Best Newcomers WGTN Fringe 09 hit Dunedin

“An engaging, compelling, provoking and confronting challenge” -John Smythe, Theatreview

Trapped at a party where the beer is warm, the music is shit and the world is ending

Best Newcomers WGTN Fringe 09 hit Dunedin

What does it mean to be part of a generation that is constantly being told it has no future?

Binge Culture Collective’s Drowning Bird Plummeting Fish recently won the Best Newcomer Award at Wellington Fringe Festival, and the collective has been offered to perform alongside the Pick of Fringe Season at Downstage Theatre, as well as creating fresh filmed skits with the Gibson Group.

In Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish four performers become their own doppelgangers; more playful, less predictable, more vulnerable and more dangerous. They bring to the Dunedin stage an extreme party in which the stakes are getting higher, the resources fewer, and the party games more deadly.

Looking at the effect of the violent collision between our ever-consuming society and the rising problems of planet earth; climate change, overpopulation and peak oil, the show explores how we as individuals deal with the hysteria, and endless conflicting voices warning us of what may be around the corner.

“Do we get on the stage for the same reasons we get on the piss? To become funnier, smoother versions of ourselves? To get away with the socially unacceptable? Or just to escape from the present, or from a future towards which we are ambivalent?” asks director Ralph Upton, who established the group to devise his Victoria University Honours production 1001 Things You Must Do Before You Die.

Binge Culture draws influence from UK theatre company Forced Entertainment. A Wellington based group, the “brazen and spontaneous” Binge Culture (Melody Nixon, Lumiere Reader) aims to make their work accessible, to New Zealanders, by exploring the personal effect of global issues and by bringing versions of their shows from the theatre out onto the streets. They perform regularly in Wellington’s Cuba Mall, have been seen in Midland Park and as the roving Anomaly on Takaka Hill at Canaan Downs New Year Festival; and now bring their work to Dunedin.

Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish is an interactive playful encounter that keeps the audience on their toes. “An innovative on target, topical, engaged performance provided professionally with edgy punctuality in an inhospitable environment." (Simon Kong).

ENDS

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