While mystery still surrounds some of the acts coming to Dunedin next year, there is still plenty to put in your new diary, Rebecca Fox discovers.
It is always good to plan ahead.
For 2016, that will be important, given it is an Otago Festival of the Arts year and especially since that will be held during the school holidays.
So, instead of planning to head away for the September 30 to October 9 school break, organisers are hoping people will stay around for a programme that director Nicholas McBryde says will include a significant children's programme alongside its usual shows and artists who fulfil its mission ‘‘to celebrate the excellent and extraordinary''.
Just what those acts will be, he cannot divulge yet.
To get us warmed up for the festival, the Dunedin Fringe Festival returns from March 3 to 13.
Festival director Josh Thomas says it is shaping up to be the biggest in recent years, with more than 70 national and international performances, exhibitions and events.
Again, many of those acts are still under wraps until the programme is launched in February.
However, he could reveal a couple of acts, including a contemporary and controversial work from Denmark, Manifesto 2083, performed by Edwin Wright (Shortland St, The Glass Menagerie), which takes the audience inside the mind of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
Another will be Enter the New World, taking place in one of Dunedin's New World supermarkets. It is an audio adventure developed to accompany your weekly shopping, and featuring original songs by Garth Hobbs.
While the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival will not be held again until 2017, the organisers will be holding one-off events featuring international writers.
BalletFor those who cannot make it to the New Zealand Festival in Wellington or the Auckland Arts Festival, the Royal New Zealand Ballet is bringing its festival south, offering Speed of Light to Dunedin on March 16.
It is a performance of three contemporary classics: Andonis Foniadakis' Selon Desir, William Forsythe's In the middle, somewhat elevated and Alexander Ekman's Cacti, under the artistic leadership of Francesco Ventriglia.
It is Ventriglia's first full season for the ballet company, which will also include the premiere of The Wizard of Oz. It comes to Dunedin on May 21, followed by Giselle on August 28, accompanied by the Southern Sinfonia.
Also on the ballet front, the Imperial Russian Ballet Company is bringing The Nutcracker to Dunedin on November 24.
Music
The Southern Sinfonia turns 50 next year and to mark the occasion it has gathered together some of the conductors and soloists who have performed with it, for a concert series running from April to October. They include former Dunedin residents Tecwyn Evans (Sweden) and Holly Mathieson (United Kingdom).
A gala concert in April will feature another former Dunedinite, bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu. He will be part of a line-up of soloists joining the orchestra and City Choir Dunedin in a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, The Choral.
Other highlights include pianist Michael Houstoun returning to perform with the orchestra and a world premiere performance of a work by Anthony Ritchie commissioned by the orchestra with funding from Creative New Zealand's WW100 Fund.
Dunedin City Choir will also perform, in the Dunedin Town Hall, Theresienmesse and Magnificat on July 3 and Christmas Oratorio on December 16 with soloists and the Southern Sinfonia.
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is bringing three ‘‘masterworks'' concerts and its collaboration with the Roger Fox Big Band to Dunedin.
Conductor Edo de Waart joins the orchestra next year as music director presenting the ‘‘masterworks'' series, featuring concertos and nine major symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Elgar and Richard Strauss.
Performing alongside the orchestra in Dunedin will be soloists including Scottish-Italian violinist Nicola Benedetti, German cellist Leonard Elschenbroich, former orchestra principal horn Samuel Jacobs, from the UK, and renowned Mozart pianist Ronald Brautigam.
In a change of pace, the orchestra adds a jazz band with rhythm section and swinging brass to its line-up in September as part of its collaboration with the Roger Fox Big Band in the tour Swing into Spring, featuring American jazz trumpeter Allen Vizzutti.
Jazz will also feature in Chamber Music New Zealand's 2016 line-up, which includes seven visits to Dunedin.
Its Kaleidoscopes concert season starts off with Grammy-nominated New York jazz pianist Uri Caine performing with the New Zealand String Quartet in March. He also performs at the Auckland and New Zealand arts festivals.
That is followed in April by a visit of early music-instrument ensemble Les Talens Lyriques led by harpsichordists Christophe Rousset and joined by two Baroque violinists and Atsushi Sakai on viola da gamba.
Then Australian violinist Suyeon Kang, who won this year's Michael Hill International Violin Competition, will join pianist Stephen de Pledge in a concert, followed by clarinettist Julian Bliss. The NZ Trio visits in July and in September American violinist James Dunham joins the New Zealand String Quartet for QuintEssence.
Its Dunedin visits will end for 2016 with an Otago Arts Festival performance called Mixing it up: Flexibility and Flair.
TheatreThe Fortune Theatre has a line-up developed by its former artistic director, Lara Macgregor.
It begins with Kings of the Gym, a New Zealand comedy written by Dave Armstrong that is touted to transport the audience back to their high school phys-ed classes.
Next will be a collaboration with The Court Theatre in Christchurch, Winston's Birthday, written by Oamaru's Paul Baker, followed by another comedy, Niu Sila, written by Dave Armstrong and Oscar Knightley.
The New Zealand premiere of Over the River and Through the Woods, about an Italian-American family, is followed by another premiere, Grounded, by George Bryant, the theatre's 2016 True Grit production. The theatre's Otago Arts Festival offering will be Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
The Globe will be back in action this year after a major renovation saw it move its productions to the Athenaeum.
Theatregoers will be welcomed back to the new and improved Globe with a ‘‘gala season'' of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in February.
For the first time, the Globe, under the direction of Leanne Byas, will offer its own children's school-holiday theatre next month, Toybox.
‘‘Based on what is found in a box of playthings, actors create fun and interactive stories for the children to enjoy and become involved in,'' Keith Scott said.
The Globe will mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in April with The Comedy of Errors, directed by Ellie Swan, followed by An Unseasonable Fall of Snow, by Gary Henderson, in June.
It also plans to participate in the 2016 New Zealand Theatre Federation Festival of Community Theatre and will take part in the Otago Festival of the Arts with a new adaptation of Mary Stuart, by Friedrich Schiller.
BookedOther shows coming to Dunedin include The Ten Tenors' Power of 10 show in June at the Regent Theatre and New Zealand opera singers Sol3 Mio's On Another Note in March at the Dunedin Town Hall.
British stand-up comedian Danny Bhoy is booked to come to the Regent in February with his Please Untick this Box show and Menopause The Musical, a singing, dancing comedy set at a department store, in which four women with seemingly nothing in common meet by chance and bond over their experiences with ‘‘The change'', arrives in September.
Previous tours of this show have sold out.
In April, Gilbert and Sullivan opera HMS Pinafore, directed by Geraldine Brophy, will arrive in Dunedin as part of a national tour. It features theatre veteran George Henare as Sir Joseph Porter and singer and performer Helen Medlyn as Buttercup.
Then there will be the International Film Festival in August.
