Wellington arts festival announces 30th programme

New Zealand Festival
Wellington
February 26 – March 20 2016

Next year’s New Zealand Festival will be celebrating its 30-year anniversary with major acts from around the globe.

“For this milestone festival we’ve pulled together the very best international artists," artistic director Shelagh Magadza says. "We’re creating experiences you wouldn’t be able to enjoy without flying across the world, and bringing them right to your doorstep. We seek out the very best for our audience, from those who have been to every festival since 1986 to those joining us for the very first time next year.”

One particularly special event will be a concert featuring Dame Kiri Te Kanawa with Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir and pianist Terence Dennis. It is likely to be one of the singer's last major concerts in this country.

The festival programme celebrates an array of iconic artists. One of the the US’ top 25 most influential people according to Time magazine, trumpeter and band leader Wynton Marsalis is the biggest name in jazz. The ensemble he leads, the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, will be in Wellington for nearly a week for a special residency. There will be a performance of Marsalis’ Swing Symphony, with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, a jazz concert as well as an education programme for Kiwi students.

One of the most important choreographers and dancers of the 20th century, Pina Bausch, will be recognised through a series of events, including the first appearance in New Zealand of her company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. There will also be a selection of films and a limited release of the Academy Award-winning Wim Wenders documentary Pina! ahead of the festival in November.

On the theatre stage, the surreal world of painter Salvador Dalí is brought to life through the imagination and acrobatics of Compagnie Finzi Pasca in La Veritá. UK theatre company Kneehigh brings its madcap musical Dead Dog in a Suitcase, which featured in The Guardian’s Top 10 shows of 2014.

Music lovers will have much to enthuse about when Sufjan Stevens brings fans songs from his acclaimed new album and his stage show while music legends Paul Kelly and Archie Roach join the Black Arm Band collective of indigenous musicians for dirtsong ­– a night of music and film which comes from the soul of Australia.

The songbooks of American idols Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell are given fresh takes by quirky Canadians, L’Orchestra d’hommes Orchestra and Kiwi songstress Julia Deans. And anyone who went to university in Otago in the 1980s will want to secure a ticket for a tribute to Flying Nun records Dunedin Double: two nights of nostalgia and great music as The Chills and The Verlaines each play for one night.

While the Auckland Arts Festival will feature John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, Wellington will be having a performance of John Luther Adams’ meditative Sila: The Breath of the World on the Wellington waterfront, in a large-scale free music event. This year Adams’ “Become Ocean” was awarded a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

There is meeting of East and West in a cutting-edge fusion of modern and traditional music when New Zealand’s most experimental composers collaborate with three of Japan’s most virtuosic performers, the Miyata-Yoshimura-Suzuki Trio.

The visionary composer of the 17th century Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers will be performed by Italian baroque masters Concerto Italiano. 

Dance icon Douglas Wright stages his startling and sensual A Kiss Insid” and the Royal New Zealand Ballet returns to the festival for the first time in a decade, presenting three contemporary dance works under the artistic directorship of Francesco Ventriglia.

The Australian dance company Chunky Moves will be returning with a dance/theatre collaboration, Complexity of Belonging.

New Zealand Arts Foundation icon Ross Harris joins forces with Vincent O’Sullivan to commemorate World War I with the world premiere season of Brass Poppie, while fellow laureate John Psathas has gathered together 150 musicians from across the world for his monumental love letter to peace, No Man’s Land.

There are a number of theatre events during the festival including the Canadian Hawkesley Workman bringing his sexy cabaret The God That Comes, Alice Mary Cooper’s theatre tale Waves, tracing the story of Elizabeth Moncello, inventor of the breast stroke and Trick of the Light theatre company’s new play The Devil’s Half-Acre, set in the Dunedin slums of the 1860s.

Part-play, part-film Cineastas traces the works, lives and loves of the Argentine filmmakers, making use of a striking two-tier stage built in the Opera House.

Alongside the big names are a series of experiences to transform the capital, explains Shelagh Magadza: “What we’ve learned over 30 years is that the festival isn’t just about what happens on stage. It’s about what happens when art brings people together. Wellington is the perfect stage for our festival, one of the reasons I believe it has such enduring success – and will get better and better."

“Opening night in Civic Square onFebruary 26 is going to be a big free dance party, with the incredible mass dance “Le Grand Continental,” featuring 150 local dance stars and partnered by Kiwibank. We’re also building you a parent-powered junkyard fairground, full of fun and food.
The Contact Festival Playground is free to attend and will run throughout the festival in Frank Kitts Park, designed for kids –and adults who don’t want to grow up!”

Another family-friendly night out will be the Wellington Airport Season of For the Birds, an avian-inspired light and sound experience at Otari Wilton’s Bush reserve, brought to the festival by the same artists who delighted 22,000 people at Power Plant in the Botanic Gardens in 2014.

The New Zealand Festival also holds the Writers Week, Its the full programme will be revealed in January but early announcements include award-winning US film-maker and author Miranda July, prolific scholar Simon Winchester, brain surgeon Henry Marsh, scientist Adam Rutherford, novelist Patrick deWitt and cartoonist Kate Beaton.

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