Culture 101

For three weeks in August every year, thousands of artists descend on Edinburgh for the largest performing arts festival in the world.

For many stand-up comedians, performing in a garage could seem like a career low-point. But in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, comedian Heta Dawson has turned his garage in his South Auckland family home into one of the freshest and most exciting comedy venues in North Island. 

Indian Ink Theatre Company has built up a remarkable reputation for developing and touring original work over 27 years.  Founded by Justin Lewis and Jacob Rajan, more than half a million people have seen their original delightful and often philosophical shows. They now tour them not just around this country, but to territories like Australia and North America. Quite a record for an independent the...

At the age of three, writer Sasha LaPointe was given her Skagit name in a ceremony - taqʷšəblu. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s a big deal to be given a Skagit name and she was her great-grandmother’s namesake - Violet taqʷšəblu Hilbert.

This weekend in Ōtepoti Dunedin small presses and independent publishers from around Aotearoa gather to share and exchange at Small Press Fest.  The festival reflects a move among younger creatives away from the internet towards community, focusing on the empowerment of making your own printed media. There’s also an eye on sustainability with presses more likely to be printing small numbers of boo...

Arts News: Injury at the Museum of Ice Cream, a #1 Netflix hit for NZ, Artbeat closes & kids books winner Stacey Gregg

30 kilometres west of Waihōpai Invercargill, is the town of Aparima or Riverton. It’s the gateway to spectacular and remote West Southland, an area sitting between the mountains of Fiordland and the Takitimu mountain range, with an infamous wild ocean out front.  Riverton is one of the earliest European settlements in New Zealand and before that  Aparima was a substantial Māori settlement, due to...

It’s a story about sisterhood and survival against a dark backdrop but Josephine Stewart Tewhiu never set out to make a film about abuse in state care. 

Artist Owen Connors is on a roll. They are one of four nominees for Aotearoa's most prestigious art prize, The Walters. Last year they won the $25,000 Rydal Art Prize, awarded biannually to a recent body of work considered by a jury to have made an important contribution to Aotearoa painting. They were also awarded one of the country’s most coveted residencies at McCahon House in the Waitakere. 

Bouncing off the success from the first season, documentary Takeout Kids is back for a second season and this time, it’s venturing beyond the takeaways.

Growing up as the only boy in a family of five children, Eli Matthewson was well prepared for a career in comedy. 

Dropping a sheep’s carcass from an aeroplane into the Waitemata harbour; sewing a sheep’s kidney onto your own back; yelling “get the f**k out” till the audience leaves, many razor cuts. The early, confrontational ‘70s performance work of the late Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland artist Peter Roche is the stuff of legend.   Yet, as Night Piece, a new documentary by filmmaker Bridget Sutherland shows, Pete...

Arts news: Arts as a 'nice to do', Parkin prize and Electric Avenue

Public galleries have been demonstrating our view of art history has been changing radically for years. It just hasn’t been published for a wider public, until now.  Art historian and curator Kirsty Baker’s smart and insightful new book Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa, published by Auckland University Press, is then a major publishing event. 

Each week Culture 101 puts the spotlight on a different region in Aotearoa and this week we’re in the Bay of Plenty town of Whakatāne.

The Bitches’ Box is back, and for the first time the show will be venturing to urban centres. 

Comedy podcast Did Titanic Sink? is back baby! Winner of the Comedy Podcast of the Year at the 2023 NZ Podcast Awards, comedians Tim Batt and Carlo Ritchie are steered towards investigating a local conspiracy - the mystery of the ‘Canterbury Cat’.

Almost 40 years on, Hunters and Collectors in Pōneke remains. The first vintage clothing store in the Capital, it’s a truly iconic creative Cuba Street institution. Hunters and Collectors’ matriarch is Chrissy O. Just turned 70, known for her flame-coloured hair and parade of remarkable vintage ensembles and spectacles, Chrissy O is herself a true avant garde style icon.

Married couple Michael Hurst and Jennifer Ward-Lealand have theatre and film careers that span 40 years. Indeed, they met in the theatre - at Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s Theatre Corporate in 1983. While they’re both beloved individually for their many and varied contributions to the arts, they’ve also appeared in some 22 shows together.  Yet it's never just been the two of them on stage together. U...

That role of the museum is just one of the ways poet, novelist and essayist Ian Wedde explores opening out space through culture in his third volume of collected nonfiction writing, The Social Space of the Essay. 

The 1960s Rolls-Royce which served as the limousine for Queen Elizabeth II’s royal tours in New Zealand is being auctioned.

Nestled in the impressive harbour of Canterbury’s Banks Peninsula, is picturesque town Akaroa.  

In the genre-busting documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, two out-of-work UK actors in lockdown attempt the seemingly impossible. They seek to mount a full production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the ultra violent world of Grand Theft Auto - the popular multiplayer online video game - with often hysterical, bloody and thoughtful results. 

Mezzo-soprano Katie Trigg has been crowned the 2024 Lexus Song Quest winner. The prestigious opera singing competition took place on Saturday night at Michael Fowler Centre in Poneke Wellington. Five singers battled it out for the country’s biggest operatic honour. 

Multi-disciplinary artist Liv Tennet is trying to be a cool mum - without losing her cool. Her new solo dance show For You To Know and Me To Find Out has been brewing for the past few years amidst the juggle of creativity, work, art and motherhood.