This Rugged Beauty - theatre performance media release

Binge Culture Collective presents…

It was just beautiful at the batch – 100 % pure NZ. Almost as good as a Tip Top ad. Why can't our parties be more like Export Gold parties? Our summers more like Tip Top summers? Our lives as passionate as a test match?
This Rugged Beauty is an anarchic, unhinged and hilarious performance taking a hard look at what it means to be branded "kiwi".

It explores the way advertisements and media sell us the myths of who we are. On a voyage to discover what their country means to them, Binge Culture Collective have spent the past few months watching beer advertisements, Shortland Street, and the brewing excitement of the Rugby World Cup. This Rugged Beauty is both a huge, doomed advertisement for NZ, and a nostalgic memoir of childhood summers at the batch.

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Binge Culture Collective, a group of recent Victoria University graduates, who each had a different “Kiwi” upbringing from Nelson to Hawkes Bay, from suburban Wellington to a childhood at sea set out to make this project well aware of how presumptuous it is to think a group of university-educated 20-somethings can tell the story of New Zealand…but perhaps it was this lack of real connection to their country that has encouraged them to try. Actor, Claire O’Loughlin, who grew up circumnavigating the world with her family on a yacht, says:

“When I got back, I felt intensely disconnected from New Zealand history and my place in it...yet at the same time my history here is old. My family was among the first settlers: my great-grandma shot and killed the abusive man who got her pregnant but wouldn’t marry her, her case caused nationwide protest; my great-grandpa was Commander of the Maori Battalion in WWII, another great-grandfather donated Wakefield Street to the Church in a moment of drunken fervor… all of this makes up who I am, but is lost on me.”

Binge Culture Collective burst into the Wellington Theatre scene in 2009 with Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish (Best Newcomers Award, New Zealand Fringe Festival). Since then they have performed all over New Zealand: Dunedin’s Octagon and Globe Theatre, atop Takaka Hill at Canaan Downs New Year Festival, Auckland’s Queen St, K Road and Basement Theatre and Wellington’s BATS Theatre, Midland Park, Cuba Street and Downstage Theatre bar. For This Rugged Beauty the collective has widened their collaborators, including Chapman Tripp Award nominated sound designer Andrew Simpson (A Brief History of Helen of Troy) and Bruce Mason Award Winner Eli Kent, who’s The Intricate Art of Actually Caring dealt with similar themes of young New Zealanders searching to feel a genuine connection to a history they are told belongs to them.

Performed by Rachel Baker, Joel Baxendale, Simon Haren, Claire O'Loughlin, Eli Kent.
Designed by Kattral Lee, Jessica Sweden
Sound Design by Gareth Hobbs and Andrew Simpson.
Dramaturg Fiona McNamara. Produced by Rose Guise. Directed by Ralph Upton.

7:30pm, 25 February-5 March (no show Monday)
Studio 77, 77 Fairlie Terrace, Kelburn Wellington

ENDS

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