Reshuffling through the year that was, SIMON SWEETMAN and BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM playlist their ten best albums of 2006 – and remind us what didn’t make the cut.

MARK AMERY responds to the tears of Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘Crying Men’ series, currently showing at City Gallery Wellington as part of larger survey of the UK artist’s portraiture and self-portraiture.

A survey by one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists, Sam Taylor-Wood is a poetic and challenging exhibition featuring ‘Crying Men’ (2002-2004), twenty-seven photographs of leading male actors in a state of intense emotional vulnerability, including Willem Dafoe, Laurence Fishburne, Paul Newman, Sam Shepherd, Jude Law, and Forest Whitaker. Courtesy of City Gallery Wellington, The Lumière Reader has three double passes to Sam Taylor Wood to giveaway. To enter, simply subscribe to our mailing list by emailing your name and address to lumiere@lumiere.net.nz under the subject heading "SUBSCRIBE + STW". Current subscribers can also enter. New Zealand/Wellington residents only. One entry per person. Entries close January 7, 2006. Standard terms and conditions apply.

Read Mark Amery’s perspective on the exhibition...[here]

By Leo Timmers/Jutta Bauer
Miranda Harcourt & Stuart McKenzie
Gecko Press/South Coast Press
$17/$14/$20 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson

TRANSLATED from the Flemish by Bill Nagelkerke, Who’s Driving provides an interactive reading experience for the very young. Each page presents a new vehicle, and the reader (or listener) is asked to guess which animal might be driving it. Plain backgrounds allow the detail of the animals and their transport to stand out, and the illustrations are colourful and lively. The answers – based on clothing, such as a safari suit for the jeep-driving hippopotamus, or a fireman’s uniform for the elephant in the fire engine – are usually logical enough, although my boyfriend (aged 29) disputed the choice of the pig as the tractor driver. He pronounced the book to be ‘great’, however, and its repetition and the capacity for audience participation will be popular with toddlers... as well as the occasional older reader.

Enjoy Public Art Gallery’s latest group show, Every Now, and Then, curates a gathering of performance artists to examine “the nature of contemporary relational practices, audience participation and collaboration.” MARK AMERY reports.

Following 2005’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Banana Conference, this year’s Going Bananas: Multiple Identities Forum set out to offer a more in-depth look at Chinese identities in the New Zealand environment, the complexity of these identities, sense of belonging and a burgeoning cultural-creative voice. Chinese-Malaysian Kiwi EVELYN KIING was in attendance.

Circa Theatre
Nov 18-Dec 23, Jan 3-Feb 3 | Reviewed by Justin Gregory

YEP, it’s a pantomime, alright – with plenty of in-jokes, bad puns and mild sexual innuendo, and if that’s not what you want, then don’t go. Because Aladdin is all-singing, all dancing, sweetness and light panto.

Playwright Roger Hall lays the traditional Far-Eastern fable as a Wellington tale. In Old Araby – you know, the one at the top of Cuba Street – Aladdin and his mum Widow Twankey spend their days washing other people’s laundry, dodging the Bucket Fountain and dreaming about true love. Aladdin loves the Sultan’s daughter Jasmine, but his chances of marrying her on his wages are pretty thin. He needs money and fast. Enter arch-baddy Abanazar with a proposition. You know the story from there.

Herald Theatre
Nov 30-Dec 10 | Reviewed by Imogen Neale

SHE WALKS on to the stage, a cumbersomely packed plastic bag in each hand. Shuffling towards the stage, her stilted movements are befitting of someone with at least forty years on her twenty-something. She plonks herself down and reaches into one of the plastic bags; out comes a packet of hamburger buns, a sponger cake (un-iced) and tomato sauce. Off comes the stiff plastic casing from the sponge cake; she takes a bite, the sugar triggering a compulsion to talk. Talk about nothing, everything, something, why it is that she is sitting here talking and eating and eating.

As if WOMAD wasn’t enough, the Naki also plays host to Parihaka in early 2007. Alexander Bisley’s picks include Che Fu and Katchafire; SIMON SWEETMAN says Dave Dobbyn and Paul Ubana Jones. His thoughts on Dobbyn and Ubana Jones, from recent(ish) reviews, run below.

Wellington Town Hall
November 22 | Reviewed by Mark Dryburgh

THE VIOLINIST Julian Rachlin is a great violinist playing a great violin. His violin (on loan) was the favourite of Nicolo Paganini and worth millions of dollars. With such a violin you could expect a cautious approach but Rachlin played with unbridled passion.