Don’t be fooled by the corporate appearance of the ground floor of 148 Cuba Street! The Art Friend Studio is only an elevator ride away on level 5, with a tattoo artist and a robot builder as neighbours.

It’s an ideal space for the presentation of Writing Home – small enough to be intimate, large enough to fit twenty audience members. There’s a couch at the back and I nab a seat, prepared for an immersive experience of a multi-media show with poetry as its main offering.

What makes a poem a performance piece? Having suffered through listening to poems that certainly weren’t, I’m curious to hear and see what Miss Leading and Rose Northey get up to.

I don’t need to worry. Here are a couple of young women whose proficiency as writers and performers is evident from the start. Rose goes first with ‘How do you turn a house into a home?’ It makes various mischievous suggestions before concluding with the line “You leave it to make your own.” The ability to relieve ostensibly serious content with light heartedness is also the hallmark of ‘An opinion I’m not supposed to have’.

Miss Leading accompanies her poems on a synthesiser – known as a deluge she tells me later – and the electronic sound is particularly suited to her material. Her poems treat the notion of home in a wider sense: they have nature and our relationship with it at their heart. About trees, she writes: “And I want to create an intimacy that will lift the lethargy of our limbs.” Climate change features in other poetic observations. A concluding poem about Wellington’s wind is especially well received.

Illustrations by Rose appear onscreen and visually accompany the poems. Sound man Marc Freeman is kept busy.

This was the first performance of Writing Home – I hope it’s not the last.
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