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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 Tenzing, The Social Reckoning, Unabomber.

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...

The top stories and other headlines at midday

Playwright and director Stuart McKenzie has spent more than three decades turning real lives and conversations into theatre, and his latest work AFTER GOD brings together two of his lifelong interests: theatre and the question of belief Stuart is the son of an Anglican minister and studied comparative religion at Cambridge and, has been circling the question of God ever since. For AFTER GOD he tra...

Clinical psychologist and broadcaster Nigel Latta left a lasting mark on New Zealand with his practical, no-nonsense approach to life's challenges. Now, his final book has informed Lessons on Living, a new three-part documentary series hosted by Married At First Sight Australia resident expert John Aiken. Through personal stories, candid conversations and thought-provoking social experiments, the...

Bonnie Harrison is here guiding us through the latest weird and useful headlines from the world of science including the decline of the dinner party, the benefit of a cup of tea for older women, and whether animals gloat.

Motoring journalist and editor of car guide Driven, Dean Evans joins Jim once again, this time to discuss the chances of suffering from motion sickness in an EV, whether shared lanes for cyclists and motorists are safe, and how loud is too loud for an exhaust.

After years of writing bestselling rom-coms, Sarah-Kate Lynch has taken a darker turn. Fresh from writing television thrillers, including the ThreeNow hit Friends Like Her, she's released her debut crime novel, Something He Did, under the name S.K. Lynch. Now based in Melbourne, Sarah-Kate says the book was inspired by a split-second act of road rage on a gridlocked street. She joins Jim to discus...

As temperatures rise and gardens burst into bloom, insects are re-emerging for spring. While pollinators like butterflies and bees are welcome visitors, other winged pests are far less popular. After a $12 million eradication campaign, the Ministry for Primary Industries is closely monitoring this spring "queening" season to make sure the yellow-legged hornet is gone for good. But vespula wasps ar...

Actor and inventor Augusta Xu-Holland has lived in China, on-and-off for 13 years. After a stint in Beijing in the north, she's currently based in the south - in Guangzhou - population 18.5 million. She joins Jim to talk about her work in product development for women's health, and the views she has from her balcony.

Our regular quiz artist is taking a break so Jim is joined by RNZ's lead scheduler Nick Robinson, who moonlights as a pub quiz master. Wake up your brain and have a go!

Would you trade some of your salary for an extra day off every week? Nearly half of New Zealanders say yes, according to new research from Revolut and YouGov. The survey found 59% Kiwis work overtime, but often without extra compensation. Yet 44% of us say we would take a pay cut in exchange for one extra day off every week. Ironically, much of our so-called free time is now being spent keeping fi...

This morning's top stories and other headlines

A wrap of the day's big stories

Coming up on Tagata o te Moana: World leaders meet in Fiji and Tuvalu for PRECOP31; The Pacific's first independent fact-checking website is launched; We ask what does independence look like for French Polynesia? And New Zealand celebrates Fiji Language Week. All that and more stories from the week at RNZ Pacific.

All the top stories and other headlines from the day

Levi Armstrong is a co-founder of the Meke Foundation in Hawkes Bay which strives to improve people's health and wellbeing. He helped to create portable fitness pods from shipping containers to improve access to fitness facilities, especially for people in more remote areas. Now he's teamed up with City Fitness which is the country’s largest gym chain. It has funded two $65,000 Hawke’s Bay pods wh...

A major new report released this week called Te Pūrongo Whakaweawe o te Mahi Taiohi, Telling the Story of Youth Work through Social Return on Investment finds that each year youth work creates one-point-seven billion dollars of social value for young people in Aotearoa. Georgia Richards was one of the report's writers and explains they compared what’s invested with the estimated value of the chang...

Last week the Electoral Commission said that just 62-percent of 18 to 24-year-olds were enrolled to vote, while only around half of eligible young Maori were enrolled. Now a major new report released this week called Te Purongo Whakaweawe o te Mahi Taiohi, finds there is a massive upside around working with young people that might grab the attention of our nation's leaders. The peak body for youth...