NEW ARTS FESTIVAL DEFIES ALL RULES

Festival of Live Art (F.O.L.A.) - AKL
14 – 19 February 2023
https://www.fola.co.nz/

Tāmaki Makaurau is set to host the inaugural Festival of Live Art (F.O.L.A.) - AKL in 2023, a wild, celebratory mash up of subversive, playful, and daring art. Local and international independent artists will come together from 14 – 19 February at Basement Theatre and digitally, to challenge perceptions and push the boundaries of performance and art. Welcome to the artistic underground. The art rats are out to play.

The ambitious programme will feature over 30 leading experimental and forward thinking, feminist, queer and BIPOCartists, including 5 international performers, across 10 full-length shows and a full free public program. This is work that takes over and sits between the spaces of traditional live performance genres of theatre, dance, performance, art, music, installation and spoken word.

The week-long festival is the brainchild of some of Aotearoa’s most prolific and disruptive theatre makers Julia Croft, Nisha Madhan, Nahyeon Lee and Hannah Moore, brought together with a desire to create a gathering place for artists who break the rules, and whose work doesn’t fit into the mainstream.

“We created F.O.L.A. [AKL] as a haven for those subversive, dirty, playful, humorous and above all daring artists who make life so much better by being in the world.” says co-artistic directors, Croft and Madhan.

Basement Theatre will be transformed into Auckland’s own festival garden, reminiscent of Berlin or New York. Complete with installations, digital projections, sculptures and a pop up food truck, F.O.L.A. will create an immersive world of art and exploration to allow audiences to delve into the playful and fiesty heart of the live art community.

The 2023 programme is shaped around the sun and moon cycles, with each live work programmed during the exact timings of moonrise and sunset, with the whole festival ending in a lavish artist’s banquet on the night of the new moon at Auckland’s iconic Satya Chai Lounge. The result is a festival that takes the audience on a journey that encourages clandestine pockets of darkness and transcendent moments of lightness that lean in our planet's celestial cycles.

The full programme of artists and works is available now at https://www.fola.co.nz/