CULTURE
ON TOPP When the 2016 earthquake hit, the curators of The Topp Twins exhibition at Palmerston North’s Te Manawa museum couldn’t access the Archives NZ building in Wellington (which held material flagged for inclusion) in time for opening day. Jools, Lynda and their management came to the rescue, lending original photos and material. See them in character as Westies Raylene and Brenda, and posh socialites Prue and Dilly – and in their own skin as cultural icons and political activists – until 29 October.
GO ODBYE, ALPHA
THE FEMALE GAZE
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Wellington artist Emma Lou has won the $5000 IHC Art Award, from nearly 400 entries, with her large, detailed pastel drawing, Emma Lou, with its faces and Cantonese characters. Lou creates art two days a week at Aranui Vocational Service in Kilbirnie, and has done so three days a week at Alpha Studio, a central-city vocational space for intellectuallydisabled adults.
Writer-director Eleanor Bishop, who is currently living between New York and her native Wellington, is having a busy year. Her play about rape culture, Jane Doe, showed at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, and now she’s in town to direct an abridged version of The Taming of The Shrew in the Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ’s triple-bill National Shakespeare Schools Production, at Mac’s Function Centre (7 October) and Wellington Zoo (8 October). Bishop has a BATS/Creative NZ STAB Commission for her show about female pleasure, Body Double in November.
To the shock of some, younger Capital staffers had never heard of the Moody Blues: the English rock band that pioneered ‘prog rock’. The three remaining ‘MBs’ still perform together occasionally, but vocalist Justin Hayward more often performs Moody Blues songs with two other musicians. Why is Hayward coming down under this month (Michael Fowler Centre, 14 October)? Waikanae-based concert promoter Tricia Macpherson worked with him 50 years ago in London as a recording engineer. ‘So this is an anniversary.’
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