Auckland Lantern Festival 2015. Photo / Gareth Cooke, ATEED
An extended programme of events will help Auckland celebrate the Year of the Sheep, writes Sarah Ell.
Auckland will come aglow this weekend as the annual Lantern Festival takes over Albert Park. Now in its 16th year, the festival celebrates the start of the Chinese Year of the Sheep, symbolised by graciousness, dignity and momentum.
Among the hundreds of lanterns that will illuminate the park this year are gifts from two of Auckland's Chinese sister cities, to mark special anniversaries. Ningbo in eastern China, sister city of the the former Waitakere City since 1995, has gifted two shipping-container loads of lanterns. Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, has celebrated the 25th anniversary of its relationship with Auckland by creating a nautical-themed lantern, celebrating the connection the port cities share.
There will also be the usual popular food and craft stalls arrayed down Princes St, performances by dragon and lion dancers welcoming the new year and roving entertainers throughout the park. The festival culminates in a fireworks display launched from the Sky Tower at 10.30pm Sunday night.
Adding to the event this year are a range of international performers and artists, plus arts events that help to bring the Chinese-New Zealand story into the festival, says event producer Eric Ngan from Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development.
Image 1 of 17: Large crowds of people arrived at Albert Park to see the Chinese New Year lanterns. Photo / Nick Reed
"Chinese" and "reggae" are not usually used in the same sentence, but that's what Beijing band Long Shen Dao are bringing to the festival - along with a touch of ska, electronica and tai chi. "They were amazing last time they played at the festival in 2012, and since then they have gone from strength to strength," Ngan says.
Other international visitors demonstrating their talents will be Taiwanese lantern-maker Wang Chen-Wen; Chinese farmer painter Lu Yong Zhong; the Guangdong Puppet Art Theatre troupe; and students from the Shangwen Martial Arts Academy in Shanghai, who will dazzle with their wushu or kung fu skills. "I don't know anyone who doesn't get excited watching a martial arts demonstration, and these kids are amazing," says Ngan.
Bringing together Asian and New Zealand cultures are two plays by Chinese-Kiwi playwright Renee Liang, at the Musgrove Studio at the Maidment Theatre. The Two Farting Sisters is a humorous play for young people told through three-dimensional puppetry, shadow puppetry and live action, based on the traditional Chinese fable of the fragrant-farting man. Under the Same Moon is a one-woman play about an elderly Chinese woman who travels to New Zealand for her granddaughter's wedding - uninvited and unexpected.
Both plays have just completed a season at the Wellington Fringe Festival, where Liang says they were well-received - and fine-tuned. "I like to hang around in the foyer after the show and we have done a couple of Q and A sessions," says Liang, who fits in writing around her career as a paediatrician.
"Both plays are finished in that they are in front of a paying audience, but as with most plays they will change over the season. We especially fine-tune the jokes - we listen quite hard to who's laughing at what, and if there are any jokes they don't laugh at. The great thing about theatre is you can try a different thing every night until it works."
Both plays feature the Chinese-Kiwi connection - The Two Farting Sisters is set in Levin and Auckland, and Under the Same Moon in Wellington - but Liang says what they have most in common is their theme of family love and relationships.
"No matter what genre I write in, I tend to end up writing a family drama," she says. "It's what I'm really interested in - relationships between family members and how they engage with the outside world. It's appropriate that both plays are being put on at Chinese New Year, as that time is all about reaffirming those relationships."
And although most of the characters are Chinese, Liang says they have characteristics all audiences can relate to. "I get labelled as someone who writes 'cultural' plays but I just set out to write stories that are real to me. So they will always reflect my background, but they are universal as well."
Also reflecting the experiences of Asian New Zealanders is the art show Living There Being Here by students from the Elam School of Fine Arts' second-language and international student group.
Many Zhu, events coordinator at the university, says the works explore ideas around distant-yet-connected places, cultures and identities. "It's a theme of what it's like to be living in New Zealand but feeling a link to somewhere else - almost like still living in that place, but physically being here. It's about travel, memory, movement between countries and cultures."
The exhibition is interactive: Korean second-year student Jeong Ryeong Kim will be painting portraits of gallery visitors and their possessions onto the walls of the gallery as part of her work The Diasporic Objects.
Also as part of the exhibition, six dancers from the dance studies programme will perform a piece choreographed in response to each work. Students have spent the weeks leading up to the Lantern Festival talking with the artists and devising a performance, which will take place in the gallery at 5pm and 7pm today.
"It's translating something visual into something that's a dance experience," says Zhu.
Event producer Eric Ngan says organisers Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (Ateed) has worked to improve accessibility at the festival this year, providing more wheelchair parking and making it easier for users to get around. Saturday night's performance of Under the Same Moon will also be translated into sign language, with three interpreters working to express the 10 different characters in the play, all performed by one actress, Hweiling Ow.
• More than 800 handmade Chinese lanterns, a street full of stalls selling delicious Asian delicacies and crafts (today, tomorrow 4.30-10pm). Lantern making (5-10pm) and diablo demonstrations (7-8.30pm), tea ceremonies (5.30pm, 6.45pm, 8pm, 9.15pm), martial arts (5.30- 8pm), performances by Guangdong Puppet Art Theatre (6pm, 7.10pm, 8.50pm), dragon and lion dancers (6.30pm, 7.30pm, 8.30pm), karaoke (8-10pm)
• Grand finale fireworks display tomorrow, 10.30pm. For more information on the Lantern Festival, see aucklandnz.com/lantern
• Under the Same Moon and The Two Farting Sisters. Musgrove Studio of the Maidment Theatre, this weekend and until March 7.
• Long Shen Dao will play the main stage at Albert Park from 9.30-10.30pm tonight and Sunday.
• Living There Being Here. George Fraser Gallery this weekend and until March 10. Elam student Jeong Ryeong Kim will be drawing portraits of visitors onto the gallery wall to form a part of her artwork from 4-7pm today. Dance students f performances 5pm, 7pm.
• Auckland Art Gallery open late during the Lantern Festival, today and tomorrow until 9pm. With more lantern-making and puppet theatre, plus tomorrow great films on modern Chinese architecture (1pm, 5pm) and work by graduate students from the Film Television and Media Studies (4pm, 7pm).
• Celebrate Chinese culture at Auckland Museum tomorrow with arts and crafts (10.30am, 1.30pm), storytelling, special exhibitions from the Chinese collection and vibrant music and dance performances.
A live cook-off featured ox heart, wapiti, wild boar and plenty of edible wildlife.