The Auckland Arts Festival has announced its 2026 programme with an international line-up that is dominated by Australian productions, while also delivering premieres of new local theatre works.
At first glance, it’s also a festival big on family-friendly, feelgood funkiness – and less so on challenge.
But that’s an assessment made on those New Zealand stage productions still being unknown quantities. Though some are from well-established playwrights delivering new works – or bringing back early ones – that will be performed in both Auckland at the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts in Wellington in the same month.
The schedule boasts at least three acrobatic-dance troupes from across the Tasman, which should do wonders for February March Oz-NZ migration statistics and short-term Auckland gym memberships. As well, the major stage drama import is the Sydney Theatre Company-Moogahlin Performing Arts play The Visitors about indigenous Australians witnessing the arrival of the First Fleet.
The festival is also featuring as its only rock music component the Aussie tribute show “27 Club” in which various seasoned musicians perform the songs of the American stars who died at 27. It’s been delivering its air-punching eulogy for a decade in Australia, a place which has turned tribute bands into an export industry.
The festival’s big classical music imports do come from other directions. The already-announced Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is playing two concerts near the end of the festival.
Grammy winning American soprano Julia Bullock is singing with the Auckland Philharmonia, while British soprano Susan Bullock (no relation) and American baritone Lester Lynch also appear with the APO in NZ Opera’s revival of its reimagining of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
Pop music wise, the festival starts with one “funk collective”, Pasifkan band Island Vibes on opening night in Aotea Square, and ends with another, Big Horns, a brass-heavy local ensemble in the Auckland Town Hall.
The only local act seemingly offering original music is veterans Moana & The Tribe with a show based on their 2024 album Ono which, as well as being the outfit’s sixth album featured six collaborations with singers from around the the world performing in their own language, two of which will feature in their town hall show.
Among the three Australian acrobatic-dance shows are Circa’s Duck Pond, which reworks Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake “as a circus spectacular” with elements of The Ugly Duckling for four nights at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre.
The others are previous festival visitors Strut & Fret with La Ronde, which combines song, dance, burlesque, aerial work and a very large mirrorball in the Spiegeltent situated in Aotea Square for 21 performances throughout the festival; Less requiring of leather g-strings but more requiring of upper body strength is Ten Thousand Hours by Aussie circus company Gravity & Other Myths, who look like a bunch of mates attempting their own Cirque show, but really well.
The festival’s dance performances range from the already-announced Royal NZ Ballet season of Macbeth, to The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave, an hour-long non-stop endurance piece featuring a trio, who in the words of one reviewer at the Edinburgh Fringe, “dance themselves into techno oblivion.”
And Among the New Zealand works, which are also featuring at the festival in Wellington are Waiora Te Ūkaipō/ The Homeland, a revival of a play by Hone Kouka which first premiered in 1996. While Music Portrait of a Humble Disabled Samoan Musician is the work of a Samoan-NZ creative supergroup – Oscar Kightley, Nathaniel Lees, and Neil Ieremia are behind a play bringing to life the true-life story of Fonoti Pati Umaga, the man of the title.
Auckland Arts Festival, March 5-22, 2026. Tickets on sale from October 29.
