Otago Festival of the Arts highlights

The programme for this year's Otago Festival of the Arts is out. Here are some highlights ...

> THE BUTLER
Among the dramatic highlights of the Otago Festival of the Arts, is the Joe Bennett-penned The Butler.

Performed by the Loons Circus Theatre Company, the play takes a hard look at the social manners and conventions of Western culture, with some bizarre results.

It has been described as "like Cirque du Soleil for grown-ups" and "a raunchy and raucous show where circus and comedy collide".

The action is set around a dinner party over which the eponymous butler presides. He's a gloomy presence, having seen it all before and stands apart from the exuberant and chaotic behaviour of the guests.

Reviewed following a performance in London, the performers were said to be "masters of manouevring", "their jaw dropping circus-injected feats are glorious to observe".

The play comes with a warning that it contains nudity and adult themes.

> HEAT
Theatre show Heat travels with its own alternative energy source, which is appropriate enough for a play set on the Antarctic ice.

It is 1999 and a husband and wife scientific team hunker down inside a tiny, tightly packed survial capsule on the Ross Ice Shelf, wintering over on the frozen continent. While he studies climate change, she fixes her gaze on a colony of male penguins, the better to study their breeding patterns.

As their relationship struggles in the harsh conditions, they are joined by a third character - one of the penguins - which blows their fragile world apart.

Heat was written by poet and playwright Lynda Chanwai Earle, and is accompanied by music by another Creative New Zealand Antarctic Fellow, Gareth Farr.

To provide the energy to power the production, a solar and wind turbine will be installed outside the Settlers Festival Theatre.

The play comes with a warning about adult content and full male nudity.

> DHOL FOUNDATION
Womad favourite the Dhol Foundation opens the arts festival with a bang, a band led by drummer Johnny Kalsi, whose work with world fusion band Transglobal Underground is also known to many.

The dhol is a double-sided barrel drum widely used in India, and is used here in a mash-up with rock, pop, electronica, drum and bass, and classical elements.

Kalsi grew up in Punjab state, in India, where he began drumming at school before joining a jazz combo.

After taking up the dhol drum, he redesigned what was a traditional instrument while beginning to use it in new settings.

Now resident in London, Kalsi has played the dhol with everyone from Robert Plant to Avril Lavigne.

> ANTAL SZALAI AND HIS GYPSY ORCHESTRA
Virtuoso Antal Szalai's playing has been described as "the musical equivalent of a circus tightrope act", while his band is considered the best in the world at what they do.

What they do, is play the gypsy music of Hungary.

As Szalai explains: "Gypsy songs began with primitive rhythms, created by the knocking of spoons on water cans and accompaniment.

About 300 years ago, the tradition of the gypsy band started and the band then comprised a violin, a viola, a cello and a cimbalom".

It is music from the heart, he says.

The band leader studied the violin at the Bela Bartok Conservatory of Music, in Hungary, before in 1967 joining the Honved Ensemble, which comprises a symphonic orchestra, a folk dance troupe, a choir and a gypsy orchestra. A couple of years later he became leader of the Hungarian Gypsy Orchestra.

> TAONGA: DUST, WATER, WIND
Choreographer Louise Potiki Bryant has woven the story of her aunt's life at Kaka Point together with a traditional Maori tale of the Moon's power, to create the dance Taonga: dust water wind.

Her work is performed to the music of Richard Nunns, an expert in traditional Maori instruments.

> BACK OF THE BUS
On a public-transport trip like no other, the Java Dance Company performs Back of the Bus.

The dancers use the entire bus - a standard city route vehicle - from the aisles, to the ceiling and some of the spaces where the audience is seated.

At several points, the bus stops and further short dance works are performed.