By Ali Ikram
If you are into shows from the edge, the Auckland Fringe Festival is for you and takes in over 100 events starting on Friday.
But sometimes you don't have to go to the shows – they might actually ambush you.
Everyday we are surrounded by so many wonders of the modern world they blend into the background – mundane trivialities – but when say the lift was invented in 1854 it was know as the vertical railway.
But some of that magic and mystery may well be coming to an elevator near you.
Named after the lift's inventor, the play is called The Safety Device of Elisha Otis.
"It's also a very strange place; it's like nothing else you go into on a daily basis,” says playwright Bronwyn Bent. “It's a little room that moves and that's quite and weird concept when you think about it."
We probably subconsciously acknowledge that it is weird by remaining silent, gazing at the floors changing and engaging in only the most Spartan conversation.
"When you're engaged in conversation it drops when you get into an elevator because we are standing close together and we don't know each other at all do we?” says Bent.
The cleaner furiously penning a free verse poem out of our stilted conversations only served to underline the awkwardness
So could all of these strange sights in lifts actually lead to not just a trip to the second floor by take passengers to another level of consciousness?
Only the unsuspecting will find out – you can't go and see the show because it finds you and will play out in elevator shafts around Auckland in coming weeks.
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