The Auckland Arts Festival has returned with a bang, a splash, and a controversy – so business as usual. Sam Brooks reviews four shows from the first week.

The Savage Coloniser Show is, for better or (often) worse, the biggest headline from the first week of the festival. The show, adapted from Tusiata Avia’s Ockham-winning poetry collection, is the follow-up to the internationally acclaimed Wild Dogs Under My Skirt of 2019, inarguably the best show of its year in Auckland. For stupid reasons, The Savage Coloniser Show has become the focus of an illiterate culture war, but the sold-out opening night at Q Theatre couldn’t have felt any further from the controversy.

As expected from FCC theatre company by this point, this is a production of unparalleled excellence. Anapela Polatai’vao remains the best director in the country of this kind of theatrical performance poetry, shepherding a tremendous cast (with a few names you’ll recognise from the screen, like Frankie Adams and Stacey Leilua) to work brilliantly among festival-worthy design from Filament 11 and Elizabeth Whiting. Each of Avia’s poems (plus a few new ones, including a choice one about garages in South Auckland) is presented theatrically; some split up between the entire cast, some shared between two. It can be easy to worry that local work might not stand up to international work – there hasn’t been the same time to hone a show on the touring market, or the same amount of money thrown at it – but The Savage Coloniser Show announces itself as world class from the jump.

The Savage Coloniser Show inevitably exists in conversation with Wild Dogs Under My Skirt – a difficult act to live up to. Having watched both, it’s hard to consider them as separate entities. Not only do they obviously share an author, but they exist as companions to each other; one expressionistic and florid, the other direct and confrontational, with a bit more of a wink to it. Wild Dogs left the audience feeling celebratory, while Savage Coloniser is necessarily confrontational; these are poems that pick at the scars left by colonisation, proving that some of those scars are actually still scabs, yet to fully heal.

Wild Dogs felt aimed at a Samoan audience audience, opening up that conversation, while Savage Coloniser feels to be intentionally provoking a Pākehā audience. I left Wild Dogs wanting to talk about it, I left Savage Coloniser needing to sit with it. It’s not a bad feeling, but it makes the show a little bit less infectious. In saying that, I’ll be glad if, in five or 10 years, a bunch of high schoolers can come across this script, and be able to embody words and concepts that they wouldn’t have had access to previously. 

Revisor, a critically acclaimed show from Canada, comes to New Zealand after rave reviews, and an inevitable Covid-19 postponement. It’s sort of the platonic ideal of an arts festival show: a little bit out there, a lot of spectacle, and a show that you wouldn’t see in any other context in New Zealand.

The show takes inspiration from Gogol’s classic story The Government Inspector, with eight dancers performing to lip-synced dialogue written by English playwright Jonathon Young. The first act of the show is hyper-exaggerated – if the performers were any less assured it would read as terrible pantomime – while the second act of the show reveals that it’s barely The Government Inspector, and more an interrogation of how we engage with story. Does narrative inform movement, or does movement inform narrative? It’s heady stuff, and the show left me more impressed than in love with it, but after a few years off a full-blown arts festival, I’ll take impressed.

Just outside at the Spiegeltent, taking up residence between the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre and Metrolanes, is Blanc de Blanc Encore. It’s the classic Auckland Arts Festival offering, an audience-friendly circus show that runs for the duration of the festival, loosely arranged around a certain theme. In this case, the theme appears to be “extremely attractive half-naked people who want to ply you with champagne”, and you know? Fair enough, it’s been a rough few years, bring it on.

While the show started off a little slow for me at the early gig on Saturday, that’s likely due to design – there’s only a 20 minute turnaround between performances on a two show night. By the time we were back from intermission and the crowd a little more buzzed up, the show fully got into action and the hosts really warmed up, especially Remi Martin with a truly ridiculous Edith Piaf-themed stunt. It feels churlish to critique circus at all – from an audience perspective, once you see a few of these shows you unfortunately start to feel jaded to the spectacular feats of people who are the best in the world at doing those feats – so take my level of whelm with a grain of salt. (Although, the ring act that closes this show has to be one of the best I’ve ever seen, worth the price of admission alone.)

Look, the point of an arts festival show is to move you in some way, be it emotionally or physically. In Blanc de Blanc Encore’s case, that movement is raising a glass of bubbles, and again, it’s hard to be especially mad at it.

The weekend closed out with Tama Waipara’s performance of his new album TE KATOA, once again in the Spiegeltent. While the first three shows covered here aimed to impress and overwhelm, it was just nice to finish out the weekend with one of New Zealand’s finest musicians returning to the stage with his first new material in a decade, visibly nervous and even more visibly stoked to be performing in front of people again.

The new music is good, and I’m particularly taken with ‘Sunrise’ and a fun as hell non-album track that I sorely hope makes it onto some streaming service for me to playlist ahead of next summer (a very slight hint). Even better, though, was Waipara’s ease with his band, his banter in between songs, and his willingness to shrug off his own performance. When you’re as good as Waipara is, playing to a crowd that so clearly just wants to see him in his element, you can afford to hit the right notes, rather than the correct ones.

It’s this experience that I’ll think of the most fondly from the weekend. When Waipara brings up the vitality of the arts to the country, and how important it is to support artists, it’s a note that stirs, against a couple of months of funding struggles and budget cuts. Without investment, we don’t get artists like Waipara, shows like The Savage Coloniser Show being made here, and an experience like Revisor. The world’s worse off without those shows.

On Sunday night, the world was a little better, because a couple hundred people got to see Tama Waipara sing ‘East Coast Moon’, the best three-and-a-bit minutes of my weekend. That’s worth investing in.

Coming up this week: Skyduck, a bilingual Chinese spy comedy, Sandsong, the new show from one of the world’s most respected First Nations dance companies, Emil and the Detectives, an adaptation of the Erich Kastner book by Australian playwright Nicki Bloom, He Huia Kaimanawa, a visceral exploration of learning te reo as a second language told through AV and dance, and of course, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I’ve reviewed here.

The Auckland Arts Festival runs until March 26. You can view the entire programme here.