Belle: A Performance Of Air Tickets

A defining experience of the Festival, this monumental collision of theatre and aerial transforms the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre into a whole other world. An all-female cast exhibits spectacular strength and skill, emerging and vanishing from portals of light and shadow, all of it enveloped in a gorgeous soundscape. It’s simply breathtaking. With captivating design and composition from the creative force that is Malia Johnston, Rowan Pierce and Eden Mullholand, in collaboration with Jenny Ritchie, Belle is a visual and atmospheric wonder that left us speechless — and we haven’t been able to stop talking about it since. It’s a performance of air, and so, so much more.

Belle – A Performance of Air is a multimedia experience that harnesses the skills of a cast of dance and aerial artists from across Aotearoa. The performers inhabit an aerial world created through spatial, light and video design by Rowan Pierce, composition by Eden Mulholland with live violin and vocals by Anita Clark, and bespoke circus apparatus designed by choreographer Jenny Ritchie. Malia Johnston, whose work includes the World of Wearable Arts show and the opening of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, is the director and producer. Belle was originally part of Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts 2022, premiering in 2024. For AAF, it will be the production’s first presentation outside of Te Whanganui-a-Tara.