Buckets of art

Martin Snell and cast. Photo by Simon Fergusson.

Three weeks tomorrow, curtains will rise, trumpets sound, violins keen, poets declaim, playwrights strut, dancers pirouette, and musicians will sing their way into the hearts of audiences across Wellington.

Once again, it is show time as the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts stocks streets and stages in the capital with "culture".

Held every two years since 1986, it is one of the largest multicultural events in New Zealand and Australia.

While Wellington has during the two decades of its existence made it its own, organisers are keen to emphasise the festival is a "New Zealand" event - with arts lovers, whether visiting specifically for the festival or coincidentally finding themselves in the city for the duration, encouraged to make the most of it.

It is hard to single out programme highlights - there are so many of them - but any retrospective of the 2010 festival will surely include the opening-night gala performance of Gustuv Mahler's Symphony No. 8 by the New Zealand Symphony Orchesta, under the baton of world-renowned conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy.

As the progamme notes, the performance combines "the forces of an immense orchestra, a children's chorus, two large mixed choirs, organ, off-stage brass, and eight vocal soloists". Incidentally, operatic talent Martin Snell, originally from Dunedin, is one of the featured soloists in the performance.

Elsewhere on the music bill there are performances and shows by the likes of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Ravi Shankar, the Branford Marsalis Quartet, a tribute to Nina Simone, and a Wagner Gala featuring New Zealand tenor Simon O'Neill and, again, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

One of the music feature highlights promises to be the Pacific Blue Festival Club at Shed 6 on the waterfront, with a truly eclectic mix of international and local artists, from Swedish indie rockers Irya's Playground to Don McGlashan and friends, and the Swell Season, comprising Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who both made such a name for themselves in the Irish film festival favourite Once.

Dance is a strong feature again this festival with the acclaimed Sadler's Wells production Sutra topping the bill, combining as it does the talents of leading choreographer-dancer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Turner prize-winning artist Antony Gormley, and Buddhist monks from the original Shaolin Temple in China.

Equally compelling promises to be Good Morning, Mr Gershwin, a dance tribute to the American composer by choreographers Jose Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu and a company of French dancers.

The festival provides riches for theatre-goers, from the visual spectacle of award-winning Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna's T. E. O. R. E. M. A. T. and the Latvian production Sound of Silence - "a play entirely without words and set instead to the soundtrack and narrative of flower-power icons Simon and Garfunkel".

One of the theatrical highlights of the festival promises to be Eleven and Twelve, a production by the legendary British theatre-maker Peter Brook - an epic tale of Africa shaken by colonialism and featuring a multicultural cast of actors from Palestine, Africa and Europe.

Elsewhere on the theatre bill, I like the look of Irish playwright Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce, and New Zealand playwright David Geary's Mark Twain & Me in Maoriland.

And of course there is the ever popular New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week (March 9-14), which this year features numerous local and international talents including Audrey Niffenegger, Geoff Dyer, Emily Perkins, Richard Dawkins, Simon Schama, Neil Gaiman, Bill Manhire and many others in a dizzying literary list.

The festival opens on Friday, February 26 and runs until Sunday, March 21.
Full programme details can be found at www.nzfestival.nzpost.co.nz