Country singer tops festival bill

Lyle Lovett, country music star and former husband of actress Julia Roberts, will perform at the International Arts Festival in Wellington next year.

Announcing his inclusion in the event before the programme launch in Wellington last night, festival artistic director Carla van Zon said she had been trying for three years to persuade Lovett to come to New Zealand.

She described the four-time Grammy Award-winning singer, who also stars in movies such as The Player and Short Cuts, as iconic and idiosyncratic - a performer who "did things his own way".

Lovett is to perform one concert on March 10 at Wellington Town Hall, which has a capacity of 1550.

Van Zon also announced that the award-winning production The Blue Planet Live! would be staged at the Westpac Stadium during the festival, in February and March.

It is based on a BBC nature documentary by Sir David Attenborough and will feature George Fenton's Bafta and Emmy Award-winning score played live by the Wellington Sinfonia, with footage from The Blue Planet projected on to giant screens.

The projected footage includes scenes of blue whales, spinning dolphins, previously undiscovered species and attacking sharks.

The show will be performed on March 5 and 6, featuring the Orpheus Choir, Orpheus Youth Chorus and several soloists. Because three big screens will be erected in the stands, crowd capacity each night will be reduced to 18,000.

Peter Hayden, from Dunedin's Natural History Unit, will be the narrator.

Other festival highlights include:

Black Grace. Auckland choreographer Neil Ieremia's company will perform its festival programme at the Holland Dance Festival and Perth Festival before the Wellington season. The ensemble features female dancers for the first time in this production.

Foi: Les Ballets C de la B. This Belgian dance company caused a sensation at the 2000 festival with its avant garde yet moving work Iets op Bach. In Foi (Faith), choreographer Sidi Larbi-Cherkaoui has created a medieval/contemporary dance opera on the themes of conflict and companionship.

The Junebug Symphony. A surreal children's show created by James Thierree, son of Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thierree, whose Le Cercle Invisible is one of the best-remembered shows of the 1998 festival. Circus practitioners combine slapstick, acrobatics and mime.

12 Angry Men. The hit show at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 12 Angry Men is a reworking of Reginald Rose's award-winning play by the creators of television comedy series Black Books. Director Guy Masterson has brought together a cast of 12 stand-up comedians to tell the story of a jury split 11-1 over the guilt of a man accused of manslaughter.

The Elixir Of Love. L'elisir d'amore, by Gaetano Donizetti, breaks ground for the festival opera by being a comedy, rather than a drama or tragedy. Director Daniel Slater has dragged the 1832 opera about a shy man's competition against a dashing Army officer for the love for a beautiful woman into the 1970s. Canadian soprano Rebecca Caine, American tenor Richard Troxell, Italian tenor Riccardo Novaro and New Zealand baritone Paul Whelan star. Dallas Opera music director Graeme Jenkins conducts the NZSO.

Stabat Mater. Choral and orchestral work by Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, featuring the NZSO conducted by German George Alexander Albrecht, with soprano Margaret Medlyn, mezzo soprano Elizabeth Campbell, tenor Patrick Power, baritone Sergei Leiferkus, the New Zealand Youth Choir and the Orpheus Choir.

Tan Dun. Tan Dun is one of the world's leading composers and the man behind the music for movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He returns to the capital to conduct the NZSO in a concert featuring his Concerto for Water Percussion and orchestra.

Abdullah Ibrahim. Abdullah Ibrahim left South Africa to further his musical career, and from his American base became regarded as one of the great jazz pianists. Once more resident in South Africa, Ibrahim retains his reputation as an articulate musician and an articulate political voice.

Cookin'. Riotous Korean show where four crazed cooks go mad in the kitchen. Melds percussion, physical theatre, gymnastics and cabaret.

Writers And Readers Week. Features a range of local and international authors. Overseas guests include Aussie raconteur Clive James, US writer Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day), US poet Mark Doty, US journalist and writer Eliot Weinberger, and British historical writer Jenny Uglow.

Rosalie Gascoigne. The City Gallery hosts the first major local exhibition surveying the career of New Zealand-born artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-99).

- NZPA