WE MADE IT! THANK YOU SO MUCH WONDERFUL DONORS! WE💖🐧💖 LOVE YOU GORGEOUS PEEPS! HOLE's development season opened last week to a great reception! We met our $2,500 Boosted NZ goal just before our deadline last week!

Your contributions helped our team to continue to realise our green-powered artistic vision with HOLE and our Antarctic Theatre Trilogy, and to raise public awareness around Antarctic conservation and urgent climate change issues!

Meantime we just wanna say THANK YOU AGAIN to our incredibly generous donors 😍🐧🐋🦠🐧😍💚💖 WE LOVE YOU💖‼

Your generous donations meant that we were able to green-power HOLE during it's development season at Circa Theatre 22-26 September this year. Your donations also went towards supporting our after-show free PUBLIC FORUM / Q&A with renowned Antarctic Scientists and HOLE's Key Creatives, at Circa Theatre, 24 September, 2020.

Your contributions mean that we can continue to raise awareness and green-power HOLE once again, the second play in our award-winning Antarctic Theatre Trilogy, at Circa Theatre for its upcoming FULL season in late 2021. The playwright Lynda Chanwai-Earle is currently researching and writing HEART, the third play in her trilogy for green-powered production in 2022.

• HOLE was performed by Wellington's finest; Stevie Hancox-Monk, Sepe Mua'au and Elle Wootton.

Each play in the Trilogy goes back in time, is set on the icy continent and foreshadows urgent climate change issues. Our ultimate vision is to sustainably tour our Antarctic Theatre Trilogy and to power all of our music, sound and lighting by solar and wind.

Visit this link to see more about the world's first green-powered, award-winning play HEAT which toured arts festivals across the country and performed off-the-national-grid within theatre venues.

Considered on a global scale, the decision of the HEAT production team to experiment with alternative energy sources highlights the unsustainability of our current first world practices. Both provocative and moving HEAT will remain in my consciousness for a long time to come — Sharon Matthews, Theatreview

Each play in the Antarctic Trilogy are based on true stories...

• HEAT is an extraordinary black comedy, an original love story between a woman, a man and an Emperor penguin, set on the Ross Ice Shelf during the endless night of winter, 1999.
• HOLE is 'eco-dynamite!' - another black comedy about a scientist, an activist, a Marine, and one humongous life-threatening hole. Its Wild West days at McMurdo Station and Scott Base. It is little more than a decade since the US Navy lifted their ban on women travelling to the ice. Stella, a NZ scientist, Ioane, a US marine from American Samoa, and Bonny, a Greenpeace activist, meet during one Antarctic summer. What unfolds is as dark, funny, and monumental as the discovery of the ozone hole itself.
• HEART is set when Sir Edmund Hillary rode his little red tractor across Antarctica. At a time when men drilled into the heart of the world's coldest continent for the first ice-core samples, HEART will be played by an all female cast and foreshadows unprecedented change to come on the eve of the irrevocable imprint of nuclear radiation, created by humans, on all living things.

A bit about us:

Marcus McShane is our creative genius behind our alternative energy and lighting design. Marcus describes himself as one of those annoying bicycle-riding vegetarian types. It's a joy to work within huge and self-imposed limitations by choosing to green-power our theatre productions. Find out more about his award-winning international lighting and alternative energy designs here!

Lynda Chanwai-Earle is our award-winning playwright behind the Antarctic Theatre Trilogy and Executive Producer of Ice Floe Productions Tapui Ltd. Lynda was 2019 IIML Writer in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington, and former Producer of Voices on RNZ. Lynda She sees herself as an artistic risk writer / playwright / poet / broadcaster and mum who loves! Find out more in her TURBINE interview.

While researching and writing HOLE during her tenure at IIML, Lynda interviewed scientists and supporters of this project like Rebecca Priestley Winner of the Prime Minister's Science Communication Prize (2016), Veronika Meduna, Editor at The Conversation NZ, and the real-life Greenpeace Activist on the Ice at the time, Dr Maj De Poorter

Visionary Director David O'Donnell helmed HEAT's alternatively powered premiere in 2008 with the STAB Festival at BATS, Theatre, Wellington and the following national tour to arts festivals across Aotearoa from 2010 to 2011. David directs HOLE's development season with the Women's Theatre Festival at Circa Theatre in September this year. David says he loves the visceral nature of our theatre.

Composer Gareth Farr, ONZM was the Artist to Antarctica Fellow 2005. The music he composed in the first award-winning play HEAT included sounds he recorded in Antarctica. Gareth's stunning atmospheric original music and soundscape became a character within the play and was nominated Best Music in the Chapman Tripp Awards, 2008.

Gareth's working with our Sound Designer Phil Brownlee to create HOLE's soundscape using recordings captured on the Ice earlier this year by Alison Ballance (MNZM), Senior Producer, RNZ and recent Fellow of the Antarctica Community Engagement Programme.

Set Designer Brian King is the creative star behind the sets for our Antarctic Trilogy, creating HOLE's frozen world alongside acclaimed new Lighting Designer Tony Black

About Ice Floe Productions Tapui Ltd:

We are a green-powered, sustainable theatre production company dedicated to creating the Antarctic Theatre Trilogy. We tell powerful and moving stories set in Antarctica that address critical issues around climate change. We build on the bridge between science and the public by communicating these vital themes through theatre. 

We explore the interface between science and the arts by engaging with science communities and alternative energy solutions in each of our theatre productions. Our team creates innovative green-technology, such as specially designed LED theatre lighting and sound designs, to bring productions to life within theatre venues anywhere around the country. Our productions draw on less than one tenth of the power of normal theatre productions. We recycle where we can. 

HOLE's development season is part of The Women’s Theatre Festival (WTF!) at Circa Theatre, 2020.