Strong women’s work for festival
Harcourts Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival has an extraordinary array of strong, highcaliber women’s performance work this year.
It’s an attunement festival director Pitsch Leiser finds particularly fitting as we celebrate 125 years of women’s suffrage in New Zealand. It wasn’t all intentionally programmed, he says, but reflects rather the strength of women’s work currently in New Zealand, as well as topical global themes.
“I’m excited that these contemporary issues, which affect not just women but all of us, are being explored in such creative, engaging ways.”
The sold-out opening show in the Spiegeltent, Songs for Nobodies, interweaves five ordinary women’s experiences with the lives of five great divas, singlehandedly performed by New Zealander Ali Harper.
There are smart, sassy theatre shows, from Penny Ashton’s hilarious satirical play on Jane Austen’s oeuvre in Promise and Promiscuity, to Robyn Paterson’s astonishing, adroit feat of performing both her parents in her show The South Afreakins, to Wild Dogs Under My Skirts, which explores what it is to be a Pasifika woman in New Zealand through Tusiata Avia’s fearless poetry.
Brave, necessary conversation starters, such as Jane Doe — possibly the most important festival show this year, says Mr Leiser — which interrogates the uncomfortable truths of rape culture in an acclaimed, engaging format. As well as fresh, naughty fun with MaryJane O’Reilly’s cabaret dance show In Flagrante.
Women’s voices feature strongly in the Readers and Writers programme too. In Rebel girls, Catherine Robertson and Tina Clough discuss how to get people who dismiss books by women writers to open the page and give them a go, while The Shrieking Sisterhood explores the diverse ways in which women argued for rights in New Zealand’s history.