arts and culture

A Dynamic Optimism

September 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Peter Shand

Gordon Walters: New vision edited by Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons and Julia Waite (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki & Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2017), 244 pp., $79

The title of Gordon Walters: New vision presents its own wero. Building from Walters’ innovating position within New Zealand art, the title points to the writers’ collective aim of presenting new ways of engaging with and thinking about his work. Hence their challenge to realise novel propositions for geometric abstraction, for ambitious local art practices, for cross-cultural appropriation and/or for histories of modernism. This is in the context of an artist who enjoys a sound if moderate bibliography, with notable contributions from Michael Dunn and, in particular, the late Francis Pound. This handsome addition to that record accompanies a touring retrospective exhibition curated by three of the book’s essayists: Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons and Julia Waite. [Read more…]

Performing Otherwise

September 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Emma Willis

Performing Dramaturgy by Fiona Graham (Playmarket Press, 2018), 189 pp., $40

If you have picked up a programme for a new play, devised or dance-theatre work, you may have seen the job title ‘dramaturge’ listed in the production credits. But what is a dramaturge? Even for those within the theatre industry, the concept is shrouded in a degree of mystery. It’s a seemingly shape-shifting position that changes according to any given group of people and process. Fiona Graham’s Performing Dramaturgy examines the role of the dramaturge in depth, its origins and many variations within the contemporary context, and analyses it precisely as a dynamic and ‘nomadic’ process. Drawing on her extensive professional experience, Graham weaves together an elegant text that moves between theatre history, theorisation, personal reflection and practical advice in order to answer the question of what a dramaturge does – or might do. As she notes, her aim is to ‘offer insights that will open up all sorts of new creative opportunities for practitioners by unsettling conventional ways of seeing and doing’. [Read more…]

Bridgehead and Beacon

August 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Simon Cunliffe

Dawn Raids by Oscar Kightley (Playmarket, Victoria University Press, 2017), 103 pp., $18

Twenty years on from its premiere in 1997, and more than 40 from the events it depicts, Oscar Kightley’s seminal play, Dawn Raids, continues to resonate – and perhaps for more than the obvious reasons.

The raids, a shameful episode in this country’s history, were initiated under the Labour government of Norman Kirk from about 1973 and carried out with renewed zeal by the National government of Robert Muldoon from 1975. They were aimed at finding and repatriating Pacific Islanders who had overstayed their work permit visas. The searches were typically executed in the early hours of the morning and were carried out by immigration officials and squads of police with dogs. Pasifika people were woken from their beds, randomly stopped in the street or singled out at their work places, and asked to show proof of identity and immigration status. Those failing to produce the requisite paperwork were deemed to be ‘overstayers’ and summarily deported. [Read more…]

Forgotten Giants

May 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Norman Franke

Poetry and Exile: Letters from New Zealand 1938–1948 by Karl Wolfskehl, edited and translated by Nelson Wattie (Cold Hub Press, 2017), 464 pp., $45

Now virtually unknown in New Zealand, the German-Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869–1948) made a great personal impression on the first generation of postcolonial writers. Frank Sargeson, writing about his first encounter with the physical and intellectual giant in an Auckland cinema, said:

I was astonished by the slow entry of a giant figure who, accompanied by a small and slight woman, made his way to the front row of seats … Karl Wolfskehl could immediately be recognised as a figure from a previous century: dark clothes, cravat or great bow, a crop of hair, artist’s wide-brimmed hat, immense: poet scholar patrician-bred Jew. [Read more…]

The Tragic Sense of Life

August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Denys Trussell

Notes from the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper by Pat White (Frontiers Press,

2017), 202 pp., $40

Peter Hooper (1919–1991) spent most his life in Westland, but travelled far by means of literature. His adult life was lived alone, but he was not a loner. He embedded himself (with reservations) in the community of the Greymouth district and had a professional life as a conscientious and imaginative secondary teacher. In this role he mentored many students, nudging them in the direction of literature and ideas. One of these was Pat White, the author of this portrait.

White has done us a favour by placing Hooper before us. Despite having lived (almost literally) to one side of the main literary developments here, Hooper was and still is of interest and relevance. To the generations born after 1945 he might seem a bit prim, even conservative in personal style, and definitely not up with the game of postmodern critical theory. As a writer he was in the main a Modernist with Romantic antecedents, and he was happy to acknowledge the prophetic American, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), as the most powerful influence on him philosophically. [Read more…]