Dr Tina Makereti will be speaking and holding a free writing workshop at the Performing, Writing symposium in Wellington. The workshop is being run on Sunday 12 March, with Tina’s keynote speech on Wednesday 15 March. Further information on the symposium can be found on the event website.
Award-winning author Dr Ti
na Makereti, who is Ngati Tuwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngati Rangatahi, Moriori and Pākehā, says people are always surprised to hear that no one offers a single paper in Māori literature in English. “In fact there are less than a handful of academics working in the field in New Zealand. A lot of published research comes from overseas researchers, some of whom have never been to the country.”
Dr Makereti says she’s excited by the opportunity to contribute new research into Indigenous creative writing along with teaching in the School of English and Media Studies. “There is a huge deficit in academic research in Māori and Pacific writing in particular. It’s no wonder young people aren’t drawn to study if they don’t see their own literature reflected.” She says New Zealand literature courses touch on Indigenous writers but she’d like to see programmes that truly engage with matauranga Māori – Māori understanding and knowledge.
Dr Makereti has a host of awards to her name, including twice winning the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards for fiction for her short story collection Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia 2011) and then her first novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage 2014).
While her PhD in Creative Writing was completed at Victoria University, Dr Makereti completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Māori Studies at Massey University in 2007 and has taught at Massey in the past. She will be based on the Manawatū campus.
Dr Makereti is looking forward to getting students excited about writing and says she’ll be aiming to surprise them.“People have preconceived ideas about what creative writing is, so I’ll be looking for work that surprises and gets them to look again.”
Yet another great review for this year’s Summer Shakespeare production, “The Winter’s Tale”. The production runs until Saturday 11 March 2017.
A great review for Sara Brodie’s production of “The Winter’s Tale”. We hope it will entice you to come and see this wonderful piece. Thirty six people in the cast who range in age from 17 to 76. It is a delight!
Congratulations to Massey’s 2016 Modern Drama class for picking up the award for Best Ensemble at the Globe Theatre awards this weekend! The Globe Awards celebrate the best of Palmerston North’s non-professional theatre, and we were delighted to be in such esteemed company. The production was Caryl Churchill’s 2012 Love and Information, directed by Rachel Lenart, with design, performance and all aspects of production by the 300-level students. The future of New Zealand theatre is bright with these students leading the way!
Madam Black, a short film written by Matthew Harris, one of our senior tutors in Auckland, has recently picked up Best Short Film at The Rialto Channel NZ Film Awards (the ‘Moas’). The film has now won 38 international awards, including the Prix du Public at the Clermont-Ferrand in France – the biggest audience prize for short film in the world. After this weekend’s win the film was described by Rialto as a “globally acclaimed short” on an “historic awards run”. Matthew says “the volume of these festival awards are definitely encouraging, so I’ll be devoting a lot more time to screenwriting, but I maintain other areas of interest too – short fiction, academic writing, teaching – I’m looking forward to tutoring Creative Writing this semester!”
Big congratulations to our Wellington media production lecturer Costa Botes and his longstanding mentee Zoe McIntosh who have won a coveted prize in the 2017 Clermont-Ferrand short film festival in France. The festival is the biggest event of its type in the world. It’s a feat just to get selected for competition, then Zoe and Costa’s film The World in Your Window has picked up the Student Prize in the international competition – this is an award given by an international student jury. The jurors described the film as “a real visual poem”. The jury announcement said “we were all touched by the relationship you depicted between a dad and his son. The breath of humanism and tolerance that emerges from your film is extremely moving.” The World in Your Window is directed by Zoe McIntosh, written by Costa Botes and Zoe McIntosh, and produced by Hamish Mortland. It will have its New Zealand premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival mid year.
Don’t miss this year’s amazing Summer Shakespeare production of “The Winter’s Tale” directed by Sara Brody, which begins on March 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 9th, 10th and 11th at 7.30 pm at Victoria Esplanade, Palmerston North. As part of our Shakespeare in Schools Project run by our School in Manawatu, Sara worked with drama students at Freyberg High School on Tuesday during a workshop on “The Winter’s Tale”.
Celeste Langan, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English, will be speaking in Wellington at the upcoming RSAA conference “Transporting Romanticism” on Friday 17 February. Details are below:
Under Arrest: Transport and Security (Excitation and Citation)
Friday 17 February 2017
4.45pmpm
The Pit 12B09 – Te Ara Hihiko, Massey Wellington
Recent books on the modern revolution in transport enabled by the shipping container remind us that the term “logistics,” now used primarily to signify systems “allowing circulations to take place,” was first used by one of Napoleon’s former generals: a chapter in Jomini’s The Art of War was titled “Logistics; or the Practical Art of Moving Armies.” How might we think of what is after all the continuing project of “transporting Romanticism” in relation to global logistics and the shipping container? Reminded that books of poems are carried on the same ships that transport settlers and soldiers, what changes about our understanding of their power to transport? Recognizing the press as an “information delivery system,” how can we differentiate between the “hackney’d” phrase Byron identifies with cant and those “truths” that “must be recited,” truths “you will not read in the gazette?” Focusing on the quotation and the capsule as figures of containerized movement in Byron’s Don Juan and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, I’ll explore their attempts to develop a counterlogistics of the word.
Celeste Langan, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English, is the author of Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom, a study of why and how Rousseau and Wordsworth represent political freedom as freedom of movement. More recently, she has helped to develop the subfield of Romantic Media Studies, with essays like “Understanding Media in 1805,” “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” (co-authored with Maureen McLane), and “Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber.” Her current book manuscript, Post-Napoleonism: Literature and the Afterlife of Sovereignty, traces the migration of the political concept of sovereignty into the domain of the literature. Drawing on the Freudian concept of “afterwardsness” or the après coup, the book illuminates ways in which the newspaper report of an event is foundational to a new idea of literature as mediated utterance.
This plenary is made possible by the W.H. Oliver Humanities Research Academy, Massey University. It forms part of Transporting Romanticism, Romantic Studies Association of Australasia Biennial Conference, 16-18 February 2017, co-hosted by Massey University and Victoria University of Wellington. https://rsaa2017.wordpress.com/
Director Sara Brodie is bringing a bit of wild to Summer Shakespeare 2017, with the Manawatu River as a backdrop and all sorts of surprises planned.
In her position as the artist in residence at Massey University, the Kapiti-based director and choreographer has chosen The Winter’s Tale as her play.
“It’s comic and tragic and I want to evoke a winter’s night and the fantastic tale element of it as much as possible.”
A stretch of Palmerston North’s Esplanade river walkway will be the stage for the open theatre piece, and Brodie said all sorts of things become possible in such a setting.
“When the audience actually come along here it will all be set up like a mid-winter fair with braziers, bunting, food stories and fire poi. We enter into the court scenes first where the jealous ravings of King Leontes start.”
Brodie is no stranger to staging outdoor events and said the “happy accidents” that occur are one of the best elements.
“Beautiful sunsets or wind at just the right moment. Those sort of things that really add to the experience for people. This will be like going into the fantastical wilds.”
The annual event is in it’s 14th year and will be drawing on Palmerston North’s non-professional theatre community for the production that will be held next March.
A workshop will be held at 10am on Saturday at Massey University’s Sir Geoffrey Peren Building, which Brodie said will give people an idea of the process.
“It’s for anyone who is interested to come along to meet me and to hear about the production and see some concept imagery around it. We will talk about the story and get our teeth into some of the text and some exercises to have some fun with it.”
Formal auditions for The Winter’s Tale will be held at the end of November and as well as actors and dancers, Brodie is also on the look out for production behind-the-scenes people.