An enticing synopsis and cast biographies are usually dispatched forthwith when a theatre company promotes a show, but Rebel Alliance isn't saying much at all about Standstill.
Other than crediting company founder Anders Falstie-Jensen as writer and director, it is not revealing the cast, content or genre.
Standstill is one of the more than 100 cabaret, burlesque, comedy, dance, music, theatre and visual arts events that make up the second Auckland Fringe Festival. It encourages performers to create boundary-pushing work and is more experimental and provocative than so-called mainstream productions.
In keeping with the spirit of the festival, the Rebel Alliance wants Standstill shrouded in mystery.
"We're simply asking people to take a chance and go in to see a play they know absolutely nothing about," says Falstie-Jensen.
"It's a bit of an experiment but since the Fringe festival is all about taking chances on the unknown, I thought it would be interesting to see how adventurous people really are."
A call-out was made in June for contributions to the fringe, garnering enthusiastic responses from local, national and a handful of international artists.
Festival director Sally Barnett says as the event is completely open access, all contributions were welcome as long as performers weren't proposing anything illegal.
"There are fringe festivals in most major cities and they are an important extension of arts development programmes which support the growth of audiences and encourage the making of new work. It's a way to corral different creative impulses and put them under one umbrella to promote the work."
In 2009, at the first Auckland Fringe, some 10,000 ticket-buyers watched 75 shows performed by 900 artists, while an estimated 30,000 people went to free, or koha, events.
This year's festival includes an opening weekend event, Fringe in the Park, at Myers Park next Saturday. Installations, live opera, pole dancing and hula hooping, a chance to be part of a live art project, snippets from Auckland Fringe and poetry delivered atop a horse are on the schedule.
Myers Park is also the venue for the outdoor production When Animals Dream of Sheep. It combines drama, music and dance from theatre company Winning Productions. The hour-long show explores how the relationship between animals and humans is challenged by how we define nature itself.
Suitable for all ages, it begins and ends with a paper-walled bedroom as a departure and arrival point for hopes, fantasies, fears and reflections and revisits the strange creatures created in outdoor performances of My Heart is a Beast for the Christchurch Arts Festival and the Auckland Living Room Series.
Barnett says because artists had to find their own venues, there's a tremendous spread across Auckland of theatres, gardens, parks, galleries, living rooms, community, church and scout halls, restaurants, cafes and pubs, public swimming pools, alleyways and even lifts being used as performance spaces.
A show at one of the smallest theatres, the Basement, may be among the biggest.
Tim Watts, 26, brings The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer to Auckland after a season at the 2009 New York International Festival, where he won an award for outstanding solo show.
Three years ago, puppeteer Watts created a deep sea diver puppet at a workshop shortly before he went scuba diving for the first time. It was the impetus he needed for a story to combine his love of the ocean, puppetry, animation and technology.
Alvin Sputnik is a whimsical tale about the power of enduring love and the end of the world. In the distant future, the seas have risen, billions have died, and those who remain live on farms on top of skyscrapers, on top of mountains. It is up to Alvin Sputnik to venture through the mysterious depths to find a place for the human race to live in peace once more.
"There's something so awe-inspiring about the ocean and it created inspiration that kept bubbling away," says Watt. "I felt I should make a show with an environmental message, but I wanted it to be beautiful rather than preachy."
Watts says his success in New York was "overwhelming".
"I'm from Perth, where it's tough to get an audience or recognition so to go to a place considered a mecca of theatre and to get that sort of acknowledgement was, well, wow ..."
Other international shows include the comedy The Hermitude of Angus, Ecstatic, classical musicians Menage A Trio, Shakespeare's Will - the story of the unsung hero in the Bard's life, his wife, Anne Hathaway - and Silk from the London-based Apostrophe Productions.
But most performers are Auckland-based. Playwright Tom Sainsbury stages his latest dark comedy, Joseph and Mahina, in which he stars with Renee Lyons. The duo has collaborated seven times before, but this is the first time Sainsbury has handed the reins to someone else to direct, Hera Dunleavy, best known as an actor.
Joseph and Mahina is the first full-length play she has directed and she's excited about the challenge.
"It certainly makes a change to have someone else doing some of the work," adds Sainsbury.
Emerging aerial theatre company The Dust Palace, headed by Eve Gordon, take fairy tales in a new direction in Deep in the Forest: A Cautionary Cabaret. The company is transforming Cassette Number Nine on Vulcan Lane into a witch's cottage, deep in a fringe festival forest.
Flaxworks Theatre's Drowning in Veronica Lake could also be described as a cautionary tale.
Veronica Lake, the 1940s Hollywood movie star, is the poster child for every star who's suddenly become famous and is hopelessly unprepared to cope with it, says Flaxworks co-founder and performer Alex Ellis.
"At the peak of her career, Veronica Lake was one of Paramount's highest paid stars; she dined with the president and piloted her own plane across the continent but in less than a decade she was out of control, out of work, out of money and stuck in a spectacular nose dive that led to alcoholism and obscurity.
"Although Lake's story takes place in the 1940s it still echoes in the gossip pages and publicity websites of today's celebs and stars."
Ellis acknowledges the production moves Flaxworks, known for offbeat comedies like Murder by Chocolate and Biscuit and Coffee, into more dramatic subject matter.
But she says the Fringe is the perfect place to launch a new work.
"There is so much happening and there is a real buzz, you almost feel like a visitor in your own town."
Performance
What: Auckland Fringe
Where and when: Venues throughout Auckland, February 25-March 13
Stand by for big fringe adventure
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.