Beyond Music Special Interest Mini-Lecture Night
September 18 @ 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm NZST
$15
Join us for an evening of short presentations from some of our Darkroom community members about what they get up to beyond making music & attending gigs here!
Darkroom’s music community is a wonderfully diverse and interesting group of people, and while we know everyone loves live music, we want to give folks from the Darkroom community an opportunity to share what else they do outside of music. This series welcomes folks to talk about their hobbies, studies, work, art and niche, special interest topics!
Our last Beyond Music night sold out super fast, so make sure you grab a ticket quick if you want to come along this time!
Our guest speakers and topics for September are:
The NZ Electricity Market – Cameron Taylor
Working in a Gin Distillery – Feather Shaw
The Psychology of Street Performance – Michael Armstrong
Each presenter will deliver a short 20min presentation featuring a slide show, physical props, loads of fun facts, and some laughs along the way! Plus plenty of time for questions and discussion to follow.
Email us at info@darkroom.bar if you’re a Darkroom regular who wants to talk about your own special interest at a future event!
CAMERON TAYLOR – THE NZ ELECTRICITY MARKET
(AKA Why Everything’s so F***ing Expensive)
Meet Cameron Taylor. By day he is a Portfolio Analyst for Meridian Energy, but you might recognise him from local stoner-doom band Enfire.
Cameron’s work job involves running complex stochastic models to forecast the New Zealand Electricity Market, and provide guidance to the business on how much electricity we generate from our hydro stations in any given week, and how we want to shape our Portfolio over the next 5 years. This gives Cameron a unique insight into the hugely complex NZ Electricity Market. He hopes his talk will help demystify some of the black box that is the electricity market, so us ordinary folk can understand how it all works and why our power bills are so damn expensive.
FEATHER SHAW – WORKING IN A GIN DISTILLERY
A theatre studies graduate, a dance school drop out, and proud failure of 5th form maths and science, Feather Shaw (who you might recognise as the co-owner of Darkroom and from local punk band Bin Day), never imagined she’d wind up knowing anything about chemistry. Feather was fully self-employed at Darkroom when COVID-19 hit, and decided she needed to get a day job while the venue was closed. Through an old flatmate she stumbled into a role as a distillery tour guide and a factory all rounder for local gin and whisky makers, The Spirits Workshop. She’s been working there part time for over 5 years now around her role at Darkroom, and she’ll share some insights into the history of gin, how it’s made, and how the words copper column reflux still came to be in her vocab.
MICHAEL ARMSTRONG – THE PSYCHOLOGY OF STREET PERFORMANCE
Michael has performed around the world at festivals including The Edinburgh Fringe, and The World Buskers Festival. He originally studied Circus at Circo Arts before touring with Circus Aotearoa. Career highlights have included performing his show Blown Away with the Tauranga Symphonia, and being invited to talk at Ted X Wellington on the use of psychology in street theatre. You might recognise him from performing at Darkroom in cabaret shows where he has flexed his juggling, rolla bolla, magic, clowning and comedy chops.
Street performance is an ancient art that differs from most performances in one important way: no one has agreed to watch it.
The audience has not purchased a ticket, and are probably busy heading somewhere else, so street performers have to employ a range of subtle psychological tricks to engage an audience and to get them to hang around. This talk will break down how the ideas of influence by Robert Cialdini are used by street performers, and probably in every other area of your life.
Fri Sept 18th
Doors open 7pm with first talk starting at 7:30pm
Tickets from UTR, starting at just $10!
No door sales for this one, so if you want to come along be sure to grab a ticket!
R18. R.O.A.R.
