5 February, 2026

Arts groups give youth a chance with creative outreach schemes

Depot Artspace and the Rose Centre are starting their 2026 programming with a focus on encouraging young talent and reaching new audiences. Here’s a taste of what’s ahead

Lily Eketone at the Depot in Clarence St, where she works and wants to welcome and support more rangatahi

Depot gallery assistant Lily Eketone is eager to ignite a collaborative spark for young artists living on the Devonport peninsula and the wider North Shore.
“Being a creative wasn’t really a pathway that was clear for me,” she says. But she hopes to make that goal more achievable for others, with skills gained from her own journey.
Lily, 25, pitched the idea of starting a Young Artists Night at the Depot last year. On 13 February the first free evening, Young Artists: Jam Night, will be held at the Devonport venue in Clarence St. The event has a music theme, with Depot Sound’s engineer Nate Selway coming along and young musos welcome to bring their instruments and enjoy nibbles.
“He’s someone in the industry who is our age,” says Lily. Her idea is that themed sessions will help interested young people – primarily school-leavers transitioning to study and those in their twenties – to come along, meet each other and connect with more established arts community members.
“I’m hoping they will start their own cohort,” she says.
Later themed evenings will focus on visual arts, dance, performance or spoken word.
Depot director Amy Saunders was enthusiastic about backing the dynamic outreach to embrace the next generation of creative talent. It fits in with Depot’s dual role of being both an arts and sound hub and offering training opportunities.
Up the road at the Rose Centre in Belmont, the board is beginning its own Artreach at the community centre and theatre, with a programme getting under way this month to stage the first in a series of supported theatre shows.
The Rose Centre’s community co-ordinator, Abby Jones, says Artreach is designed to encourage young talent and greater diversity in programming, with the board allocating funds to help share costs and expertise for newcomers putting on performances.
The first show to be assisted to the stage, Countdown to Midnight, gets under way this week. (See story on facing page).

Back at the Depot, Lily, who began working there a year ago, was chuffed when Saunders allowed her to lead on the best use of its front space, dubbed the lounge, as a community-based but youth-focused area. The small room to the side of the main entrance is the ideal spot in which to show the work of emerging artists, who may not be ready for a full-scale exhibition in the main gallery or at the Depot’s offshoot at 3Victoria Rd. It can also used as a collaborative work space.
At 3Vic Rd, collaboration is also working upstairs from the gallery and shop, where more established artists hire studios.
Lily’s vision is for more people to feel comfortable coming into creative spaces. “If for myself, I had a community when I was younger, I would have loved it,” she says.
“The Depot has a really big collective of cool people to pull from.”
She envisages drawing on this to get experts in for informal talks to inspire rangatahi.
Originally from Northland, Lily moved to Auckland to do a BA in visual arts at AUT, focusing on painting and printing. Initially a product of one of the Depot’s Arts Lab creative careers courses, she is now well-placed and passionate about advocating for the arts.
A curatorial internship she undertook last year at Māoriland, a creative hub in Ōtaki, has encouraged other plans, such as bringing together a show of work, including her own, by wāhine Māori for the Depot mid-year.
But first up is Young Artists Night, of which four are planned in 2026, starting from 5-7pm on 13 February. (For numbers, those interested in attending are asked to RSVP on Humanitix, with details about the event at www.depot.org.nz.)

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Student director aims for young audience

Ear for it… Young director Aedan Ward workshops the script of his upcoming play with actor Casey Roberts

Film student Aedan Ward is staging an original play at the Rose Centre this week, with a horror twist he hopes will engage young adult audiences more with theatre.
Drawing on his background in drama, he is also working with other like-minded former students from Takapuna Grammar School on the production, called Countdown to Midnight.
Ward, 20, back home in Narrow Neck over the break from his studies at Massey University in Wellington, is directing the play he wrote for its four-night run at the centre in Belmont.
While a senior at TGS, Aedan – with fellow student Tom Talbot, who is now studying music at the University of Auckland – collaborated on Golden Screens, a musical comedy also staged at the community theatre. Tom is again creating music. The production is backed by ArtReach, a Rose Centre initiative that helps share costs.
Aedan said he got the idea for the play, the first he has directed, from watching a disconcerting Devonport Drama production. “I wanted to make a show that felt that way.” He immediately began jotting down ideas, based on four critters and creating a growing sense of unease. The result was a 50-page script, aided by Tom’s atmospheric music.
The characters – including two mice living in a mouse hole and two insects – appear to have an idyllic life, says Aedan: “That night one of them disappears, like others before them did.”
But this time, a character returns and the horror unfolds. “I want the audience to forget that’s a bunch of animals in costume.”
Hulking props ramp up the visual impact, along with costumes created by a friend with experience in cosplay. The producer is another former TGS talent, Edie Lane, who is involved in AUT’s Stray Theatre Company and was stage manager for Golden Screens. Actors are four creative friends, including Freya Said from Devonport and Emre Logan-Erdi, who lives in Hauraki.
Aedan says he wanted to make a thought-provoking play that would resonate with his age group. “Most of the theatre isn’t for us, it’s for older people.”
Although Aedan is about to start his third year of film studies, longer-term it is the stage he is most drawn to, with work on the West End an ultimate aim.

• Countdown to Midnight, Jan 29-31 at the Rose Centre in Belmont, tickets $15. Door sales, or book at iticket.co.nz.