New Zealand International Arts Festival

New Zealand Festival Welcomes the World in 2014 for 24 spectacular days to Wellington, New Zealand (21 Feb - 16 Mar). The programme includes music, theatre, dance, visual arts, film and a Writers Week. Performers and artists from Ireland, the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Spain, among others. In the performing arts, there's a great dance programme with RIAN by Fabulous Beast from Ireland and La Curva by Israel Galván from Spain. In theatre there's Russian director Dmitry Krymov’s inventive take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company for the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, with 6 metre high puppets and a small dog, performed in Russian. For Writers Week (March 7-12), Wellington welcomes the storytellers: journalists, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, illustrators, historians, critics, poets, translators, biographers and more to share stories about their craft, their lives and the world around us. The idea of ‘change’ as a building-block is the subject of the New Zealand Book Council Lecture for 2014, delivered by the latest Man Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton, from New Zealand. She will be considering how change can reveal itself in fiction - as a change of heart, a change of mind or a change of state. In the visual arts programme, German photographer Jens Uwe Parkitny has travelled extensively through the Chin villages of Myanmar, documenting the last remaining examples of facial tattoos that represent what is seen as a tradition in decline. The tattoos are created using patterns made up of dots, lines and circles ranging from geometric forms to a maze of interwoven patterns. Each individual tattoo is customised to emphasise the natural beauty and features of a face, and represent a part of the rites of passage. These remarkable, evocative photographs along with beautiful hand-woven Chin textiles are being shown for the first time in New Zealand in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. Images: RIAN | © Ros Kavanagh A Midsummer Night's Dream | © Royal Shakespeare Company Blood Faces | © Jens Parkitny

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