Here's the latest draft for the Rugged Beauty poster. It's a show we're doing at the end of March at BATS. What do you think? Hopefully better than this one.

Also! You should check out the sweet webpage of our friend and frequent collaborator, sound designer Gareth Hobbs. There's a clip of the music from This Rugged Beauty among lots of other good stuff.  

Photos by Alastair Upton

Have you heard the Kincaid weekender?  

Welcome to the Kincaid Weekender! Every Saturday of the 2014 NZ Fringe Festival, a new easily-digested 20 minute episode of this comfy small-town radio show becomes available right here. Join Stanley Mills, Pete Brown, Gerard Colbeck and more white men in this delightful aural outing. It's the Fringe show you can enjoy between Fringe shows!Presented by Cinema In Decline for the NZ Fringe Festival


I found it pretty bang on.

Ralph

"We asked the Grim Reapers to come up with a really banging musical clip to get people excited about our Help Us Change! project, and they gave us... this".

Barbarian productions are bringing their reapers back for the performance arcade. Here's the blurb: 

"Fearing their lack of engagement with the youth, two Grim Reapers take time out from their usual business for an ‘outreach initiative’, canvassing public perception of their organisation. The Reapers directly survey passers-by and use their feedback to generate a wider conversation across social media/the blogosphere around themes of organizational change, personal growth and mortality."

A few people have asked me why our company is breaking up. I thought I'd try and explain it here as best I can, though words can be so difficult.

Just to be clear, this is a make-believe break-up, as part of Fringe. It's not real.  It's the game of breaking up, improvised over an evening. It's between five performers, but it's one conversation.

It lasts six hours. You don't have to stay that long. In fact, you don't even have to come- you can watch it for free live on our website, www.bingeculture.co.nz, assuming the technology works out. We also would like you to bring your phones and tweet your commentary to the #bingebreakup hashtag if that's your thing.

The idea came out of an hour-long show we made a while ago, called Animal Hour. About two thirds of the way through, (after the tiger mauling and the dance of evolution, but before Simon was force fed the cold saveloys off the floor), the show ground to a halt because it 'wasn't working'. The other performers formed a semi-circle around the 'host' character and we broke up for about ten minutes.  During the break up, the others looked at the host, and the host looked at the audience. The rule was that the conversation had to zig-zag around. The presence of the audience made it into a competition as well as a game.

The fun was trying to drag the tone back to earth- to something that felt real- whenever it got silly.  There's an excerpt at the one minute mark of this video.

It lasts for six hours because, pretty much, we want to see what happens. We're inspired by some of the long-form Forced Entertainments shows, especially Quizoola. Tim Etchells explains why duration is  intriguing this way:  "Your expectations are very different. I mean, you don't walk into a twenty-four-hour-long performance going, "entertain me!" It's seven o'clock in the morning, or four o'clock in the morning, the performers there have been going for four hours already doing something that's reasonably taxing: you know that the rules are different, and your way of engaging with the work is different."

So Break Up [We Need to Talk] is about honesty, but it's also about lying and bullshitting. It's about seeing if we can do it, which is why it's Fringe. I hope you can make it this Saturday, but if you can't, I think I understand- I guess it just wasn't meant to be.

-Ralph

Break Up [We Need to Talk}
Matchbox Studios, 166 Cuba Street
7pm- 1am, Saturday Feb 8th.
$5 in person, free online.

If you'd like to vote for us for the Fringe Fav award, its easy: just add #FringeFav and well as #bingebreakup.