A new year with an even number means a return to the great Wellington-Auckland culture derby. In February and March next year, both the biennial Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts (ANZFA) and the annual Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival (AAF) give their respective cities a late-summer defibrillation.
Both have just announced their programmes, which show some overlap among performers – some of whom are also heading to other parts of the country – and some coincidental variations on a theme.
For example, King Lear gets a different reworking in each city: Wellington has acclaimed Irish production Lost Lear, a dementia story told via a character who thinks she is rehearsing the play. In Auckland, the festival has commissioned the work, Not King Lear, performed by the Hobson Street Theatre Company, an arts project created with the Auckland City Mission and guest-directed by English stage director Adrian Jackson. In 1991, he founded Cardboard Citizens, a company in which the actors were homeless, refugees or asylum seekers.
“It’s a timely work for Auckland,” says AAF artistic director Shona McCullagh.
And maybe Lear is apt. McCullagh and her counterpart in Wellington, ANZFA creative director Marnie Karmelita, have spent past years raging against the storm that the pandemic brought to live events.
The Auckland Arts Festival returned to a full programme earlier this year after three years of Covid disruptions and cancellations. Next year will mark the first full Wellington event in four years, including having almost all of its live programme cancelled during the Omicron wave of 2022.
Not that things are quite back to normal. The festival sector still has its own form of long Covid.
Says Karmelita: “Sadly, the impacts of Covid continue to be felt by our artists and those who bring us live events, but we feel more equipped to plan around them now. Travel and touring, especially freight timelines, for example, have not bounced back to the efficiencies on offer pre-Covid. This is a new reality and one that we take very seriously, given the ongoing effect on climate.”
Next year’s event will be the last for McCullagh, who took on the role in 2021. She’s hoping things run more smoothly than they did at the beginning of her tenure. “A pandemic-free, flood-free, cyclone-free, cost-of-living crisis-free festival would be fantastic, for a start.”
The ANZFA programme features local works that have already toured extensively, such as Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Show and Nancy Brunning’s Witi’s Wāhine, but which Karmelita considers still deserve a Wellington festival slot.
“One of the things that was very important to us as we looked ahead to our 2024 programme was also looking back to some of the amazing Aotearoa New Zealand work that didn’t have a chance to connect with an audience due to the events of the past couple of years. So we wanted to create an opportunity for a number of these to finally make it to the stage.”
Among the local productions finally making it to both festivals is an ANZFA and AAF joint commission, Gravity & Grace, written by Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCracken.
It’s based on when American writer Chris Kraus (of I Love Dick fame) wrote a film of the same name, shot it in Auckland with local actors and released it to the world, where it was roundly ignored. A few years later, she wrote the book Aliens and Anorexia about the experience of her failure.
“The cancellation of this work in 2022 gave the artists the opportunity to develop the work further, a silver lining in all the chaos of un-producing and reproducing work in Aotearoa,” says McCullagh.
For Karmelita, other new works getting world premieres that she’s keen to plug include Our Own Little Mess by the audience participation-enthusiastic Wellington company A Slightly Isolated Dog, where audience members will don headphones to follow the messy lives of its five characters. She’s also excited about the all-female multimedia aerial show BELLE –a performance of air directed by choreographer Malia Johnston.
As well as the aforementioned Not King Lear in productions which the AAF has helped commission, McCullagh cites Aiga, a new work by dance company Touch Compass which is based on founding member Lusi Faiva’s life of disability and disconnection from her birth family; and The Valentina, a space travel play for young people, starring many famous astronauts and cosmonauts, written by Anders Falstie-Jensen.
How do the artistic directors think the 2024 programmes reflect their own artistic leanings?
Karmelita: “I love art and performance that changes you – that feeling of holding your breath as the lights fade at the end of a show, the butterflies in your stomach seeing or hearing something astonishing, being moved to laughter or tears while surrounded by your fellow audience members, ideas that challenge me. I like to think that people will love or hate these works – I realise this seems like a strong reaction – but I guess, ultimately, I want people to be moved rather than feeling ambivalent.”
McCullagh’s background as a dancer and choreographer is reflected in the AAF’s strong dance offering. “My love for dance is clear – it’s a universal language and truly does articulate the unsaid and unseen in mysterious ways.”
As a result, the line-up includes Australian Ballet’s new choreographer-in-residence Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto with its nine-drummer/nine-dancer show, avant-garde South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn’s Dragons, as well as another participatory dance event – the line-dancing hoedown Boot Scootin’ Boogie led by the Dynamotion dance comedy duo of Lara Fischel-Chisholm and the ubiquitous Tom Sainsbury.
ANZFA doesn’t lack for dance muscle, though. Its opening weekend features the UK’s Akram Khan Company and its acclaimed retelling of the Rudyard Kipling story Jungle Book remagined.
The two directors speak a similar language on many topics, but they do differ on one thing – whether they prefer it when the curtain goes up or down on their events.
Karmelita: “Most definitely, it’s the opening night – the power and excitement of the potential, the knowledge of what is to come and the extraordinary moments that are about to take place.
“In live art and performance, we often feel a real decline at the close of an event. You won’t meet many people in the business who are not deeply passionate about the work they do, and the thrill of it has a real emotional impact when the curtain comes down.”
McCullagh: “I prefer the closing-night massive shoulder drop, for sure. Opening nights are always nerve-filled – and with so many unexpected curveballs hitting us over the past four years, you’re never quite sure until the rodeo is finished.”
Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts, February 23-March 17, 2024; Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival, March 7-24, 2024.
What to see in 2024 - learn more about the shows here.