Dunedin’s arts calendar for 2024 is starting to fill up. Rebecca Fox takes a look at some of what has been programmed so far.
From Shakespeare to ABBA and everything in between, Dunedin audiences will again be spoilt for choice as local arts practitioners get set to do the hard graft to entertain people this year.
Alongside them are visiting shows from our national organisations - the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Royal New Zealand Ballet, Chamber Music New Zealand - and touring theatre works and music performances.
Theatre
Despite continuing challenges with funding and venues Dunedin theatre practitioners are pushing on with creating new works and performing others.
This year William Shakespeare’s timeless works - such as Twelfth Night and The Tempest - are making a reappearance on many of the city’s theatre company seasons.
Leading the way is Dunedin Summer Shakespeare which is celebrating its fifth anniversary season with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).
Producer Kim Morgan said it is a true milestone for the professional-amateur company that wrapped up its first season just before Covid and has despite the dearth in arts funding continued each summer to offer free Shakespeare in the park.
Lara Macgregor returns to direct this season with professional actors Sara Georgie, Gregory Cooper, and Nick Tipa leading the team which tackles "all 37 plays in 97 minutes" at Chingford Park in mid-February.
Morgan and her husband Matthew, a sound designer and technical director, have set up their own company Hic Sunt Dracones (aka Here Be Dragons, from the tradition of placing monsters at the borders of old maps) and have their inaugural show planned for May.
"We were tired of waiting on the ongoing performing arts venue debate, and have vowed to go ‘off the map’ to make theatre in exciting and unusual spaces that suit specific texts that have yet to grace our local stages."
So with funding from Creative New Zealand and the Dunedin City Council Professional Theatre Fund they are staging Nick Payne’s Constellations starring local actors Matt Wilson and Rosella Hart to be performed in the Beautiful Science Gallery outside the Planetarium at Tūhura Otago Museum and taking advantage of the venue’s 13 projectors.
"It’s an Evening Standard Award-winning dramedy about love, life, and death in the multiverse - featuring two characters (he’s a beekeeper, she’s a quantum physicist) navigating their tumultuous private relationship and a life-altering diagnosis, against the backdrop of ever-shifting realities across multiple universes."
Saraha BreeZe Productions theatre company plans to produce two plays - the first a professional multi-disciplined adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in June and the second, a new verbatim play called Happy created from interviews with local people about their journey with depression to be staged in November. Both will be performed at The Mayfair Theatre in Dunedin.
Blaise Barham says The Tempest is regarded as the most lyrical, profound and magical of Shakespeare’s comedies while Happy asks the question of what it means to be happy and uses a multi-disciplined approach to telling local people’s stories.
"It hopes to be both inspiring and educational."
Theatre company Dollhouse are planning a three-show season this year, continuing their trajectory of adding a play each year since they began as well as developing a new work over the year.
"We will also be stepping up in formally incorporating as a company now that we have a critical mass of a team," the team say.
They also plan to take their work on the road.
"Bringing shows out into the community, touring beyond the city limits, and working in site-specific spaces in the tradition of legendary Dunedin company Wow! Productions, who have been an inspiration to us."
Dunedin theatre company Prospect Park plans a return performance of Emily Duncan’s performance Establishment in partnership with the Friends of the Hocken Collections, whose 2023 Award funded the research and writing of the script.
Duncan is also "plotting" the next season of the Play: Notes podcast and has been awarded the Whakahoa Kaitoi Te Puna Toi Arts For All Fellowship to work on "Between the Lines", a practice-as-research project to test, develop, and document tools and approaches for neurodivergent playwrights to write for theatre.
Prospect Park will again run their popular platform Ōtepoti Writers Lab. But Ōtepoti Theatre Lab will be having a hiatus this year after a successful five-year cycle.
Fellow Prospect Park member H-J Kilkelly is producing the national tour of Hatupatu Kurungaituku for Taki Rua Production, before undertaking the United Kingdom tour of Faovale Imperium with James Nokise and DJ Don Luchito. Kilkelly will also be developing a new work for stage with award-winning novelist/poet, Dominic Hoey and assisting Cindy Diver with the development of her new Kāi Tahu epic, Wāhine Mātātoa.
Dunedin’s Globe Theatre has a full year of shows planned starting in February with Artist Descending a Staircase, a humorous take on the meaning and purpose of art, by Tom Stoppard, a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter, directed by Sheena Townsend through to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night directed by Lorraine Johnston and Townsend in December.
Also programmed is the thriller Yellow Hut by Invercargill-born playwright Ella West in March, the whodunit The 39 Steps by Patrick Barlow directed by Rosemary Manjunath in July and in September the Alzheimer's comedy Bothered and Bewildered by Gail Young directed by Jess Keogh.
It also has a youth play programmed, Break a Leg, by Judi Billcliff, directed by Harry Almey and Kay Masters.
Arts on Tour has a restricted programme this year due to reduced Creative New Zealand funding but is bringing south Te Tupua the Goblin, a solo show by John Davies in May and Red Heavens by Martine Baanvinger in July to the Regent’s Clarkson Studios. Also in April it is bringing children’s show Land of the Long Long Drive featuring New Zealand singer-songwriter Benny Tipene.
Festivals
Some theatre companies’ performances and shows will be programmed as part of this year’s Fringe Festival but the programme is not launched until mid-February, with the festival on March 14-24.
Like many others in the sector the festival has struggled with funding but it is still committed to bringing the 11-day multidisciplinary arts festival to the city, co-director Ruth Harvey says. It continues to fundraise to support artists with the aim of bringing new, innovative and experimental art to a wider audience and support the work of emerging artists.
In a first for Dunedin, dance enthusiast Anna Noonan is planning a four-day Dunedin Dance Festival in May. She is anticipating an "exciting and eclectic programme" which will be launched in March.
"Celebrating dance at its heart, this festival is a platform for professional, recreational and community dance."
It is the "off year" for many of the region’s festivals with the Dunedin Arts Festival, Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival and Wānaka’s Festival of Colour not happening until 2025.
But in the meantime in Wānaka there will be Aspiring Conversations from April 5-7 with a range of events and talks about key issues affecting the nation.
In Dunedin the New Zealand Young Writers Festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary in September with four days of free, literary-focused events run by the Dunedin Fringe.
Classical music
While the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra’s (DSO) full programme is not out until February it does have some big news - it has secured New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) music director emeritus James Judd as its principal guest conductor for 2024-26. This year he will conduct the DSO twice.
"I am honoured to become the DSO’s principal guest conductor for the next three seasons. I greatly look forward to being a part of the creative team and especially to be making more music with the orchestra’s wonderful musicians, including a concert in the Dunedin Town Hall which is one of my most favourite halls in the world."
Judd’s first concert is in July at the town hall with one of Dunedin’s favourite sons, bass baritone Jonathan Lemalu, who is returning to sing with the DSO, performing some Mozart and Mahler arias. The concert also includes the NZSO’s concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppanen as a soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5.
Another highlight will be the Matariki celebration with Rerenga by Michael Norris, a work which won the SOUNZ Contemporary Award at the 2020 Apra Silver Scroll Awards.
Two new conductors bookend this year’s Matinee Series, Swiss conductor Matthias Bamert launches the series in April, and in September the 2024 NZ associate conductor Ingrid Martin, of Australia, will close the series.
This year also sees a return visit by Umberto Clerici in August to conduct Mozart’s Requiem, featuring City Choir Dunedin along with four vocal soloists.
The DSO’s year finishes in November with something quite different - a concert of the music of ABBA. This follows on from its 2023 hugely successful Beatles music concert. To be held in the town hall, it will feature four of the University of Otago’s contemporary singers.
Meanwhile, the NZSO, which has been roundly criticised by some Dunedin classical music fans for only programming one concert in Dunedin this year, announces today a second concert to be performed at the Glenroy on June 12, "Reflections of Schubert and Beethoven", featuring Jessica Oddie and Yua Eguchi on violin, Alexander McFarlane on viola and Ken Ichinose on cello.
The first concert will see Judd return to the city in June to conduct Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, alongside two works by young Kiwi composers Henry Meng and Sai Natarajan, both 2022-23 NZSO Todd Corporation Young Composer Awards finalists. The NZSO will also perform this in Invercargill.
But it appears the city will miss out of the NZSO’s top concerts of the year featuring "global music stars" including violinists Maxim Vengerov, Augustin Hadelich and Christian Tetzlaff, percussionist Jacob Nissly and pianists Andrea Lam and Alexander Gavrylyuk.
Chamber Music New Zealand (CNZ) has confirmed it is bringing three concerts this year one featuring a first for New Zealand, world-renowned didgeridoo player William Barton with the United Kingdom’s Bodsky Quartet in March, reed quintet Calefax from the Netherlands in September performing the premiere of a new CMNZ-commissioned work and The Young Virtuosi in November showcasing Michael Hill International Violin Competition winner Yeyeong Jenny Jin and Jeonghwan Kim, winner of the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition, all to be performed at the Glenroy.
CNZ is also bringing a range of concerts to Cromwell and Wānaka over the year.
City Choir Dunedin’s 2024 season includes collaborations with the DSO and in June with New Zealand Organ Association (NZOA). As part of NZOA’s conference City Choir and organ scholars will perform together in St Paul’s Cathedral for organists from throughout Australasia.
In March the choir will also perform Bach’s St John Passion in the Dunedin Town Hall with Dunedin Symphony Orchestra and soloists.
It will also accompany a DSO ensemble in December for Joyeux Noel at Knox Church.
Ballet
The Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB) is bringing two shows down south this year, its Swan Lake production to honour the artistic legacy of former artistic director and RNZB kaumatua Russell Kerr who died in 2022, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream a co-production between RNZB and Queensland Ballet which premiered in 2015.
"Swan Lake is a ballet that all dancers aspire to perform and there is a huge excitement in the company to be performing this iconic production again, following in the footsteps of so many of the RNZB’s former stars," acting artistic director David McAllister says.
Unfortunately Dunedin audiences miss out on the trio of premieres in Solace: dance to feed your soul, featuring new and recent ballets by Britain’s Wayne McGregor, New Zealand choreographer Sarah Foster-Sproull and Australian choreographer Alice Topp, although the show is going to Christchurch.
It is also performing its Tutus on Tour show in Wānaka and Oamaru in February and March which will feature a excerpts of Kerr’s Swan Lake, choreographer in Residence Shaun James Kelly’s Prismatic and Clay by Alice Topp.
Music and comedy
A range of other performances are coming to Dunedin this year including Grammy Award-winning singer and performer P!nk’s "Summer Carnival" stadium tour in March while LA-based New Zealand singer-songwriter Greg Johnson is bringing his "1000 Miles Tour" to the city’s newest venue Errick’s for a seated show also in March.
While in April Kiwi rock band Dragon will return to the city and the town hall on their 50th anniversary tour with special guests Hello Sailor and then in May Waimate-born country pop artist Kaylee Bell will perform her "Nights Like This Tour".
At the Regent Creedence Clearwater Collective will perform in March followed by guitarist Tommy Emmanuel and New Zealand’s own prima diva Jackie Clarke in April.
Arts on Tour are also bringing south Genre Fluid, Wellington-born vocalist and performance artist Silk Satin Suede and Nelson-born multi-instrumentalist Bosho who fuse music and theatre into funk-rock anthems in March, Across the Great Divide, a folk roots fusion featuring guitarist and dobro player Tony Burt, Swedish saxophonist, Hanna Wiskari Griffiths and music specialist and Scots traditionalist, on harp, guitar and vocals, Karen Jones in September and "India meets Ireland" which fuses Indian classical music with traditional Irish music in February.
The city will also host top comedian Russell Howard at the town hall in February and as part of the comedy festival season Guy Montgomery will do his Over 50,000,000 Guy Fans Can’t Be Wrong show and Chris Parker returns with Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t throw my phone off this bridge in June at the Glenroy.
