Brad Cox Postpones June New Zealand Tour To November
While the Wellington show unfortunately won't be going ahead this time, Christchurch and Auckland tickets will remain valid for the new November dates. Refunds for Wellington tickets are available through the original points of sale, and Brad sincerely thanks all his Wellington fans for their support and understanding.
Brad Cox shares:
"Hey everyone, Coxy here. Unfortunately, I've had to postpone my NZ dates to November for unforeseen circumstances, but the good news is we have added some new shows in the South Island. Unfortunately, we cannot make the Wellington date work now. Christchurch and Auckland tickets will be valid for the new dates, and I really look forward to partying with you in November. A full refund will be available from your points of sale if required. As this tour poster states, I 'really do love NZ,' and as unfortunate as it is to have to postpone, it actually means I'll be able to spend a bunch more time in your beautiful country with your beautiful people.'
The rescheduled New Zealand tour supports Brad's fourth studio album, Endemic Intelligence In Multiple Dimensions, out Friday, September 26. The 15-track album promises a bold new chapter in Cox's artistic evolution - unfiltered, emotionally raw, and sonically adventurous.
BRAD COX - NEW ZEALAND TOUR DATES (with Piper Butcher):
Wed 12 Nov – Double Whammy, Auckland
Thu 13 Jun – James Hay Theatre, Christchurch
Fri 14 Nov - Errik's, Dunedin
Sat 15 Nov - Croydon Lodge, Gore
Sun 16 Nov - Barmuda, Queenstown (Acoustic)
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NZ Herald
4 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Toi Tū Toi Ora reframed: Doco reveals Auckland Art Gallery politics of landmark Māori exhibition
The artists are all here tonight. The always-too-small foyer of SkyCity Theatre is bursting with a sold-out crowd for the premiere of Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty, Chelsea Winstanley's documentary about what happened five years ago and a kilometre away at Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. There had been a crowd back in 2020, too, with many of the same people in it, for the opening of Toi Tū Toi Ora, which was not only the largest show in the gallery's history, but also the largest exhibition of contemporary Māori art there had ever been. Yet, amid the celebration, there was a whisper that something had gone wrong, that even as Toi Tū opened its doors, its curator, Nigel Borell, had resigned. A cover story in the NZ Herald's Canvas magazine a few weeks later finally told the public what the artists knew – that Borell and the gallery's director, Kirsten Lacy, had fallen out over what he described as 'different ways of viewing aspirations for Māori'. Winstanley had been on the inside of it all, filming what she had imagined would be a celebratory film that would accompany Toi Tū as it toured internationally. The show never toured, and she wound up with a different story to tell. Curator Nigel Borell: 'You have a moment to make some change.' Photo / Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki This is an audience that knows the story. It's also an extraordinarily engaged crowd. The next 100 minutes are dotted with swirls of applause, knowing laughter and even cheers as one artist or another comes up in the tale. What had originally seemed like an obstacle to the production – the pandemic – turned out to be something of a gift. The lockdown Zoom meetings with Borell, the gallery's longstanding artists' advisory board Haerewa, and Lacy and the gallery's senior management, all tiled across the screen, are rich documents in retrospect. There are murmurs and an audible gasp when Lacy, an Australian appointed to run the gallery in 2019, just as Borell's five-year dream for the exhibition was becoming a reality, is shown announcing her intention to go off on her own to conduct 'informal meet and greets' with iwi about how they would like to engage with the exhibition – effectively over the heads of Borell and Haerewa. Borell, sitting at home on Zoom, simply gets up and leaves the frame, to laughter from the audience. 'She's got to go with someone,' says painter and Haerewa's chair and founding member Elizabeth Ellis at a follow-up hui without Lacy. 'She's going to be discussing Māori stuff. We can't send her off, this young Australian woman, to carry our message.' Ellis and five other Haerewa members would eventually follow Borell in resigning. The film turns on an understanding of mana – translated on screen as 'authority to lead' – that will be familiar to many New Zealanders, but was not evident to Lacy. The gallery director arrived with an admirable record of working with indigenous artists in Australia but, it seems, an incomplete sense of the moment she was entering here. 'You have a moment to make some change,' says Borell at one point in the film. 'And if you don't use it in that way, then you're just taking up space.' Winstanley has gone out of her way not to be inflammatory, to the extent that some viewers could even wonder what all the fuss was about. She's after a teachable moment rather than a pile-on. Former Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki director Kirsten Lacy. Photo / Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 'I don't think she's a villain,' Winstanley says of Lacy the following morning. 'I think she is someone who … She's not Māori, she doesn't have the experience of having lived in this country, she doesn't understand or know that, and I think that's what comes across. And there's an opportunity, I think, for people in these positions. You can do what the beautiful Dr Maya Angelou says: 'Do the best you can until you know better – and when you know better, do better.'' Winstanley's original, more celebratory film survives through the twists of the story. We're taken straight from a troubled Zoom meeting to Reuben Paterson working out the lighting for Guide Kaiārahi, the crystalline waka taua that was Toi Tū Toi Ora's most prominent commissioned work, by virtue of its position at the gallery entrance. As commissions from Shane Cotton and Mataaho Collective take shape, we get a glimpse of the artists as purposeful engineers. The film, also commissioned by the gallery, provides an enriching context for the exhibition that will make viewers wish for a chance to see the art again with it all in mind. Indeed, that was the role it would have played had the exhibition toured as planned. Those plans were let go after Borell's departure – but the artists travelled even if the show did not. Eight New Zealand artists were invited to present at the Venice Biennale last year; all were Māori and all had been part of Toi Tū Toi Ora. An investment from the barrister Kahungunu Barron-Afeaki allowed Winstanley to fly there to capture the event, where Mataaho Collective claimed the Biennale's Golden Lion prize. Mataaho Collective won the Golden Lion award at the 60th Venice Biennale for their installation Takapau. Photo / Creative NZ Although Toi Tū Toi Ora had made its case by breaking gallery attendance records – at least since the return of the landmark Te Māori exhibition from New York in 1987, to which it is consciously connected in the film – following the story to Venice meant, says Winstanley, that 'we were able to truly celebrate what having that kind of sovereignty meant and that's what I'd envisioned in the beginning. Because if the whole point of Toi Tū Toi Ora was to enable our art to live and thrive through a Māori lens, it didn't feel like it was able to do that fully, opening the way it did and with what happened.' Lacy, who resigned in April and left in June, saw a rough cut of the film before she departed. By that time, she had received the recommendations of an independent review of the gallery's relationship with Māori and appointed Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei chief executive Tom Irvine as her deputy director. The move had the effect of further stirring debate about Lacy's personal cultivation of mana whenua at the expense of the mana of Haerewa. Ngāti Whātua seems like a missing voice in the film. Irvine is currently acting director. Whoever is permanently appointed to the role will find plenty to think about and much to respond to in Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty. A day after the premiere, the friends I went with were still exchanging messages about what it meant. Perhaps that's what teachable moments are meant to do. After selling out its screenings at the Auckland leg of the NZ International Film Festival, Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty has screenings in Wellington (Aug 17, 23), Dunedin (Aug 24) and Christchurch (Aug 17, 21), see for more. Plans are underway for screenings beyond the festival. To request a screening go to Director Chelsea Winstanley: 'I'm not putting words in people's mouths.' Photo / Supplied Things Fall Apart Chelsea Winstanley on filming in a crisis. For film-maker Chelsea Winstanley, Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty represents her most serious film in years. Her recent producer duties have been on former husband Taika Waititi's Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit and before that What We Do in the Shadows and giving Disney's animated hits te reo makeovers. But TT:VS is also her debut feature as a director. Her career began with directing Whakangahau, a documentary short about cousins from her Paparoa marae running a tourism venture. It was her 2003 graduating film from the Auckland University of Technology and won a Media Peace Award. Her feature directing debut also focuses on another relation with Ngāti Ranginui iwi roots – Nigel Borell. Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty started out of conversations she had with Borell in the years running up to the exhibition about what it took to stage an event of its size and ambition. When you spoke at the premiere, you seemed quite nervous about how the film would be received. For a few reasons, I suppose. This is my directorial debut – I've done enough producing in my life – and you're putting your film out into the world, it's all on you this time. But not only that, it's the community that I love the most. You love them so dearly that you just want to do right by them. Was there a distinct point where you knew that the story was going to be different from what you had thought it would be? Obviously, when Nigel had to make that decision, it really did change then. I was going to follow the whole exhibition and the background to it, because I don't think we ever really understand what goes into putting on something like that. I thought it was going to travel overseas, because that's what I was told. I was like, 'Wow, this is going to be amazing, a celebration from beginning to end.' And then when he made that decision, for himself, I had to go, 'Oh, all right, I have to now rethink how it's going to happen.' Other things were happening, too – everyone went through Covid. Even at that point, I was like, 'Oh, my god, is this show even going to come to fruition?' That was actually a moment, too. A small selection of the art shown as part of Toi Tū Toi Ora (clockwise, from left): Lisa Reihana, Ihi, 2020; Israel Tangaroa Birch Ara-i-te-Uru, 2011; Aimee Ratana, Potiki Series, 2005; and Shane Cotton, Te Puawai, 2020. Photos / Supplied What was the response after the screening for Kirsten Lacy and the gallery staff? Was there a response? It's challenging for anybody to have to observe themselves. But remember, when they watched that edit, it's not like it was a big surprise what happened there, the story was already out. It's about how you have to reflect on your position, so that was up to them. And they knew that I had final cut anyway, and I'm not putting words in people's mouths or anything like that. While I watched the film, I did find myself thinking I'd like to go and see the exhibition again, having absorbed all this context. Yeah, of course, and that's the wonderful thing for people who were fortunate enough to see the show. A lot of people said to me afterwards that it brought back so many memories, both people who were working there and those who had gone to the show and wanted to see it again. And I think, for us as a country, we need to have spaces where we can just see that beautiful, contemporary art all the time, not just these once in 20-year timeframes.
Otago Daily Times
7 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
The solace of strangers
Relationships and healing were central for the director and star of a new film, they tell Weekend Mix film reviewer Amasio Jutel. New Zealand-Australian director Samuel Van Grinsven transforms the familiar nursery rhyme Jack and Jill into a haunting ghost story in his New Zealand International Film Festival entry Went Up the Hill . Starring Stranger Things ' Dacre Montgomery and Phantom Thread 's Vicky Krieps in the Australian heartthrob's most personal role to date, this slow-burning, genre-bending tale explores the aftermath of loss and the eerie ways grief can possess us. Set against the glowing winter scenery of Canterbury, Van Grinsven's Gothic quasi-adaptation unfolds as a tonally sombre, narratively fantastical chamber piece between two strangers who share a ghost. Jack (Montgomery), an estranged son, and Jill (Krieps), a grieving widow, meet for the first time at the funeral of Elizabeth, the woman they both thought they knew. But as they inhabit the cold, creaky house Elizabeth left behind, secrets unravel and something else begins to inhabit them both. The two powerhouse performances at the film's centre compellingly anchor Van Grinsven's vision. Compositionally, he has a masterful grasp of tone, powerfully announcing his entry into the canon of New Zealand's cinema of unease. This dream-turned-nightmare supernatural tale is more Bergman than Blumhouse - less a conventional horror and more a psychological supernatural drama infused with the gothic sensibilities of nursery rhymes. For Van Grinsven, there is something haunting about nursery rhymes. "There's something about nursery rhymes that are both caring and cautionary. They're connected to the maternal, passed down from generation to generation and reinterpreted. That felt very connected to the idea of generational trauma, and how that is passed down, willingly or not, from parent to child. That, in itself, felt haunting," he says. If Jack broke his crown, perhaps it wasn't a fall that did it. Maybe Jill did come tumbling down, just not in the way we were taught. The film was shot on location at Canterbury's Flock Hill estate, nestled beside Lake Pearson; there couldn't be a more fitting environment in which to set this ethereal tale. The snow-blanketed Southern Alps loom over the estranged pair, isolated by their grief. Stretching into silence, the wintered highlands dampen any connection to the outside world - a cold and indifferent land, up the hill. Van Grinsven shoots the mountains, the snow and the shadows with precision, capturing the eerie locale as it lives in his mind. "I wanted to capture New Zealand as I remembered it," Van Grinsven says, "as a child driving up and down with a sense of wide-eyed wonderment and being dwarfed by the landscape." The painterly, desaturated aesthetic - whites, greys, browns, and blacks - pushes the visual language towards the Gothic. Van Grinsven and director of photography Tyson Perkins use light, shadow, reflection, and bisecting lines to mirror the characters' fractured identities and emotional states. Claustrophobic framing ensnares the viewer in Van Grinsven's trap, a compositional control he holds with a firm grip. "The antagonist of the film is not on screen in a way that audiences are used to," Van Grinsven explains. "I had to bring her to life with every other tool in my toolkit, whether that's the control of the camera or an extremely severe control over colour palette." Composer Hanan Townshend wrote the score before filming even began, helping shape the film's emotional tone. Lullaby-like, wordless vocalisations amplify the childlike longing Van Grinsven saw in the nursery rhyme. "That lulling effect that a nursery rhyme has on you in real life is what I wanted to capture," he explains. "That you almost feel hypnotised by it." The resulting tone is sombre and dreamlike, finely tuned, precise, and eerie. The tonal unease - somewhere between horror, fantasy, and drama - was achieved by layering genres. Van Grinsven drew inspiration from Persona -era Ingmar Bergman. He describes it as "the strange tension point when you put two genres together that aren't meant to go together, or don't conventionally go together". The cold and creaky house at the centre of his film, perched like a secret among the hills, was in the world of the film designed by the recently deceased Elizabeth. Young star Montgomery calls it "the third character". "Every single element and layer of the onion that is this beautiful film is influenced by Flock Hill estate. We were living on one side of the house and performing on the other side. It was intrinsically in our bones and our DNA by the end of the film. You couldn't escape it. It's everything," Montgomery says. "It's the archetype of the haunted house, but in a purely naturalistic way, connected to the landscape in New Zealand. She built in this location for a reason," Van Grinsven adds. It shapes the film's oppressive mood and echoes the characters' emotional imprisonment, eloquently portrayed by Montgomery and Krieps. "We were all Shelly Duvall in The Shining at one point," Montgomery jokes. Jack is fragile, consumed by a longing for maternal connection; Jill's identity, like Jack's, is deeply entangled with Elizabeth. He is searching for a mother he never had; she is mourning a partner she never truly knew. Together, they engage in this poetic "psychic ballet" - to coin Van Grinsven - creating Elizabeth in each other's bodies: Jack as Jill's wife, Jill as Jack's mother. In doing so, they search for what they believe is closure, but it's what ultimately keeps them trapped in grief. "There's always this unearned intimacy between the two of them; this unease where they are for a portion of the film, using each other as a means to an end, but gradually grow to care about each other," Van Grinsven says. "There was something quite beautiful about the way Vicky and Dacre kept up the energy - that palpable kind of tension that only comes from two strangers." Taking a leaf out of Phantom Thread co-star Daniel Day-Lewis' book, Krieps never socialised with Montgomery off-set. "We have the most intense chemistry of anyone I've ever worked with, but we never spoke to each other," Montgomery says. "I feel like I had this weird old soul bond with Vicky that we didn't need to get into." As much as this ghost story wasn't a horror film, it was certainly an exorcism for Montgomery, who describes his time on the film as a deeply personal journey of self-reckoning. "From the year of rehearsal we did and the further year and a-half it took me to let go of the character before we premiered at Toronto, I didn't do anything except live Went Up the Hill for two and a-half years of my life." The role demanded more than just performance. Montgomery stripped away his own defences to inhabit not just Jack's grief, but his own. "Using art to try to heal oneself is incredibly revealing. You become very self-conscious of your performance, your being, how your body looks, and how you feel. That was a challenge I overcame in this film: letting go of that and allowing myself to be a child and to be vulnerable as Dacre. I felt I was able to overcome that in some parts, and in others, it was truly a wall I couldn't break through. "Jack may be the only character I ever play that is truly almost, in so many ways, me." Went Up the Hill casts complex queer characters in a story archetype that traditionally invites conventional narrative expectations, a fact that informs the subtle power dynamics and emotional distance between its leads. "I was excited by the core relationship in the film being a queer woman and a queer man," Van Grinsven says. "If they were both to be heterosexual, the baggage that an audience brings to a film about possession and ghostliness would be that they're going to form a romantic connection. By queering that expectation, it opens audiences up to a more honest and raw exploration of what the film's dealing with." The film also continues themes Van Grinsven explored in his debut, Sequin in a Blue Room . "It was exciting for me, being able to grapple with things that I see in real relationships around me, real queer relationships around me, and bring that to the screen in a way they're not often represented. "I think queer cinema is changing so much. I think for the first time, we're seeing queer cinema being approached as commercially viable. There's a real appetite coming from audiences, which is fantastic." • Went Up the Hill screens as part of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival at Rialto, Thursday, August 21, 6pm.
NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Former Wiggles CEO Luke O'Neill sues popular kids' group in Australian Federal Court
Award-winning Australian children's music sensation The Wiggles face a lawsuit from their former CEO. Photo / Getty Images Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Award-winning Australian children's music sensation The Wiggles face a lawsuit from their former CEO. Photo / Getty Images The former chief executive of The Wiggles – who left after just over a year into his role – has lodged proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia against the popular children's entertainment group. Luke O'Neill was named the music sensation's first CEO last year, according to aNb Media, with his role focusing on 'expanding The Wiggles' digital footprint, developing new products and expanding the commercial operations of the business'. O'Neill had worked as a consultant with The Wiggles since mid-2023 before stepping into the new role. His LinkedIn profile states he finished the role in August 2024. In a Federal Court application filed this week, O'Neil has lodged proceedings under the Fair Work Act against The Wiggles, the group's leader, Anthony Field, and its general counsel, Matthew Salgo.
