Today's uncomfortable ideas are tomorrow's social norms and the artists exploring those boundaries often test that work at Fringe festivals. Mary de Ruyter talks to creatives presenting topical work at the first Whangārei Fringe Festival.
If you're thinking hairstyle, stop right there. Not that sort of fringe. Fringe festivals are a testing ground for quirky, experimental works that explore new ideas. New Zealand currently has close to 10 Fringe festivals, and this month Whangārei joins that arts circuit.
In a year of large-scale cancellations and delays, the Whangārei Fringe Festival has lined up 88 eclectic arts events for – fingers crossed – 17 days. Some are provocative, some silly fun. Others, such as those below, tackle topical issues with courage, curiosity and a healthy dose of absurdity.
A Fantastical Journey by Boat
In January, our skies turned yellow and orange – climate change had brought a deadly beauty to our doorstep. There are echoes of that in this immersive, multimedia performance art piece.
Artist Sarah-Jane Blake and her husband Alistair Moore, both experienced ocean sailors, are sailing to Whangārei from Auckland in an international offshore racing boat named Darth Vader, on which they live, to present their surreal virtual-reality work A Fantastical Journey by Boat.
The 20-minute experience takes participants across an ocean to an altered landscape, where whales fly and icebergs sit in a desert, says Blake.
"In our world, we've seen yellow skies from forest fires and pink seas from algal blooms – strange phenomena that present in candy-wrapper colours – but we know these dangerously beautiful skies or seas are not healthy ones."
The atmosphere is at once magical, uneasy and nonsensical, an upside-down world inspired by Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat. Blake's drawing attention to environmental issues in a very different way from her father, the late Sir Peter Blake.
"We need a radical shift in the way we think about things, our systems and ideas, if we are to change the world," says Blake. "Perhaps I'm trying to shift perspectives and shake things up just by doing something publicly odd."
A Fantastical Journey By Boat will travel the North Island's east coast from October 2020. www.darthandstormy.com