Some daylight remaining.
The Wellington International Festival has started. The opening event, free, outside in Civic Square, was crowded and loud. Community and school choir singers sang, children and adult drummers drummed, lights played on buildings and into the sky. Performances happened in several areas, including a high balcony on one of the buildings. I enjoyed being in the crowd and was pleased to be tall. This what I scribbled on the back of a London Review of Books I was reading on the train taking me home.
The kid in the middle
There was a kid
in the middle
drumming up a storm
playing to the crowd
along with big men
and some women
hitting all kinds of things
rhythmically. Hard.
The kid was having
the best time.
There’ll be more posts on the festival in the next three weeks including, of course, Writers’ Week.
An explanation for non-Wellingtonians: the ball in the sky is a sculpture by Neil Dawson, one of my all-time favourite works of art. And the pyramid and palm shapes are also sculptural works, along and around a pedestrian bridge over a four-lane road. Wellington’s Civic Square is a place of beauty.
And then it got dark.
out there 