Category Archives: Wellington

Expressive Arts at Massey Wellington campus

Writers Week – Wellington – 8-13 March 2016

Writers Week is fast approaching. In addition to every other excellent New Zealand Festival happening, from 8—13 March you can also get your fill of stimulating discussion in Wellington’s Embassy, BATS and Circa Theatres.

Packing quite some punch is the Gala Showcase: Fighting Talk on Thursday 10 March. Five writers who have never appeared on stage together before will share their personal stories on the theme of ‘rapprochement’ {noun: the development of friendlier relations between countries or groups}. Robert Dessaix, Mariko Tamaki, Etgar Keret, Courtney Sina Meredith and Sally Gardner are coming from all corners of the globe to be in Wellington, and each have a tale of conflict, and possibly also of resolution, to tell.

Writers Week includes sessions on running and the science of endurance, to genetics and brain surgery, selling books, special effects, slam poetry and magical worlds.

Visit the Festival website to see a full list of events: http://www.festival.co.nz/2016/writers-week/

Staging a Cause

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Elspeth Tilley does the little things that many do on the homefront to protect the planet, from recycling and marching against climate change to encouraging her family to walk and take public transport.

On a global scale, though, the Massey University theatre and arts lecturer knows that many are tired of being bombarded with information and statistics about climate change.

On the eve of one of the most important global meetings, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, which starts on the evening of November 30 (NZ Time), her short, provocative play, Flotsam, has been accepted by the New York-based Climate Change Theatre Action group, as one of the official plays.

“Information about climate change is very depressing and leaves us all churned up, thinking the world’s going to end,” says Tilley. “The result is that people switch off. Instead, it works to reach people’s hearts and consciousness, and to help them think differently.”

Playwrights like David Geary, a Vancouver-based Maori playwright and Jacqueline Lawton, an award-winning black American playwright, are among 50 writers whose poetry, plays and songs were chosen by the action group to be performed before and during the Paris event. Not all will be held in Paris, though, and Tilley’s play is being shown in Chicago, Washington, New York and Virginia. Other productions range from living-room readings to fully produced shows, and from site-specific performances at the foot of glaciers to radio programmes and film adaptations.

Tilley says that climate change is often seen through a policy or scientific lens, and solutions are discussed only in political offices, boardrooms and negotiating halls.

Her play is based on the real-life case about a man from Kiribati – Ioane Teitoita – who was denied status as a climate change refugee and sent home. In a case which affected Tilley, the issue is battled out between a refugee application officer following the rules, and her teenage daughter, who challenges her mother about the case after following it on Facebook.

In Flotsam, the refugee officer says: “It’s not that simple, love. The law says there must be a well-founded fear of persecution causing serious harm to qualify for refugee status. Maybe there might be a cyclone causing serious harm, maybe not. But a cyclone isn’t persecution. I can’t override the wording of the law, it’s my job to apply the letter of the law. If it says definite serious harm, then I have to require definite serious harm to prove the application”.

The case of Teitoita, who was sent home, stuck with Massey Associate Professor Tilley, who says: “It’s symbolic of the system’s response. Eventually, we are going to have to welcome climate change refugees. We can’t keep turning a blind eye, treating them like an inconvenient teenager.”

Flotsam premiered here at a Massey University climate change event, Waves, earlier this month and each production overseas features local actors and directors – it’s being shown at the Institute for Excellence in American Contemporary Theatre in New York on Tuesday, chosen by Matthew Clinton Sekellick, an award-winning director. Theatre activism isn’t new to Tilley, who teaches a paper on the expressive arts, so her students have been involved in everything from a multimedia smokefree campaign on campus, to a play about GM corn.

“We emphasise artistic expression as both intrinsically worthwhile and as a means to an end. Art has aesthetic value, but it’s also powerful as a communication tool that can connect people with ideas, provoke new ways of looking at things, and create change.”

At the Waves event, Massey PhD student Sara McBride acted in the world premiere of Geary’s play, Morehu and Titi, about a tuatara and muttonbird heading for Antarctica on a floating island.

McBride, a disaster management communications specialist, has seen the effects of climate change first-hand, after working in the Solomon Islands as a volunteer communications advisor. “The Reef Islands was one of my areas, where you have 14,000 people living on coral atolls totalling 12 square kilometres. The area has eroded so much. Locals are losing their island, but they can’t leave, and it’s heartbreaking to watch.”

She says that climate change is now the most pressing issue for those working in disaster management. “It’s like, how can we fix this, or mitigate it?”

McBride also knows what it is like to live with the threat of disaster hanging above. Growing up in Washington state, she lived within 15 kilometres of the Hamburg nuclear site as her father was a nuclear chemist.

“We grew up with the threat of the nuclear plant melting down. We had to do drills regularly and we were told that if the nuclear facility went critical, we had to put a big white sheet up on our window to let the military know we were still alive.

“Working in disaster management has been a natural extension of my childhood.”

Expressive Arts Club Winning Film!

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This is the Expressive Arts Club video that won the MAWSCA a few weeks ago! Beautiful work Olie and Ruth! (Please note, made for educational purposes only.)

2015 LitCrawl – Wellington

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Check out LitCrawl in Wellington this weekend, Saturday 14 November. 15 Events, Countless Readers.

Bryan Walpert is on a ‘Scientia [knowledge]’ panel : 7.15pm Arty Bees, 106 Manners Street.

Ingrid Horrocks is reading in a competing slot on ‘Real Life’ : 7. 15pm Concerned Citizens Collective, 17 Tory St.

Then Bryan will be on for a second run as part of a Hoopla poets reading 8.30pm Concerned Citizens Collective, 17 Tory St.

http://www.litcrawl.co.nz/

More Creative Works from Waves

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The EAC Climate Change Creative Writing finalists Stevie Greeks, Braidicea Warriner and Sophia Dempsey receive their awards from EAC president Olie Body

Last but not least in our series of posts of creative works from Waves: Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa (#climatechangetheatreaction), we bring you all in one place the links to the three finalists’ poems from the Expressive Arts Club Climate Change Creative Writing Competition.

The Expressive Arts Club is a large and vibrant student club at Massey Wellington campus open to students and alumni in our three Expressive Arts disciplines: creative writing, digital media production and theatre studies. (Plus we do find their friends from other majors tend to want to join the fun too, which is fine by us as the more the merrier.) EAC ran meet-ups and showcase events throughout 2015, culminating in the climate change creative writing competition in association with Waves. Many more events are planned for 2016 so if you want to join the best student club on Wellington campus, see http://www.mawsa.org.nz/clubs/clubs-mawsa-2015/massey-wellington-expressive-arts-club/ for details.

Thank you to Dr Ingrid Horrocks, creative writing senior lecturer, for expert judging of the entries in the EAC competition. Here are all three finalists – congratulations to them all, and happy reading!

Links to read online the three shortlisted poems from EAC Climate Change Creative Writing Competition 2015.

1. Finalist: A race to extinction by Stevie Greeks

2. Highly Commended: Melting Clocks by Braidicea Warriner

3. Winner: Fade Out by Sophia Demsey

Melting Clocks: Poem from Waves

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Braidicea Warriner reading her work at Waves: Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa

In the second installment of our creative work posts from Waves: Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa (#climatechangetheatreaction), we bring you ‘Melting Clocks’ by Braidicea Warriner. This poem was Highly Commended in the Expressive Arts Club Climate Change Creative Writing Competition 2015.

Braidicea Warriner recently completed a Bachelor of Arts where she developed a passion for writing screenplays. The weirdest thing she’s ever written is a love poem from a grassy lawn to a willow tree. Some of her favourite-sounding words include; effervescent, epiphany, clandestine and cacophony.

Melting Clocks

By Braidicea Warriner

Salvador Dali’s
melting clocks are
all the more
relevant today
At my house
the tap drips
like a reminder
that this big blue
marble of dreams
is quickly dissolving
into an apocalyptic puddle
Pearls of water
slap the stainless steel
like hurried footsteps
Water weeps from the hour-hand
and time drains down the colander
in the kitchen sink
Drowning tensions
are shipwrecked
in my stomach
as I gaze at
the intricate tree
stump
outside my window
Exposed like an open artery,
it bleeds sap
seeping down its age-defining rings
Branches and twigs
lay scattered
like dismembered
body parts,
a skeleton that was once
filled with the flesh
of crimson flowers
and outspoken birdsong
The tap continues
to drip relentlessly
like a siren in my ear
it strikes the stainless steel
harder and faster
A pool of water trickles
down the edge of the bench
like the world slipping
off its surface

Creative Works from Waves

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Philip Braithwaite reading Danny’s Monologue at Waves: Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa

If you couldn’t make it to Waves, our fantastic #climatechangetheatreaction event recently, or you were there, loved it and would like to relive those magic moments, we’ll be posting some of the creative writing work here for your reading pleasure. So no more fear of missing out!

First up, we’re posting Phil Braithwaite’s moving monologue from The Atom Room. Phil, who teaches on our Expressive Arts programme, has won multiple awards including the top playwriting award in New Zealand, and we were honoured to have him share at Waves this sneak preview from his next major work. Our audience nominated the lines ‘And the rats and stoats’ and ‘I don’t even know who to be angry at any more’ as some of the best lines in the show (along with David Geary’s Al Gore saying ‘I told you so!’)

In The Atom Room, Danny and Sarah are a modern couple. They are living in a long-distance relationship: he is in Wellington, and she is on Mars. But this is a universe where the Earth has been catastrophically damaged by tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns, and the rich elite are moving to outer colonies and Mars.

Sarah is an engineer and scientist in the Mars programme. Danny is on his own on Earth, working for Envirocorp, the only organisation left that looks out for the environment. Every now and then they can meet in The Atom Room: the most advanced virtual avatar programme in the galaxy. In his monologue, Danny is engaged in a series of interviews, trying to talk about the death of his planet, and why he refuses to leave it.

Danny’s monologue from The Atom Room.

Philip Braithwaite

DANNY I once heard this saying: ‘They were joined at the wound.’ That’s how it was with me and Sarah. Not only that, you know, but we discovered pretty early on that we’d both lost everyone in the deluge. We were both orphans.
Problem is, now the world is crawling with orphans, running around, trying to find a home.
When someone’s about to die, and you know they haven’t got long left, you ignore it. You make excuses.
He came home one day. She knew he’d been sick, but mum just thought it was the weather, it was a cold, it was whatever. He brought home some lemons, a bag of lemons. And she said he couldn’t hold onto the bag. He was so weak he couldn’t even carry a bag of lemons.
They’d be out for their daily walk and he’d say, ‘hold on,’ and he’d have to take some time to get himself together. He’d clutch at a pole or a stairwell or anything that was handy. She said that was all she knew about how sick he was; the rest he kept hidden, beneath that iceberg: the giant was cracking and melting.
The Earth was like that: it cracked open, it split itself down the fault lines. It was sick, its sickness was stabbing our faces, tumbling through us, but we had cars and jobs and families, and we didn’t notice. We lost touch. We walked around in the streets. We didn’t see.
I wasn’t there when the deluge came. We called it the deluge, but you know, that’s only the first act. The fault lines, they opened up through the middle. It’s a good thing space exploration was up and running at the time. It’s good the Russians and Americans kept trying to outdo each other. If you had enough money when the tsunamis and storms came you could get out.
You know how everyone thought it was gonna be nuclear war that ended us? It wasn’t like that. It was so much subtler than that, so much slower. It was just that we weren’t paying attention.
Dad was getting radiation therapy for his cancer at the time. Radiation therapy! All he needed to do was stand outside! Open up his arms and let the sky pour itself inside him. The iceberg, it melted, it flowed into the world. The earthquakes, then the tsunamis. The meltdowns. It’s hard to know whether it went willingly or under duress, whether it gave us a passing thought or whether it was happy to jettison us, so that maybe it could start again.
Nothing much could survive those first few months. But somehow the planet spared me. I was standing on train tracks, the train was coming, and it went right past me.
Actually I was in an office building discussing a document on the preservation of native birdlife against the threat of rats and stoats, and then the tsunami came and washed away the buildings. And the rats and stoats, so that was that problem solved.
We were evacuated and taken to a safehouse. One of the many ironies: because I work for the environment we were able to avoid the extremities that it threw at us. Sit it out.
After that, when the world had shaken us free, we couldn’t cling on anymore; the fault lines, they’d all cracked open; we were walking inbetween, hanging on to the cliff face.
Charitable trusts, church groups, they set up shelters, and gave out free counselling, if you didn’t mind the ministers, the church fathers, even the liberal ones, starting to rabbit on about the end-times and being prepared and all that. If you could put up with that then at least you had someone to talk to and a cup of tea: in that sense they certainly were prepared. The earth is cracking open and you’ve still got your choice of Dilmah special filter, Twinings, Bell, or Rooibos for the more adventurous parishioner.
I never saw it, except I did. It’s worse in your mind. I have this dream, where the storm comes over the horizon, the burning light, and it sort of envelops everyone … then … nothing. I wake up. I wish it was as dramatic as that. It wasn’t like that. I sat it out.
When the atmosphere became unbreathable, we all bought oxygen helmets. Oxygen helmet manufacturers. Advertising! Everywhere!
It seemed like there was this shift, this perceptible change in … I don’t know, agendas. Suddenly the planet was dead, but no-one was telling you about it. The advertising, it washed over you, like that giant iceberg, flooding towards you, without shape, you’re numb to it. It rolls towards you, this giant mass of buy this and go here and do this and everything’s fine. And money and corporations and pop culture and oil and lemons and chemicals, and Hollywood stars and hydrogen bombs. Ads and bad poetry, and sometimes you can’t tell the difference.
But it wasn’t about Earth. It was pointing somewhere else. No-one was talking about Earth. The commercials, they were talking about spreading out, us children, leaving home for the first time, into the stars, it was time, time to make the change, time to cut the apron strings, that’s where we were supposed to be, out there, the exterior of life. When life throws you lemons. That’s where you went if you had the money. That’s where you could feel better. You could pay in instalments. Equity, loans, brokers. Suddenly everyone’s flying to the Moon, to the space stations. They all took off, the governments couldn’t stop them. There was no government, even that was gone. You didn’t even know who to be angry at anymore. You walk through the embers now and all you see is where things used to be. We’re defined by the past tense.
So Sarah went to Mars, to build a new Eden up there, start again. Create opportunities for chain stores and Dilmah tea bags. I stayed here and tried to rebuild the old. But I want to be here. And I’m starting to think, maybe that’s the difference between me and her.
I once said to her, ‘We’re joined at the wound.’ She didn’t like it. She thought it was a weak thing to say. She said I feel sorry for myself, and we have to just get on with it. And I suppose I do feel sorry for myself, but I don’t. I feel sorry for us. ‘Cause it showed us who we really are.

New Postgraduate Paper in Theatre for Innovation

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A/P Elspeth Tilley, paper coordinator

The School of English & Media Studies is launching a new postgraduate communication paper in 2016.

The paper, 139.764 Theatre for Innovation and Communication, is available to students in both the Master of Communication and Bachelor of Communication Honours programmes.

It is an internal, second-semester paper offered at Wellington, and is timetabled on a Tuesday from 4pm to 7pm to enable working professionals to attend in the evening. Other PG papers in the same programmes are available on Wednesday and Thursday evenings so that professionals studying while working can make up a viable schedule of after-work study on Wellington campus.

Theatre for Innovation and Communication offers an advanced, practical exploration of theatrical improvisation techniques in relation to enhancing creativity, innovation, leadership, teamwork, and communication performance, with an emphasis on the application of theatrical techniques to communication and innovation challenges.

It is designed for those with organisational experience who want to understand how theatre and roleplay can extend their skills as a communicator, manager and team facilitator, or for those with theatre experience who want to move into applying that background to organisational training or communication roles.

In class, students will examine a range of historical and contemporary models for improvisational theatre through reading, seminar discussion and evaluative writing and engage in a range of practical theatre exercises such as spontaneity, story-telling, and character and dramatic narrative development during workshops. They will also study organisational communication theory and models, particularly evidence-based approaches to non-verbal communication and teamwork. As part of the final assessment, they will be required to bring these two areas of learning together to research, plan, pitch, deliver and evaluate their own short workshop using theatre and improvisation to offer a communication intervention.

Paper coordinator Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley said the course filled a clear gap in available curricula for postgraduate communication study. “There is growing recognition of the value of creative techniques for improving business and theatre techniques for enhancing communication, but there is nothing like this that brings them together in one integrated learning experience at postgraduate level.”

Dr Tilley has a background as an improviser and theatre practitioner, and has also taught and researched in communication and public relations at advanced levels for more than a decade, meaning she was able to connect up these two areas of expertise in designing the paper. “Organisations have been asking me repeatedly for input on how this is done – with this paper we will be able to upskill a whole new cohort of communication professionals who have evaluated the evidence about creative and improvisational approaches, had practice in designing and delivering workshops, and can go out into industry and start using these techniques effectively to create change in how our organisations innovate and communicate. I’m very excited by the potential for this to lead to significant improvements for New Zealand businesses.”

For more information about the paper, see http://www.massey.ac.nz/paper/?p=139764&o=1229693 or contact Dr Tilley on Email: e.tilley@massey.ac.nz or Phone: + 64 4 9793565

Waves online programme

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Below you will find the full programme for Waves: Climate Change Theatre Action

Theatre Lab, 5D14, Massey University Wellington Campus, Wellington, 1pm November 1. (Waves is a paperless event, and so we have posted the programme here, and will provide free wifi to the audience.) For more information about Waves, or to join us, see previous post at: Waves: Climate Change Theatre Action

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to ‘Theatre Without Borders’, ‘The Arctic Cycle’ and ‘NoPassport’, in particular Caridad Svich (recipient of 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre), Chantal Bilodeau (Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle), and Elaine Avila (Recipient, Mellon Foundation Environmental Arts Commission, Pomona College, Los Angeles) for curating and coordinating the global programme of Climate Change Theatre Action 2015 from bases in L.A. and New York. Through the vision and hard work of these three women, from today (the global launch) to mid-December, more than 100 Climate Change Theatre Action events will be staged in 22 countries, featuring the work of more than 40 distinguished international playwrights. This is the third and largest global theatre action event organised by the team, the others being ‘The Way of Water’ (2012, theatre action on oil spills) and ‘Gun Control’ (2013).

Waves, the only Climate Change Theatre Action event in Aotearoa and the first in the world of the global schedule, is produced and directed by Elspeth Tilley, with lighting design by Emma Bennetts of Backlight, film editing and multimedia technical support by Samuel Williams, and video recording by Mark Steelsmith. Scene-change visuals between items are from the Pacific Climate Change documentary ‘Storm Islands’, provided courtesy of director Steve Menzies. The Massey University School of English & Media Studies fed and costumed the actors among many and various other supportive inputs. Artcop21 (the global cultural programme of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change 2015, of which Waves is a registered part) provided free hosting for our event at http://www.artcop21.com/events/waves/ Link to other Artcop21 events worldwide from that page.

A huge thank you to all the Waves performers (whose intriguing details are at the end of the programme) and authors for providing their time, talents and inspirational creative work to Climate Change Theatre Action to help contribute a crucial cultural and artistic element to the worldwide conversation about our planet’s wellbeing. A huge thank you to you, our audience, for coming out today to show your support for the role of the arts in provoking new thinking about the issues that matter. Follow the global project at #climatechangetheatreaction to see more events unfold worldwide over the next six weeks.

Programme

Item 1: Danny’s monologue from ‘The Atom Room’ by Philip Braithwaite

Read by Philip Braithwaite

Danny and Sarah are a modern couple. They are living in a long-distance relationship: he is in Wellington, and she is on Mars. But this is a universe where the Earth has been catastrophically damaged by tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns, and the rich elite are moving to outer colonies and Mars.

About the author: Philip Braithwaite has won multiple playwriting awards including the 2001 BBC World Service International Radio Playwriting Competition, the 2013-14 William Evans Playwriting Fellowship, and New Zealand’s top playwriting prize, the Adam NZ Play Award, in 2014.

His work has been produced in New Zealand, Australia and Europe, and he has collaborated with the Royal Court Theatre in London, the BBC and SEEyD theatre company. His radio plays have been produced on the BBC World Service and Radio New Zealand. Oh and he once had a beer with Alan Rickman. You will be the first in the world to hear a reading from this brand new work.

Item 2: Mōrehu and Tītī by David Geary

Mōrehu – Hamish Boyle

Tītī – Moira Fortin-Cornejo

Al Gore/Aurora – Sara McBride

Mōrehu is an ancient male punk rocker tuatara. In the Māori language of the Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand, Mōrehu means survivor or remnant. Tuatara means ‘spiny back’. Tuatara are rare, medium-sized reptiles found only in New Zealand. They are the last survivors of an order of reptiles that thrived in the age of the dinosaurs. Mōrehu is stuck on a drifting raft with Tītī, a young female sooty shearwater bird, muttonbird, Puffinsus griseus, or tītī (pron. Teetee). The young of these birds are a traditional food source for Māori, preserved in copious amounts of their own fat and salt. So though they may perish in large numbers before reaching adulthood, the tītī can rest assured those who eat them regularly will die prematurely of heart attacks.

AG/Aurora Australis – a famous person and The Southern Lights – makes an appearance as the raft nears Antarctica.

About the author: David Geary writes plays, television, film, fiction, and haiku on twitter @gearsgeary. He is of New Zealand Māori and Pākehā heritage, and is now also a citizen of Canada. He teaches at Capilano University, North Vancouver, in the Indigenous

Filmmaking and Documentary programs, leads playwrights’ workshops for Playwrights Theatre Centre, and works as a freelance dramaturge. He is the author of ‘Lovelock’s Dream Run’, co-wrote and co-directed the television documentary ‘The Smell of Money’ and his short story collection, ‘A Man of the People’ was published in 2003. He has worked as a scriptwriter and storyliner for television including Shortland Street, Mercy Peak, Jackson’s Wharf and Hard Out. He won the Bruce Mason Playwrights’ Award in 1991 and the Adam Foundation Playwrights’ Award in 1994. ‘Mōrehu and Tītī’ was written specifically for Climate Change Theatre Action 2015. This is its world premiere.

Item 3: Climate Change Poems from Aotearoa
Readings selected and presented by Dr Ingrid Horrocks

Many recent poems by New Zealand writers grapple, directly or indirectly, with questions of climate change. In “The Uprising,” which appears in nature poet Dinah Hawken’s latest collection, Ocean and Stone (2015), Hawken considers the rising oceans. So does Lynn Jenner in her book of poems, Lost and Gone Away (2015). Several Massey graduate students, among them poets Lynn Davidson, Sarah-Jane Barnett, and Janet Newman, have spent time exploring new ways to engage with and write about the environment. Ingrid will read fragments from some of these recent works.

About the authors: Dinah Hawken was awarded the Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry; Lynn Jenner has won both the Adam Prize in Creative Writing and the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry; Lynn Davidson is widely published and just completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Massey University; poet and Massey creative writing tutor Sarah-Jane Barnett just released her new (and second) poetry collection, titled Work; and Massey Master of Creative Writing student Janet Newman just won the Open category of the New Zealand Poet Society’s 2015 International Poetry Competition.

Item 4: Flotsam by Elspeth Tilley

Mariana – Anna Barden Shaw

Natalia – Charlotte Tilley

Stefan – Jack Hitchens

Mariana has a tough job, judging climate-change-refugee applications. Her teenaged daughter Natalia has been reading Facebook and is less than impressed with her mother’s decisions. Things don’t look good, weather-wise – but it’s OK, Mariana can afford to build a nice big wall to keep it all at bay.

About the author: Elspeth Tilley is a graduate of the University of Queensland drama programme, the La Boite improvisation, devising and writing for theatre courses, the Gold Coast Institute of Technology acting courses 1 and 2, and the Queensland Film Academy screen actor training programme. An experienced actor for stage and screen, she now teaches theatre and creative activism at Massey University Wellington, publishes on performance and postcolonialism, and enjoys directing regular student theatre both scripted and devised. She was inspired to write ‘Flotsam’ to illuminate the massive damage and inequalities climate change is wreaking in the Pacific. ‘Flotsam’ is an official Climate Change Theatre Action selection, chosen by the curators for inclusion in the worldwide programme. This is its world premiere.

Item 5: Earth Duet by E.M. Lewis

Read by: Grace Bucknell and Jack Hitchens

An elegiac poem, for two voices.

About the author: E.M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, librettist, and teacher of playwriting. She was a finalist for the 2014 Shakespeare’s Sister Fellowship, received the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University in 2010-2011, and won both the ATCA/Steinberg Award and the Award for Outstanding Writing of a World Premiere Play from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for her play ‘Song of Extinction’. She won the Primus Prize for her play ‘Heads’. Her work has been produced around the world – and we are very excited to be able to bring it for the first time to New Zealand.

Item 6: Our Corner of the World by Jacqueline E. Lawton

Emily – Alice Guerin

David – Tobias Nash

Emily and David have moved to Detroit, where you can buy a house for a dollar. Emily stands on the porch of their once-condemned new home that they are slowly renovating. The lawn that surrounds the house is covered with abandoned tires and dirt. There is a cracked sidewalk and an empty street. Emily stands on the porch and cradles a young baby in her arms. David enters on a bike. Emily does not turn to look at him.

About the author: Jacqueline E. Lawton was named one of the top 30 national leading black playwrights in the USA by Arena Stage’s American Voices New Play Institute and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the 2015-2016 Kenan Institute’s Creative Collaboratory Project Grant, two Young Artist Program Grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for Playwriting; the Ellsworth P. and Virginia Conkle Endowed Scholarship for Drama; the Jean McKenzie Schenkkan Endowed Scholarship in Playwriting; and the Morton Brown, Nellie Lea Brown, and Minelma Brown Lockwood Endowed Scholarship in Playwriting.

Item 7: Expressive Arts Club Climate Change Creative Writing Competition Finalists
Melting Clocks, by Braidicea Warriner, read by Braidicea Warriner

A Race to Extinction, by Stevie Greeks, read by Elspeth Tilley

Fade Out, by Sophia Dempsey, read by Sophia Dempsey

Item 8: Prizegiving
Announcement and presentation of the prize for best piece of Expressive Arts Club Climate Change Creative Writing

Item 9: Korero
Please stay for a chat. We invite you to ask questions of the performers and artists, express your views, and generally linger for a relaxed korero about climate change and what we can do about it.

About the Fantastic Waves Performers:

Alice Guerin. Last year Alice played a Russian spy and a Swedish housewife in the same show. She’s excited to be in Waves as she truly cares about climate change and believes it is a topic that needs to be talked about more.

Anna Barden Shaw wanted to be part of the Climate Change Theatre Action as it is something that she feels passionately about. Over the years she’s played all sorts of roles from witches to prostitutes, the last being a settler’s wife in ‘The Ragged’ earlier this year. Now she finally gets to play someone a little more mundane – a lawyer, a mother of a politically aware teenage girl (which she also has!). Her astrology always said she should be a lawyer – Anna figures this is the closest she will get.

Braidicea Warriner recently completed a Bachelor of Arts where she developed a passion for writing screenplays. The weirdest thing she’s ever written is a love poem from a grassy lawn to a willow tree. Some of her favourite-sounding words include; effervescent, epiphany, clandestine and cacophony.

Charlotte Tilley has studied drama from age 7 and has distinctions in Trinity College London musical theatre and performance exams. Previous stage roles include an orphan, a wolf and the captain of a sinking ship, with her favourite being Rapunzel for ‘Fractured Fairytales’.

Grace Bucknell fell in love with performing when she was cast as chief ferret in ‘Toad of Toad Hall’ aged 10. She has studied drama for 10 years and is completing her diploma.

Hamish Boyle has spent the past the past three years regularly escaping into Wellington from the Hutt, only to stumble around the stage and screen and call it acting. Credits include Summer Shakespeare 2015 and 2016, Young and Hungry 2015, and Alone it Stands with Lord Lackbeards.

Ingrid Horrocks is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey Wellington. Ingrid is a poet and nonfiction writer. She has published books of poetry and travel writing, and her work has been anthologised in collections such as Essential New Zealand Poems and New Zealand Love Poems.

Jack Hitchens. So far Jack has been in 6 different musicals, including The Gabe, from New Zealand’s original ‘Next to Normal’ cast which premiered mid last year. He originally had his stage debut, wearing a full red ruby dress with intense high heels and bright red lipstick, as a sassy sister, Ruby, in the pantomime, Pantalot.

Moira Fortin-Cornejo. Birds seem to like Moira… she has played many birds before, and from different cultures, Chilean and Rapa Nui. Now she’s very happy to play a New Zealand bird… not a kiwi… but nearly!

Sara McBride played Santa when she was 12, so gender bending roles are nothing new to her. The play was about Santa being forced to go a health and fitness camp to lose weight. In one scene, she had to run through the audience and … her pants accidentally fell down in front of everyone. Like the true professional she is, Sara pulled her pants up and kept acting. That early brush with mass embarrassment didn’t diminish her love of theatre as she has continued acting and singing throughout her adult life. Currently, Sara is part of Wellington Footlights, where her specialties include singing, dancing, and making sure her costume doesn’t fall off.

Sophia Dempsey is a veteran of three NaNoWriMos, twice winner of the senior high school poetry competition, and likes to indulge in Facebook conversations that look like philosophy students got drunk on metaphor.

Stevie Greeks is an Expressive Arts student, who believes in the power of the written word to start important discussions.

Tobias Nash is a writer and student whose acting experience comes mostly from school plays, helping out with university projects and pretending to be interested in other people’s opinions, but he’s keen to broaden his horizons and try something new.

Summer Scholarship win for Leleiga’s Safety Communication Project

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Congratulations to Bachelor of Communication Honours student Leleiga Taito who has won a second award for her potentially life-saving Mt Ruapehu safety communication research. In January, Leleiga received an award from GNS Science to conduct research into safety communication on Mt Ruapehu. Now, Leleiga has received a Summer Scholarship to work with Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley over Summer in order to produce creative digital research outputs from her Mt Ruapehu ethnographic video data.

Leleiga has just spent three months living in Whakapapa Village on Mt Ruapehu gathering written and audiovisual ethnographic field data about safety culture – you can see her fantastic blog about her experiences here: http://www.esocsci.org.nz/social-science-snow-and-safety-communications-why-do-people-ignore-safety-warnings-guest-blogger-leleiga-taito/

Over Summer Leleiga will be busy in post-production, editing and finalising film footage so as to make her research findings easy to share with others, and spread the word in creative ways about mountain safety communication. The 2-minute sample of raw video footage posted with this blog shows a real-time view of just one ski slope during a lahar warning test – the video shows that many people don’t move out of the way and, had the test been real, could have been in the path of a boiling river of mud, water and rocks with the viscosity of wet concrete, moving at up to 65 kilometers per hour down the valleys of the mountain and destroying everything in its path.

Leleiga’s field work aims to crack the puzzle of why people don’t move quickly when the warning sounds, or why some move into the valley floor instead of to higher ground, so that the effectiveness of mountain safety communication can be improved. Her research is part of a broader collaboration between the School of English & Media Studies and Massey’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research on disaster safety communication, and was funded by a scholarship from GNS Science. Her Summer Scholarship is funded by Massey’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Leleiga’s research is innovative and transdisciplinary, looking at safety research from new angles to add to our existing understanding. She is supervised by the cross-disciplinary team of Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley (School of English & Media Studies) and Dr Mimi Hodis (School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing).

See more about the project at:

Skitrip yields important safety information

Leleiga’s first scholarship win

Ruapehu on the radio