New Zealand International Arts Festival
As the official photographer for the New Zealand International Arts Festival from 2004 - 2012, I covered a lot of ground - and blogged about it, sometimes at the time, sometimes afterwards. This is a collection of those posts over the years.
New Zealand International Arts Festival
As the official photographer for the New Zealand International Arts Festival from 2004 - 2012, I covered a lot of ground - and blogged about it, sometimes at the time, sometimes afterwards. This is a collection of those posts over the years.
It's always tough to choose a single image from a New Zealand International Arts Festival - after all, I photographed for 24 days straight, usually working 17h days; so there are a few to choose from!
And 2010 was a particularly good year, between visiting companies and New Zealand works; but somehow I come back to Red Leap Theatre's production of The Arrival often, when I'm thinking about that festival. It caught me by surprise, I think - in the same way Giselle did two years earlier, I came into rehearsal not knowing much about the show, and came out a fan of the company...
If you've visited my website at all in recent years, you've probably seen this one already! Taken at a rehearsal for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre's production of Giselle at the New Zealand International Arts Festival, it's been one of my all-time favourites for almost a decade now.
As with so many of my favourite images, it doesn't explain itself - but with a graphic shape and strong colour (if not quite clean lines), it lures you into wanting to know more...
To me, there's a lot to like in this week's image, from Tan Dun's opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2006; it's simple, clean, and graphic.
And yet, at the same time, there's something mysterious about it. Like the best production images for promoting the arts, it raises more questions than it answers...
2004 was the year of my first New Zealand International Arts Festival as the official photographer (I'd been a box office manager, followspot operator & lighting technician in previous years); and while there were a number of images I really like from that Festival, this one still grabs me the most, I think.
This was also my first time photographing traditional Maori Kapa Haka performance...
One of the longest & proudest associations I've had as a photographer - and as a person, really - is my work over fifteen years with the New Zealand International Arts Festival. I moved to Wellington in 1997, working as a box office manager at the time, in part lured by the fact that the venue I'd be working on was the primary ticketing agency for the Festival, and moreover that Wellington would be the last place ever to see Robert Lepage's Seven Streams Of The River Ota in 1998...
Berthold Brecht & Kurt Weill's opera The Lindbergh Flight / The Flight Over The Ocean, directed by Francois Girard, is seen in rehearsal at the St James Theatre in Wellington, New Zealand.
When I was studying drama at university, I went for an interview to spend the summer at the Banff Centre For The Arts. I'd been focussing on the technical side of theatre at that point, including a bit of stage management, and thought this might be an interesting way to spend a few months between school terms.
The question was asked: did I read music? And frankly, it had never occurred to me that this might be a useful skill - our university programme was pure theatre, not even musicals, much less opera or dance; so it had never come up, and of course I didn't. So, I didn't go to Banff, and I didn't become a stage manager...
In my previous essay on photographing the arts, I was talking about selecting images from a shoot; now, we're on to the conversion and correction of the files themselves, taking a RAW file and turning it into a beautiful, finished image.
RAW files are the original camera files, which contain far more image data than an in-camera .jpg, so as a result there's a lot you can do in the RAW conversion process - and, there are a lot of choices that need to be made for each image that gets worked on. Sometimes, it's possible to take settings and copy them from one image to the rest, and get consistent results that way - but that's rare in the performing arts, as the light usually changes from scene to scene, or from one part of the stage to another. Having been a lighting designer, I know how hard it is to get an even, smooth spread of light across a stage, if that's what the aim is - but often, it's not!
The work I've been doing recently with Apocalypse Theatre and Pinchgut Opera got me thinking about what I try to achieve in production stills photography; so I thought I'd have a look at a show that epitomises my favourite kind of images from this sort of work - New Theatre of Riga's production, The Sound Of Silence, which I photographed for the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2010...
This week's Lost & Found post is from my last Wellington Jazz Festival - who are kicking off again today, over in New Zealand!
Our major draw card in 2011 was a one-off concert with Sonny Rollins and his band at the Michael Fowler Centre. He may have been 81 (REALLY!?) at the time, but he put on a heck of a show - and as you'd expect from someone of his calibre, the band were top notch as well...
The Wellington Jazz Festival of 2009 was quite a different beast from the previous festivals I've mentioned in the last couple of Lost & Found posts - this time, the management of the New Zealand International Arts Festival took on the programming and running of it, so the scale of production and calibre of performers was substantially different...
Following on from last week's post, today's Lost & Found is from the 2003 Wellington International Jazz Festival - which is only weeks away from its next event, in early June.
I was very sorry to hear yesterday of Jack Body's passing, in Wellington; he was a New Zealand composer of great talent (though he'd never admit to it himself), but also boundless energy and irresistible enthusiasm. Whenever I saw him, he always had a project on the go currently, and invariable one or two more waiting in the wings for when he had a free moment. (I honestly have no idea how he found time to write music, as well!)
Today's Lost & Found is an image from the 2010 New Zealand International Arts Festival, and as was so often the case, was something that just happened in front of me when I found myself in exactly the right spot...
I was looking through a few images recently from past New Zealand International Arts Festivals, and came across this one from the 2008 opera, The Trial Of The Cannibal Dog, at the Opera House in Wellington...
Another sculpture is this week's Lost & Found, from my old home town of Wellington New Zealand. I've always been fond of Neil Dawson's Ferns sculpture, which hangs above the city's Civic Square in the centre of town - I was at the unveiling of it at the dawn ceremony to launch the 1998 New Zealand International Arts Festival, which was my first festival in that country not long after I'd arrived there.
There's a lot of sadness in the New Zealand theatre community at the moment, as news goes around of Willem Wassenaar's passing in Holland on the weekend. I met him a few times around town and at the New Zealand International Arts Festival, and photographed him at least once - leading a SchoolsFest workshop with a group of actors from The Walworth Farce in 2010.
Last one! It's the closing day of the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington, so I'm wrapping up this series here. Hope it's been interesting!
Almost there - only one day left of this look back at the New Zealand Festival over the past decade or so. Of course, the Festivals we're looking back at were winding up too, so today we've got more people than shows, as naturally there were fewer & fewer rehearsals for me to attend & photograph as the shows came to an end.
Wow, we're getting towards the end of the Festival, aren't we! Well, there's still time for a few more shows - this one's Hone Kouka's play The Prophet from 2004, by Taki Rua Theatre; and a rare example of when I had to do an actual 'photo call' for a show, rather than being able to cover a rehearsal or show. I always resist doing that if I can, because I don't think you get the same emotional honesty in the images by getting actors to perform a quick bite of the show just for the camera; but sometimes, it's the only option.
Today's images are brought to you by the letter T: first, Tuwhare, the concert tribute to the great New Zealand poet Hone Tuwhare. Following on from Baxter in the 2000 Festival, songwriters were invited to create a new work using one of Tuwhare's poems, and an album and concert were created from those.
It was a pleasant surprise to be asked to pop over to Ravi Shankar's sound check on the afternoon of his concert - I don't think I was really expecting to get a chance to photograph him or the show, but I tailed Festival Director Lissa Twomey over to greet him and spent a bit of time with them as he & his daughter Anoushka got things ready for that night. It was amazing to see him, at the age of 90, settle in and just play. Because he could really PLAY. Amazing - wish I'd been able to come back for the show!
Another three-show day, today; this time, starting in 2004 with a production from my old home town of Toronto! One of the few times English-Canadian theatre has visited New Zealand - in fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another - this was The Overcoat, an entirely wordless work that totally won audiences over, and possibly paved the way for The Sound Of Silence in 2010 now that I think about it. (Having proved a silent show could work, I mean!)
Four shows today - first is Cookin' (Nanta), which apparently is the most popular show in Korea and toured to Broadway just before it came to New Zealand! I remember enjoying it, but also that I had no idea the cook in the fourth photo was going to throw that onion in the air and chop it - much less that it was stuffed with glitter...!
Chamber orchestra Stroma followed up their 2002 concert with Velocities II in the Wellington Town Hall in '04; and this photo from the sound check became one of their main images for most of the next decade, which was nice! They're a great ensemble, wish I could see more of them.
Two shows and a workshop, today - first is Out Of Order, from the Out & About series in 2002. Looking at the photos, I remember the show pretty well - I feel like the performer was French, but of course the phone box was sourced & branded locally so it would look normal. I feel like he didn't speak during the show, but convinced members of the audience to help him at various points - getting up on the box, then passing him his briefcase, that sort of thing - and I think it was the most popular Civic Square show that year. Certainly the crowd on the steps was good, and enjoyed themselves! (Of course, could you do a show about trying to get into a phone booth now? Wouldn't someone just hand him their iPhone, if he needed to make a call!?)
A good selection today! First up is Indian Ocean, a band that appeared in Civic Square as part of the Out & About section of the Festival (which one year was run by a Canadian, to much hilarity in the office) - and second isn't from a show, it's the band Verona from the show Geographical Cure in the 2004 Festival, but at the traditional Government House reception that all artists were welcome to attend. A great bunch of people, and one of my favourite New Zealand bands.
A quick couple of events today - one of our outdoor regional events in 2004, part of a series of Festival Picnics we did in Upper Hutt, Porirua and at Frank Kitts Park in town. (There may have been more I'm not remembering, too!) This one had a series of performances over a few stages, including Pacific drummers, bands, a British comedian, and - as you can see - Korean tightrope walkers & drummers! Nice to see some of the staff from that era out enjoying the sunshine, too - we all spend too much time in dark venues!
It's actually kinda hard to date these images from 2002, because they're on FILM - and unlike those fancy digital cameras, they don't have data in the file to tell me what day & time they were taken! But this was the day I got the film scanned and saw the results, so I think we're close...
Continuing from yesterday's rehearsal photos, here are a few images of Mahinarangi Tocker's 2004 concerts in the Festival Club / Pacific Crystal Palace tent - I went back the following day to photograph the school's performance in the afternoon, then again in the evening to enjoy the show myself. These are a mix of both shows - two from the afternoon, three from the evening - and the second one was cropped, clearcut and used as the cover of her album the following year, The Mongrel In Me.
Once in a while, an image comes along that doesn't fit my usual ideals, but still works, and suits the show. This one - of Irish company Pan Pan's production The Rehearsal, Playing The Dane - was a matter of being ready for the unexpected...