Rotorua Festival of Arts
Hotel
Princes Gate Hotel
Runs each night March 4 to 9 .
Much like a more intimate version of an airport departure lounge, a hotel room can be a stopover spot, an inbetween zone where hopes and plans - and even desires - are laid out.
An intriguing
performance examines these possibilities, so close you can almost touch it, with the site-specific theatre production Hotel, performed at Princes Gate Hotel.
A slightly guilty feeling attaches itself to the intimate 20 audience members who are led through the corridors to the Marvelly Suite. All become "voyeurs", as they go up the stairs to the bedroom where a couple lie cradling scantily clad, through to the steamy bathroom where another actor is bathing in suds, to the living room where the watchers snug up to the wall seating.
A businessman talks into his earpiece about his foggy airport landing in Tauranga as he opens the cupboards and makes the room's fittings his own. A thin young woman strolls gargling across the room in her bathrobe, figuring which beauty treatment to do next.
Considering the dirty details of what's gone on with previous guests, she plucks a hair from the table and flushes it.
Another woman finds a gifted sexy green dress, which she dons, then awaits her suitor.
The bedroom couple emerge and in different states of dress and redefine their roles.
Each scenario is paced so that while the actors share the stage, they enact separate visits. An all-New Zealand musical soundtrack provides the cues for mood and movement.
Anxieties of invisible interaction with the outside world are played out in the paid-for solace of a hotel room, where behind closed doors humiliation, broken hearts and stealing from the mini-bar are fair game.
The imaginations of Hotel's creators, Paul McLaughin and Gavin Rutherford, who act in the Rotorua show, answer to the curious and heartfelt for a unique, up close and personal performance.
For more information visit www.rotoruaartsfestival.co.nz.
