Culture 101

Port Chalmers in Ōtepoti Dunedin has long been a haven for artists as well as seafarers. It’s an active commercial port and these days the locals also welcome flocks of cruise ship visitors. While that provides its opportunities for the arts, artists are here as much to create as present, relishing the community and beauty of the surrounding environment to develop their work.

For North Yorkshire’s Alexander Wright theatre making is a way of bringing together the very local with the much larger universe he believes we need to feel connected to.  In his latest touring show, with longtime collaborator musician Phil Grainger, Helios, the immensity of the sun is brought down to earth with the use by Wright as sole performer of little more than Grainger’s soundscape and a ra...

Weekly arts and culture news from Aotearoa New Zealand with Perlina Lau and Mark Amery

The Māoriland Film Festival is being held in Ōtaki on the Kapiti Coast this week 20-24 March.  It's Aotearoa's annual International Indigenous film festival in a town where Māori culture thrives.

Still Lives - Auckland is a live performance artwork combining what are sometimes considered opposite ends of the spectrum; rugby and art.  Following two weeks of rehearsal, the artwork will be at the Concert Chamber at the Auckland Town Hall on Saturday 30th March. 

Culture 101’s Mark Amery invited award-winning author of fiction, poetry and essays, the Kirikiriroa Hamilton based Tracey Slaughter, to play Fast Favourites. Tracey picks out some favourite poems, cultural initiatives and music.  

It may be the fifth and final episode of Best of the Fest but festivals across Aotearoa have not been slowing down.  Culture 101’s Perlina Lau in Tāmaki Makaurau is joined by playwright and dramaturg, Nathan Joe, actor, voice artist and intimacy coordinator, Romy Hooper and comedian, writer, actor, producer and director, Tom Sainsbury.  Mark Amery is joined by critic Hannah Molloy in Ōtepoti Duned...

News for the week with Culture 101.

A new report commissioned by Asia New Zealand Foundation Te Whītau Tūhono has found an increased interest and desire for Asian arts and cultural experiences in Aotearoa. 

For a band from Taranaki, making the WOMAD lineup is a dream come true. For Ngāmotu New Plymouth indie group, Fin Rah Zel, this weekend is it.  Known for its outlier music and visual art scene, the band joins Mark Amery at WOMAD to talk about Ngāmotu for this week’s Regional Wrap.  

Taiwan’s first professional percussion ensemble, Ju Percussion Group, was founded in 1986 by Tzong-Ching Ju who still leads the group today.

In Samoan, aiga means family. Not just your immediate family but your wider circle. It could be through blood, marriage or even an adopted connection.  It’s also the name and central theme of Lusi Faiva’s new disability and Pasifika-led show with Touch Compass, premiering at the 2024 Auckland Arts Festival.

There are four shining stars on screen in the new joyous and heartfelt Aotearoa New Zealand film The Mountain - the directorial debut of acclaimed actor Rachel House.  The first is the majestic mountain itself, Taranaki Maunga, in all its moods. The other three are Aotearoa’s latest movie stars - and they’re only 12 years old.  The Mountain is about three tamariki’s mission to find healing with th...

Dance company Black Grace has just returned from a US tour where thousands of people watched their latest work, Paradise Rumour. The company performed in Portland, Laguna Beach and Chicago.  Black Grace has become one of Aotearoa’s most internationally successful performance groups. The company have been touring in the US regularly since a sold-out season at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2004,...

The arts and culture news on Culture 101 

In 2018, Sandro Kopp was tasked by film director Wes Anderson with creating ten monumental paintings for the film The French Dispatch in less than three months.  Kopp’s works needed to look like the work of a singular genius (the fictional “criminally insane” artist Moses Rosenthaler, played by Benicio Del Toro) who had created the work while imprisoned over three years.  No pressure then! The Ros...

A well known arts critic, historian and commentator, Andrew Paul Wood in Timaru fills us in on ‘drama’ around the Timaru Theatre Royal redevelopment, which includes a new venue for South Canterbury Museum and some functions of the Aigantighe Art Gallery - one of the South Island’s most significant public galleries.

What would a map that represents a more distinct lived human cultural perspective look like? That has been the very personal question for Icao Tiseli with her award-winning project Mapping the Wheke. At the end of 2023, the Tongan-born Tāmaki Makaurau-based associate at architecture firm Jasmax was named one of six winners for the project at Archiprix International, a biennial competition that loo...

It’s the 96th Academy Awards on Monday 11th March - the final ceremony of the awards season which started almost a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival.

The true story behind theatre show Boy is both controversial and compelling. Appearing at the Auckland Arts Festival theatre and written by Dutch-born, Netherlands-based playwright Carly Wijs (Us/Them) is based on the life of twins, Bruce and Brian Reimer born in Canada in 1966.

Ōtepoti Dunedin’s Robert Scott is best known as a member of seminal New Zealand bands The Bats and The Clean, but more quietly he’s been painting for decades with work appearing in both exhibitions and on album covers. These days he also co-runs Port Chalmers gallery Pea Sea Art.   On Friday, an exhibition devoted to the art of Scott’s late Clean bandmate Hamish Kilgour, I Go Side On opened at Pūm...

News from Aotearoa and abroad

Berlin-based New Zealand artist Simon Denny’s work has long explored the culture of new technology and the dreams tech entrepreneurs sell us.    Back in 2016, Denny was one of the first artists to look at the complex politics behind  blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. His work has looked critically at the boom and bust of the NFT (or non-fungible token) as a way of creating ownership of dig...

Artists in Tauranga recently took a creative response to comment on the City Council's Long Term Plan, which proposes steep rental increases for community groups, and a 'user pays' approach to charging for access to community spaces. 

At the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Pōneke hangs an enormous New Zealand flag upon which artist Richard Lewer has painted the words: “To have a future I must reconcile with MY past.”  Lewer’s exhibition What they didn’t teach me at school about the Waikato Wars has been his most difficult project, he tells Culture 101’s Mark Amery.