Going to town

Our biggest arts festivals have announced their line-ups for 2024. The events' creative directors talk about how they've put their own stamp on their programmes and life after Covid.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

A new year with an even number means a return to the great Wellington Auckland culture derby. In February and March next year, both the biennial Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts (ANZFA) and the annual Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival (AAF) give their respective cities a late-summer defibrillation.

Both have just announced their programmes, which show some overlap among performers - some of whom are also heading to other parts of the country - and some coincidental variations on a theme.

For example, King Lear gets a different reworking in each city: Wellington has acclaimed Irish production Lost Lear, a dementia story told via a character who thinks she is rehearsing the play. In Auckland, the festival has commissioned the work, Not King Lear, performed by the Hobson Street Theatre Company, an arts project created with the Auckland City Mission and guest-directed by English stage director Adrian Jackson. In 1991, he founded Cardboard Citizens, a company in which the actors were homeless, refugees or asylum seekers.

"It's a timely work for Auckland," says AAF artistic director Shona McCullagh.

And maybe Lear is apt. McCullagh and her counterpart in Wellington, ANZFA creative director Marnie Karmelita, have spent past years raging against the storm that the pandemic brought to live events.

The Auckland Arts Festival returned to a full programme earlier this year after three years of Covid disruptions and cancellations. Next year will mark the first full Wellington event in four years, including having almost all of its live programme cancelled during the Omicron wave of 2022.

Not that things are quite back to normal. The festival sector still has its own form of long Covid.