Shirley Horrocks’ tenth NZIFF documentary relates the storied 37-year history of Christchurch’s often provocative, always daring Free Theatre, creators of countless extraordinary productions and performance events.
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We should be interested in working in ways in which we are not necessarily comfortable.
Free Theatre 2017
Founded by Peter Falkenberg in 1979 Christchurch’s Free Theatre has provided a remarkably persistent alternative to the city’s more vaunted legacy of traditional theatre. Favouring the event-based over the text-based, Falkenberg has steeped a succession of actors, writers and theatre technicians in the practice of an avant-garde theatre that has strong roots in his native Germany, while being constantly responsive to political and social change.
Shirley Horrocks film draws on Free Theatre’s extensive archive of their own work. Free Theatre has often courted controversy and the film is studded with remembered provocations: audiences at a production of 1984 were separated from their friends and even forcibly evicted by costumed security guards.
But Horrocks, who began shooting seven years ago when she first encountered Free Theatre’s touring production Distraction Camp, is especially observant of the shift in focus and a less combative – though no less satiric – imaginative engagement with community activation since the earthquakes.
37 years on Free Theatre has proven as definitive and resilient a Christchurch institution as the one it set out to oppose – and richly deserving of this salute from New Zealand’s most dedicated and attentive documentarian of art and artists.