eh-kay-oh-nine

The Auckland Festival is already half over so we thought we'd share our favourites so far. Mind you, we've only had the chance to catch a tiny percentage of the whole thing (I am yet to even step foot in the Spiegeltent) but the stuff we have seen so far has been impressive. These are my top 3 picks:

1. Art Crazy Nation at Seed Gallery is the kind of exhibition you can bring the kids to. Which saves on babysitting costs. Nice. It's also a growing hub for bringing out the lego enthusiast in people. And we all know that everyone, at some point in their life, has felt an affinity towards the colourful pieces of buildable plastic. I used to make marble tracks and model houses. The Little Artists, however, get their pleasure from lobster phones and the YBA's. Much cooler. Apparently they spend a lot of time on ebay searching for that particular Star Wars or Harry Potter Lego piece that they need to make up someone like Andy Warhol. I didn't even know ebay sold individual pieces of lego. Apparently it's a thriving market.

2. The Arrival was also another show you could bring the kids to. See, the festival is child-friendly. This is based on the book by Shaun Tan, and for a theatre show with practically no dialogue, it succeeds in communicating instead, with movement, puppets, shadow, limbs, planks of wood, sound, rolls of paper and anything else etc. etc. etc. Criticism has been that perhaps, instead of actors, they should have hired dancers. But the Red Leap Theatre was able to bypass such a need because the show was seamless. Each actor had the task of having to switch from character to object to even embodying the weather in a matter of seconds. The convincing and inventive natures of whatever they were at any given point was the success of the show. You didn't doubt that they could have been a vacuum cleaner in one scene and then a raindrop in another.

3. Artspace's Mash Up is probably the favourite from the Visual Arts bunch. There's a great video work from the artist Shimabuku, who rips an octopus from the comforting bosom of the sea in order to force on it a tour around Tokyo. He then returns it to the sea, looking a little worse for wear. The funny thing is that the octopus ends up spending most of it's time in a polystyrene box, unable to view Tokyo properly. Such is the precious failure of the artist as tour guide.

Voila! AK09 happening at a theatre, art gallery, aotea square near you.

- Agnes