Cate Blanchett to direct Arts Festival play (+video)

Reuters

STAR POWER: Cate Blanchett is one of two big names heading to the New Zealand International Arts Festival in February and March next year.

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The complete lineup for Wellington's three-week, $12.5 million festival in February and March was unveiled last night.

Blanchett, whose new film Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens this month, will be in Wellington to direct the play Blackbird. She has directed plays, including A Kind of Alaska, for Sydney Theatre Company, but Blackbird will be her first as the company's artistic director with her husband, playwright Andrew Upton.

Blanchett's appointment has upset some in Australian theatre, including actor Colin Moody, who quit Sydney Theatre Company this month, saying "an Oscar for acting is not a suitable recommendation to run the biggest theatre company in the country".

Trudeau, who rarely makes public appearances, will be a guest at the festival's Writers and Readers Week, with top British author Ian McEwan - the hit film Atonement is based on his novel - and Gourmet magazine editor and chef Ruth Reichl.

Other big names include American jazz legend Ornette Coleman, 77, considered the most innovative jazz musician since Louis Armstrong.

Popular television cartoon show Bro'Town is also coming as a live stage show, featuring its cast and creators.

The festival, from February 22 till March 16, will involve more than 800 artists from 29 countries. It is the first chosen by artistic director Lissa Twomey, former associate director of the Sydney Festival.

Ms Twomey said she had been trying for several years to secure some of the artists, including Coleman, for the Sydney Festival and failed, so was rapt to get them for Wellington.

The festival opera will be a double bill of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Lindbergh Flight and Seven Deadly Sins from Opera National de Lyon, which even features hip-hop dancing. It will be directed by Francois Girard, who has directed films, including Silk with Keira Knightley.

"It will surprise people because the director has quite a cinematic vision, which makes this so different," Ms Twomey said. "It's not what one ordinarily might expect in going to opera - in a good way. That's what the festivals are all about - breaking down expectations. If we all stayed set in our ways it wouldn't be very exciting."

A 24-hour interactive artwork, Body Movies, will be showing on the waterfront, and circus-style events will include Secret, a one-man show from France's Cirque Ici, and Traces, from Canadian acrobatic company Les 7 Doigts de la Main.

A radical version of classic ballet Giselle, from Ireland's Fabulous Beast Dance Company, set in an Irish village minus tutus and pointe shoes, is part of the dance lineup.

A wooden European-style tent - the Pacific Blue Festival Club - will again host music acts, including American soul singer Mavis Staples, Canadian singer Feist, French band Nouvelle Vague, who play classic punk and new wave songs in a bossa nova style, and Kiwi acts Dave Dobbyn, Lucid 3 and The Little Bushman.

- © Fairfax NZ News