The Fortune Theatre is taking the opportunity to push artistic boundaries and do something out of the ordinary during the Otago Festival of the Arts.
The company wanted to do something offbeat and off-site, Fortune Theatre artistic director Lara Macgregor says.
So it is hiring its building to other productions and taking a multimedia installation/performance, Play by Samuel Beckett, to one of the city's historic buildings.
Kidd makes life-sized sculptures using recycled corrugated iron, and Macgregor thought she would be ideal to create the three huge pots needed for Samuel Beckett's Play.
Play is about a man, his wife and his mistress, encased in large pots in somewhere like purgatory. A moving light triggers each to speak - the dialogue is fast and at the end someone says "repeat" and they repeat it, she says.
The cross-media performance/installation will be presented in the former Standard Insurance Company Building, which is being restored to its former glory, in Princes St between the former BNZ and National Bank buildings.
The early-evening performance will be free and people on their way to a mainstage show elsewhere will be able to pop in for a short time or stay for the whole show.
Macgregor says she had been wanting to perform Play for a long time but because it was a non-literal work the opportunity would not ordinarily arise in the Fortune's normal programme.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright and poet and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, wrote Play in the early 1960s.
"There's a hollowness that comes with Beckett's work, like words suspended in space, almost. That has a fascination, so I suppose it's the technical challenge of bringing something like that to light.
"There's a coldness that is inherent because there's a detachment and to work in a detached way is very different from the way we are usually working which is an engaged way," she says.
For Franz Josef-based sculptor Hannah Kidd, designing pots in which actors sit was somewhat different from her usual line in life-sized metal sculptures.
She has created three huge urns on steel framework with covered flattened recycled corrugated iron for Play.
"When you are building a sculpture it doesn't have to be a functional object, but thinking about these pots, the actors actually have to get inside them, so of course you need to think about the weight, how they are going to get in, how they are going to get out, and you know how vulnerable they will feel when they are inside, whether they will be knocked over," she says.
Kidd graduated from Otago Polytechnic School of Art in 2001 and later worked for Methven Engineering Services to learn how to weld.
"It was the most fantastic thing I ever did in a practical sense because the way an engineer thinks compared to my ideas about making all these big things that would never actually stand up - the practical thinking of an engineer has been really beneficial to my work."
Although she lives in Franz Josef with her husband, a tourism helicopter pilot, and their two toddlers, Kidd also has a workshop in their home town, Ashburton. She commutes a week a month because she employs an assistant there.
"I build the framework in Franz Josef - that's the thinking part of making the sculpture, and the cladding, the welding on the skin, is kind of like colouring in, in a way. It's already dictated how you will chop each little piece to fit in."
See it
Play, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Lara Macgregor collaborating with sculptor Hannah Kidd and lighting designer Stephen Kilroy, is at the Standard Insurance Building, 201 Princes St, daily from October 10-13 from 5.30pm-7pm.
Dave Armstrong's Where we once belonged is an adaptation of the 1994 Commonwealth Prize-winning novel by Sia Figiel. In 2008, it won the Chapman Tripp Theatre Award for best New Zealand play.
Lively, spirited and fiercely written, it is an unflinchingly honest, sometimes brutal, yet wildly funny coming-of-age story set in 1970s Samoa. As young Alofa navigates life in her village of Malaefou, she comes to terms with her own changing sense of identity and the price she must pay for it.
One of the underlying threads is the tension between the individual and the group, and darker themes include the threat and execution of violence, the power adults have over children, the oppressiveness of an introduced religion and the bleakness of being isolated from your culture or community are seeded early in lighter, more humorous scenarios full of vitality, ebullience, and irreverence.
Armstrong's earlier works include The Motor Camp, The Tutor and Rita And Angus.
See it
Where we once belonged, by Dave Armstrong makes its South Island debut at the Fortune Theatre on October 8 for four nights at 7.30pm.
Being deaf does not stop Asphyxia performing - in fact, she has used it as an opportunity to create unusual shows, from a trapeze act on a tightrope 13m above the ground to manipulating puppets in a magical gothic fairy tale, The Grimstones, which will be performed at the Fortune Theatre during the Otago Festival of the Arts.
With a background in ballet, but rejected by the Australian Ballet School because of her deafness, she trained as a circus acrobat.
"I was hungry for a physical discipline which gave me the freedom to be deaf, to be different and to use it as an advantage rather than try to cover it up," she says.
However, a chance encounter with Chilean puppeteer Sergio Barrios on the streets of Guatemala, where she was touring with her circus/theatre show Blood Makes Noise, gave her a new direction.
"I was fortunate to have a few masterclasses in puppetry and he also drew instructions for me as to how to make my own puppets. When I got back to Australia, I got to work turning my new knowledge into a puppet show, The Paint Factory. The Grimstones is my second puppet show."
She wanted to create a large puppet show that would fill the larger stages she works on and was intrigued by the gothic themes in movies - and her teenage years as a goth. She spent hours in her loft studio building the puppets, the props and the large books that pop up to form the sets, mostly from discarded objects and junk.
"The Grimstones: Hatched is essentially a puppet show, but it's no traditional piece with the puppeteers hidden behind a velvet curtain. The performers walk through the set and interact with the puppets, creating an amazing juxtaposition of scale: the miniature world meets our world. The story is told partly through narration in sign language with voice translation, and partly through the expressive movements of the puppets themselves. It's sprinkled with humour and delightful magic surprises."
It is aimed at anyone who likes a gothic fairy tale or a world in miniature - children, teens, adults, seniors all love the show, she says.
It is about a girl called Martha, who longs to work magic like her grandfather Elcho, but he won't let her. She can read dreams and sees her mother Velvetta's grieving for her husband, Martha's father, Mortimer, who died some years earlier, and her desire to have more children. Martha steals into Elcho's studio to work a spell and creates an egg from which hatches her baby brother Crumpet, who turns out to be different due to an error in the spell.
The show explores themes of family love and acceptance, The central message is about the importance of accepting those we consider to be different, Asphyxia says.
"I like to offer an insight into deaf culture and lifestyle. For hearing audiences this is often quite educational; for deaf audiences it validates their lifestyle and for young deaf audiences it provides a positive role model. It also makes the show fully accessible to both deaf and hearing audiences", she says.
She and co-performer Paula Dowse offer a question and answer session after the show so members of the audience can ask anything they want to and often unusual and personal questions come up.
Asphyxia was a nickname given her by her brother as a joke. She called him Ataxia (lack of muscle co-ordination) in return, but Asphyxia stuck.
At university there was so much confusion about her "other" name on the roll, she changed it legally to streamline everything, she says.
She has written several books, three Grimstone stories, Hatched, Mortimer Revealed and Whirlwind, and An Artist's Journal which records her creative process while making the puppets.
See it
The Grimstones: Hatched by Asphyxia is at the Fortune Theatre from October 12 and 13 at 6.30pm and October 13 and 14 at 2pm.
