Ghosts to haunt arts festival
Ghost stories are set to give audiences the shivers at the Nelson Arts Festival this year.
New Zealand performers David Ladderman and Lizzie Tollemache will dig up strange and eerie stories from the Otago gold rush of the 1860s in their show The Dunstan Creek Haunting. They say their show promises to have the audience experience phenomena that can’t be explained.
The festival in October will also feature the Royal New Zealand Ballet performing a specially curated programme of works including classical and contemporary favourites.
Another highlight is New Zealand play Jane Doe, written and directed by Eleanor Bishop, in which performer Karin McCracken leads a public reading of a rape trial transcript.
The audience will be reading as witnesses and lawyers, and will feed in live responses via their phones in a work described as a discussion on consent, feminism and sexual empowerment.
Nelson Arts Festival director Charlie Unwin said there was also a strong local representation in this year’s festival, with five local performances plus the Granary gigs.
Composer Rhian Sheehan, originally from Nelson, whose work has featured on the BBC, Netflix, HBO, the US Super Bowl and the Academy Awards, is performing an immersive audiovisual show at Nelson’s Theatre Royal.
The Nelson Arts Festival will run for 16 days, from October 11 to 26, with the Masked Parade and Carnivale finishing it off with a Weird & Wonderful theme.
The programme was launched at the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts on Wednesday night.
Festivals team leader Axel De Maupeou said the fact the festival was largely community-driven was unique.
‘‘That’s not given in any other event in Nelson. What we all have in common here . . . is that we’re embracing the same vision, and that collectively [brings] an amazing reward.’’
Nelson Mayor Rachel Reese said the arts festival was ‘‘the most experienced’’ in the country.
‘‘We made the decision to move the festival to an independent trust. This year is a shadowing year, and in the future years they will take care of something that’s very dear to all of us.’’
She said it was important to the city council that the festival was accessible to everyone.
This year’s theatre in development is Aperture, by Martine Baanvinger, a one-woman play about a Dutch woman arriving in New Zealand in 1957 who begins to take photos of her new homeland.
Penny Ashton will also bring her rollicking Olive Copperbottom show to musical life, described as a Dickensian tale of love, gin and the pox.
The Page & Blackmore Readers and Writers programme will feature writers from around the country, including Diana Wichtel, Elizabeth Knox and Miche`le A’Court, in 15 events over two weekends, including two Thinking Brunches.
Visual arts feature with the flag project, which will see Auckland artist Miranda Brown work with local community groups and schools to create large flags which will be placed at Founders Heritage Park. The flags will tell the story of Nelson’s long connection to the arts and what that means to everyone.
Poetry Lane is also back this year, and the Refinery ArtSpace will host The Story Inside My Head, an exhibition about what artists think when they create a work.
Early bird tickets are on sale until August 31 via nelsonartsfestival.co.nz.