Sparks Of Light: Lola Veronica, Wildcards Aotearoa - David Eggleton...

A dynamic night of poetry and music with two acts coming together for one night only in Ōtautahi!

Wild Cards Aotearoa, based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, are former Poet Laureate David Eggleton, with guitarist and vocalist Richard Wallis, and percussionist and bassist Hiliako Iaheto (of the award-winning Pasifika reggae band 'Koile). Together, Wild Cards Aotearoa provide a cultural and political vision of Aotearoa New Zealand's contemporary place in the South Pacific – Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – which is at once local and yet not quite recognisable or predictable. This is a cabaret presentation that's lyrical and satirical, comical and fantastic – and totally up to the minute. David Eggleton is a jazz-bop-beatnik poet whose poems never cease to amaze and astound, a a freestyling op-shop surrealist and fairground carnival barker, rhyming to a rhythmic beat.

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Lola Veronica's style blends the intensity of spoken-word poetry with the immediacy of music and song. Her original compositions feature fingerstyle guitar and voice, intertwining themes of language, climate, and personal experience. She moved aboard a sailboat before she could crawl, and was raised among natural landscapes of our world. With a life immersed in vast seascapes and dramatically shifting weather, Lola Veronica grew up acutely aware of the climate crisis, and the place of humanity in our natural world, both borderless and fragile. She brings this experience to her creative work, her activism, and her research in music composition, working in bioacoustics and climate change. Her music and poetry seeks to tether the abstract to the personal. And with occasional surprising takes on the Nine Inch Nails, Regina Spektor, and Warren Zevon, you are in for an evening of surprises.

'Lola is a wonder - a talent on fire!' - Mike Chunn