Culture 101 RNZ Radio

Arts news for 19 May 2024

The Auckland Writers Festival has set central Tāmaki Makaurau abuzz this week with a strong lineup of leading local and international authors, panel discussions, and events, including the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 
For more than three days, the festival takes over Aotea Centre and various inner city venues. This year the festival has a brand-new artistic director, Lyndsey Fineran. 

Te Whare Tapere in the Christchurch Arts Centre is neither a European-style gallery or theatre. As a space principally by Māori, for Māori, it is, says co-founder artist Juanita Hepi, “a multidisciplinary, indigenous house of storytelling.”
Te Whare Tapere was the name given by Māori before the arrival of the European to such community houses of storytelling, dance, music, puppets, games and other artforms.

You know those embarrassing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you have you usually keep inside? Pōneke playwright and comedian Viki Moananu uses theatre and comedy to let them out. He calls them ‘Icky’. 

Gore is quite rightly known as our Capital of country music. But there’s always been much more going on culturally in this East Southland town.

Vast exclusion zones operate around the cities of Pripyat, near the ruined Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, and Plymouth, on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, decimated by the island’s volcano.
The two cities have been the focus of two long research projects with multiple exhibitions by Pōneke Wellington based Mexican artist Raúl Ortega Ayala.