Inside CubaDupa, where the street becomes the stage
Friday, 27 March 2026
At CubaDupa, the question isn’t what’s on -- it’s whether you’ve already wandered into it.
Held across March 28 and 29 in and around Wellington’s Cuba precinct, the free annual colourful street festival celebrates art, music, dance, food, and boasts hundreds of artists of all disciplines.
But this year joy will not only be spread to audiences from the plethora of stages and stalls in every nook and corner of the precinct ‒ it will also come from a growing cohort of street theatre artists.
Characterised by accessible, visible performance in a public, often open-air space, street theatre requires minimal props and no amplified sound, and instead relies on physical acting styles like comedy or mime to captivate people without a formal stage.
The idea is for festivalgoers to be immersed in unassuming, personal, or highly innovative art experiences.
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CubaDupa was committed to supporting creatives take their work out of black-box theatre settings and reimagine it for the street, said festival director Bianca Bailey.
“By blurring the line between audience and performer, many experiences begin almost inconspicuously. You might not realise you’ve stepped into a performance until you’re already part of it, drawn in through curiosity, play, or connection,” she said.
CubaDupa has this year partnered with the recently-wrapped Fringe Festival, as well as multiple emerging artists, for some of the street theatre activations.
One of the characters crowds may encounter is the Cool Pope, who will be dapping people up and forgiving them for anything they’ve done that’s wrong; dressed in a red hat, gold cross, white robes, and a red morph suit.
Played by Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin, who trained at French clown school École Philippe Gaulier, the character is said to be very friendly – people can expect smiling and waving. “It’s very common for me to forgive anybody – most of the time,” Dugdale-Martin says. “We all make mistakes.”
As for why CubaDupa is the perfect place for the Cool Pope to make an appearance? “Many people do not have time for confessional, and perhaps are afraid of churches. … People may suspect that I am performing, because it is uncommon to see a Pope in Wellington,” says Dugdale-Martin.
From there being no control over sound or lighting, to the fact there’s no time limits, performing in public requires a certain sensitivity from the artist, who must decide when to continue and when to move on ‒ seconds, minutes or hours?
“To be on the street [is to be] where anything can happen,” Dugdale-Martin says.
“The fun comes from them figuring out what kind of performance it is. Theatre can come with very complicated rules or feelings for people. For me, the theatre of it is the connection between a Pope and a stranger.”
Also roaming will be the characters of the stage play HAUSDOWN, which has had two Wellington seasons: once in 2023 at BATS Theatre, and the other in 2025 at Hannah Playhouse.
As well as performing jigs from the play, on Sunday the troupe will be more focused on children, with the characters taking tea, playing games, dancing, and racing on hobby horses.
By co-writers and producers Katie Hill and Ruby Carter, the show’s seven deeply delusional Regency-era queer aristocrat caricatures will be promenading the streets in bold, fanciful, colour-coordinated weekend finery (by Carter); simultaneously confused and shocked at the inventions of today.
How they came to wander the main drag of Pōneke, you ask? “Nobody quite knows, but it will certainly be fun to watch them marvel at modern contraptions like the Bucket Fountain,” Hill says.
Audiences should expect to be asked plenty of questions.
“Wellington is so different from life at the manor. But be warned: they do rather think they’re better than everyone else,” Hill says.
With the cast having played these characters for three years now, they’re well-practised in witty quips and ready to roll with whatever a busy Cuba St crowd throws their way.
Stepping into a public performance can be a really unique experience for someone who’s never seen street theatre, Hill says. “You’re far more likely to remember the day you played croquet with the cast of HAUSDOWN than the Tuesday you bought some milk and sent a few emails.”
Or perhaps you’d prefer some fatherly advice from a handful of dads, decked out in polo shirts, cargo shorts, socks and sandals?
What began as a solo, improvised show called I’m Proud of You by Austin Harrison that toured the country last year, has turned into a celebration of wholesome, affirming Kiwi fathers and their yarns, under the moniker The Dad Brigade.
“We’re the kind of dads who are incredibly proud of their kids no matter what they do, and we want you to know that,” Harrison says. “We’ll be checking in with the kids we haven’t seen in a long time, offering some fatherly wisdom, and encouraging kids to brag about how much cooler they are than their dad.”
As part of a group, there’s a sense of relief for Harrison, who says it will be somewhat obvious a performance is going on. “When it was just me, it did sometimes take people by surprise because I just looked like a guy committing fashion crimes.”
While a lot of street theatre plays with absurdity or spectacle, Harrison also wants to help create genuinely lovely human interactions.
“Everyone has reasons to be proud of themselves. Our mission is to find all the awesome, little things that people are doing in their lives and celebrate them the way you wish your dad would,” he says.
Then there’s BodyFX Makeover Mayhem presented by Wētā Workshop, in which audiences are invited into fast-paced head-to-décolletage transformations, effectively turning festivalgoers into living artworks.
People go into a tent and come out a few minutes later completely transformed. “The fun is not quite knowing what is going on in there,” BodyFX general manager Myrthe Heydenrijk says.
As those people then move through the streets, it will become deliberately unclear who is performing and who is taking part, dissolving the boundary between art and audience, Bailey says.
BodyFX, a company that’s now run by award-winning special FX makeup artists Heydenrijk and her sister Yolanda Bartram, was started by the pair’s mother in a studio on Wellington’s Victoria St in the early 2000s, just one block over from the Cuba precinct.
Over the years the organisation has been involved in the Cuba Street Carnival that predated CubaDupa and, as of recently, it has run more artist-focused events.
“[Cuba St] really is our old stomping ground,” Heydenrijk says. “This time we really wanted to flip that around and create something where the public could step in and become part of the experience themselves.”
In face painting and makeup, Heydenrijk says the best part is the mirror moment ‒ when the person gets to see what they look like.
“We often deliberately don’t show people until the very end. You see someone transform ‒ not just visually, but in their personality as well. … Sometimes we have a really shy model in the chair and by the time they see themselves as a new character, they completely change. They stand differently and move differently. It’s a really special moment.”
For the full CubaDupa programme and more info, visit cubadupa.co.nz