q for the show; the work felt dwarfed by it, making the myriad stage tricks used throughout feel hokier than I’m sure they do in a more intimate space. Maybe it was the quiet crowd of its target audience, who seemed unwilling to be roused into any sort of delight. Or maybe it was simply that the show was not for me (although the show’s one gamble with audience interaction absolutely works and softened even my hardened, weary heart).

There are certain shows that you see and know they’re going to be around for a long time. The Savage Coloniser Show is one of the shows from the festival that I know I’ll be smug to say that I saw on its opening night. He Huia Kaimanawa is a show I won’t be smug about, but will be stoked that I got to see it in its first outing, at the recently reopened Te Pou Theatre (a truly gorgeous space I can’t wait to see utilised more and more).

He Huia Kaimanawa bills itself as a “performance experience”, which in this case is code for “dance theatre”. It responds, through breathtaking use of AV, massive set-pieces and intense choreography, to the resurfacing, reclaiming and honouring of te reo Māori. It’s a visceral, immediate exploration of not what it feels like to come to te reo Māori as second language learners, but what it is. A massive set piece sits in the middle of the space, protecting language from people, or protecting people from language, and each of the dancers exists in tense, febrile conversation with that set piece.

By the time Tui Ranapiri-Ransfield was onstage at the end, smile on face and poi in both hands, a guiding light through the darkness, I was aware that I was seeing something special. Language doesn’t exist in books, it exists in the body, on the tongue, between people. Shows about language can feel heady or philosophical, but He Huia Kaimanawa felt immediate. It might end up being my favourite show of the festival, and while I’m sure it’ll tour across the country and hopefully the world, it felt at home in Te Pou.

Staff writer Shanti Mathias went along to Force of Nature, a curation of eight chamber music compositions commissioned for Forest and Bird’s 100th anniversary:

“Each piece reflected New Zealand’s natural environment in some way: tuna, or long-finned eels, pekapeka-tou-roa, albatrosses, insects on the forest floor. Rob Thorne, a master of taonga pūoro, walked in at the beginning, barefoot, the sound echoing, while projected blue light shimmered across the walls. I felt like I was inside a paua shell. All of these compositions are for chamber groups, which makes them particularly accessible to people who don’t know much about classical music. Because there’s only one performer playing each instrument, if you’re trying to figure out who is making what sound and how, it’s easy to see. A trill of birdsong coincides with the flautist’s quick fingers. The breathy high echo is a cellist with his finger on the very highest part of his highest string. That low hum? It’s the strings of a porotiti twisting and untwisting.

“Most of my experience of classical music is of the Bach or Schubert kind – old European composers, who have their own merits (I’ve watched Tár) – but knowing very little about contemporary composition made me appreciate the show more. It’s fascinating to see a more experimental approach to the instruments themselves: Amalia Hall tapping and breathing across her violin gave me more of an idea of how resonance works in these instruments than just seeing a bow arc across the strings, and watching Somi Kim pluck her grand piano strings reminded me that pianos are made of little hammers hitting taut wires. It made me feel really excited about contemporary composition, and want to listen to more present-day New Zealand composers. In the meantime, I reckon I’m going to have the Force of Nature album on repeat.”

I closed out my week with The Picture of Dorian Gray (already reviewed here) and had an even better time at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre than I did at its Sydney home; the grandeur of this venue means that the audience’s focus is on the various screens – solo performer Eryn Jean Wilson is too far away to see the subtleties of her face otherwise – and I had a smoother ride throughout. The silliness, the wit and the breakneck speed of this piece opened up to me in the bigger space.

Turns out we’ve got the spaces after all. Now, I just wish we had the shows and people filling them all year round.

Coming this week: The Picture of Dorian Gray runs until March 25, while The Unruly Tourists opera opens at the Bruce Mason on the North Shore on March 23, and acclaimed Edinburgh export The Chosen Haram opens on March 24. SamulNori! The Power of K-Rhythm, a high energy Korean folk music spectacle happens around the city all week too.