Culture 101

Sarah Ell was a sixth former camping on the shores of Lake Tarawera when she first imagined writing about the eruption. That was 1986, a century after the mountain blew. Forty years on, her story has a cast of visitors gathered at the hotel with lies to tell and plans to carry out. The reader knows what's coming. They don't. At the heart of A Sky Full of Fire is Mohi, a young Tuhourangi boy. Sarah...

Kirsten Vangsness was halfway through an ab workout when a distinguished voice across the gym announced that it worshipped at her throne. It was Tim Curry. She went straight to work and burst in on her bosses to tell them he wanted to be on the show. Kirsten has played Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds since 2005, a part she only auditioned for to help a friend in casting look good. She was workin...

It's Labour Weekend, which in Raglan means the studio doors are open. The Raglan Arts Weekend is in its 16th year, with more than 70 artists inviting thousands of visitors in to see where the work gets made. Co-ordinator Nicky Brzeska joins Perlina to talk about what's on show, from ceramics to taxidermy, and how the weekend makes room for emerging artists alongside the familiar names.

There's a lot more singing in season two of Happiness, and Luke Di Somma is the one writing it. This time the show within the show is a Sherlock Holmes musical. Luke helps run the writers room, so the songs are planned from the ground up rather than dropped in later. TV is tough on a songwriter, though. A stage number can run six minutes. On screen, two minutes is a long song, and a close-up can s...

Not many people decide to sit down and watch a 40-minute drama on their phone. Plenty of people will watch 40 one-minute episodes, though, one easy decision at a time. That's the hook behind micro-dramas, the vertical, cliffhanger-loaded soaps turning up in social media feeds, more and more of them made with AI. University of Auckland business lecturer Johnny Chan has been studying why they're so...

Jonathan Smart knew artist Mark Braunias since 1988, the year Jonathan opened his gallery and Mark graduated from Ilam with a remarkable class of artists. Almost two year's after Mark's death, Gliff, the current show at Jonathan Smart Gallery, offers a glance across a career that began with Donald Duck in conversation with the Virgin Mary and ended in bright fluoro colour. Jonathan remembers Mark...

Todd Karehana is a Maori and queer writer-director from Kawerau, and his short film Socks is in Show Me Shorts. He says the story starts with his own childhood in the Mormon Church. His brother died when he was about nine, and the visiting missionaries were around at the same time. Todd says the film is in black and white because colour pulled attention away from the performance. He describes the...

Dylan Reeve takes Perlina through The Reality Machine, a seven-part RNZ podcast with two episodes a week. He has worked in and around reality TV for more than 20 years and was a contestant in the first season of The Traitors NZ. He says reality TV gets written off, yet ratings show plenty of people watch it. Dylan talks about duty of care and the tension between producers and participants. He also...

Dan Slevin joins Perlina on Zoom to review three films. Sense & Sensibility is Georgia Oakley's adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, written by Diana Reid. The Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, move to a cottage in Devon after the family estate passes to their half-brother. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles plays Marianne. Whalefall is a survival thriller directed by Brian D...

Duncan and Erin McKellar talk about turning their family story into a musical. Duncan is a psychiatrist who works with people living with dementia, and his mother was diagnosed with younger onset dementia at 60. The show grew from a song Erin wrote using lyrics her dad had written. Duncan says the aim is to bring the person back into the story, and he has heard from families who used what they lea...

Jason Te Mete explains how Battle Chorus works. The audience is split into two teams, learns a set of choruses on the night, then sings off. Jason co-created it with Rutene Spooner, and it began in 2019 as a commission for the Auckland Cabaret Festival. This year's disco edition is at the Nelson Arts Festival, with songs from Earth, Wind and Fire and the Village People, and Jason says most people...

Megan Brown, Artistic Director of the Tauranga Arts Festival, gives Perlina a heads up on this year's festival highlights.

When Roberta Flack died, Zoe Moon felt like she'd lost a teacher. Flack was the singer who helped Zoe find her own voice, away from the sonic expectations she felt as a Black woman. Real Black for Me weaves Flack's speaking voice from interviews through the songs, with a string quartet and original arrangements by Seth Boy. After its first outing last year, the show is now part of Wellington Jazz...

Auckland-born, Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer Rebecca Jensen brings two works to Tempo Dance Festival, and both are about threes. Natural Basic is a trio built on the waltz step, with layers of choreography stacked on top until the body becomes a kind of barometer for chaotic times. Marking Out, at Tapac in Henderson, puts professional wrestlers and dancers in the same space for three ho...

The New Zealand Film Commission is ending its Core Funding Programme, which gives just over $1 million to 10 screen organisations and guilds, including Equity, the Directors Guild, SPADA and Pacific Islands Screen Artists. The funding has existed in various forms for more than 20 years, and the current contract ends next June. The Film Commission says the programme is no longer the most effective...

Kate Rodger reviews three new releases: Verity, The Social Reckoning and the Netflix documentary Unabomber.

In 2000, Tom Eslinger became the first global creative director of digital at any agency network, at Saatchi & Saatchi, in a role that had no job description. It started in 1989, when a mentor in Minneapolis sent him a teaching job ad for New Zealand. Before long he and his colleagues were making ads on weekends and sending them to Saatchi, which led to work and then a job. These days he's an arti...

Ten of the 120 artists at this year's Lyon Biennale are from Aotearoa, after curator Katherine Nichols was told to return to where she's from. Taarati Taiaroa was at the opening. In the main venue, a former locomotive workshop in the south of the city, visitors walk past a sound installation of a woman's karanga followed by synchronised gunshots, then a 61-metre line of white pine trunk sections i...

After two years of major upgrades and earthquake strengthening, City Gallery Wellington is open again. The work covered the internal masonry walls, the roof, heating and ventilation in the gallery spaces, new display walls, reading room skylights and accessible toilets. The gallery has reopened with a major exhibition of Cornelia Parker's work, which runs until March 2027. Director Charlotte Davy...

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for October. He recommends Happiness Season Two on Three and ThreeNow, the local musical comedy about an ex-Broadway director forced to return to Tauranga, which won him over completely in its first season and hasn't dropped the ball in its second. He's enthusiastic about Kill Jackie on Neon, a stylised Catherine Zeta-Jones action thriller with comic...

Magenta Creative Space is Nelson's only fully resourced creative studio, giving people the chance to try their hand at a range of artforms. Strategic director Rose McGrannagan joins Culture 101 to talk about what the space offers, why it's been struggling to stay open, and the fundraising effort underway to carry it through the year.

Rua is the debut novel of Candice Tutauha, who completed a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland and has spent close to a decade developing the story. It follows a young Maori woman in a tight-knit small town who dreams of becoming a writer and moving to New York City, navigating gang tensions, domestic violence and the weight of community expectation. When a soldier's diary fro...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: Big Girls Don't Cry, Paloma Schneiderman's Sundance Audience Award-winning debut feature and New Zealand International Film Festival Best Film winner, starring newcomer Eny Palmer as a teenager navigating an Omaha summer in 2006, which Michelle describes as acutely observed and immersive in the way it captures that teenage feeling of waiting for life...

Cornelia Parker is one of Britain's most celebrated contemporary artists, known for large-scale installations that begin with acts of destruction. Her 2022 retrospective at Tate Britain cemented her status. She's now in Wellington for the opening of her first solo public gallery exhibition in New Zealand, at the newly earthquake-strengthened City Gallery Wellington, bringing together more than 50...

The Sargeson Prize is New Zealand's richest short story competition, named after Frank Sargeson and sponsored by the University of Waikato. Conceived by writer and lecturer Catherine Chidgey, it's open to original, unpublished work of no more than 5,000 words, with a prize of $15,000 for the Open Division winner. The award evening took place last night. Perlina Lau speaks with this year's winner.