Tempo Dance Festival

A council-era initiative that outlasted everything around it

Tempo's lineage begins not with Tempo but with the Auckland Dance Festival, which ran from 2000 to 2002 as a project of the Northern Dance Network. In 2003 that event was rebuilt and renamed, established by the Northern Dance Network together with the New Zealand Dance Festival Trust, and it has run annually since — the longest standing annual dance event in the country.

The founding brief was plain enough: bring dance in all its forms to Auckland and promote the talents of artists coming up. That double purpose — a professional shop window and a development ladder in the same building — has shaped the programming ever since, and it is why Tempo has never settled into a single genre. Contemporary work, hip hop crews, ballet, Pasifika performance, screendance and site-specific pieces have all shared the same fortnight.

The money has come from Creative New Zealand, Foundation North and Auckland Council, with a Boosted donation campaign running alongside the 2026 edition.

Five artistic directors and a development ladder

The festival has been handed on repeatedly rather than built around one person. Sonja Bright led it from 2000 to 2004, covering both the Auckland Dance Festival years and Tempo's first editions. Mary Jane O'Reilly took it from 2006 to 2011, Celia Walmsley from 2012 to 2014, Carrie Rae Cunningham from 2015 to 2018, and Cat Ruka was appointed in February 2019 and stayed to the end of 2020.

Underneath the headline programme sit the strands that do the slower work: Secondary Colours for school-age dancers, a Tertiary Improvisation Showcase, and Bloom — formerly Fresh — for emerging choreographers and for established ones changing direction. In 2011 the festival added Tuakana, a Māori contemporary showcase. The tenth-anniversary gala in 2013 ran 34 separate performances.

The roll of artists who have passed through is effectively a map of the local field: Douglas Wright, Michael Parmenter, Atamira Dance Company, Ōkāreka Dance Company, Malia Johnston, Footnote New Zealand Dance, The New Zealand Dance Company, and Parris Goebel with the Palace Dance Studio crews.

The disrupted years, and the rebuild

Ruka's 2019 edition ran from 2 to 12 October and put Parris Goebel, Bianca Hyslop and Rowan Pierce at the front of the programme. The opening night in Q Theatre's Rangatira sold out: Hyslop and Pierce's Pōhutu used the Rotorua geyser as a metaphor for the destructive progress of Alzheimer's disease, and reviewing it for the New Zealand Herald on 7 October 2019, Raewyn Whyte described the two performers as phenomenally well-matched and noted the standing ovation. The same bill carried a festival commission, Dances with Aldous, in which three choreographers responded to the musician Aldous Harding.

Then the floor dropped out. The 2020 festival moved entirely online as #GoingDigital. By August 2022 Tempo was still assembling itself from fragments — a press release on 25 August that year announced free dance-film installations with live elements at Studio One Toi Tū on 27 and 28 August, from Nalia Wilde, Holly Finch, Suzanne Cowan, Amber Liberté and Dance Plant Collective, alongside Choreographer 12 by Kristian Larsen and Forest V Kapo at the Auckland Old Folks Association, a trans-Tasman collaboration framed as a remembrance of dances not yet made.

The recovery landed properly in 2024. The 24th iteration ran from 10 to 20 October, programmed by guest curator Moss Te Ururangi Patterson under the theme Whenua Wāhi: Stories of Land & Place, and was the festival's biggest live programme since the end of COVID restrictions: 12 live shows and more than 15 artists and companies, including the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Atamira, the Australian company Marrugeku and The New Zealand Dance Company, opening with a pōwhiri. Writing in Theatreview, Lexie Matheson ONZM called it an eclectic selection of works with wide appeal and many different audiences; the reviewer Andrew Whiteside's verdict on the dancing itself was one word — perfection.

Where Tempo stands in October 2026

The festival is now run by Zanetti, who holds the artistic director and festival producer roles and uses they/them. Zanetti's framing for the 25th edition, in the announcement issued on 19 August 2026, was that dance and being in the body is an antidote to the present moment, and that the point of the week is the choreographers already working here.

The scale is the largest claim the festival has made since the pandemic: 27 activations and more than 160 artists across six days, 13 to 18 October 2026, with pre-festival events starting on 9 October. Roughly a third of the programme is free. By the start of October, with the opening a week and a half away, the festival was reporting that 40 per cent of the ticketed programme was close to or fully sold out.

The venue list is the other measure of how far the festival has spread beyond a theatre foyer. Q Theatre remains the spine, joined by Basement Theatre, the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Objectspace, Academy Cinemas, the Cassette Nine club, Myers Park, Karangahape Road and its car park, Te Puna Creative Hub out in Henderson, and the Karanga-a-Hape and Te Waihorotiu stations on the new city rail line. Ticketing runs through iTicket, with Q's own box office handling the theatre shows.

The 2026 programme in detail

At Q Theatre the week is built from short evening bills, mostly doubling two works together. Rebecca Jensen's Natural Basic and Atamira Dance Company's YMCĀ open on 13 and 14 October, the latter commissioned from Oli Mathiesen as a takatāpui rebirth of the Village People. John "Happyfeet" Vaifale's Off Axis follows on 15 October at 8pm, pushing hip hop freestyle into theatrical form. On 16 October, Deanne Butterworth's When It Is Finished pairs with val smith's GLIMMER, and Touch Compass's WHITE NOISE — made by Alisha McLennan Marler with Jessie McCall from lived experience of disability and motherhood — shares a bill with Oro. Tendrils of Tomorrow plays on 17 October, Kelly Nash's The Room Would Split Open on 17 and 18 October, and the festival closes on the afternoon of 18 October with Honouring A Dance Creative, a tribute to the late Dr Carla Marja van Zon ONZM, whose career shaped arts festivals across the country.

Away from the theatre the programme is deliberately harder to categorise. CONJAH and Auckland Live present DARK!DARK!DARK!, a promenade work that sets dance against live metalcore. MARKING OUT 3 COUNT puts wrestlers and dancers in the same room at Te Puna Creative Hub in Henderson. EXHAUST takes over a Karangahape Road car park, Yunha Jang's Fitting In: Karangahape GGebi works outdoors with community performers, and the New Zealand School of Dance brings SHOWPONY, choreographed by Matte Roffe. Other works include Xin Ji and Alistair Deverick's Body Story 0.25, Wiseman Zekaria Mataiti's 404: Fafa Not Found, Sefa Tunupopo's SEKI, Jessie McCall's Big Low Dream for Footnote New Zealand Dance, and operamoth from Ctenophora Co.

The non-performance half matters to how the week reads. Dreaming With Your Feet offers classes for mixed ability levels, there are screendance programmes at Academy Cinemas and a pre-festival Dance Films of Yesteryear screening of Flashdance, and the Friday night ends at Cassette Nine with bodies: a club night, co-curated with Prowl Productions. Selected performances carry New Zealand Sign Language interpretation, audio description and touch tours.

Tōrua: the work that moves through the city

The piece that best explains what Tempo has become is Tōrua, made by Malia Johnston's company Movement of the Human with Auckland Live and supported by Auckland Council Events. It returns in 2026 after a sold-out 2025 season, running 9 to 11 October around Karanga-a-Hape Station and 16 to 18 October around Te Waihorotiu Station.

It lasts an hour at each location and is free, though tickets are required because every audience member is issued a wireless headset. Those headsets carry a choice between two original scores, one by Eden Mulholland of Ngāti Porou and one by Anna Edgington, so two people walking the same route hear different pieces of music. Audiences gather outside Pitt Street Church on Pitt Street for the first run and inside the Aotea Centre box office for the second, then move through streets, laneways and public space with nine dancers — among them Sefa Tunupopo, Xin Ji, Jemima Matsuda, Ella Williams, Veronica Lyu, Andre Busby, Petronilla Su'a, Montell Nickel and Nate Gascusan — who work the architecture around them and absorb the crowd into the choreography. Accessible route options are offered, and the work is pitched at all ages.