Culture 101

Hastings Art Gallery launched a free art bus for schools last November, providing transport for students from Hastings, Napier and Central Hawke's Bay to visit the gallery, with priority given to high-equity and rural schools and those affected by Cyclone Gabrielle. Hundreds of students have already visited. The Gallery's audience and Learning Manager Elham Salari joins Culture 101 to talk about what happens when transport stops being a barrier.

Rose Matafeo came home from London to star in New Zealand Spy, a new local comedy set in the 70s about the country's intelligence agency recruiting the only three people who applied to protect the nation from the threat of Australia. Written by Paul Williams, the show also stars Bret McKenzie, Joe Thomas and Tim Key, and is streaming on TVNZ+ now. Matafeo, who won Best Show at the Edinburgh Fringe for Horndog and wrote and starred in three seasons of BBC series Starstruck, joins Culture 101 to talk about the show and what it means to be recognised at home.

Artist and book cover designer Todd Atticus is parked up in the window of Unity Books in Wellington this week, designing cover artwork for Mia Farlane's new novel And How Are Things With You in real time, turning his practice into a performance. Atticus has designed covers for Catherine Chidgey, Duncan Sarkies and Tusiata Avia. He joins Culture 101 live from the shop window.

Lisa Reihana has spent more than three decades using film, photography and installation to centre Maori and Pacific perspectives in history. She represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and her work sits in collections from Te Papa to the Brooklyn Museum. Right now her installation ANZAC, eight metres high and twenty metres long and made from 180,000 shimmering discs, runs along the Auckland waterfront as part of the Aotearoa Art Fair Sculpture Trail. She joins Culture 101 live to discuss the work, her shimmer-disc technique and thirty years of using the computer as her carving tool.

Laura Jean Shannon is a superhero speciality costume designer whose credits include Iron Man, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Murderbot. For the past seven years she's been working on The Boys, the Amazon Prime series about a group of corrupt celebrity supervillains led by Kiwi actor Antony Starr, with the fifth and final season now streaming. Shannon is in Auckland this weekend for Armageddon Expo and joins Culture 101 to talk about what it takes to dress a superhero.

Taumarunui-based artist Tyrone Te Waa's latest work draws on the mattress room of the wharenui at his marae, a space associated with play, sleep and hosting visitors. The resulting exhibition, Dreaming from Afar, features stretched cotton across four single mattresses, painted and incorporating sculpture, and is showing at Gus Fisher Gallery in central Auckland until May 2. Te Waa, who received an Arts Foundation Springboard Award in 2022, joins Culture 101 to talk about his creative whanau, marae life and the links between the work and his nan.

Silo Theatre's new production of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge features a mainly Pasifika cast and is playing at Q Theatre in Auckland until May 3. Miller's 1956 play follows a Brooklyn dockworker whose obsession and jealousy unravel his family and ultimately destroy him. Beulah Koale, who plays lead Eddie Carbone, joins Culture 101 to discuss honouring the text without making it Samoan, the comedic roles he wants to explore, and the moment he landed his first US film and realised he could charge anything to the room.

The Global Book Crawl runs until next Sunday, connecting independent bookstores across 73 cities worldwide through a shared passport readers get stamped at each store they visit. Canterbury is joining for the first time this year, with ten stores taking part from Kaiapoi to Timaru. Jared Raines from The Great Kiwi Bookstore in Kaiapoi, and Canterbury spokesperson for the crawl, joins Culture 101 to explain how it works and why indie bookshops are worth the trip.

& Juliet is a jukebox musical built around the back catalogue of Swedish songwriter Max Martin, the most successful chart producer in Billboard Hot 100 history. A Broadway and West End hit with three Olivier Awards and nine Tony nominations, the show reimagines what happens if Juliet decides she's done with Romeo and writes her own story. It opened in Auckland this week and runs at the Civic until May 3, before heading to Wellington and Christchurch. Director Hamish Mouat joins Culture 101 alongside audience reactions and a word from cast members Matu Ngaropo and Lavina Williams.

It's Music Therapy Week, and Chris O'Connor is a registered music therapist at the Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre in Auckland whose career has taken him from jazz studies and ethnomusicology to touring the world with Don McGlashan, Neil Finn and The Phoenix Foundation. He joins Culture 101 to talk about how music functions as therapy and what drew him to the field.

Dr Sue Watson has written publicly about her adoption journey, and now she is taking that story to the stage. Working with writer and director Renee Lyon, Watson is currently in rehearsal for a theatrical adaptation of her memoir, in which she will also act. She joins Culture 101 to discuss the process of turning personal history into performance, the lines that come easily and the ones that take longer to settle, and what it means to revisit connecting with her birth mother and the mystery of her birth father.

British actress Natascha McElhone has worked alongside Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey and George Clooney, and spent seven seasons on Californication opposite David Duchovny. Her latest role is Cordelia Holmes, mother to a young Sherlock, in Amazon Prime's new series Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Hero Fiennes Tiffin. She joins Culture 101 to discuss the show, her Kiwi connections and a cat named Chekhov.