Culture 101

A gateway to Te Wai Pounamu and the Marlborough Sounds, Picton has the capacity to surprise travellers with the range of cultural experiences on offer.  It’s the destination for this week’s Culture 101 Regional Wrap.   Barbara Speedy is the Director of The Diversion Gallery, situated on the picturesque waterfront. 

What is the secret to designing a great kitchen? Many of us may think we have the answers, but reality can throw up plenty of challenges.  

550 migrants or their advocates laid complaints last month. It comes as less than 2000 overseas workers arrive. Meanwhile Immigration New Zealand reports they have revoked the accreditation of 500 employers. For 200 years this has been a land of immigrants, welcoming successive waves of peoples and their cultures.  We, the Outsiders is a documentary theatre piece created and inspired by migrant wo...

A new show by dance group Company B is giving emerging choreographers a creative platform, and mentoring and training 10 young dancers.

Maori-Samoan RnB artist Jordyn Rapana - also known as Jordyn with a Why is on a roll.

You may have heard the phrase ‘triple threat’ in the arts, but Petmal Petelo is perhaps a quadruple threat. A dancer, actor, stage manager and assistant director she’s been steadily rising in the theatre world. 

The Ōtepoti arts scene has long had a gloriously independent fertile, multi-generational, cross art form approach. But is that culture - once famously dubbed the Dunedin Sound - under threat?  Many creatives are concerned. They came of age in the city from the 1980s through to the 2010s, and cite factors like increased rents and noise control provisions as practical threats to space for the city’s...

Each week, Culture 101 puts the spotlight on a different part of Aotearoa. This week, we’re in Feilding in Manawatū as the town celebrates 150 years. 

Kōanga Festival in Tāmaki Makaurau is celebrating 10 years with a packed three-and-a-half week programme and more than 12 events.

The paintings that Whanganui painter Edith Collier created in England 100 years ago remain to this day, utterly fresh. At that time, there was no one in Aotearoa New Zealand painting with such modernist verve.  “I am certain your fate will bring you back to England as mine did,” wrote our most celebrated artist of the period, Frances Hogkins to Collier, after she had returned home in 1921. Yet, th...

It’s a striking and brutal name for an art collective. The Killing is made up of six friends and former Elam School of Fine Arts students in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. At the time, they say, the choice of the name reflected their mindset - angsty, angry at the institution and full of what they describe as a lot of ‘young adult feelings’.

Mīria George (Te Arawa, Ngāti Awa, Tumutevarovaro, Enuamanu) and Hone Kouka (Ngāti Porou, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Kahungunu) are both acclaimed, experienced writers and directors in theatre and film in their own right.  Collectively as partners in work and life they are the founders and producers of Tawata Productions, providing a platform for Māori and Pasifika artists for stage and screen. 

Arts News - Sunday 1 September

What happens when you fund 10 artists a part time wage - a universal basic income - for an entire year, to help facilitate change within their community across an entire region?    Over 2022 and 2023 arts agency Creative Waikato trialled such a project. Whiria Te Tāngata, was given $630,000 from the Manatū Taonga Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Innovating Aotearoa fund. A documentary exploring...

Writers, poets, musicians, artists and storytellers have descended on Otautahi Christchurch this week for the Word Festival. More than 100 guests have been taking part in sessions across venues in the city from the 27 August to 1 September.

Every week on RNZ’s Culture 101 we explore the cultural richness of this country by catching up with a local in a place, big or small.   There’s no better demonstration of that richness than the cultural scene over-the-hill, top-of-the-south at Tākaka in Mohua, Golden Bay. 

Remember making dioramas with pen and card in shoeboxes as a child?  As a quick survey of German artist and writer Antje Damm’s instagram will attest, Damm creates a world of hand-cut wonder with tiny dioramas constructed in matchboxes.  It began with architecture and shoeboxes. At home with children after a professional life as an architect, Damm turned her 3D modelling skills to constructing car...

While festivals around the world have been either cancelled or scaled back, Electric Avenue in Ōtautahi Christchurch is doing the opposite.

It may be true that the most exciting place at a flat party is the bathroom. Private, yet not so private.  In a queasy bravado move for local television, that bathroom over one long night is the setting for the entire first episode of second series of comedy Not Even.   

This year marks 25 years since the Aotearoa band Stellar exploded onto the music charts in 1999 with multi-platinum album Mix.

Arts News for 25 August 2024.

They flit around you in the back garden at the compost, or dive at your feet in the bush. The pīwakawaka or fantail is a special bird: so common, yet so magic.  There's a lightness, a joy to this small bird, but while they perform a cheeky acrobatic dance closer to us than any other, they are also known as harbingers of death. For Māori, to have the ability to cross from our physical world  into o...

The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is bringing the epic scores of The Lion King and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the stage alongside the films this year. 

Palmerston North or ‘Palmy’ as it’s known brims with energy, culture and heritage. Overlooking the Manawatū river, the region boomed with a pastoral farming industry. 

Last year the Ministry of Culture and Heritage Manatu Taonga reported New Zealand's arts and creative sector contributed $16.3 billion to New Zealand's GDP, or 4.3% of the total economy, in the year ending March 2023.