Fringe Festival Review: When Animals Dream of Sheep, Lower Myers Park

<i>When Animals Dream of Sheep</i>. Photo / Supplied

The avant-garde end of Fringe Fest spectrum finds an appropriate niche with a free event held at the base of the stairs that link Saint Kevin's Arcade with Myers Park.

With the audience perched rather precariously on one side of a steeply raked gully the performance stretches out beneath a spectacular grove of Phoenix palms and reaches up to the concrete parking basements that line the Upper Queen Street border of the park.

In a bizarre piece of serendipity actors sporting deer antlers prance around a massive marble copy of the Michelangelo sculpture that depicts Moses with horns of light radiating from his head.

The show offers up a provocative meditation on the confluence on the animal and human worlds by blending a story about deer being illegally released onto a small Dutch island with an amusing account of various bureaucratic attempts to control the population of red deer in New Zealand.

The production represents a fruitful international collaboration between Dutch dance-theatre group TragicTrio and New Zealand director Stephen Bain.

Stylistically the work aligns itself with seventies performance and installation art rather than conventional theatre and the combination of live music, dance, drama and video projection throws up some powerful images.

Conversational dialogue shades into a comical Greek chorus, weirdly amplified animal noises emerge from the dark recesses of the park and a dreamy sequence has a family of masked deer engaging in mundane breakfast table conversation while retaining a disturbingly animalistic presence.

The production may not be everyone's cup of tea but it provides a tantalising glimpse of the inspired madness that will be unleashed on the city as the Arts Festival hits its stride in the coming weeks.