Culture 101

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...

Beautiful Words Con is a new independent writing festival launching in Nelson from Tuesday until 26 September, with 30 talks and workshops covering fiction, poetry, songwriting, game writing and indie publishing. Director George Penney is a published author who moved to Nelson three years ago and started writing people-watching vignettes about the community, which then took off both locally and in...

Four Hawke's Bay artists have each received $10,000 through the second Te Matau-a-Maui Contemporary Art: Gwen Malden Trust Commissions, supported by Hastings Art Gallery. Leanne Morrison's contribution, Inside Looking Out, is nine geometric paintings combined with fabric works that aim to put the viewer inside the work rather than outside looking in, drawing on the Samoan concept of va, the space...

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic survival story in which a former mechanic and soldier keep a small plane flying after a virus has wiped out almost all human life, starring Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley and Josh Brolin; The Whisper Man, a Netflix thriller from New Zealand director James Ashcroft in which a widowed crime writer must enlist his e...

Tiny Statements is a Te Papa exhibition drawing 200 badges from a collection of more than 4,000, spanning just over a century from the First World War to 2024. One highlight is the pennant of Alpha Maamoe, the first woman to captain the New Zealand women's hockey team in the 1960s, covered in badges she swapped with players from around the world. Another is a simple cast badge that says only "Post...

Erotica by the Fire is a new RNZ podcast hosted by comedian Donna Brookbanks and writer Shoshana McCallum, in which fellow comedians, writers and performers write their own erotic fiction and then read it out loud to the hosts. Josh Thomson's contribution is set in a hardware store and involves compost. Hayley Sproull's features Jason Momoa, who she messages on Instagram and from whom the hosts ar...

WORD Christchurch runs from 1 to 6 September, with more than 60 events, 100 writers, artists and thinkers, and an expected 13,000 attendees flooding the CBD. Programme director Kiran Dass joins Culture 101 to preview this year's lineup, which spans Dave Dobbyn and Jon Toogood, romantasy, crime, politics and art, and to make the case that you don't need to have read the books to get something out o...

Emily Hartley-Skudder's new exhibition CAMEO has opened at Te Manawa Museum in Palmerston North. The show is her response to Ladies Rest, the city's 1936 Art Deco public toilet block in the Square, which Lonely Planet has named one of New Zealand's five most picturesque toilet blocks and which received a Category 2 heritage listing. The title comes from Community Action by Mothers and Existing Oth...

Michelle Langstone reviews new releases: Spa Weekend, a comedy starring Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau, Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher as old friends whose trip is derailed by a chaotic fourth; and Savage House, a period comedy-drama set during a Georgian smallpox epidemic with Richard E Grant and Claire Foy as a debt-riddled noble couple hosting a Duke and Duchess in their crumbling manor. She also pic...

Melanie Lynskey plays a mother dying of cancer in Don't Say Good Luck, a Netflix film produced by Adam and Jackie Sandler and co-starring their 17-year-old daughter Sunny. It was, she says, one of the easiest jobs of her career. She traces her training back to Miranda Harcourt, who taught her more in a single day audition for Heavenly Creatures than she learned in formal drama school, and to Jenni...

Rachel Hemingway stepped on her son's skateboard returning from a family Disneyland trip, fell backward on concrete, and spent the next two years trying to come back from a serious brain injury. She came out the other side as the owner of Chapter One Gallery in Christchurch and the creator of Suitcase Stories, a fundraising project where she put out a social media call for artists to each transfor...

Our Ocean of Islands has just opened at the New Zealand Maritime Museum and is unlike most exhibitions in that it is contributor-led rather than curator-led: each of the 24 participating island nations was invited to decide for itself what it wanted to share, guided only by a broad focus on the inseparability of peoples, environments and indigenous knowledge. All 17 Pacific nations with diaspora c...

Therese Eberhard is an American-born scenic artist, props and set painter who came to New Zealand to work on King Kong and never left. She has worked on Avatar, The Hobbit, Rings of Power, What We Do in the Shadows and more, and spent the past decade accumulating interviews and photographs from more than 50 contributors for The Reel Deal, a scrapbook-style love letter to the below-the-line film cr...

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: One Night Only, a comedy set in a United States where pre-marital sex has been legally outlawed by biometric implant, except for one night a year when unmarried adults can let off steam - starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner; & Sons, in which Bill Nighy plays a reclusive novelist making one last attempt to reconcile with his two estranged adult sons and...

Resilience psychologist Dr Lucy Hone has spent 15 years researching how people navigate loss. Her TEDx talk, The Three Secrets of Resilient People, has been viewed more than nine million times and translated into 23 languages. Her new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This, grew out of readers of her earlier work Resilient Grieving asking whether the same tools applied to losses that don't involve...

Nairn Street Cottage has stood since around 1858 and has been a house museum since 1980, with each room dressed to reflect a different decade of the Wallace family's occupation. A new exhibition, Unsettling Nairn Street, has placed seven contemporary artists in those rooms to respond to the layers of history embedded in the building and the whenua it stands on. Writer and co-curator Emma Ng joins...

An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen's play about a medical officer who discovers contaminated water at a local spa and finds himself crushed by the forces protecting economic interests, has been adapted by Aaron Richardson of Fly Leaf Theatre Company and set in a small Canterbury town. Fraser Hoffman, who plays Dr Thomas Stockmann, says he's found examples of this exact situation playing out in N...

Hospital of Emotions is an immersive exhibition that has taken over an abandoned four-storey hospital in downtown Los Angeles, with 70 artists transforming 80 rooms around eight departments of human emotion. Visitors check in like patients, receive a wristband and work their way through rooms for fear, anger, hope, love, sadness, gratitude and resilience. The building was found largely intact, nur...

Lindah Lepou is a multi-disciplinary artist raised in Porirua and Samoa who coined the term Pacific Couture. Her new exhibition Mata'aitu, now at Pataka Art+Museum until 8 November, traces the history of human zoos from the 1890s to the present, exploring how the voyeuristic gaze of the 19th-century zoo has evolved through film and into the digital age. On a research trip to Germany, she found a l...

Kate Rodger reviews two new blockbusters: Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's epic starring Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Zendaya, following Odysseus on his perilous journey home after the Trojan War; and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, currently the highest-grossing film of 2026 with $1.1 billion at the box...