Cabaret Thoroughly Modern Māui stemmed from a conversation between musical theatre performer Rutene Spooner and actor Jennifer Ward-Lealand.

A group of acclaimed Maori artists have been selected to exhibit as part of the centrepiece international exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale in May. Brett Graham was one of those chosen. 

But it’s not the only island hopping the sculptor has been doing this year. Brett is the curator of this year’s Sculpture on the Gulf, opening this weekend on Waiheke Island, Tāmaki Makaurau. It’s arguably the most highly regarded contemporary sculpture exhibition in the country, forming a trail across the headlands, and also one of the most beautiful.

A theatre show at this year’s Hamilton Arts Festival was inspired by an incident and debate at Waitangi in 2021.

Poetry and music at their best share a trick: the ability to be both celestial and grounded; dealing with the particulars of our lives, yet moving into abstraction. They can be at once very personal to their writers, but also build community. 

This is certainly true of Te Whanganui-a-Tara poet Sylvan Spring’s first book Killer Rack, recently published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. As novelist Pip Adam writes on the back cover, Killer Rack is “somehow intimate and communal in the same breath, and wild and compassionate”

Super Bowl 58 was held in Las Vegas this year with the Kansas City Chiefs facing off against the San Francisco 49ers. The event has become a cultural phenomenon across the world, televised in more than 200 countries.

Every week Culture 101 speaks to a creative correspondent to gauge the cultural pulse of Aotearoa’s regions.

This week, we’re in Kaikoura with writer, poet, researcher and museum curator, Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga.

Kristen Ng aka electronic artist Kaishandao has been touring Aotearoa this summer in support of her beat-filled album Homeland. She describes it as an “atemporal exploration through the places, spaces and people we call home.”

Ng is Pōneke born-and-raised, but home for the past 10 years has been Chengdu, the captial of China’s Southwestern Sichuan province.

It’s one of the great cultural events of Aotearoa New Zealand – certainly one of the longest established: Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. But now, RNZ film critic and broadcaster Simon Morris says it seems a shadow of its former self. The last three years have been a challenge and now, the festival has been rocked by a series of major resignations in the last month.

2023 Billy T winner Abby Howells is taking her award winning show La Soupco to the Hamilton Arts Festival.

It was love at first sight, or sound rather, for tabla master Basant Madhur, and Irish guitarist and bouzouki player Jon Sanders.