Auckland Arts Festival 2015 features world class acts

Auckland Arts Festival 2015
March 4-22

For 19 days next March across Auckland, the Auckland Arts Festival will be hosting more than 100 world class shows, exhibitions and performers – both local and international.

The French multi media Groupe F will open the festival, again at the Auckland Domain. Last festival the group's The Breath of the Volcano was a sellout event. Featuring fireworks, light shows and a myriad of lit actors, the show was a great crowd pleaser. The new work, Skin of Fire, has been commissioned by the festival.

There are a number of international artists and companies including South African provocateur Brett Bailey’s arresting and utterly original operatic version of Macbeth, the British choreographer and dancer Akram Khan’s with his work iTMOi (in the mind of igor), Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s ad-rap version of Othello, a combination of the sights, sounds and smells of southern India in The Kitchen where the audience gets to eat the food cooked on stage. Among the Maori and Pacific works will be Samoan/New Zealander director Lemi Ponifasio's MAU company's I AM, which was part of the Edinburgh festival last year. It is another of his immersive and visionary performance dance works; Silo Theatre’s new artistic director Sophie Roberts will make her directional debut with The Book Of Everything, an adaptation of the classic children’s story.

There are also world premieres of Hikoi – written and directed by Nancy Brunning and The Mooncake and the Kumara, by Maori/Chinese playwright Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen and directed by Katie Woulfe. The festival will provide a mix of music with Irish super group The Gloaming, the best of baroque music with Tafelmusik's House of Dreams; and the acclaimed Brodsky Quartet.

A major production – A Child of Our Time –- will be performed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra with Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, New Zealand Youth Choir and four soloists for Sir Michael Tippet's anti-war oratorio. Ross Harris and Vincent O'Sullivan's Requiem for the Fallen, a wide-ranging musical drama continues the anti-war theme, interweaving the Latin Requiem Mass with poetry, taonga puoro, the New Zealand Chamber Choir and the NZ String Quartet, in a reflection on how WWI impacted on New Zealand, then and now.

The Festival Club, set in the shabby-chic elegance of the Paradiso Spiegeltent in the TimeOut Festival Garden will have a unique line up of performers. Topping the bill will be hip-hop goddess, Neneh Cherry with New York’s RocketNumberNine+ Calexico guitarist Jairo Zavala, aka DePedro, combining the melodies of Spain and Tex Mex and, Birmingham’s Electric Swing Circus. The Festival Club also features NZ musicians with sessions, Lady Sings the Blues, Where the Apple Falls and Pass The Gat. These concerts will feature a rollcall of Kiwi musicians including Whirimako Black, Julia Deans, Hollie Smith, Ladi6, Will and Annie Crummer, Tigilau Ness and Che Fu and Warren Maxwell.

There is also the Colenso BBDO season of LIMBO featuring a live band and an ensemble of cabaret and circus artists from around the globe. A new venture, Close Encounters will offer three individual events created by local senior artists at Leigh Sawmill Café, Te Uru in Titirangi and the Pah Homestead, in which artists will cross the boundaries of performing and visual arts. Another first will be RAW: audience sessions with artists of projects handpicked and presented in the raw as works in development and rehearsals: Tim Finn and New Zealand Opera, playwright Nathaniel Lees working with senior Pacific artists, and Rochelle Wright and the team behind Daffodils. Younger festival-goers are particularly catered for with the highly visual and imaginative White, by Scottish company Catherine Wheels; the award-winning Jazzamatazz, which will whip kids up into no-holds barred singing, prancing, twisting and dancing; and SMARTSfest–, the schools programme offering students and young people unique opportunities to discover the power of creativity and the thrill of the arts.

The visual arts programme includes White Night, when for one Saturday night from 6 pm to midnight over 80 of Auckland’s galleries and arts spaces will play host to exhibitions and visual arts installations. The festival’s wide-ranging visual arts programme includes commissions: New Zealand multimedia artist Lisa Reihana's visually striking and emotionally provocative video work, Tai Whetuki, will be on the big screen in the TimeOutFestival Garden. And nearby, Niki Hastings-McFall's transformative work Fale Ula will add a Pacific dimension. The Auckland Art Gallery will be mounting a major retrospective exhibition of the work of Billy Apple, The artist has to live like everybody else.