The Culture Compass
24th July 2025
If 2025 is teaching us anything, it’s that while chaos and turmoil run rampant, art in all its forms will remain.
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Over the coming weeks, there are some spectacular examples of art and culture rising, including three unique festivals – one literary (WORD), one musical (NZSO) and one cultural (Toitū Te Reo) – and three wildly different theatre experiences. Read on for our selection of the most interesting, inspiring and entertaining pieces of culture happening around the country.
Tickets recently went on sale for WORD Christchurch, and choosing which to attend from the more than 60 literary events on the programme is going to be a veritable Sophie’s Choice. Programme director Kiran Dass and team have done an exceptional job pulling together an incredibly varied programme that includes deeply insightful conversations with acclaimed authors like Charlotte Wood and Catherine Chidgey alongside lighter events like a live, on-stage, poetry-based dating show with New Zealand Poetry Laureate Chris Tse. There’s a free whānau day at Te Ara Ātea on August 9 to kick things off, before the festival proper from August 27 to 31. Some names on the programme that might pique your interest include Alison Mau, Susie Ferguson, Tom Sainsbury, Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu), Damien Wilkins, Petra Bagust, and many many more.
The Culture Compass
24th July 2025If 2025 is teaching us anything, it’s that while chaos and turmoil run rampant, art in all its forms will remain.
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Over the coming weeks, there are some spectacular examples of art and culture rising, including three unique festivals – one literary (WORD), one musical (NZSO) and one cultural (Toitū Te Reo) – and three wildly different theatre experiences. Read on for our selection of the most interesting, inspiring and entertaining pieces of culture happening around the country. Tickets recently went on sale for WORD Christchurch, and choosing which to attend from the more than 60 literary events on the programme is going to be a veritable Sophie’s Choice. Programme director Kiran Dass and team have done an exceptional job pulling together an incredibly varied programme that includes deeply insightful conversations with acclaimed authors like Charlotte Wood and Catherine Chidgey alongside lighter events like a live, on-stage, poetry-based dating show with New Zealand Poetry Laureate Chris Tse. There’s a free whānau day at Te Ara Ātea on August 9 to kick things off, before the festival proper from August 27 to 31. Some names on the programme that might pique your interest include Alison Mau, Susie Ferguson, Tom Sainsbury, Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu), Damien Wilkins, Petra Bagust, and many many more.Five Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island) centres get to experience a transcendent piece of theatre next month when Te Pou Theatre and The Dust Palace tour Te Tangi a Te Tūi to Tauranga, Rotorua, Taranaki, Whangārei and Kerikeri. A collaboration between te reo Māori storytelling and circus arts, the piece received emphatic standing ovations when it was performed at Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival and recently had its international premiere in Vancouver. Co-writers Amber Curreen (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa, Te Roroa) and Tainui Tukiwaho (Te Arawa, Tūhoe) have created something extraordinarily unique, entirely in te reo Māori yet widely accessible to non-speakers. A visually captivating story of pre-colonial Aotearoa, Te Tangi a Te Tūī is a profound expression of te ao Māori and a theatre experience likely to stay with you in the weeks, months, and years ahead.It’s been a long time since we’ve had to use the phrase “COVID cancellation” but that is what derailed Indian Ink Theatre Company’s original performances of Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream in Nelson and Dunedin. It’s taken until now to get the show back down south for three nights in Nelson (August 29-31) and one in Dunedin (September 5). The solo show stars Jacob Rajan performing seven different characters with some spectacular puppetry in the form of a life-size vulture. The play is both deeply existential and hilariously entertaining, exploring human death and the mystery of India’s vanishing vulture population – an unparalleled mass extinction event. Rajan has called the play a love letter to Mumbai and to vultures, and a meditation on what people do with their brief time on earth.He won’t officially be stepping into his new role as Music Director of the NZSO until 2027, but internationally-acclaimed German conductor André de Ridder is coming to Aotearoa next month to conduct some musical sorcery for the Rumakina Immerse Festival. The festival features three concerts performed across one weekend in Wellington (August 8-10) and repeated the following weekend in Auckland (August 15-17). The first concert, Enchanted, conjures the Disney film Fantasia with Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, along with Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Night two, Ascension, is an ode to the natural world with Papatūānuku by Salina Fisher and Jerome Kavanagh Poutama, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, and Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1. The final matinee concert, Creepy-Crawly Carnival, is one for the whole whānau with Albert Roussel’s The Spider’s Feast and the endlessly charismatic and entertaining Bret McKenzie narrating Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, complete with live drawing by Stephen Templer.There are two events to mark in your calendars for further down the track: Toitū Te Reo in Hastings and Aotearoa Art Fair 2026 in Tāmaki Makaurau. Toitū Te Reo is a national Māori language festival that had its inaugural event last year with great success. Hastings CBD will be humming on November 13 and 14 with language workshops, musical performances, speakers, food, and whānau-friendly events. Festival director Dr Jeremy Tātare MacLeod hopes to create a truly inclusive festival where everyone feels comfortable to come along and have a go at te reo Māori. The festival is also calling for interested businesses, service providers and creatives to get in touch to see how they can get involved with the growing festival.