Culture 101

When Roberta Flack died, Zoe Moon felt like she'd lost a teacher. Flack was the singer who helped Zoe find her own voice, away from the sonic expectations she felt as a Black woman. Real Black for Me weaves Flack's speaking voice from interviews through the songs, with a string quartet and original arrangements by Seth Boy. After its first outing last year, the show is now part of Wellington Jazz Festival. Zoe also talks about growing up in a family where everyone harmonises at the end of dinner, 16 years of working with her sister Deva Mahal, and her hidden gem from the set, Angelitos Negros.

Auckland-born, Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer Rebecca Jensen brings two works to Tempo Dance Festival, and both are about threes. Natural Basic is a trio built on the waltz step, with layers of choreography stacked on top until the body becomes a kind of barometer for chaotic times. Marking Out, at Tapac in Henderson, puts professional wrestlers and dancers in the same space for three hours. It riffs on the referee's three count and asks what a referee is really for when the match is already fixed. Audiences can come and go as they please. Rebecca also talks about kayfabe, the wrestler's code of treating everything fake as real, and why she wants to work across both sides of the Tasman.

The New Zealand Film Commission is ending its Core Funding Programme, which gives just over $1 million to 10 screen organisations and guilds, including Equity, the Directors Guild, SPADA and Pacific Islands Screen Artists. The funding has existed in various forms for more than 20 years, and the current contract ends next June. The Film Commission says the programme is no longer the most effective way to deliver its mandate and wants to direct funding toward fewer, higher-impact investments. Perlina speaks with Alice Shearman of the New Zealand Writers Guild, Roseanne Liang, co-founder of the Pan Asian Screen Collective, and Patricia Watson of Women in Film and Television about what the cut means for the industry.

Kate Rodger reviews three new releases: Verity, The Social Reckoning and the Netflix documentary Unabomber.

In 2000, Tom Eslinger became the first global creative director of digital at any agency network, at Saatchi & Saatchi, in a role that had no job description. It started in 1989, when a mentor in Minneapolis sent him a teaching job ad for New Zealand. Before long he and his colleagues were making ads on weekends and sending them to Saatchi, which led to work and then a job. These days he's an artist making collages from album covers, stickers and lyrics, an obsession that goes back to clearance stickers in his North Dakota hometown when he was five. His Festival of Design Aotearoa talk argues that tech upheaval, a bit of chaos and nobody watching make the perfect conditions for creative people, and that a healthy dose of anarchy is a good thing.

Ten of the 120 artists at this year's Lyon Biennale are from Aotearoa, after curator Katherine Nichols was told to return to where she's from. Taarati Taiaroa was at the opening. In the main venue, a former locomotive workshop in the south of the city, visitors walk past a sound installation of a woman's karanga followed by synchronised gunshots, then a 61-metre line of white pine trunk sections in the form of a fallen kahikatea, both by Tamaki Makaurau artist Ashley Topic. John Miller's billboards declare Honour the Treaty, and Fiona Clarke shows a 1970s photographic series that has never been exhibited before. Taarati talks about a day of Oceanic events at the opening and why Aotearoa needs to keep a presence there.

After two years of major upgrades and earthquake strengthening, City Gallery Wellington is open again. The work covered the internal masonry walls, the roof, heating and ventilation in the gallery spaces, new display walls, reading room skylights and accessible toilets. The gallery has reopened with a major exhibition of Cornelia Parker's work, which runs until March 2027. Director Charlotte Davy joins Perlina after a weekend of celebrations.

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for October. He recommends Happiness Season Two on Three and ThreeNow, the local musical comedy about an ex-Broadway director forced to return to Tauranga, which won him over completely in its first season and hasn't dropped the ball in its second. He's enthusiastic about Kill Jackie on Neon, a stylised Catherine Zeta-Jones action thriller with comic book energy and a 90s vibe in which she dispatches a squad of assassins one by one, and which lets Zeta-Jones use her own Welsh accent on screen for the first time. And he's most looking forward to Small Profits on Apple TV, a six-episode series from Mackenzie Crook in the spirit of his cult show Detectorists, about a grief-stricken man whose partner vanished seven years ago who stumbles into something supernatural in his suburban shed, which Karl describes as eccentric and quietly magical.

Magenta Creative Space is Nelson's only fully resourced creative studio, giving people the chance to try their hand at a range of artforms. Strategic director Rose McGrannagan joins Culture 101 to talk about what the space offers, why it's been struggling to stay open, and the fundraising effort underway to carry it through the year.

Rua is the debut novel of Candice Tutauha, who completed a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland and has spent close to a decade developing the story. It follows a young Maori woman in a tight-knit small town who dreams of becoming a writer and moving to New York City, navigating gang tensions, domestic violence and the weight of community expectation. When a soldier's diary from the Taranaki Wars surfaces, she finds herself pulled into long-buried truths. It's the first part of a planned series. Candice joins Culture 101 to discuss the book.