Flat City Field Notes is a blog about arts and culture in and around Ōtautahi Christchurch, with an emphasis on performance and live events. It’s not a clearinghouse for reviews of everything that’s being made and produced in the city – and there’s a lot! There are other sites that do that quite well, as well as online gig guides and events portals that will give you consumer advice or tell you if something is entertaining or not.
Instead, this site offers observations from the ground: quick-fire reviews, responses, essays, and long-form criticism from people who know what they are talking about, about things that we find interesting. This includes events and topics that tend to fall outside of regular reviewing; not just performances, but festivals, seasons, competitions, programming, workshops, works in progress, talks, and anything else of note.
You’ll also find some of our reviews republished digitally and in print in The Press.
Contributors
This site is edited by Erin Harrington. She has contributed reviews and cultural criticism to The Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff, The Press / stuff.co.nz, Bulletin, The Physics Room / HAMSTER, Theatreview, Christchurch City Libraries, Art News New Zealand, The Playmarket Annual, RNZ National, BBC5, TV3, rdu98.5, Plains FM, The Conversation, Pop Junctions, Horror Homeroom, a bucketload of podcasts and a range of scholarly publications. Her academic work has been featured everywhere from local community radio to the New York Times. She is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in the English department at the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, where she coordinates the UC / Creative New Zealand Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence programme. She appears regularly as a panelist, moderator, and keynote speaker at festivals and events.
Ruth Oy Har Agnew is a writer and teacher of Chinese and Pākehā descent from Ōtautahi Christchurch. She has written for Theatreview, The Press, Stuff, What’s Up Christchurch, and the Playmarket Annual. Her theatre works have been developed by Proudly Asian Theatre. She is an experienced actor, and currently works supporting young performers as a speech and drama teacher.
Naomi van den Broek is a creative person living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She works as a performing artist (under the name Naomi Ferguson), as well as in arts/educational management. Her specific artistic interests are the intersection of music and theatre, site specific or bespoke performance work, textile art, waste reduction/sustainable making, creative writing, craft and artisan making. She also likes to read, eat, cook, sew, ride her bike and talk.
Steph Walker is a creative producer and programmer with a penchant for festivals, contemporary performance and site-specific work across all artforms. Originally from Ōtautahi Christchurch, she has held roles at the Adelaide Festival and as General Manager & Assistant Director at the Christchurch Arts Festival. She holds her Masters in Arts Management with Distinction from the University of Greenwich (UK), and is previously Head of Programming at Auckland Arts Festival. She is currently Executive Director of WORD Christchurch, the best little words and ideas festival in the world.
Claudia Jardine is a poet and musician, and the author of best-selling poetry collection BITER (AUP, 2023). She holds a Masters in Classics from Te Herenga Waka, where she won the 2020 Alex Scobie Research Prize and a Marsden Grant for Masters scholarship for her thesis on intertextuality in Byzantine historiography. She works in a range of arts management and community engagement roles, tutors creative writing at the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, and is the current host of the monthly cult-favorite event Late Night Poetry Hour.
Sophie Gray is the recipient of an Arts Excellence High Achievers Award from Dame Malvina Major and a graduate of NASDA. She is a member of the pop-music choir The Vocal Collective, a vocalist with the big band Sideline Swing, and is in demand as a standup comedian and event MC. She regularly performs with Showbiz Christchurch, MUSOC, and has toured her cabaret show, “BLUE Experience”, to the Dunedin and Nelson Fringe Festivals. When she’s not performing she works as a learning designer, dotes on her dog (@lady.edith.hound on Instagram).
Lisa Allan is the creative director of Wintergreen Collective. She has an MFA in Theatre Studies from the University of Otago, and an extensive background in creating, teaching, performing and producing theatre. She has worked around the world, and has helped establish opportunities for other creatives (such as co-founding the Nelson Fringe in 2015). She has particular expertise in physical, devised and experimental theatre, and also works as a yoga teacher and reiki practitioner. She and her husband / creative partner Dan were awarded the ‘Nelsonians of the Year in Arts’ award in 2015.
Jordon Jones is a professional technical writer, occasional playwright, and sometime community thespian living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Jordon graduated with a Master of Writing degree (with Distinction) in 2022, which included writing a high-spirited and very queer restoration comedy. Although currently taking a break from the stage for health reasons, you can still read Jordon’s opinions about things in the odd review or in their weekly blog/newsletter Red Pens and Playwriting.
Juanita Hepi (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Mutunga, Moriori, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Wai, Ngāpuhi) is a multidisciplinary storyteller exploring the intersections of race, class, and gender through indigenous storytelling and cross-cultural collaborations. A cornerstone of the arts in Ōtautahi, she produces, writes, directs, performs in, and supports a range of creative projects from large scale productions to intimate performance art. Check out her current work with Te Whare Tapere.
John Armstrong is a writer, researcher and theatre-maker based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. He holds a Master’s in Creative Practice, a Bachelor of Performing Arts and a postgraduate teaching qualification. His research focuses on mask theatre as a training pedagogy and considerations of’representations’ of mental health in theatre. You can find more of his work at the substack Theatre Research NZ.
More contributors to come!
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