When it comes to innovative performance, designer and theatre maker Martyn Roberts is `himself something of a quiet tour de force. This season he's been juggling work on no less than five new Aotearoa New Zealand shows for the Dunedin Arts Festival.
There's been lighting design for the premiere of rising Ōtepoti choreographer Jeremy Beck's Commentary of Dreaming, cherished dancer choreographers Michael Parmenter and Lucy Marinkovich's new work The Night Has A Thousand Eyes (in both Dunedin and Wellington), and Cindy Driver's play Wahine Mātātoa.
This coming week it's the turn of his own collective Afterburner, with two works first tested last year.
Making science understandable through art, The Anderson Localisation on the 5th and 6th of April uses new New Zealand interactive phone app Pickpath to take audiences along some of Ōtepoti's laneways on audio-driven, individual journeys into the quantum world. A place where past, present and future coexist.
And before that on the 2nd and 3rd of April is a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett's novella Company, performed by one of the city's finest veteran actors Simon O'Connor. Winner of the 'Best Performance' award at last year's Dunedin Fringe Festival, in Company a voice emerges from the darkness, using language sparingly. It's a work, Afterburner say, where light, sound and performance aim to do just enough to focus the words.
Martyn Roberts established Afterburner in 2001 and now teaches theatre technology and design in the Theatre Studies programme at the University of Otago. Being deaf, Roberts believes, has made him "very visually aware" and has been a continual source of inspiration for how he sees and relates to the world
