The curtain closes on another successful Festival.

Thank you for all your support with the 2020 Harcourt Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival.

This year’s ambition was to present a festival programme that reflects and celebrates the best of our local and national arts community. To represent more of our cultural diversity in Aotearoa and more specifically Heretaunga and to challenge and inspire our audiences with great theatre, music, dance, multidisciplinary work and literature alongside some stunning visual art offerings.  To start conversations through presentation of more challenging works and a call to unite in our diversity in these difficult times globally or locally.  And we also sought to entertain and celebrate New Zealand artists and bringing new audiences to Toitoi, the Hawke’s Bay Arts and Events Centre and the festival at large.

This festival delivered in spades! We brought many of our existing audiences with us and through careful programming attracted many new, more diverse audiences sitting shoulder to shoulder, Pakihiwi Ki Te Pakihiwi at our events, creating a sense of coming together as a community, standing next to each other with open minds and hearts.

 The feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive from audiences both new and old in a year where planning was difficult, outcomes for the most part unpredictable and the delivery of shows uncertain until show time.

  “We set out to deliver a festival during a global pandemic to first and foremost support our artists and offer our community a reason to come together and celebrate live arts in all its forms. It has also been a great opportunity to move most of our programme to Hastings and feature fantastic local artists, alongside an amazing line-up of New Zealand performers in the world class venue that is the Hawke’s Bay Opera House.“ Pitsch Leiser, Festival Director