Three shows today - well, actually, four really! From 2004 we've got both Gilberto Gil at the Events Centre, and a late-night set at the Festival Club (but I'm not sure who the band was that night, I was flying past on my way to the car ten years ago!).
Read MoreTwo shows from the same year (and the same day), today - plus a bonus photo of lovely Vi Blackburn, who has been ushering and selling programmes around Wellington for as long as anyone can remember. This is possibly the first photo I got of her in action, but I always tried to track her down at some point during each Festival.
Read MoreBelgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's work had been to New Zealand before, with works like Iets Op Bach and Foi appearing at the Festival previously, but I think Sutra was the first to appear under his own name rather than as part of Les Ballets C de la B. (Happy to be proven wrong of course, but that's how I remember it!)
Read MoreA few different events today - a glimpse of the huge outdoor exhibition that opened Waitangi Park in 2006, Yann-Arthus Bertrand's photo series The Earth From Above, which I'd guess might be the Festival's biggest free event ever? Certainly the biggest I saw, in my time! It always seemed to be packed, and it was quite a large area - almost a shame it didn't become a permanent exhibition there.
Read MoreAs I mentioned yesterday, Kneehigh Theatre are one of my Festival favourites - and a company I'm always happy to see when I get a chance in other cities, too. From Tristan & Yseault to Brief Encounter and The Wild Bride, every show I've seen has a wonderful warmth to it - so it was great to have them back in Wellington in 2012, their second visit from their home in Cornwall.
Read MoreI should probably point out that, in doing these 'history' blogs, I'm obviously skipping over huge swaths of material. Given that each of the five Festivals I photographed represents some 30,000 images (yes, EACH) it's hard to go back through and pick, say, 20 to represent a day in the life. So, sometimes I'm picking a show I liked, or one that photographed particularly well; or just one where I think the images weren't seen by many people at the time, for whatever reason.
Read MoreWell, now that the Festival is rolling, it would usually be a tightly scheduled 24-day marathon for me, jumping from rehearsal to rehearsal to opening night function to post-show function, with the possibility of seeing something in between those two - and from looking back over the years, there were certainly a number of days like that!
Read MoreEven after the Dawn Ceremony is over, the preparations continue! The pressure is certainly on in the final week leading up to the shows starting, but sometimes the opening nights are staggered so as not to conflict with each other too much - so today, we have a few more preparation images before the shows kick off in full. Enjoy!
Read MoreI'm cheating slightly on this post - these didn't all happen on Feb 21 each year (which is tomorrow anyway, of course!), but the Dawn Ceremony / Powhiri to welcome the visiting artists is such an integral part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival that it only makes sense to see images from them together in one place, really.
Read MoreContinuing on from my previous post - here you can see the progress over a week of rehearsals for The Lindbergh Flight / The Flight Over The Ocean, the opera at the New Zealand Festival in 2008. As I mentioned then, the first image image here is a surprising match for one I took a week before, when we were in the rehearsal hall!
Read MoreI always have one big folder of images on my hard drive during the Festival that's just labelled "Festival Setup"; it's the catch-all for photos of people building stuff, wiring things, whipping the whole thing into shape. And it's important, because years later when there's a new crew working on the Festival, it can be that the images are the only record we have of how a certain temporary venue was situated on the site, where the power came from, or how a stage went into Shed 6, and so on. It's also often part of the early publicity for the Festival - giving people the sense that something is happening, in the weeks before shows actually start to happen on stages, building the anticipation. At least, I like to think so!
Read MoreWith the New Zealand International Arts Festival coming up soon (from Feb 21 - Mar 16 this year), and as this is the first one I'll miss since I started working with them in 1998, I thought I'd have my own festival of photos, from the time I spent as their sole photographer from 2004 to 2012. I'm going to have a look through my archives, and pull out a few - but not TOO many - images that might not have been seen at the time, but that I like looking back at now.
Read More
