CubaDupa Street Festival 2016

Wellington hosted its first CubaDupa festival in March 2015. It was a fantastic festival with over 800 artists providing 200 performances to an audience of 100,000. The crowds loved it, really joining in and embracing the spirit of CubaDupa in true Wellingtonian style.

The next CubaDupa is on Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 March 2016. We are fundraising to build on the success of 2015.

To stage the best possible CubaDupa we need your support. If everyone pitches in and Gives-a-Little, the future of CubaDupa will be secure.

A lot of unpaid hours go into making CubaDupa happen, but we want to honour the professionalism and expertise of our extraordinary artists and pay them what they are worth.

We have unleashed the creative juices of our creative community and we need your donation to help us bring their magical ideas to fruition in 2016.

Here is a taste of some of the projects we would like to bring to life in March 2016...

THE MASS CUBA STREET ORCHESTRA

The Massive Cuba St. Orchestra will return with three fantastic guest singers including King Kapisi, TK Mara and Lisa Tomlins, who have written songs celebrating Wellington - especially for CubaDuba! Honorary Wellingtonian and musical wizard Adam Page will be arranging and conducting the songs for 24 members of Orchestra Wellington and we will be invited to learn their songs during the day and join them for a grand performance on the Sat evening. This is world-class music taking to the streets!

LADY BUG OPERA

Giant stilt-dancing Ladybugs will weave a sensational fairytale around the soaring operatic vocals of soprano Stephanie Acraman. This uplifting, roving opera presented by Empress Stiltdance fills the streets with a type of elegant fantasy to delight the whole family. The larger than life bugs really come to life at night when the solar powered light costumes create a twinkling evening show to weave magic of dance and opera together beneath the stars.

DUETA DUPA!

CubaDupa and will commission duets from leading New Zealand choreographers and companies based in Wellington: Footnote NZ Dance, Malia Johnston, Java Dance to create 4 very unique site specific dance duets. The project will work in conjunction with Marcus McShane’s musical project NAG - set to a soundtrack on a gramophone and entirely powered by vintage racing bicycles where audience members will be invited to power the music for the duets as top notch professional dancers cavort on a specially built small stage.

STREET PARADES

Joining us for 2016 we are excited to welcome Taiko Japanese Drummers to parade through the streets, while Batucada groups from across NZ and Australia will be returning to battle it out for the most impressive costumes and performances filling the streets with Latin beats to get people dancing in the streets.

Spread the word, ask your family, friends, colleagues to Give-a-Little. With everyone’s support CubaDupa will be the most extraordinary creative inner city celebration in New Zealand.