As a newbie in Auckland in 2006, live performance and theatre maker Stephen Bain discovered he had to be 'in the know' and hunt the most interesting work down to church halls, community venues or warehouses.

So this year, in collaboration with The EDGE, he brought ‘these seemingly disparate groups together’, bound by genre-blurring, for the New Performance Festival.

“I call it my mix-tape of greatest hits in performance from 2010/11.”

Based in a pop-up festival venue in Aotea Centre, NZ artists will join forces with leading companies from Canada, Europe and Australia to showcase their works from February 17-25.

Stephen tells us more about himself and the festival.

Tell us a bit about your background and role as curator of New Performance Festival (NPF).

I’ve been making theatre since the early nineties. I spent a lot of time in Wellington where I co-directed a company called Under Lili’s Balcony, we were interested in choreographic theatre and studied very hard to find something we could call our own. Eventually we followed slightly different paths and I started Winning Productions (2004), which aimed to tour smaller productions to unconventional performance spaces. Video and music have taken a stronger role with Winning and we’ve put on some larger shows (like Kafka’s The Trial in 2008) as well as some smaller productions (like Stories Told to me by Girls 2005 – 7). More recently the company has been focussing on public performances, which means performing in public places and this in itself has been a huge challenge to understand. An installation performance (Baby, where are the fine things you promised me? 2007 – 2011) had a great run touring far and wide, then last year we were commissioned to present an ambitious dance-theatre work in Auckland (Meyers Park) and Netherlands (Oerol Festival) and again in France (Chalon-dans-la-rue).

Working in different environments has challenged me to think hard about what the social and societal role of performing arts is. In 2006 I set up a development residency space in the Britomart area (named Luxembourg Gardens) and there was a great flourish of activity that came from bringing different individuals and groups together. It seemed a natural progression to bring a festival of experimental work together in a city where so much is possible.

How and why was the NPF put together? What do you hope it achieves?

A lot of the shows I was watching in Auckland were happening in strange venues outside the commercial ‘main-stage’. As a newcomer to this town (I arrived here from Wellington in 2006), I quickly realised that you had to be in the know and hunt the most interesting work down to the church halls, community venues or even private warehouse apartments where they are being presented. I suppose this refers to what Bill Gates calls ‘the disincentive of innovation in a capitalist market’.

So, earlier last year I spoke with The EDGE whom I’ve been collaborating with recently on a number of projects, about how we could bring these seemingly disparate groups together under one festival. The more we looked into, the more this work had in common. Despite covering Theatre, Contemporary Dance and Performance Art, each borrowed liberally from all performance disciplines, to the point that they defied a simple categorisation. We realised that this needed an open title to comfortably fit the work, the New Performance Festival was that title.

Since then we’ve realised we also have a lot in common with a number of contemporary Live-Performance festivals around the world. In fact these common points mark a number of new influences; the internet with it’s access to all sorts of performance video and visual artifacts, the ease of new media in performance (every artist now has access to computers with sound, video, image editing), the insistence of live performance to be more immersive and interactive for the public, and the growing acknowledgement of artistic discourse within a performance.

How did you select the performing artists for the festival?

It’s an interesting process and I’m very lucky with this festival to be totally subjective, I call it my mix-tape of greatest hits in performance from 2010/11. Everything is there because I think it’s great and I’d love other people the chance to see it. I’ve been touring my own work in NZ for a few years now and to Europe since 2008, so I’ve had the chance to see a lot of work in festivals, so when The EDGE suggested we may be able to invite some internationals, I already had a scrapbook of favorites.

I was in Berlin last year at a dance festival (Tanz Im August) so I was able to meet with Rimini Protokoll at their theatre-in-residence, Hau . They had been theatre hero's of mine so it was great to speak to them about this festival and suggest that we find something of the right scale to bring over. Of course it took untold hours of administration either end to make it happen (the Geothe Institute here finally gave us the much needed extra support to bring them over), but it certainly came from a personal connection.

The New Zealand shows are almost all from individuals or groups whose work I’ve been following as a collegue or an admirer, so again it was a pleasure to ask each of them to be part of this. Some of them are friends, I think NZ is like that, you make alliances because you need that to survive.

I’ve always really enjoyed festivals programmed by artists, they tend to be a lot more specific and have a stronger sense of a specific time and place.

If you could go back and choose a completely different career path to the one you've chosen, what would it be?

I studied architecture at University and I’m very glad that I found my way through to the performing arts building next door at the top of the hill in Kelburn. It just seemed like they were having more fun in there. I’ve never particularly enjoyed a huge life-work separation, so any career would have ended up with myself anway. Even the word ‘career’ sounds like something deliberately designed to identify a part of yourself outside your personality, and that’s it really, we’re generally all a bit afraid that our personalities aren’t acceptable enough or interesting enough to contribute to society. In reality I think it’s the opposite. The great influences of the world allowed their personality to direct their actions. I think all parents understand this, most good teachers understand it too. Business of course is afraid of personality because we have spent so much of the last century defining humans as productive machines. It will all change of course. Businessmen won’t rule politics forever either.

What place is always with you, wherever you go?

At the risk of sounding like a character out of a William Gibson novel, I’d say cyber-space has truly become my new home. Geography isn’t as vital as it used to be, we connect with friends, intellectual and sensory material and even define our own self through the place that is essentially a cloud of numbers. But what makes it home is the specificity of that landscape, it encompasses many things from my past, my fantasies, the connection between people and things, an ever changing view of the world. I cannot think of any physical place that might get close to that.

Interesting speaking with Christchurch folk recently about their sense of home, no-where is permanent, no-where is forever.

What's the best way to listen to music, and why?

I lived over the road from a piano teacher for a few months, none of the performers ever knew I was listening. It was like being inside their heads. The best concerts have very little to do with the surroundings, music is about transcendence. I would love to think I could do this in the theatre, I’m not sure I’ve ever achieved that, but it’s my challenge.

You are given a piece of string, a stick and some fabric. What do you make?

A cake. I eat the cake. All of it. I get very fat. I am fat with the pleasure of life.

What’s your big idea for 2012?

I’m working on a couple of projects with my best friends, we want to turn the audience experience into something more like a life-style choice. Being an audience is like being a kid in the best imaginable summer holiday; everyone is there for your pleasure, to look after you, to bring you new experiences and make sure you grow up having a good time. Imagine all of that in one evening – you’d never want to go home.

Win win won (one) is a fanzine publication of performance writing about to be launched onto the streets of Auckland. I hope those who pick it up will realise that people are thinking very very hard about how to make being an audience a worthwhile experience. Hopefully we’ll do 6 publications over the year.

The Big Idea 10th Birthday Questions

What changes have you noticed in (live performance and theatre) in the past 10 years?

I’ve got a free subscription to the absolute best and biggest library of videos, images and performance writing that ever existed. It’s called the internet. And it’s allowed me to peek into more rehearsal rooms, theatres, concert halls, galleries and converted bedrooms than I could ever have imagined. Part of our changing view of live performance is coping with this expansive amount of new information.

What are some of the opportunities and challenges for the next decade?

Actively, subversively, violently, naturally, nurturingly, responsibly, truthfully, magically, uncompromisingly, radically, swiftly, maturely, generously, irrefutably…

changing the system.