JIMMY ASTON is a young man living in Dunedin who really should know better.

Tempo Festival of Dance 2009
Leigh Sawmill Café; Ascension Vineyard, Matakana
Oct 16-17; 24-25 | Reviewed by Renee Liang

THE RUSTIC timber surrounds of the Leigh Sawmill Café at first seems an unlikely place for a show described as “an opulent and flamboyant avant-garde burlesque cabaret”, but during the efforts involved in getting there something of the intent of the producers starts to dawn. For Birds of Paradise is not so much a show as an experience. It provided an opportunity to escape Auckland on a warm and sunny Friday afternoon (we got away well before the traffic jam started on the Bridge) and laze into a glass of rose at Matakana before claiming a front row table for a preshow dinner at the Sawmill Café.

Auckland Town Hall
October 16 | Reviewed by Samuel Holloway

WHILE evolution may be (to borrow from Richard Dawkins) ‘the greatest show on earth’, the creation-in-seven-days still makes for a damn good story. And Genesis has never seemed more enjoyable that in Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1798), a monumental, joyful piece that draws on the Old Testament and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is one of Haydn’s most admired works, and – in running the gamut from the creation of worms to the creation of planets – contains some of his most memorable musical moments.

“Understand nothing about this ‘town’, where everything is traveling except the pigeons.”—Marcel Duchamp, postcard to Jacques Doucet, Venice, May 23, 1926.*

THOMASIN SLEIGH: Even though it is ambitious in its aspirations, grandiose in its size, and touted as the most important event on the contemporary art calendar, the Venice Biennale is shabby. It runs for five months. Venice is crumbly, and it crumbles over everything. Art works break. Venue attendants don’t know what they are talking about. No one knows what a ‘Collateral Event’ is. All the maps for the Biennale are inexplicably different and impossible to decipher. Visitors get lost and are only found months later, walking in circles in Campo Santo Stefano.

On the eve of Niki Caro’s adaptation of The Vintner’s Luck (in cinemas Novemebr 12), its author, Elizabeth Knox, talks to CHRISTINE LINNELL about conceiving the sequel, The Angel’s Cut.

Auckland Town Hall
October 3 | Reviewed by Samuel Holloway

IN THE 1930s and 40s the United States received a cultural shot in the arm with an influx of artists, writers and composers from war torn Europe. One such émigré was the Hungarian Béla Bartók. In contrast to the experience of others who were fêted upon their arrival, Bartók’s time in America was characterised by frustration and poverty. In spite of this – or, some might romantically argue, because of this – Bartók managed to write one of his best works there, shortly before his death in 1945.

Metronomy front-man Joseph Mount talks making music, sci-movies, and other priorities. Interview by BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.