We the Young

Built in a year

We The Young is a children's arts festival run by Auckland Live, the performing-arts arm of Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, the council-controlled organisation that operates Auckland's civic venues. It is aimed squarely at tamariki aged from birth to twelve and at the families who bring them, and it is very new. The first edition ran in 2025 and, by the organisers' own count, drew more than 10,000 people into the central city. On 4 August 2026 Auckland Live confirmed a second edition, running from Friday 25 September to Sunday 11 October 2026.

Daniel Clarke, Auckland Live's director, framed the return in plain terms. The festival, he said, invites tamariki and their whānau to explore, create and discover together through extraordinary shared experiences. That is the whole proposition. This is not a franchise of a touring product, nor a one-off attached to a single company. It is a city venue operator using its own buildings, and the square outside them, to programme work for an audience that most of those buildings rarely serve during the rest of the year.

Growth between the two editions is measured in reach rather than in headline names. The 2026 programme runs to more than 25 performances, events and experiences, and Auckland Live states that more than half of them cost nothing to attend. The mix leans towards New Zealand-made work, with a small number of international guests placed in the larger rooms.

Five rooms and a square

The festival occupies a compact patch of the central city. The Aotea Centre, whose Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre is the biggest room in the programme, and the Auckland Town Hall take the ticketed theatre and music shows. Aotea Square, the open space between them, becomes Out There in the Square, a free outdoor playground of installations, workshops, games and music-making that runs alongside the indoor programme. Auckland Central City Library and the New Zealand Maritime Museum extend the footprint beyond the theatre district and give the festival rooms that are not stages.

In practice that means a family can move between paid and free activity on foot in a single afternoon, which is the point of building the festival around a square rather than a single theatre. The 2025 attendance figure of more than 10,000 reflects that design as much as any individual show. Much of that number will have come from people wandering into Aotea Square rather than buying a seat.

What is on in 2026

The international guests are two. Mario the Maker Magician brings a show that mixes do-it-yourself robots, magic and vaudeville, pitched at children who like to see how things are made as much as what they do. Patch Theatre, from Australia, brings Wonderverse, an immersive journey through light and sound for younger children, the sort of work in which the audience walks through the piece rather than watching it from rows.

The New Zealand strand is broader. Suzy Cato, one of the country's best-known children's entertainers, performs Suzy Cato's Animal Antics with a band, built on singalongs, percussion and audience participation. Kitchen Chaos deals in magic, mayhem and slapstick. Motuhake is a physical-theatre adventure. Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi is a circus production performed in te reo Māori. Bundle Baby is theatre for the very smallest audience members. The Girl Whose Twin Was a Bird combines puppetry and storytelling, and Betsy Balloon and the Very Great Terrible Flood is a family fable.

Two participatory pieces sit alongside the shows. The Kids' Election, by Barbarian Productions, is a free interactive experience about how democracy works, run for children rather than about them. The Imaginarium is a sensory experience made by disabled and non-disabled artists together. It appeared in 2025 and has been expanded to two days for 2026, one of the clearest signs of what the first year taught the programmers about demand.

The free half

The free programme is not an afterthought bolted onto the ticketed one. Out There in the Square runs through the festival, and a series of free Sunday Sessions presents children's musicians including Spellodies, the 95bFM Kids Show Live and The Stink Bug Band. The Stand Up Stand Out finals put emerging young musicians and dancers on a festival stage in front of a public audience, which for most of them will be the largest crowd they have played to.

Auckland's deputy mayor, Desley Simpson, made the civic case directly in the launch announcement. With so many free and affordable events across the city centre, she said, the festival makes it extra easy for tamariki and whānau to discover something new together. That framing, a festival as a reason to bring children into the city centre, is consistent with the venues chosen and with the decision to put more than half of the programme outside the box office.

Access as part of the brief

For an audience that runs from newborns to twelve-year-olds, access provision decides who can actually attend. The 2026 programme includes relaxed performances, in which house lights, sound levels and the usual rules about sitting still are loosened. Several works are language-free, which serves both very young children and families for whom English is not the home language. Selected performances are audio-described and interpreted in New Zealand Sign Language.

The Imaginarium, made with disabled artists and expanded for this edition, belongs in the same column. Taken together these are not add-ons to a mainstream programme but part of how the festival defines its audience, and they are listed in the launch material with the same prominence as the headline shows.

Where it stands now, and a name to watch out for

As of the launch announcement of 4 August 2026, ticketed sessions are on sale through Auckland Live's own website, with the festival opening on 25 September. Because the 2026 edition has not yet opened, there are no reviews of the current shows to draw on, and the announcement does not publish running times or ticket prices for individual productions. Those details should be checked against the listing for each show rather than assumed.

Anyone searching for the festival should also know that the name is shared. Songkick lists a separate act called We the Young whose past dates were in Winterthur and Zürich, a Swiss music group with no connection to Auckland. Search engines also tend to return the Las Vegas rock festival When We Were Young for the same query. The Auckland event is the one presented by Auckland Live at the Aotea Centre and its neighbouring venues, and it is a children's arts festival rather than a band.