THE CULTURAL PROGRAMME

Te Ao Hou, June 1961, Page 11

THE CULTURAL PROGRAMME The cultural part of our programme was the furthest removed from the past experience of the Punaruku children, and therefore the most challenging. Our cultural programme was ambitious, from the viewpoint that the school tour would, for most of our children, provide the only opportunity for cultural experiences such as the Auckland Festival offers. Furthermore it was hard to prepare the children fully for all the functions because the final festival timetable did not get printed until the very end of the first term, and the full programme, which provided essential background for teaching, came later still. Here is the list of things we saw and heard: Stage Struck, one of the films shown by the Auckland Festival Society; A chamber-music concert by the New Zealand Wind Quintet; Brief visit to the Auckland Art Gallery; The Waters of Kidron, a play by J. A. S. Coppard, produced for the Festival Society by John Thomson; School Concert of the National Orchestra; Madame Butterfly, presented by the New Zealand Opera Company; Visit to an exhibition of paintings entitled “Life in New Zealand”, at the Society of Arts rooms. In these arrangements we were given wonderful help by the Festival organisers, who also arranged concession prices. Apart from Madame Butterfly, for which only 15 seats were booked, we took our whole group to all these occasions. Those who did not go to Madame Butterfly were taken to the Cinerama, a contrivance none of the children had seen before.