There are now 14 days until AK03, Auckland's long-awaited, much-anticipated Festival, finally becomes a reality. Check them out at www.ak03.co.nzThere are now 14 days until AK03, Auckland's long-awaited, much-anticipated Festival, finally becomes a reality. Check them out at www.ak03.co.nzOpening Weekend
The Festival opens on Saturday, 20 September, with the Visual Feasts Free Weekend seeing Queen Street closed from Wellesley Street to the Town Hall, and traffic replaced by graffiti art, interactive sculpture, a sculpture symposium, markets, sculpture John Radford's Transplastic, a giant video screen, and installations and performances of Bright Future, Interdigitate, Aquarium, and Luminarium's immersive art experience in Aotea Square. The Saturday closes with a dance party from 9.00pm to 1.00am.

Opening weekend shows include the stickytape, lights and explosions of Sticky at Britomart Place, Taipei Ballet's Lady of the Camillias at The Civic, the joining of the NZSO and APO for the specially commissioned Twin Peaks at the Great Hall, Don McGlashan and friends in concert at the St James Theatre, and MAU's Paradise at Skycity Theatre.

14, 13, 12, 11, 10, -
The next two weeks see Sticky and Luminarium make their way to Auckland from the UK, Canadian troupe Barrage head South for the first time (with New Zealander Jessica Hindin sure to be first out of the plane), Twin Peaks and Michael Hurst's Aladdin entering rehearsals, and New Zealands major theatre companies preparing to converge on Auckland for the AK03 Theatre Programme.

The future
Amidst all this activity, Prast also found time for a mad-dash visit to perhaps the world's most famous and successful Festival. "Every August, Edinburgh plays host to a vast multitude of artists and audiences from around the world. It's now a tradition, an arts mecca: the 'mother-of-all-festivals. I was keen to view potential programming for AK05, but also to experience first-hand the energy, organisation and controlled chaos that is a big Festival in full swing."

And Prast says Edinburgh didn't disappoint. " It's an astonishingly beautiful city and the place was pumping: a real sense of excitement and anticipation in the air, with people poring over programmes, trying to schedule in as much in as they could. And they were also spending plenty of money in shops and restaurants throughout the city. At times, you could get quite giddy as one audience streamed out of an auditorium right through another queuing to get in. I was fascinated to observe it's actually a conglomeration of 5 separate stand alone Festivals: the International, the Fringe, the Book, the Film and the Television and Video. But apparently they all worked together in a seamless way! Plenty of inspiration and food for thought for us in Auckland."