Celebrating 15 years
Te Whanganui-a-Tara
Wellington, 2011–2025
Running Since 2011
The Performance Arcade is an acclaimed live art event that attracts 60,000–90,000 people every year to Wellington Waterfront. Every year since 2011 audiences have come for an exciting and diverse programme of works by NZ and International artists, presented within an architectural arrangement of shipping containers.
This innovative space for live art, music and performance presentation offers new encounters between artists and the public. Opening onto the bustling life of the Wellington Waterfront, these sites of encounter engage the public in contemporary art and performance practices outside the familiar constraints of gallery or theatre spaces.
The free admission and waterfront location makes this miniature festival accessible to a broad community, developing empowered audiences and participants in the creative and cultural life of Wellington. Over two weekends every summer, The Performance Arcade becomes a vibrant hub on the waterfront: activating the city, and exposing communities to new ideas and cultural perspectives.
PA2026 Core Concept / Kaupapa
A taura woven through many works in our 2026 programme is that of diaspora - the dispersal of peoples as seeds from their homelands, their journeying across spaces, and arrivals on new shores. Other works examine displacement as something internalised, as a rite of passage, grief, yearning, or personal transformation towards something new.
Haerenga Moana invokes the waka and individual stories that have brought us all to this whenua. Each of these journeys involve processes of separation, transformation, and reconnection. Te Ara Moana, the city's waterfront, holds and guides this kaupapa for all of us from this whenua or travelling through.
In 2026 The Performance Arcade is conceived as a wāhi huihuinga, a site of gathering, ceremony, rites of passage, and regeneration. In this place we will gather to celebrate, ask questions, heal, and reimagine through performance, live music, workshops, artist talks, and whanaungatanga.
The body becomes a vessel for ceremony
The container a meeting house for the future
The artist a navigator through shifting worlds
From Te Kore to Te Ao Marama, from homelands to new lives, from birth to death, we all move through shifting currents that test and teach us. Haerenga Moana invites us to rise with the swell of change, to navigate the unknown, release the past, and find balance within new waters. This kaupapa holds space for artists and communities to journey together, guided by the rhythms of the sea.
Key themes
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Diaspora - the many lines of migration and displacement that these works/artists explore
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Rites of passage - often in three stages: separation, transformation, reconnection
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Moana - the rhythms and open-ness of the ocean currents
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Wāhi huihuinga – meeting points, collective transformation, ceremony, meeting points, discussion, dialogue