BATS hits 30-year milestone
The saying goes that the more things change, the more things stay the same – and at BATS Theatre, change is a state of being.
Things change: BATS programme director Nick Zwart has been in the role less than a month – he started on January 1.
Things stay the same: BATS’ 30th year will open next week with a provocative and experimental show about a taboo topic.
Zwart said BATS had always been a place to take risks.
‘‘It allows people to just try something out for the first time or push something further.’’
And the building, at 1 Kent Tce, has always been home to ‘‘beautiful little weirdos’’.
That included the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes – the ‘‘Buffs’’ – which leased the ground floor to the theatre for 22 years.
The secretive fraternal society caused a crisis for BATS in 2011 when it put the building up for sale.
It was famously saved at the eleventh hour by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who bought the building and did it up – including seismic strengthening – ensuring BATS a home for many years to come.
But Zwart said the BATS community held no bad feelings with the Buffs.
‘‘They were super-supportive of us.
‘‘I don’t think they had any idea what we were doing, and we had no idea what they were doing.’’
The theatre had then moved into a temporary site on the corner of Cuba and Dixon streets before ‘‘flying’’ home.
Zwart said he was ‘‘so excited’’ to open the doors to the theatre’s 2019 season.
The first show of the year would start with which aimed to spark ‘‘courageous conversations about racism, whiteness, power and colonial fallout’’.
It was billed as a ‘‘macabre and hysterical’’ rumination on ‘‘white resistance to ongoing challenges about unearned power and privilege’’.
It had been performed in a ‘‘pop-up/ guerrilla’’ style previously, including as part of a festival in Denmark.
Zwart said BATS was a space for ‘‘anything’’.
Development was at the ‘‘real core of its kaupapa’’.
‘‘It’s around development of people . . . that’s young, early career artists, or about development of ideas from older, more established artists, and development of the theatre scene in Wellington and New Zealand.’’
BATS had been named for its founders Rodney Bane and David Austin, an acronym for the Bane and Austin Touring Society.
At first a successful amateur theatre, by the early 1980s the theatre fell into neglect.
Theatre makers Simon Bennett and Simon Elson conjured a proposal to save the theatre in 1988, and by November 1989 the theatre took its familiar risk/share form.
Since then, it had helped launch the careers of comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, playwrights Ken Duncum, Jo Randerson and Jacob Rajan, actor Miranda Harcourt and film-maker Taika Waititi, among many more.
BATS was also the original home of the NZ Fringe Festival, now a separate entity of its own, that brought the cutting edge of Kiwi and international theatre to the capital in February and March every year.