'The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave' Edinburgh Fringe 2025

After sold-out seasons across New Zealand and Australia, the award-winning ‘The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave’, goes global as they travel to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025 to perform an epic 23 show season. 

With invitation and programming from the prestigious Summerhall, the work was the inaugural winners of the ‘PANNZ - Edinburgh Fringe Festival Summerhall Award’ at PANNZ Arts Market 2024, which sees PANNZ, Summerhall, and Aurora Nova team up to assist the team presenting at the festival.

We now turn to our friends, whānau, community, and fellow ravers to help raise the remaining funds needed to achieve our tour.

THE TEAM

• Oli Mathiesen (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi), emerging queer and Māori choreographer, join forces with powerhouses of contemporary dance:
• Lucy Lynch (Ngāti Kahungunu)
• Sharvon Mortimer (Ngāti Porou)
• and Celia Hext (Ngāti Kahungunu) to deliver a dynamic, endless, booming performance
• with Abbie Rogers (Kāi Tahu, Te Arawa), emerging creative producer and stage manager
• and Bekky Boyce, celebrated production designer and operator

As a whole this team creates our versed and uniquely skilled queer Māori led touring party. 

We seek your support as friends and whānau to contribute costs toward:

• Cost of travel and flights from Aotearoa to Edinburgh for touring party of 6
• Adequate accomodation for our 4 performers
• Repairs and maintenance of costuming and supportive footware

“An international sweaty hellhole and the cesspit I so desire to be trapped in for 48 hours. The likes of the Berlin and New York underground rave scene have always fascinated me. I believe another version of myself exists somewhere in a piss-covered club where I’ve chewed through my cheeks and some guy’s kids are spilled down my back. I am galvanized and roused by rave culture and everything it encompasses.”

From Aotearoa New Zealand, Oli Mathiesen with Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer present the award-winning 'The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave', an endurance-based dance work to the booming techno album 'Nocturbulous Behaviour' by Suburban Knight. Exploring the movement vocabulary used in techno and rave culture, a contemporary nightclub between 3 bodies emerges. Relentless movement, seamless without pause, detailed down to every beat. The atmosphere and culture of a 3-day rave condensed into a high art, streamlined performance where you watch the destruction of 3 human beings commence in front of you. Indulge in the pain, the sweat, the cathartic mess; a display of pure endurance to achieve a goal. A spectacle of the human body as a victim to music, as a victim to passion, as a victim to our endless desire to achieve more. To win and win again.

Resuscitation on repeat. It is the come up and the come down all in one and highlights the beauty of feeling alive but all the consequences that come with it. It’s an ode to the past 5-year marathon of losing societal morals and political structure. Our communal loss of work, time, love, sex, eating, fighting, cleaning, holidaying, sleeping, pashing, drinking, throwing up, everything, physicalised as an artifact of what we as a people have endured. And just like listening to a love song that sings to that one breakup you had, 'The Butterfly Who Flew Into the Rave' is an acid house remix that screams f**k you to the pandemic.

This radical yet successful show promises to enthrall, excite, and build new audiences across a month-long season. Through our boldly queer and trance-inducing work, we are excited to share and engage international communities by developing career-shaping relationships with international presenters and artists, while uplifting and showcasing Aotearoa queer excellence on the world stage.

Our season commences over the 31st July - 25th of August, performing 23 shows over the month at the internationally recognised Summerhall. Known for its reputable curation in programming, championing emerging and established artists at the cutting edge of contemporary storytelling, it is Edinburgh’s hub for innovative performance. As “one of the world’s great arts venues”, Summerhall has garnered a loyal audience that spans diversity, age, and culture, attracting over a million visitors a year.

THE SHOWS HISTORY

• ‘The Butterfly Who Flew Into That Rave’ premiered in February as part of Auckland Pride Festival 2024 at Basement Theatre. The work was co-commissioned by the festival for its Pride Elevates program, platforming and celebrating emerging queer artistry. 
• The show premiered two astonishingly successful seasons, the second at BATS Theatre for the New Zealand Fringe Festival 2024. With 3 sold-out performances, the rapturous response from audiences proved its critical and commercial success; with avid dance lovers to theatre first-timers enthralled by the rave.
• Concluding the NZ Fringe Festival, the work was announced as the winner of the Melbourne Fringe Tour Ready Award, Sydney Fringe Tour Ready Award, and the Momentous Movement Award, alongside 3 further nominations, and 3 nominations at the Wellington Theatre Awards 2024.
• This led us to our Australia and South Island 4-centre tour. The show took form in four new exciting formats as we adapted the show to rave boldly in a convent, a rail station, a royal theatre, and a library. Presenting 9 shows over Melbourne Fringe Festival, Performance Space’s Liveworks (Sydney), Nelson Arts Festival, and Tiny Fest (Christchurch), our tour provided the stepping stones to international audience exposure and strengthening touring capabilities. The tour was met with a rapturous success, with sold-out seasons, 5-star reviews, and a celebration of queerness nationally and internationally.

• Recently, we concluded a 3-night sold-out season at Australia's premiere arts festival, RISING 2025 (Melbourne). The show’s presence was unmatched with its vibrancy and cutting-edge approach to unique presentations, transforming the Buxton Contemporary art gallery into a club.

   

ACCOLADES

• Winner of the ‘PANNZ - Edinburgh Fringe Festival Summerhall Award’ at PANNZ Arts Market 2024
• Winner of the ‘Melbourne Fringe Tour Ready Award’ at New Zealand Fringe Festival 2024
• Winner of the ‘Sydney Fringe Tour Ready Award’ at New Zealand Fringe Festival 2024
• Winner of the ‘Momentous Movement Award’ at New Zealand Fringe Festival 2024

“...an extraordinary dance work; a marvellous simulation of an intensely vigorous, volatile and transcendent rave.” - Theatre Review

“…it is, without a doubt, an unmissable experience.” - Theatre Travels 

“...a breathtaking, unyielding display of the human spirit fueled by music and movement.” - Theatre Travels

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest and most diverse arts festival globally, providing a vital network where artists gain international attention from the likes of presenters, venues, and directors. The value of presenting our work not only exposes us to the wealth of new relationship-building but also lets our art speak, putting our practice and artistry directly on display. As emerging queer Māori makers, this opportunity is vital to our career trajectory and growth as individuals and a company. These ventures allow us to meet new artists to challenge and grow our practices, with the promise of future collaboration and exchange.

International touring pathways are unclear for independent artists, especially in dance, and through fringe, we will be able to spearhead new networks and relationships that will benefit the emerging landscape of Aotearoa choreographers to help build a robust touring infrastructure within our wider working arts communities.

‘The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave’ has proven national success, acclaim, and international programming. This is an opportunity to represent the high-quality work being produced in NZ on a global stage while platforming queer and indigenous voices. It showcases Kiwi talents at different stages of their careers with intersecting practices, celebrating the diversity in our backgrounds, dance histories, and life stories while unifying on the common ground of being skilled technicians, captivating performers, and our unwavering commitment to artistic excellence. The work teeters on the edge, fringe-y and raw in its attempt, but professional and exemplary of NZ’s world-class production, skill set, and innovative creativity.

Fringe is known for its progressive and inclusive atmosphere, with receptive and supportive audiences interested in diverse and bold artistic expressions. The presentation will be conducive to the queer celebration, uplifting our collaborative team through visibility while contributing a unique Kiwi voice to the international dialogue about LGBTQ+ representation in the arts.

The belief instilled in us by our backers provides a unique opportunity to let young queer Māori voices lead the artistic conversation overseas. With our current momentum, we are excited to harness these opportunities to exponentially propel the development of us as artists and our artistic, queer, and indigenious communities.