Dust Palace brings circus cabaret to Kerikeri
Audiences are invited into the inner sanctum of Haus of Yolo, where couture creations are stitched live on stage – only for them to become part of gravity-defying circus routines moments later.
'The whole concept of the show is that we sew all the costumes on stage and the audience chooses,' Gordon explains. 'Sewing an item of clothing in three or four minutes is a risky thing to do, it's speed sewing and that's the kind of game we're playing with the audience which adds to the adrenaline of the circus.'
Following sold-out seasons across the country in 2018, the revised cabaret is this time touring Auckland, Kerikeri and Hastings, before it's off to Canada.
The company has a regular gig in the country after Gordon decided to take a career gamble back in 2017.
'Montreal is like the home to contemporary circus and I'd wanted to go and check out what was happening in the industry.
In 2017, we decided to take the Goblin Market show across to the arts market in Canada and I spent my grandmother's inheritance money getting over there. It totally paid off as the show was seen by a producer in Vancouver, who picked it up and we've been invited back ever since.'
With a background in ballet and theatre – her grandmother paid for ballet lessons when she was small, skills she uses every day. Gordon almost went to dance school but switched to drama school, where she studied to become an actor. She later learned circus theatre, combining story-telling with circus before producing her own shows.
As well as the dance, acting and sewing talents, Gordon writes the scripts as part of a collaborative team effort. Then there's the performing and acrobats.
'You do have a healthy respect for gravity,' she shares. 'That's the fun, to play with the calculated risk of it.'
Dust Palace was founded in 2009 by Gordon and Mike Edward and has become New Zealand's premier contemporary circus company, creating internationally acclaimed productions such as The Wonderwombs, Goblin Market and Te Tangi a te Tūī.
The name derived from a dusty studio where Gordon and her friend were making a circus flash film back in 2007.
'It was this dusty, creative space like magical fairy dust, which harks back to something coming out of the ashes. My friend thought it looked like a dust palace.'
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She parked the name and used it years later when she formed her company.
Dust Palace's work extends beyond performance; they are leaders in circus education and have pioneered New Zealand's most comprehensive circus teacher training programme. The Dust Palace School, which began in 2013, has had up to 450 students at a time and Te Kura Maninirau Kaupapa Māori Circus School, in its second year, has waiting lists.
The company have recently secured a new venue in Ellerslie.
The former War Memorial Hall has been repurposed as an arts venue and, as a dedicated hub for circus arts, cabaret and live performance, is set to become the beating heart of contemporary circus in the region.
Their latest tour kicked off from this new venue on May 15 and they are set to perform at the Turner Centre, Kerikeri, on Friday, May 23.
The flamboyant, fashion-fuelled spectacle is described as pure late-night indulgence with one reviewer saying: 'The imperfection of fast-fashion is perfectly highlighted in this fun show that is packed with high energy, thrillingly dangerous acrobatics and a perfectly put-together soundtrack.
'It's a script but it's not, we have personal leeway to modify,' says Gordon: 'Expect a wild ride. The show is definitely R18, it's pretty saucy, but in a fun way! Expect fast-fashion, expect to get involved, dress up in as much fashion as you can.' What type of fashion? 'Couture, darling, couture,' Gordon laughs. 'Your highest-end couture. You only live once!'
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Otago Daily Times
16 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Aloud and in full colour
It might sound like Carol Hirschfeld but it's Shayne Carter's story, film-maker Margaret Gordon tells Tom McKinlay. In the opening frames of a new documentary, Shayne Carter walks along the Aramoana mole as if it were a runway. He's coming in to land, returning to Ōtepoti, back from the world. There he immediately meets the rough acclaim of the mole's resident seagulls - and curses right back. But it's an uneven contest, even for as practised a crowd wrangler as the Dunedin musician. No problem though, because the film jumps straight to Carter unleashed, wringing rawk high in feedback's most seaside registers from his leftie six string. Take that, you gulls. It's emblematic. As Life in One Chord chronicles, Carter seems to have had an answer always, to circumstance, to distance, to tragedy, to success. Life in One Chord is the work of journalist and documentary-maker Margaret Gordon - formerly of Christchurch, now of Melbourne - its title taken from the first vinyl release of Carter's very nearly all-conquering band Straitjacket Fits, a squalling '80s four-track EP that carried the propulsive She Speeds. This past week Gordon was applying the final touches to her film - crucially, making sure the sound mix does the material justice - ahead of its New Zealand International Film Festival release. The film's a musical biography, tracing Carter's trajectory from the hard-knock playgrounds of 1970s Brockville to the world stage and back again. It charts a course of approximate parallel to Carter's Ockham-winning memoir Dead People I Have Known, but welcomes in the perspectives of others involved in the various milieu that set him on his way or who travelled with him. And indeed, the book was part of her motivation for the film, Gordon says. "It really spoke to me, and I was like, it really needs to be painted in with all the bright colours, so when he talks about the bands or the people or the places that you can hear it and you can see it." So, alongside weaving in essential servings of Carter's rich songwriting catalogue - including some rare live footage - the film makes room for voices from his early life, home and school, and an extended cast of Dunedin Sound musicians. "The key people there would be John Collie, the drummer from Straitjacket Fits ... and also Natasha, Shayne's sister, which is important, because, you know, Shayne talks a lot about family," Gordon says. The film-maker's rule was that the people included had to be directly related to the story. The film follows Gordon's well received 2014 documentary Into the Void as another entry in the musical history of Te Waipounamu - the earlier documentary focused on the Christchurch band of the title. Music, bands, people interest her. "I think being in a band, it's a really ephemeral thing, isn't it?" she muses. "Like, it's very hard to exactly pinpoint what it is that makes it so special, but there is a certain kind of magic there that happens within that group of people and it's really the transmission of that through to the audience ... just that spark, in that moment, when that happens, where this group of people is doing something and this other group of people is there and they witness it and they feel it and they get engaged." So, not a straightforward phenomenon to distill, to capture, away from a gig's pulsing cacophony, but in her film, Gordon has a great ally. "Shayne's such a good talker," she says. "That was one of the things that I was really drawn to about him in terms of a documentary subject, you know, he has really great reflections on everything, really, and he has a lot of really great things to say, so that's really important. "He's a performer, too, and so that's really good. Like, it's not necessary, but it helps when you're making a documentary to be working with someone who's not afraid of a camera, someone who's OK to gather themselves together and put on a little bit of a show, which is most certainly what he did." Carter's on foot, in his own footsteps, through much of the film, from the mole to Brockville Rd, from his old high school to tracking down Straitjacket Fits' original broom cupboard George St practice room. It's a story of making your own fun. And Carter's created a lot of it. Still is in new and reinventing ways - he's now composing for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Gordon wasn't familiar with all of it when she started into the doco. She'd joined the Carter fandom from about the Straitjacket Fits, following it on to Dimmer, but was learning about his earlier output with Bored Games and Double Happys. The formative story of the former plays out at what was Kaikorai Valley High School, Carter trooping back despite some misgivings. But as Gordon tells it, his reception there also pushes out the margins of the story to include a community's pride in the boy who did good. "You know, he said before we went back, he was like, 'oh, I didn't really like high school that much. I don't know how this is going to go'. "We came in and then before we'd even got into the office, you know, the deputy principal, John Downes, came out ... and then a couple of other people came out and everybody came out welcoming Shayne - really loved to see him back there." That sort of slightly revisionist remembering - back in the day the school's then principal stormed out of Bored Games' abrasive punk-inspired school hall performances - is joined in conspiracy by a Dunedin caught at its blue sky best. There's no sense here of the cold, suffocating grey that those Dunedin bands of the 1980s were trying to mitigate. Gordon admits to being a little bit disappointed Dunedin didn't deliver on its meteorological reputation. "I was like, 'oh, OK, this is making it look really good. Is this true? Are we really telling a true story here with all the sunshine?'." There is, though, plenty of shade in the story. Grim reality foreshadowed in the title of Carter's memoir. Gordon had some difficult material to cover, requiring sensitive handling. A striking element in the film is the tight knit nature of the community involved in Carter's shared story. Among the most prominent players is his Double Happys partner in crime, Wayne Elsey - another preternaturally talented friend from school, who was there for the pre-teen hijinks that became teenage kicks and rock and roll. The Carter-Elsey chemistry meant the Double Happys seemed destined for the sort of success Straitjacket Fits later achieved, but Elsey died in a touring accident. Gordon says they thought long and hard about how to handle that tragedy, integrate it into the story arc. "Because his passing was so tragic, it's still felt very strongly, it's still very raw within that Dunedin community. So, whatever we did, we had to be really careful about it and respectful." She knew Carter was not going to talk about it in an interview so that responsibility was picked up by Collie - drummer in both Double Happys and Straitjacket Fits - who grew up a stone's throw from Elsey's childhood home. And if anything more was needed from Carter, he'd addressed that responsibility already in his song Randolph's Going Home, a rawly heartfelt remembering that is afforded generous space in the film. For all Carter's showman inclinations, Gordon says she knew he was not going to be offering unlimited access to his inner workings. "He has a lot of self-protection, and I think that, you know, I always knew that he wasn't going to do a big interview where he would reveal all. "That's really not what he's like, and I did know that going in." That contributed to her decision to use passages from Dead People I Have Known in the film. "It's all there. All of that stuff is very, very real and very raw in Shayne's own words." However, in a genius twist, those words are read into the documentary by Carol Hirschfeld, the broadcaster's honeyed tones mixing equal measures of her straight-faced professionalism with the double-take comedy of delivering the punk rocker protagonist's own words in the first person. There's more pathos to come, beyond Elsey's passing, as of the original four members of Straitjacket Fits there's only two still standing, Carter and Collie. Bassist David Wood died in 2010, followed 10 years later by the band's other songwriter, Andrew Brough. Brough left the band abruptly in the early '90s just as they were about to go stratospheric and, while he found further critical success with his band Bike, had largely retreated from the world by the time he died. As a result, Gordon's interview with him is particularly affecting, as the bitterness previously reported about his departure from the band appeared to have receded. "It was interesting, because he was a lot warmer about his time in the band and a lot more circumspect about the band's demise than I thought he would be," Gordon says. "I feel like he'd come to a point where he still had a bit of grievance, but overall he was pretty much, you know, had accepted that it was what it was. "I wouldn't want to say that he'd moved on, but he wasn't fretting about it any more, that's for sure." As the documentary does at various other points, Brough's story acknowledges the well-observed tensions at the heart of the music industry and the price to be paid. "The music industry is always a strange one because it's got this unhappy marriage between creativity and money," Gordon says. "And those two things just don't really work well together." A lot of Dunedin bands would have been through the same grinder, she says, having been identified by the industry as bankable propositions. "And then, you know, all of that kind of influence starts creeping in and things become very difficult. And I actually think that's an underlying theme of the film." Adversity, character and resilience are foregrounded again in a chapter on Carter's role in supporting Dunedin Sound progenitor Chris Knox, following his debilitating stroke, in which the Enemy and Toy Love frontman delivers his own lesson in gritty defiance. Knox's determination seems to hold up another mirror to Carter's doggedness. Gordon confirms that was the story she found, but it was also the story she chose to tell. "You could have made a documentary and not talked about that, but for me one of the big things about Shayne that's really important and that is potentially unusual is that he really is resilient and that he just keeps getting back up and getting back to work again. And even though he's had to deal with some of the most difficult things that you could possibly imagine, including, being in a band and touring the world and then coming back to Dunedin - I mean, that's going to be tough. "It'd be tough for anyone. Especially because, you know, I don't think New Zealand is very good at having much empathy for people in that situation." The standard antipodean advice to such vicissitudes, absent of much empathy, would be to "get over it". Yep, true, Gordon says. "But, you know, that's exactly actually what he does. And so, yes, that theme of resilience, it really was something that we wanted to tell because I think it's very central to Shayne's story. "He's a resilient guy and amongst all of this difficulty and tragedy, he just continues on. He's an artist. He stays on the path." While Gordon's film will initially screen at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and perhaps beyond that in a conventional cinema format, she has other plans for it. "We're going to regroup and create, like, a different version of the film that has more music in it and that will have live incidental music and that will tour more like a band." Music documentaries aren't always huge box office draws at the cinema, she says, and, in a lot of ways, Life in One Chord is quite niche. It is, to a significant extent, one for New Zealand about New Zealanders. "So, we always wanted to have another plan so the film could have a second life where it could travel to, like, music festivals and arts festivals and things like that." It would be a longer show, incorporating live music. It would be doing things differently, appropriately enough. "One of the things about Shayne, he was, is and remains a punk and likes to do things his own way," Gordon says in summary. "And that was the way we did the film - 'this is how it is and we're going to do it the way that we want to do it, we are going to do it ourselves, we're going to do it our own way'. And that's how it ended up." Life in One Chord screens as part of the NZ International Film Festival at the Regent Theatre, Dunedin on August 16 and 19.
Otago Daily Times
16-07-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Carter documentary to premiere at Dunedin festival
Life in One Chord in Auckland in 2021 are (from left) cinematographer James Ellis, Shayne Carter, director Margaret Gordon and Chris Knox. A documentary about Dunedin music legend Shayne Carter will make its world premiere in Dunedin next month as part of this year's Whanau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. Life in One Chord, directed and co-produced by Melbourne-based film-maker Margaret Gordon, is among a total of about 70 films screening in the city between August 15 and 31. Comprising about two-thirds archival footage, the documentary was a "painted-in memoir" derived from the Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer frontman's 2019 autobiography Dead People I Have Known. Set to make its world premiere in Dunedin on August 16, Ms Gordon said she was "excited and nervous" for audiences in the city to watch it. Dunedin had a precious musical legacy which needed to be treated with respect, she said. "For me, it's quite scary and I really hope that the people who are seeing themselves and their friends and their community on screen think that it's OK. "So far, what I've heard from people who have seen it is that it has been good, so I'm trusting that's going to be the way that people view it — I'm hoping anyway. "And, of course, Shayne, he's the main one." Dunedin band Bored Games, as pictured in 1980. Shayne Carter, smoking, is far left. Born in Christchurch, Ms Gordon said she had always been a fan of the Dunedin Sound and had wanted to pursue a project based on the city's musical legacy for some time. She approached Mr Carter about the project as he was writing the book. "What I didn't realise at the time is he'd actually said no to quite a few people for doing something like this before. "I was actually really lucky that he did it and it's a real vote of confidence that he said yes." Filming took place in Dunedin and Auckland over seven years and included interviews with former bandmate John Collie, Peter Jefferies as well as Flying Nun Records founder Roger Shepherd. "Our rule about it was that we would only talk to someone who was directly involved with Shayne's story, or that he talked about in the book." It would also feature the "last ever interview" of the late Andrew Brough, former guitarist of Straitjacket Fits, who died in 2020. Footage was supplied from the personal archives of members of Dunedin's music community, TVNZ and TV3 among others — a lot of which had never been seen before, Ms Gordon said. This included a 1989 Straitjacket Fits live show captured on VHS, and unseen footage of The Double Happys. "There's some real treats for people who are a fan of Shayne, his music and his legacy." Festival manager Matt Bloomfield said this year's programme was "bigger and bolder" than it had been in recent years. "With a Dunedin festival that is 30% longer, 40% more extensive and with a second venue, the 2025 festival responds directly to Dunedin audiences with what they've asked for in our annual festival survey." Both local and international film-makers would be presenting their films in the city and the world premiere of Life in One Chord at the Regent Theatre was a particular highlight, he said. Tickets for the festival go on sale next Thursday.
Scoop
09-06-2025
- Scoop
Devastating Fire Destroys The Dust Palace's Stored Circus Equipment And Theatre Assets
Press Release – The Dust Palace The damage is catastrophic, says Grae Burton, Chair of The Dust Palace Trust. This is more than just equipmentthis is the creative heartbeat of years of mahi, training, and generosity from our community. Auckland, NZ – A massive fire in the early hours of Sunday morning June 9th has completely destroyed the storage facility housing all of The Dust Palace's circus props, aerial equipment, costumes, and recently donated theatre seating. The fire broke out in a commercial warehouse on Maurice Road in Penrose just before 1am on June 8, with over 50 firefighters responding to the blaze. Among the tenants of the facility was The Dust Palace Trust, a renowned circus and performing arts organisation known for its community engagement, national touring productions, and kaupapa Māori-led education programmes. The fire resulted in the total loss of more than 15 years of creative material, including hand-crafted set pieces, specialist circus gear, and the full inventory of aerial rigging equipment. Also lost were newly donated theatre seats used in the recent production of Haus of YOLO at Ellerslie Arts—seats that were destined to support the creation of affordable performance spaces. 'The damage is catastrophic,' says Grae Burton, Chair of The Dust Palace Trust. 'This is more than just equipment—this is the creative heartbeat of years of mahi, training, and generosity from our community.' The Trust has launched a Givealittle page to raise funds to rebuild and recover. Donations will go toward replacing essential equipment so that upcoming shows, community classes, and youth outreach can continue as planned.
