NZ Festival: Magic and madness
GET ready Wellington: the only event that could bring together Dame Kiri, lost art by Salvador Dali and a toilet-bowl ferris wheel is coming.
The 2016 NZ Festival programme has been released, and the event promises to be more weird, wonderful and enthralling than ever, artistic director Shelagh Magadza said.
‘‘It’s not just any old festival. I know every festival is special, but next year is especially special because it’s our 30th anniversary.’’
Magadza and her team have selected 53 unique shows to keep Wellington entranced for three weeks from February 26 next year.
New Zealand opera great Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is playing a one-off recital for the festival – two decades after she performed for them in the Michael Fowler Centre.
Magadza was there all those years ago. ‘‘It was a complete stunning sell out and she is still someone, I think, who just stops us in our tracks.’’
Dame Kiri said, after 20 years, she was ‘‘delighted’’ to be returning to Wellington ‘‘at a time when the city shines with the brightest talent from New Zealand and abroad’’.
Magadza was personally looking forward to top New York jazz coming to Wellington in the form of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, led by one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people, Wynton Marsalis.
One of the most important things was keeping the festival accessible for all, Magadza said.
A free ‘‘hand-made junk assembled playground’’ from Spain was being set up at Frank Kitts park featuring a ferris wheel made out of recycled toilet bowls. The playground relied on team-work to run. ‘‘The brilliant thing about it, in its recycled madness, is it runs on people power . . . parents have to pedal things and pull winches to make all the rides go round until at the very end they get a little reward,’’ Magadza said.
For the stalwarts who had been to every festival since it launched in 1986, the ‘‘must-see’’ was the season of German choreographer Pina Bausch, performed by Tanztheater Wuppertal.
The company had been invited to the festival before, but hadn’t come, so Magadza was feeling ‘‘very lucky’’ to have attracted the show she said was decades in the making.
For those drawn to stage shows that make them feel as though they’re in a dream, try La Verita.
Using a recreation of a long-lost Salvador Dali painting as a backdrop, the show employs acrobatics, dance and music in a dream-like stage performance.
‘‘It’s a homage to Dali and to surrealism, and to circuses and dreams and to worlds that are not quite real, with just beautiful, beautiful images,’’ Magadza said.
The Spiegeltent would not be returning, but Magadza assured there would still be opportunities to run away with the circus.
‘‘We’ll have a social hub at St James Theatre, so there’ll still be a chance to meet the artists and have a glass of wine.’’