Cruise control distracts crowds

By PAUL PANCKHURST

The scary time for Taranaki Festival director Roger King was the long stretch of summer when ticket sales for the event, the biggest of the New Plymouth arts calendar, stubbornly refused to take off.

"A late flyer" is King's description of the festival, which kicked off on February 27.

Founded in 1991, the biennial event is slotted into the off-years of the Wellington arts festival, and will soon face the complication of an Auckland festival.

King attributed the slow take-off to local minds turned elsewhere - largely in the direction of Tom Cruise and The Last Samurai - and alternative events such as a Santana concert.

King has organisationally scarier stuff to come, however, with the world music festival Womad tacked on to the end of the Taranaki Festival and expecting an audience of 15,000 over three days from Friday.

A sampling of the festival so far ...

On one side of New Plymouth's main street, citizens poured into the festival's biggest attraction, The Pickle King, the final instalment of the loose trilogy from the Indian Ink Theatre Company that began with the winning Krishnan's Dairy, an Indian comedy of fast-moving mask switches.

The Pickle King's New Plymouth run drew audiences that, at the time of writing, were 2500 and counting.

A typically uncertain review in the local newspaper said some thought the show long, and lacking in action and pace, while "others" were just delighted.

On the quieter and darker side of the street, a few dozen people slipped into the Mayfair one night - a venue next to a sex shop called Nauti Nik Naks - to hear Duncan Sarkies.

The writer of the movie Scarfies is in his fourth year of solo public readings of expletive-loaded stories of obsession, compulsion, sex in cars, "derrrbrains", and drug-diminished experiences of OE, from his book Stray Thoughts and Nose Bleeds.

He illustrates the stories with a slide show (a map of Amsterdam gone fuzzy, a series of a stranger stalked down the street and killed by a bus, sex in cars).

The readings still work.

The stated centrepiece of the festival was The Prodigal Child, a new, local and festival-commissioned chamber opera with a story largely set in a early 1900s New Zealand back-blocks pub. It was performed in a cathedral.

In a word: lugubrious.

An excerpt from the synopsis: "Anna, an itinerant, wanders through wild landscapes distraught and maddened with grief by the loss of her child."

An excerpt from the libretto: "Leave that alone wife/Can't you see I'm trying to read the news?"

Opera fans were won by the work, rating highly the singing of Paul Whelan, Joanne Cole and Stephanie Acraman, but the taste for a show like this is a very particular one.

A festival surprise: choral music pulls crowds.

The Wellington-based Sings Harry vocal ensemble packed the pews of St Andrew's Church with a lunchtime concert on a Thursday that ranged through Mendelssohn, Benjamin Britten, a Samoan song called Minoi, minoi and the Beatles' Penny Lane.

A British actor and New Plymouth festival veteran, Guy Masterton, was back with another solo show of works by Dylan Thomas, this time including A Visit to Grandpa's, Holiday Memory and A Child's Christmas in Wales.

The delivery was physical, the show was a stand-out, and Aucklanders will not see it.

Masterton took it to Wellington before the festival but described Auckland as "a more difficult proposition ... it takes a lot more effort and finance to make the public aware of the work".

Two exhibitions launched in tandem with the festival at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery were Ultimate Ground, a collection of Ralph Hotere works in black, and Extended Play, New Zealand and international art works that sample, distort and reassemble the music and motifs of pop, rock and dance.

Near a Kylie Minogue press clippings shrine is a videotape of a little known Australian artist, Kati Rule, in her garage, performing Michael Jackson's dance moves from the video of the 1980s song Thriller.

One effect of this tactic - removing the original artist from the performance - is to illustrate how deeply embedded is the choreography alone in the brains of a generation.

Elsewhere, the gallery's staff are the subjects of a test of endurance as Swiss-born artist Pipilotti Rist takes apart the old Chris Isaak song Wicked Game. There's a lyrics-screamed segment that pierces throughout the lower levels of the gallery, every five minutes. Sound leakage in the gallery is sometimes an issue but this is a high-quality show.

This week's highlights include the debut on Wednesday of Black Grace dance company shows Surface and Human Language - and then the start of what King says will be a distinctively New Zealand-ish Womad.

A footnote to the whole thing: what King described as the late withdrawal of Telecom as a sponsor. Something to do with the money sucked up by a black boat.