Standing Room Only for Sunday 27 June 2021

12:10  Seniors staying engaged with life through drama

Loneliness we know is a huge issue for many older people, as are losing self-confidence and mobility.

Community drama classes for seniors being held in several Wellington suburbs are encouraging people to get out of their homes and using their imagination.

Voice Arts runs the classes that promote improvisation and imagination, with the support of the city council and Wellington Community Trust.

I have reported on a class held at a Wellington rest home previously on Standing Room Only  - this time I headed to Karori see meet the budding thespians and those who take the class - experienced theatre practitioners Jacquiline Coats and Hillary Norris.

 

12:45 The legend of Maori guide and interpreter, Lucy Takiora Lord 

Lucy "Takiora" Lord  who worked alongside the militia in the Taranaki Land Wars,  helped the government  purchase Māori land in her own tribal area and was guide and interpreter for Major Gustavus Von Tempsky, remains such a contentious figure that many of her iwi still refuse to speak her name.

But one of her direct descendants, actor and now playright Nicola Kāwana, is so fascinated by her great aunt's story and motivations for working on the side of pākeha, she's researched Lucy's story for three decades.

Now she's about to present a play based on the life of her fiercely independent and ambitious forebear.

Kūpapa premieres next month and Nicola hopes it will encourage more stories about overlooked women from New Zealand's past.

 

1:10 At The Movies

 

1:33 Building Southland's artistic capital

A new plan to get Southlanders more excited about and involved in the arts is about to be unleashed on the region.

That's after the Arts Murihiku Charitable Trust succeeded in its application for a grant as part of the Ministry of Culture and Heritage's distribution of money - and it's taken a while to be done - from the government's pandemic related Capability Fund.

The $150,000 the Trust's receiving is modest compared to some of the other successful applicants who've reveived more than 600-thousand dollars.

Becs Amundsen from the Trust tells Lynn Freeman about the plan to 'up the arts ante' in Southland.

 

1:50  Photographer and sculptor Melissa Macleod

When she's not in her studio, Christchurch artist Melissa Macleod can be found foraging coastal flower seeds around New Brighton.

She takes the seeds home and cultivates them in a greenhouse before finding ways to incorporate them into her photography and sculptural work.

Visitors to the most recent Scape Public Art Festival in Christchurch might have experienced her show - 'on an east wind, 144 bags of sea air', where she captured the air in giant plastic containers that visitors walked through.

Melissa is spending most of this year researching and imagining rather than making, after receiving the $30,000 Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation award.

 

2:06 The Laugh Track - Samantha Hannah and Toby Hunter

Almost every comedian has at some stage, made a gag out of their love life or their dating life. Scottish Samantha Hannah is a stand-up comedian, comedy writer, comedy actor, improviser and comms advisor who specialises in 'motivational comedy'.  Sammy to her friends, she's taken it further and made a career out of writing riotously funny comedy out of finding a Kiwi partner on the other side of the globe after travelling to New Zealand to find a husband. Now she's back with the third in her trilogy of motivational comedy, How To Win At Life to perform to actual humans - which she couldn't do in the UK.

 

2:25 Rob McDonald's second novel, The Nancy Business

The intense bullying of a young boy by schoolmates over his love of My Little Pony motivated expat Kiwi Rob McDonald to write his award winning book The Nancys that took out last year's Ngaio Marsh Best First Novel award.

There's now a follow up, Nancy Business, with the same core characters - teenage sleuth Tippy and her partners in detection, her gay uncle Pike and his partner Devon.

They're all fans of the Nancy Drew detective book series.

The story's set in a fictional South Otago town called Riverstone - countryside well known to the Balclutha-born, now Melbourne based author.

It starts with a bombing on the main street, but the amateur detectives believe the police have charged the wrong person with it.

 

 

3:10 Bryan Walpert's musings on middle age

Brass Band to Follow is the name of Bryan Walpert's 4th poetry collection and in it, he's thinking about what it means move into middle age.

The busy professor in creative writing at Massey University in Auckland has also written an award winning novella Late Sonata, short stories and academic books on poetry.

 

2:49 Building recording facilities for Hokianga youth

A recording studio in Hokianga has successfully attracted enough funding on the website, Boosted, to get the process of setting up a new sound desk and studio well on the way.

Eru Wano, Jo Barrett and Taane Thomas are the creative forces behind the Hokianga Recording Studio, which has taken over an old polytechnic studio in Rawene, a little town near Opononi in Northland.

The ambition is to create an educational facility for all rangatahi in the area and provide work for creative professionals. If you'd like to contact Eru and Taane, you can email them at eruwano@xtra.co.nz.

 

3:06 Drama at 3 -