Culture 101

Manchester writer and theatre maker Chris Thorpe spent the week in Aotearoa running an intensive workshop, Conversations for Impossible Times, organised by Playmarket and the British Council. The workshop brought together 16 practitioners including Pip Hall, Sam Brooks, Ni Dekkers-Reihana and Alice Canton to explore how theatre can engage with subjects that feel overwhelming, from nuclear disarmam...

At The World's Edge is a non-profit chamber music festival running 3 to 16 October across the Queenstown Lakes, founded by violinists Benjamin Baker and Justine Cormack. This year's programme includes Orbital, a new commission pairing Victoria University composer Michael Norris with Arrowtown-based artist and designer Ed Cruikshank. Norris describes the 15-minute piece for string trio and live ele...

Dan Slevin reviews three family animation releases: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, a Halloween special from Aardman in which Shaun accidentally mixes a pumpkin growth serum with the farmer's hair tonic, with predictably chaotic results; Forgotten Island, an animation inspired by Philippine mythology following two best friends who discover a portal to a magical island where their frien...

Jason Chasland, known as cabaret performer Leather Lungs, was discovered at WOW in 2004 when Dame Susie Moncrieff came into his Wellington performing arts school while he was rehearsing Rocky Horror in shiny heels and liked what she saw. He grew up on a farm in Wairarapa where his father was a farmer, a bodybuilder and a wood chopper, and started in community theatre in Carterton aged seven after...

Actor and filmmaker Romy Hooper won the global CinemaStreet Women's Short Screenplay Competition with her script The Gap, becoming the first New Zealander to take the award from 125 entrants. She's now crowd-funding to produce the film in New York.

Josiah Morgan is a Christchurch-based poet, theatre practitioner and editor heading to Dunedin this week as Young Writer in Residence at the Robert Lord Writers Cottage, as part of the New Zealand Young Writers Festival. He is working on a poem of around 100 pages in which a person attempts to surgically transform their body into that of a moa, and expects to have the first quarter of a draft and...

Sefton Rani lived in Piha and lost his home and studio in Cyclone Gabrielle. His first institutional solo exhibition, Clear My Throat, is now showing at Pah Homestead in Tamaki Makaurau until 15 November. The show uses industrial and hard materials across large sculptures and installations, and curator Dina Jezdic has placed it in dialogue with the colonial history of the homestead itself. Perlina...

Cabaret turns 60 this year and is closing out Auckland Theatre Company's season at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, running 22 September to 25 October. Nomi Cohen plays Sally Bowles, the role made famous by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film. Cohen has a Bachelor of Performing Arts in Musical Theatre, trained at the Actor's Programme. She joins Culture 101 to talk about inhabiting a character so embedded i...

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with the latest from the big screen.

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with the latest from the big screen.

Peter Salmon directed all six episodes of After the Party and came out the other side burnt out, so his next move was a comedy. Good Bones is a horror-comedy on ThreeNow and Neon starring Josh Thomson as a procrastinating husband whose marriage hinges on his ability to renovate a murder house. Salmon describes finding tone as the hardest and most instinctive part of directing, something he often d...

In(Visible) Stories is a new online archive tracking the history and current movements of Pan-Asian film, television and screen creators in Aotearoa, created by Dr Sarina Pearson and Dr Shuchi Kothari through their Asian New Zealanders on Screen Research Project, funded by the Royal Society Marsden Fund. The project maps work written, directed and produced by the Pan-Asian community, filling a gap...

Reo Journeys: Te Pou Herenga Tai is a new five-part RNZ podcast debuting this afternoon, following documentary makers Eugene Bingham and Adam Dudding as they cycle the 90km Twin Coast Cycle Trail in Northland, with sound recordist and composer James Dansey recording the land, the people and the korero along the way. Dansey came to the project through te reo Maori class with Eugene and Adam, and de...

Production designer Ashley Turner and costume, hair and makeup designer Lissy Turner are the pair who built the world of Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, the local body-horror comedy now in cinemas. They set the film in what they described internally as aspirational Invercargill, a deliberately familiar semi-rural New Zealand brick-and-tile apartment that makes the alien elements land harder when they arr...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: The Rivals of Azmiah King, Andrew Patterson's film with Matthew McConaughey as a beekeeper and bluegrass musician reconnecting with his former foster daughter while fending off threats to his honey business; The Weight, in which Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in a Great Depression survival story about smuggling gold through a hundred miles of wild...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: The Rivals of Azmiah King, Andrew Patterson's film with Matthew McConaughey as a beekeeper and bluegrass musician reconnecting with his former foster daughter while fending off threats to his honey business; The Weight, in which Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in a Great Depression survival story about smuggling gold through a hundred miles of wild...

Auckland's City Rail Link opens today, and two of the artists whose work now fills the new underground stations joined Perlina for a guided walk-through. At Karanga-a-hape Station, Reuben Kirkwood designed a vaulted ceiling made from metal sections inspired by the pupurangi, a large snail that lives in the trees, alongside carved kauri lunar discs and a sun-and-moon installation tracking the tides...

Jess Reiner Reed is the senior project director for Wolverine at Insomniac Games, the studio best known for its Spider-Man series. She's visiting New Zealand for the game's release and joins Culture 101 to talk about what you have to get right when you take on a character that exists across decades of comics, films and cartoons, how her team landed on a specific vision rather than trying to please...

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for September. He recommends Good Bones on Three, Josh Thompson's new mystery dramedy about a procrastinating home renovator who discovers a body behind a wall, calling it frighteningly good; A Killer Story on HBO Max, a three-part true crime about a true-crime-obsessed couple who spend years emailing a sceptical New York Times journalist with eviden...

Mama Moo is a new absurdist comedy from Prayas Theatre, New Zealand's largest South Asian theatre company, in which a widowed butcher who can see his dead wife's ghost slaughters a cow that then becomes a spiritual matchmaker and life coach, setting him on a course to win the heart of an animal rights activist. Writer Nimish Tanna started researching the ethics of vegetarianism after being embarra...

Mike Allen has spent his career in retirement planning and financial advice, but music has always run alongside it. He put down the saxophone as a child and picked it up again in his 40s. This Sunday he'll be one of more than 300 community instrumentalists joining the Auckland Philharmonia for their annual Community Bash at the Auckland Town Hall, alongside 134 singers and 74 orchestra musicians p...

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, a New Zealand indie gross-out comedy about a slacker still living at home who finds herself carrying a fast-developing alien foetus after an awkward hookup with her neighbour; Fall 2: Deadpoint, in which the sister of one of the two women from the 2022 surprise hit is dared to walk an off-limits ancient plank walk around a terrifying...

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, a New Zealand indie gross-out comedy about a slacker still living at home who finds herself carrying a fast-developing alien foetus after an awkward hookup with her neighbour; Fall 2: Deadpoint, in which the sister of one of the two women from the 2022 surprise hit is dared to walk an off-limits ancient plank walk around a terrifying...

Nic Russell's memoir Bollix took four years to write, partly because she had to learn to write it at the same time. She got her medical notes to use as a timeline, and found that revisiting the clinical language pulled the emotion back too. By the time she was in her late 40s, Nic had lost a daughter to Ewing's sarcoma, survived breast cancer, received a heart transplant and been diagnosed with Pa...

Black Grace has moved into a converted warehouse just behind Karangahape Road, the latest stage in founder Neil Ieremia's decade-long plan to build a permanent centre for Pacific contemporary dance. The new space has a sprung, moveable performance floor, a full lighting rig, blackout draping and an LED wall at its entrance built from the same design grid as the Black Grace branding. It doubles as...