Festival director Jo Bond said they also managed to bring Welsh play Hiraeth to the festival after talking with them at the Edinburgh festival.
"Putting a festival together is a like doing a jigsaw puzzle - sometimes all the pieces slot together and sometimes they don't - but the face-to-face meetings are so important to making something work."
Opening the festival at 7am on October 22 is a free public performance of Takiri Ko Te Ata - A Chorus Dawn.
The waiata has been composed by Welcome Bay's Teraania Ormsby-Teki and is the festival's first music commission.
It will be performed on The Strand's waterfront by a community choir led by pop star Ria Hall.
Other shows expected to be popular included the physical thrills of circus show, Finding the Silence (Australia) and Leo (Germany), and family shows The Road that Wasn't There, a 'scary New Zealand fairytale', and Squaring the Wheel (Australia) with its comical contraptions.
High-profile performances from New Zealand include the members of Trinity Roots teaming up with four Irish performers for a cultural exchange via the language of music, and Daffodils, a play that tells a love story with live music.
For the first time the writers' programme will be spread over two weekends instead of four consecutive days with authors including investigative journalist Nicky Hager, his sister and YA writer Mandy Hager, shark researcher Riley Elliott, historical novelist Debra Daley from Tauranga, World War 1 historian Damien Fenton and sports writer Joseph Romanos.
The waterfront will be the venue for Exxopolis, a 1000m sq walk-in light-filled sculpture, which opens on October 16.
"Having Exxopolis on the waterfront will give the festival extra visibility and will help make a festival hub of the Masonic Park-Strand area," Ms Bond said.
Ms Bond said she was pleased with the programme's community tie-ins, including a family day on The Strand on October 24, a screening of a surf movie classic by Night Owl Cinema, an exhibition by photographer Bob Tulloch of his portraits of Tauranga Moana kaumatua, a performance at Huria marae of SolOthello, an abridged version of Othello that uses masks, and a zine/book-making workshop by Victoria University's printer-in-residence Sydney Shep.
