This spectacular cirque cabaret, starring the stylish acrobats of The Dust Palace, imagines The Odyssey as Star Trek.

Get your leotards, leg-warmers and sweatbands ready, because Flashdance is making a comeback, this time in stage musical form.

The Southside Arts Festival has morphed into Urbanesia, and offers more than 70 events, concerts, workshops and family days, many of them free, at a range of venues.

Pasifika beats, arts, culture and talent will be seen and heard around Auckland over the next two weeks during the Urbanesia festival, which starts today.

The lineup for next year's Auckland Arts Festival keeps growing with the announcement last night of more shows joining the March 2-20 programme.

One of our finest acting and directing talents turns his attention to the classic musical Guys and Dolls. By Dionne Christian

The wheel of death rolls out for the latest spectacular, writes Dionne Christian.

Kate Tempest is a woman of many talents, with a background as a poet, playwright and a novelist. When she's here in January, she'll be showcasing her skills as a rapper.

Perri Exeter is a choreographer and dance teacher at Rutherford College where her students got the best scholarship results in New Zealand.

Playwright Aroha Awarau has created a sensitive and engaging drama out of something that is almost unimaginably tragic - the random death of a young man cut down in his prime as an innocent bystander at a police shooting.

If you are going to do fairies there can be no holding back, so wunderkind English choreographer Liam Scarlett unashamedly mixes.

There was a sense of celebration, marred only by the thudding beats of revivalist worship downstairs. A well-filled Town Hall Concert Chamber hosted an audience keen to welcome home some distinguished young Auckland musicians.

The three choreographers contributing state of the art pieces for this ground-breaking season with the New Zealand Dance Company were given the brief of "light, illumination, space, image and movement" by the company's artistic director Shona McCullagh.

Princesses, pirouettes and prancing. Eli Orzessek gets a sneak preview of this weekend's Disney on Ice show in Auckland.

On stage, she's the leader of a sex strike, aimed at ending a 20-year-old war. Off stage, Amanda Billing can't fathom such a drastic move.

The dancing ‘soldier boys’ perfectly translate human strength and fragility in the war, writes Bernadette Rae.

Greg Dixon talks to Rawiri Paratene about how he came to be taking Shakespeare to the world.

Comedian and bestselling children’s author David Walliams recounted how the inspiration for one of his villains came from his experience judging Britain's Got Talent.

Learning lines, frumpy clothes, and getting naked … Kiwi fashion queen Denise L’Estrange-Corbet talks to Suzanne McFadden about her very revealing stage debut.

Emily Perkins' A Doll's House is to Henrik Ibsen's original what Clueless is to Jane Austen's Emma: it's a wonderfully assured adaptation, writes Janet McAllister.

The opening stage is set with a tall scarlet banner which flows, bloodlike, from the rafters and bears the names, of relatives of the company one suspects, lost to the savageries of war.

The Kiss Inside, an exposition on the primal search for ecstasy, finds him in a new frame of mind though, with an underlying wryness to his observations, anger mitigated, the passion wiser.

Tourettes, real name Dominic Hoey, is a local poet, rapper and spoken word performer. He talks drugs, politics, Grey Lynn and more with Jennifer Dann.

A young Kiwi will fulfil a dream today when she dances lead ballerina in Swan Lake, performed by the Paris Opera Ballet.