Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival 2020 Programme

Gisborne’s annual arts festival, Te Tairāwhiti returns on 2 to 11 October to deliver connection, light, reflection and joy. The festival celebrates and illuminates the unique and vast creativity of the East Coast and its people.

Tūranganui-a-Kiwa locals and visitors to the region will be given over 40 unique opportunities to spend quality time with the arts and performance. In a very difficult year for people across Aotearoa and the world, the Festival is a place for reflection, uplift and joy.

Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival CEO and Artistic Director Tama Waipara says, “Our inaugural Festival was abundant with artistic experiences for people of all ages. Life has changed quite dramatically since then and the role of the Festival has subsequently changed, too.

“In 2020, our Festival occurs at a time in which people across the country are either emerging from or still in a state of isolation, yet we all share a deeper need to connect than ever before. We take our role in helping facilitate connection and collaboration very seriously. But we don’t take everything seriously – that’s something which is proudly Te Tairāwhiti, too, and certainly reflected in this year’s programme,” Waipara says.

The 2020 Festival programme brings light, sound, theatre, dance, colour and legacy.

It also delivers the inaugural Trust Tairāwhiti Festival Hub – Te Pūtahi – at Marina Park, where people are invited to converge, eat, and soak up the Festival atmosphere in an extensive programme running the length of the festival.

The 2020 Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival opens with the first of a number of very special performances in a return season of Nancy Brunning’s Witi’s Wāhine. In 2019, not long after the inaugural Festival and world premiere of her ultimate play, Aotearoa lost a leading light of the stage and screen. Brunning’s legacy lives on this bold, beautiful work which brings into the spotlight formidable wāhine Māori characters from Witi Ihimaera stories. Witi’s Wāhine will tour the region, opening in Uawa, Wairoa and Gisborne city.

Waipara says, “Nancy’s last wish for the work was that it was first experienced by the communities these stories belong to and all the wāhine characterised in the play – that’s why it premiered in last year’s Festival and why this year it is touring regionally, as well as the fact that it sold out and a number of locals missed out. Personally, I think this work is destined for audiences around the world. As a region, we can lovingly send it on its way, while honouring the memory of Nancy.”

Also taking place on opening night is a brilliant solo performance by a beloved Te Tairāwhiti export. Opening the spanking new Festival Club at The Marina Restaurant, Jackie Clarke will bring all the sequins, show-stoppers and sass to her one-woman tour-de-force, Jackie Goes Prima Diva.

“Anyone who was at Respect last year would have seen what a dynamic and beloved performer and presence Jackie is. Her solo show celebrates just a few of her favourite things. I couldn’t imagine a more enjoyable host and performer with whom to go on a dazzling musical journey,” Waipara says.

Returning in 2020 is the brilliant Marina and Kelvin Park multi-media installation of light sculptures, projections and artworks, Te Ara i Whiti. Celebrating Te Tairāwhiti people’s connection to place, Te Ara i Whiti explores a journey of legacy, showcased through contemporary Māori art by artists from around the rohe, with support of award-winning lighting designer Angus Muir. 

“Te Ara I Whiti is, for me, the heart of the festival and is an anchor piece in our programme. It belongs to the whakapapa of our place as much as it belongs to our festival. Our relationship to light is exemplified in this free outdoor experience for the whole whānau,” Waipara says.

On 9 and 10 October, Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival 2020 will present the world premiere of the Silo Theatre production of Every Brilliant Thing, starring Anapela Polatai’vao. Described as “the funniest play you’ll see about depression”, Every Brilliant Thing is a warm, deep hug of a play. It takes an unflinching look at the guilt of not being able to make those we love happy, and encourages all of us to recognise the many beautiful things in life.                                 

According to Waipara, the issues of suicide and depression are recurring themes that artists continue to investigate, and which our country is constantly trying to understand.

“This special show is one way that we can examine some of our feelings around these issues. I’m a big fan of the work of Silo Theatre and the dream team of Silo, co-directors Danielle Cormack and Jason Te Kare, with Anapela on stage – well, we’re all going to experience the profound energy of some of our country’s best storytellers,” he says.

Another brilliant storyteller is local actor and singer Rutene Spooner who will perform his hilarious award-winning cabaret show Super Hugh-Man at the Festival Club at The Marina Restaurant. This one-man play charts Rutene’s personal journey growing up as a young kapa haka student to becoming a musical theatre star after discovering the secret identity of his hero, Hugh Jackman.

In 2019, the Rongowhakaata Iwi Trust brought All Roads Lead to Ngātapa, an innovative devised production that explored the intricate history of Rongowhakaata to full houses at the inaugural Festival. This year, the Rongowhakaata Iwi Trust is back. Their new piece TŪRANGA: The Land of Milk and Honey is a groundbreaking devised production that dives even further into our past, questions narratives, and brings divisive issues to the forefront.

A spectacular spectacle of Queer deliciousness will dazzle at this year’s Festival Club at The Marina Restaurant. Dragon’s Diva Den will deliver sensational singing, lip syncing, and – yass, Qween – celebrity transformations, all dished up by Drag Queens. Spot prizes and audience participation will round off an evening guaranteed to leave a smile on your face, stars in your eyes, and a rainbow in your heart.

 

 

Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival has a broad music offering in 2020. This includes Ngā Mata o te Ariki Tāwhirimātea, an intimate evening with award-winning local musician Maisey Rika singing waiata she composed to explore the ancient stories and kaupapa of Matariki. Inspired by the enlightening kōrero tuku iho about Matariki from Māori Astronomer Dr Rangi Mātāmua, her latest waiata have been lovingly composed for our tamariki as a waiata and pūoro resource.

“What’s not to love about Maisey?” Waipara says. “What I particularly like about this work of hers is that it’s responsive – she’s making sure our tamariki know, and understand, the stories and relationships of Matariki. In this instance the story is formulated through multiple genres – visual artworks created by artist Erena Koopu that are inspired by Maisey’s waiata, and Maisey’s breath-taking voice – which means the audience gets to use many senses. They’ll hear it, see it and feel it.”

The people of Te Tairāwhiti are of the light, yet it was in the darkness, Te Pō, in which the universe was sung into existence. Ka Pō, Ka Waiata combines live performance and soundscapes, woven layers of sound and cosmology to shape and honour the darkness, and te hunga kāpō. This stunning immersive experience, presented in association with Auckland Arts Festival, has been created by Warren Maxwell, Teina Moetara, Tama Waipara, Whirimako Black, Horomona Horo and Waimihi Hōtere.

“Ka Pō, Ka Waiata is an audio-visual response to the concept of Te Pō and what that means for Māori as a creative space. The other part of this profound event has been a conversation with the blind community and centering their experience as a musical installation,” Waipara says.

Touring for the first time together as Reid & Ruins, Nadia Reid and Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins) will present an intimate evening of acoustic mastery, while Gitbox Rebellion – an innovative and exciting eight-piece, multicultural Guitar ensemble – will perform intricate and clever original compositions and a few much-loved guitar hero covers.  Taite Prize finalists, Hopetoun Brown, will take their audience on a boot-stomping journey through blues, soul, funk, jazz and Americana at Smash Palace on 7 October.

 

There’s plenty for the tamariki this festival, too. The Festival sits inside the school holidays and embraces its role as a family-focused, whānau-friendly festival. The doors are open to people of any age.

While Te Pūtahi – The Trust Tairāwhiti Festival Hub will be the home of all things whānau, there are exceptional theatre shows on offer including Tröll, the new work by Trick of the Light Theatre – makers of The 

 

Bookbinder, which sold out at the 2019 Festival. It’s 1998. Twelver-year-old Otto lives in an old wooden house with his mum, dad, sister, a chain-smoking Icelandic granny, and an ancient malevolent tröll who’s started living in the wall. Smartphones become light sources, laptops transform into skyscrapers, and charger cords morph into puppets in this mythic and modern fable for people aged 10+.

This year’s Tipu Te Toi – work in development – programme is a treat all on its own. Three events by established and emerging playwrights, songwriters, performers and authors will preview this year.

The first is Bill Kerekere, a whānau-led theatrical celebration of Bill’s life and legacy presented by the Kerekere Whanau Trust.

Audiences will be delighted to experience a rehearsed reading of Victor Rodger’s ridiculously riotous comedy, Uma Lava – an outrageous, irreverent comedy of terrors in which no sacred cow is left unslaughtered by the provocative pen of an award-winning playwright.

The third is by actor and writer, Te Huamanuka Luiten-Apirana, who wrote her first play for Te Pou’s Kōanga Festival Playwrights Programme 2020, Lip Sync, Kanikani & Twerk Off, in which three sisters launch a compulsory nightly Lip Sync to hold their whānau together following the loss of their mother.

There is also a vibrant visual arts programme, with events and installations popping up in many surprising places.

Already launched is Pakiwaitara, the Festival’s digital retrospective of Gisborne’s beloved Tile Wall – a vibrant display of 6500 hand-painted tiles, which was created in 1999 ahead of the Millennium celebrations and lives at the Gisborne Inner Harbour. Twenty years on, Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival has created a digital hub for all tile artists, connecting those who drew their beautiful self-portraits with each other and people at home. The Festival is asking, “If this wall could talk and these tiles had voices, what would they tell us about who and where those children are today?”. The search for the 6,500 artists on the Tile Wall continues throughout the Festival.

Noise Vacancy is a conceptual sound and art project by Tairāwhiti artists and musicians. As the number of vacant buildings in Gisborne’s city centre grows, this work arrests a moment in time by activating a selection of empty spaces through sound, delivering a sonic trail through the city.

Local artist and photographer Phil Yeo’s Salt exhibition, exploring identity, will reside at the Miharo Gallery. Caravannex, designed by Katy Wallace, after winning Creative New Zealand’s Craft/Object Fellowship in 2017, will park up at the Festival Hub so everyone can have a nosey inside a stunning piece of transformable mobile architecture.

Running alongside the festival is a comprehensive programme at Tairāwhiti Museum. Zak Waipara: Pepeha – is a series of works exploring word, pictures and word pictures which speaks to the ways a modern artform reveals whakapapa. In Te Hono Wai: Where Waters Meet, works by costume artist Jo Torr highlight encounters between Māori and Europeans in the early 19th Century. Gisborne artists, potters and photographers hold their annual exhibition, and Tū Te Whaihanga also continues.

Cross-sector partnerships continue to be a priority for 2020. The Kai Food Festival will again coincide with the festival opening and the Show Me Shorts Film Festival makes a welcome return and. New this year. the Southern Hemisphere’s largest Indigenous Film Festival, Māoriland Film Festival – all the way from Ōtaki – will pop-up at Te Poho o Whirikoka with a two-day programme of short films. The Māoriland team will also deliver a two-day filmmaking workshop for rangatahi, premiering those films as part of their programme.

 

And there’s more. More info and the full programme are available on www.tetairawhitiartsfestival.nz.

Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival takes place 2 to 11 October at venues, marae, and pop-up locations across the region.

Printed programme brochures will be in cafes and venues across the region from 3 September. Tickets are now on sale via the festival website www.tetairawhitiartsfestival.nz.