Based in a pop-up festival venue in the Aotea Centre, leading companies from Canada, Europe and Australia link up with some of Aotearoa’s finest in the inaugural New Performance Festival. 

A brand new opportunity for arts adventurers to get their fix, as New Performance Festival encourages audiences to drop in after work or pre-show, to sink a beer courtside and experience conversations, music, design and even the odd hair cut in the cutting edge atmosphere which is the Festival Club.

The Ping Pong Pit is conversation over the competitive sport of table tennis. Each day, two artists involved in the New Performance Festival duke it out, mind and body, as their interviewer acts not only as mediator in the conversations, but as umpire during the match. Post artist conversation the space becomes a pop-up ping pong workout for audiences.

Hairdressers – they’re gossips at the best of times. Who better to have a gossip about the life and works of artists involved in the New Performance Festival than in The Barbers Chair? Two guests of the Festival Club will spill their guts regarding their work, all the while getting a short back-and-sides from a guest barber. Perhaps their answers would be something to mullet over (pun completely intended).

For the night owls, the New Performance Festival brings the cutting edge of New Zealand alternative music for the meagre sum of $5. Late Night Music is headlined by the mighty Orchestra of Spheres who return to our shores after flying the New Zealand flag across Europe in 2011. Having been spotted by indie recording artist Caribou at the annual Campus A Low Hum, the Wellington outfit were invited to play the hallowed music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, performing alongside such popular artists as Battles, No Age, Les Savy Fav and fellow Kiwi Conan Mockasin.

Superstars of Westlynn, the brainchild of improvised music impresario Jeff Henderson, are best described as transcendental dance collage, while Coco Solid gives us her newest project, Flying Nun signees Badd Energy, a “psychedelic ethnicalypse quartet of your stoner swamp dreams.”

The Festival Club will also present the performance architecture exhibit from the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2011.  The NZ exhibition table was curated by Wellington architect Amanda Yeats.