Always My Sister. Written and directed by Michelanne Forster, starring Torum Heng, Jess Sayer & Chris Tempest, Costumes by Charlie Baptist, Lighting by Ruby Reihana-Wilson.  June 10-21. The Basement Theatre. Michelanne Forster’s newest play, Always My Sister tells the story of Maggie Reardon, partner of Joseph Burns (whose grisly murder of Lt. Snow and his family shocked colonial Auckland), and her sister, Sophia Aldwell. The sisters’ silence in the murder’s wake almost condemned an innocent man. Forster talks in the programme of “being drawn to that female silence” in her work and, while it is a dynamic lens through which we can view history from a new angle, the 55-minute length deprives Forster of much opportunity to fully capitalise on the relationship. With the play’s action spanning several years, temporal and spatial shifts relied heavily on expositional dialogue and Reihana-Wison’s lighting changes for demarcation. While I applaud the lighting design’s ability to mark this shift so subtly, it felt that Forster was asking a lot of the technology and the blocking did not adequately support Reihana-Wilson’s …

I first learnt about Love and Strife = Cosmic Cycle at Gow Langsford in an unconventional way for the digital age. I was passing by the gallery in the evening and looked inside. There were people with glasses of wine in their hands, meaning something was on. The next day there were photos from the show opening in my Facebook feed. Somebody had been to an opening of a “Vogue photographer”. Not that New Zealand is a small country far away from anything, but we don’t see Vogue photographers coming to town every day. I was curious and decided to pay a visit. Think of a “Vogue photographer” and the first things that come to mind are exotic settings and hot skinny females in extravagant clothing (or not). That was how I imagined Spiros Poros. I was not that wrong. There were hot naked bodies there, and not much clothing involved. But there was more to it than a fashion photo shoot. There is definite sense of glamour about the photographs, and something cinematic, surprisingly …