Arts festival scoops a dancing digger

HUGO GLENDINNING

BODY ART: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, left, features with kung-fu, spirituality and art in Sutra.

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A controversial atheist, movie-star musicians and a dance duet between a man and a mechanical digger are all on the cards for next year's New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Organisers say they are building a 500-seat venue on the Wellington waterfront to replace the giant tent used in previous years.

The month-long, $14 million festival's programme, which was announced last night, includes 18 works not seen before in New Zealand or Australia.

It will also have something for bargain-hunters. At 12.30pm every day of the festival, 10 tickets for almost every show that day will go on sale at Midland Park for $20.

Among last night's announcements were the authors Richard Dawkins, a biologist renowned for his fierce atheism, and Peter Singer, the thinker dubbed the world's most influential living philosopher. Both will be part of the festival's Writers and Readers Week.

On the stage, theatre fans can see Eleven and Twelve, the first play by British playwright Peter Brook to come to New Zealand.

Avant-garde Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna will present T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T – a play without words about an upper-class family in strife. Festival artistic director Lissa Twomey predicted it would be one of the festival's most talked-about works. "It's just exquisite theatre."

Dance works will include Sutra, a blend of kung-fu explosiveness, Shaolin spirituality and artwork from a Turner Prize winner.

"It's an extraordinary project," Twomey said. "It will cross all sorts of boundaries in terms of contemporary dance. Very entertaining. Quite spiritual. It's for a really wide audience."

A circus offering will come in the form of Inside Out from Sweden. A zany free act will be Transport Exceptionnels, a choreographed dance duet between a man and a digger at Waitangi Park.

Musical acts heading to New Zealand include singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright and acclaimed jazz singer Dianne Reeves as part of a tribute concert to Nina Simone.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the duo from the hit Irish movie Once, will also perform as The Swell Season.

Their set will be one of many in the festival's new waterfront venue – a space at Shed 6 on Queens Wharf that will include a lounge bar with space for 300 guests. The festival, from February 26 to March 21, will sport a new logo – still a kiwi, but a grey version this time.

For your chance to win tickets to Sutra with Stuff.co.nz, click here.