Culture 101

Glide Time opened at Circa Theatre on 11 August 1976 with a waitlist of more than 1,000 people, and audiences laughed before a line was even spoken, recognising their own offices on stage. Sir Roger Hall wrote it in a Connecticut library while attending a playwriting workshop where Meryl Streep was one of the actors, after deciding he could do better than the plays he was watching. Five decades an...

The Auckland Mushroom Festival runs from 12 to 15 August on Karangahape Road, with more than 20 restaurants offering fungi-inspired dishes, art installations including mushroom sculptures and a sound installation, a speaker series on psychedelics and foraging, and a Saturday costume parade through the new CRL station before it officially opens. Fungi enthusiast, author and festival co-ordinator Li...

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for August. He recommends Settling on Three, calling it an authentic and distinctly Kiwi rom com that rises above its familiar premise through sharp writing and real chemistry between its leads. He's more cautious about Monsters of God on HBO Max, the new documentary from the Tiger King creator about exotic reptile smuggling, which he finds fascinati...

Time Shivers is a trio of friends, Lachie Oliver-Kirby, Oscar Fitzgerald and Aidan O'Malley, who started making each other laugh privately and eventually decided other people might want to watch. Their new show On Purpose, opening at Basement Theatre this week, is an absurdist sketch comedy about three wanderers stuck in purgatory, trying and failing to write a sketch show, and promising audiences...

Writer, creator and actor Hannah Marshall has two shows releasing this week on Three: Ms X, a crime comedy about a mother whose revenge plot takes a homicidal turn, starring Melissa George and co-written with her director husband Dave, which has already sold to Disney+ in the UK, Peacock in the US and Binge in Australia; and Settling, a rom com she wrote and stars in alongside Pax Assadi about two...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: H is for Hawk, Phillippa Lowthorpe's biographical drama based on Helen MacDonald's memoir, starring Claire Foy as a grieving woman who channels her loss into training a goshawk, with Brendan Gleeson as her father; Kiri and Lou Go Raah!, Harry Sinclair's feature-length origin story of Aotearoa's most famous dinosaurs, starring Liv Tennent and Jemaine C...

At The Wake is a play by Victor Rodger, imagining what might have happened if his Scottish grandmother and Samoan father had met at a funeral. Susan Brady plays Joan, the grandmother, who is foul-mouthed, hard-drinking and says exactly what she thinks. It's Brady's return to the stage after a long gap, and she describes the South Island as hungry for theatre in a way that doesn't always get enough...

Music thanatology is a practice that uses live harp music and voice to help manage pain, restlessness and anxiety in patients approaching the end of life. Tony Pederson is one of a very small number of practitioners worldwide, and he paces the music in real time to match a patient's breathing, adjusting moment by moment as those rhythms change. He came to it while working in an Alzheimer's unit, w...

The 48 Hours Film Competition is on this weekend, with teams racing to deliver a short film by 7pm today. Chris Callus and Adam Reynolds of Positive Barry won last year's competition with Grounded, an animated film about a ladybug with anxiety and the spider trying to help it fly, made as a buddy film with the required elements of something miniature, an accident and a slow movement. Chris did all...

Boro is the Japanese tradition of mending and patching fabric over generations, born in rural farming and fishing communities where nothing could be wasted. The repairs were always done on the back of the cloth, never meant to be seen, and pieces were sometimes built up across seven or eight layers of fabric over decades. Pip Steel stumbled across it while sourcing recycled indigo cotton online, a...

The global Kate Bush phenomenon where participants dress in her iconic red outfit and perform the choreography from the Wuthering Heights video is taking place at its wet weather venue in Wellington's Central Library. Culture 101 crosses to organiser Emma Harrison to find out whether library goers are likely to Shhh the dancers.

Anna Thomas heads to Te Toi Uku Crown Lynn and Clay Museum in West Auckland, where curator and director Louise Stevenson has just reopened the site's 100-year-old kiln, the last surviving structure from the brickmaking era in Auckland. The museum tells the story of four decades of Crown Lynn ceramics including 2,700 patterns, 15 million items a year at peak production, exported around the world, a...

Dan Slevin joins Culture 101 with a preview of this year's NZ International Film Festival. Films include ARCO, a family animated film co-produced by Natalie Portman about a boy who steals his sister's time travel suit hoping to see dinosaurs but lands in the near future instead; The Ice Tower, in which Marion Cotillard plays a tyrannical 1960s film star who befriends a teenage orphan girl on the s...

Brett Austin decided, after retiring in his late 60s, to try writing a novel. His first step was typing "how do you write a novel" into Google. His debut, Flood Zone, is a Coromandel-set crime thriller built around climate change, a suspicious subdivision on flood-prone land, and the kinds of wealth and power that make things disappear. He joins Culture 101 with advice for anyone thinking about ha...

Nelson-born, Melbourne-based artist and cartographer Anton Thomas spent three years on his Wild World map, drawing every one of its 1,642 species on a single original sheet of paper, in pencil, without any sort of digital backup. He describes imagining every disaster scenario including a roof leak, a magpie through the open door, while knowing years of work sat on one piece of paper in his studio....

Stefan Roesch has spent years studying the relationship between screen tourism and location. His PhD began with a simple question: why would anyone fly to New Zealand just to look at a grassy hill where Hobbiton used to be? Film Dunedin's latest marketing campaign, a short film shot as an actor's casting tape, with James Mustapic playing someone who very much doesn't get the part, has just won a g...

Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now at Auckland Art Gallery is the largest survey of contemporary Chinese art ever staged in Aotearoa, spanning 67 works and 42 artists across more than four decades of practice since China's 1978 reforms. Curator Hutch Wilco spent nearly a decade living and working in China, ending up there almost by accident. The exhibition includes Ai Weiwei's famous sequence of ph...

Playwright Dave Armstrong describes his new Circa Theatre show, Local Library as a love letter to libraries and the people who work in them, inspired by a real-life incident involving a man who was gaming the magazine rental system to save $2. From that, Armstrong built a two-hander about a conservative British retiree and a feminist librarian at war over a library ban, who slowly discover they ha...

Massive Theatre Company, Auckland's oldest and New Zealand's third largest theatre company, is celebrating 35 years. Founder Sam Scott started it after someone asked why there wasn't a company doing quality youth ensemble work in Auckland, and has built it into an organisation that trains teaching artists, runs a directors lab and charges participants nothing. All of that is now under significant...

The Art Attic Gallery in Invercargill is calling for expressions of interest from national and international creatives for its Cabinets at the Attic project, a series of display cabinets at street level and inside the gallery where all work must fit in a space less than 3cm deep. Gallery spokesperson Lisa Benson joins Culture 101 to explain the idea, the dimensions, and how street-level cabinets h...

Today is the final day of Winter Deco Weekend in Hawke's Bay, the annual gathering of jazz, heritage architecture tours, classic fashion, glitzy soirees and Art Deco everything. Art Deco Napier General Manager Jeremy Smith joins Culture 101 to reflect on the weekend's highlights and what's left to do before the day is done.

Jackson Burling grew up in Wairarapa with a father and grandfather who were both truck drivers, and a standing instruction: never become one. His solo verbatim theatre show Over and Out is built from a real interview with a truck driver, using his exact words and rhythms on stage. The real truck driver had seen two films in his life before coming to the theatre to watch an actor perform his own wo...

Michael Gould has spent 50 years working up to his first poetry collection. The Canadian-born Wellington writer turned down an academic career in the 70s, published a book on surrealism in cinema, traveled for decades, and arrived in New Zealand at 40. Perverse Verse is what he calls light verse with a black edge, satirical and reflective in equal measure. He joins Culture 101 to explain what perv...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: Moana, the live-action Disney remake starring Catherine Laga'aia with The Rock reprising his role as Maui, Rena Owen as the grandmother and Frankie Adams as the mother; The Richest Woman in the World, an Isabelle Huppert comedy-drama based on the L'Oréal Bettencourt scandal; and Primavera, an Italian biographical drama following a young violinist in a...

Rodney Scott has been cooking whole hog since he was 11, taught by his father at the family BBQ shop in Hemingway, South Carolina. A life-changing moment came during a wood-cutting session when his phone rang with little credit left on it: the New York Times was calling. Since then he's appeared on Chef's Table and Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain. He joins Culture 101 ahead of his visit to Wel...