Auckland Festival a challenge

The race is on to come up with sponsors and a programme for the first Auckland Festival, reports arts editor LINDA HERRICK.

The directors of the first Auckland Festival have a daunting task ahead of them: they've finally fixed a launch date but they have less than a year to find a range of sponsors, let alone programme the three-week event, which will open on Auckland Anniversary weekend next January.

Sandwiched between the Louis Vuitton Challenger series, and the America's Cup races, the festival aims to provide some alternative to all that yachting fever.

It's a challenge, agrees artistic co-director Mike Mizrahi, who shares the job with Inside Out Productions partner Marie Adams, "but the last time the America's Cup was in Auckland it was a little bit culturally embarrassing. There was nothing on."

Mizrahi and Adams will be helped along by Renato Rispoli, who has been brought over from Sydney as the festival's executive director. Rispoli has more than 20 years' experience in festival and event management, and he worked with Baz Luhrman setting up Fox Studios' $7.25 million City Live venue. He was also entertainment director at the Sydney Olympic Village and Director Carnivale at the Festival of Sydney during the 90s.

The rescheduling of the festival from March 2003, as originally planned, to January, was vital for the goal of longevity, he says.

"The long-term benefit is finding the right period of time. Auckland is best poised to be having a festival which doesn't conflict with any other event. If we launch it on Anniversary Day, it's still school holidays yet most people are back at work and looking for things to do."

He points to the example of the Sydney Festival, which runs in January and has become a huge event in the city's calendar, for business as well as culture. "The commercial sector started it up 24 years ago as the Warratah Festival to try to invigorate the economy."

Mizrahi and Adams are aware there are sceptics who might claim there is already a biennial international festival which is doing very nicely in Wellington, but they feel Auckland's time has come. "Our main passion is contemporary performance," says Mizrahi, who co-produced the magnificent if soggy This Is It millennium celebrations in the Domain. "We are looking at warehouse spaces around the central city and we will use consultants in the field, people we trust in their own field of expertise. And we want to make the city look and feel different during the festival so you know there's a festival on."

The council is fronting up with half a million dollars in funds for this year, and $550,000 in 2003, which is small change in festival-budget terms; the race is on to seek sponsors and, as Mizrahi puts it, "We are going to work our butts off - we need money and a programme."

Watch this space for programming news.

Auckland Festival