Jean Teng

Kate Low is an actor and producer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, originally from the heart of the South Island, Timaru. She developed a love of theatre as a child through holiday programs, community theater shows and basically as much theatre as she could get her hands on. That love carried her all the way to New York to study at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Atlantic Acting school.

If you’re here you already know that The Big Idea is a national website for the arts sector with jobs, opportunities, events, and stories. The first three are self-explanatory, but the fourth, stories… well what, and whose, stories exactly? I’m here to give you a little peek into the way we do things so that you can navigate our editorial content like an expert. The arts sector is a broad brushstroke – you might even say there’s sectors within that, for example the literary sector.

Shakespeare’s work might have been around for four centuries, embedded in the Western canon with no signs of being dethroned but keeping a theatre company that focuses on his work around is no easy feat. The success of festivals like Auckland’s Summer Shakespeare and companies like the Pop-Up Globe show that the demand from audiences for the bard to end all bards is real, but survival isn’t quite as easy.