Underworld Puppetry, on June 21 at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, features three puppet plays and live early music from the Rare Byrds.
Giant puppets perform in Godfather Death, shadow puppets in The Devil and his Grandmother, and glove puppets in The Theft of the Moon.
The second show, The Castle of the Sun: a fairytale of corporate benevolence, in the Athenaeum Underground from June 26-28, is a collaboration with the University of Otago German Potluck Collective and the OUSA Fire and Circus Club.
An anti-corporate satire, it features fire performers, giant puppets and a live band with original music by Kara Braithwaite-Westoby.
Inspired by the Grimms' story The Crystal Ball, it follows the hero's journey as he takes on the forces of the wicked near-future bioengineering conglomerate Solaureus.
Like all Grimm tales, this had a strong narrative structure that lent itself well to contemporary adaptation, Jonathan Cweorth, of the Medieval and Renaissance Society, said.
He and Kara's brother Tama Braithwaite-Westoby, a fire performer who is studying the Brothers Grimm for his PhD, have collaborated on the projects, following a successful show last year, Dr Faust and Mr Jabberwocky, at the Gasworks Museum.
''Tama and I read through a whole lot of Brothers Grimm stories to find some fascinating lesser-known tales which we thought would fit our theatrical purposes,'' Cweorth explains.
The three dark ''underworld'' tales offer a fun way to engage with rather dark topics, which is one of the age-old functions of fairy tales, he said.
Tama Braithwaite-Westoby explains that in the early 19th century, the Brothers Grimm collected tales that came from a storytelling tradition going back into the mists of time, and some, such as Cupid and Psyche and Aesop's fables, can be traced to ancient Greece.
However, fairy tales as we know them were first written down in France in the late 17th century by Madame d'Aulnoy and Charles Perrault.
The Grimms collected these as well as many others and, over several editions of their collection, changed them not only to make them more Germanic but also to make them more relevant to their contemporaries.
That is what they have done with The Castle of the Sun, making a bridge between the past of the old tale and the future of the new.
''It's a modern tale. The whole theory behind the tale; it becomes material you can work with and adapt to new situations. That was what Jonathan and I liked about this tale and that's what drew me to study the tales of the Grimms. What is it that people find interesting historically, and how that becomes relevant today. What is still relevant in our context and what can be changed about it to make it more relevant for the future, and not just always be looking back into the past.''