Fun, funky finally coming

It's back ... Auckland is planning a festival of the arts to knock people's socks off. DITA DE BONI talks to the man masterminding the programme.

The contract's signed, and the slash-and-burn pairing of Sir William Birch and maverick Auckland Mayor John Banks can't touch it.

The Auckland City Council's arts funding, vulnerable and quivering under the duo's flint-eyed gaze, has one rock-solid hold-out: almost $1 million, signed, sealed and delivered to a charitable trust to help to finance Auckland's arts festival early next year.

The festival will not - despite claims to the contrary - be Auckland's first. The city held arts festivals between 1947 and 1961, a precursor to the the Australian and Wellington festivals and, at the time, a rarity in the British Commonwealth.

Renato Rispoli, next year's Auckland festival's newly appointed executive director, says he was "surprised" that a city the size and style of Auckland had not staged an arts festival in recent times.

How bombastic the festival turns out to be will depend largely on the additional funding Rispoli can squeeze out of corporate sponsors between now and next year's Auckland Anniversary Day when the event is due to kick off.

He estimates he will need between $4 million and $6 million to put on the kind of festival he feels the city needs.

While the lack of a local major arts event has long irked aficionados and artists alike, it took a feasibility study in February 2000 to prompt the Auckland City Council's Attractions Committee into action, declaring it would part-sponsor a "unique arts and cultural festival celebrating Auckland's place in the Pacific."

And now, says Rispoli, comes the hard part. "A festival such as the one we want to create will only work if the private sector embraces what we are trying to achieve and puts its hand up to accept some of the responsibility in making it happen."

It is the same story many of Auckland's other cash-strapped cultural events organisers could tell, no doubt.

Rispoli's offices near the Auckland police station are spartan, to say the least. He's starting from scratch.

He's a plain-talking Australian, with a history of festival management experience in his homeland, which counts for a lot but, one can't help thinking, may also ruffle the feathers of the highly politicised, highly sensitive arts scene in this country.

He probably will, he reckons. "But I think that's part of a festival's job, to be honest, to be [an] agent provocateur, [a] catalyst. The reality is that most established companies survive on a combination of patronage, box office, subscribers and probably a funding authority. And because of that they've got to stick to guidelines that are tried and true, proven to generate income.

"But what a festival does is give a company the opportunity to go outside the parameters and take some creative risks with new projects - a festival is not about putting on something you could see during the course of the year."

Neither sponsors nor acts are pinned down. But Rispoli, fresh from sampling the recent 27th annual Sydney Arts Festival, has some ideas. This year, Sydney's festival took a different direction - less classical, more contemporary - and Rispoli is impressed.

Sydney-featured acts such as The Flood Drummers (an improbable fusion of French and other European theatrical styles alongside the traditions of Japanese Kabuki, Japanese Bunraku puppetry, Chinese Opera and Shakespearean theatre) gets his big tick, as does Kayassine, a spectacular mid-air trapeze ballet which the audience watched reclining in deck chairs.

Another act of the sort Rispoli approves is The Celestial Bells, a free event which featured an enormous chandelier suspended above the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, filled with performing musicians and aerial artists illuminated like Christmas decorations.

Historic buildings were lit up with coloured lights to create another free, fanciful work, Neon Colonial. On average, 20,000 people a night attended one or other Sydney Festival event, a record for both attendance and box-office takings.

Picking up on the successes of Sydney, Rispoli is keen to add "visual vibrancy" to Auckland for the festival, as well as "high quality, free events".

"There are a lot of things I'm hoping to do - outdoor movie screens, create a bit of a hub for the festival, and different sorts of activities - during the daytime that could mean markets, could be children's activities, In the evenings it could be outdoor film and music."

A "big name" and a "solid, one-person show" are also crucial to a successful festival, he says.

In Sydney this year, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne was the "big name" who set the box office alight with a rocking musical concert, an exhibition of his art at Circular Quay called The New Sins, and a talk about public art and advertising at the city's Museum of Contemporary Art.



T HE offices of the Sydney Arts Festival, as the festival reached the last week of its three-week run, stand in chaotic contrast to the desolate Auckland offices.

Festival director Brett Sheehy's voice has been reduced to a croak from three solid weeks of talking up the festival and entertaining the artists "till the small hours of the morning."

Sheehy is a bundle of energy who talks at the rate of knots - another contrast to Rispoli's languid manner. But the two share the same vision of what an arts festival should be, and have been in talks about possible collaborations.

And not before time. None of the acts gracing Sydney this year has gone on to Wellington or Auckland, surely a missed opportunity if the Sydney Festival's tidy profit and record attendances are anything to go by.

It is hoped that Auckland can "piggy-back" Sydney's roster next year, organisers say.

Sheehy has worked for the Sydney Arts Festival organisation since 1995, succeeding former head Leo Schofield for the event's top job last year. In ascent, he took Schofield's traditional arts festival formula and turned it on its head.

Scaled back are conservative theatre, opera and ballet performances, comfortable seating, front-row spots for dignitaries, and black ties. As he says, Sydney caters to the sophisticate all year round.

Instead the festival, with an annual budget of $11 million, went avant-garde. Spanish theatre company La Fura dels Baus, for example, was brought to the city to perform OBS: Macbeth, a gore and nudity-filled version of the Shakespearian classic which audiences watched while standing in puddles of water and fake blood.

Not all exhibits ran to such gory extremes. But popular culture was a constant theme.

Included in the mix were all the state's museums and art galleries, which timed some more daring shows to coincide with the festival.

A modern Japanese art exhibition Neo-Tokyo at the Museum of Contemporary Art underlined the modern and visually-based emphasis of the festival with style. From an installation of Japanese neon signs, to poodles made of styrofoam, to Miwa Yanagi's digitally manipulated photography of elevator girls (a now defunct feature of large department stores in Japan), to Yoshitomo Nara's disturbing images and models of children, the works spoke a language that was accessible to even the most amateur of art lovers.

One of Neo-Tokyo's most popular pieces was Momoyo Torimitsu's life-sized, business suit-wearing robot which the artist takes to the commercial centres of cities. The robot crawls on its stomach along sidewalks around the world, incredibly human-like, as the artist, dressed as a nurse, periodically stops to wind it up, a indictment on the life of the "sararii-man" (salary man) immediately relevant to all urban dwellers.

Among the esoteric, traditional exhibits were also evident, such as Buddha: Radiant Awakening, a collection of Buddha-related artefacts and art work that alone made for a fascinating show.

Despite the bold new direction, the crowd-pleasing mix drew fire from some critics who criticised the festival for not being risky enough. Australian historian Humphrey McQueen insinuated the festival was too much about "movement and colour, rather than text-based performance". Other Ocker critics found the sheer amount of French content distasteful.

But "every festival is absolutely a reflection of the [director's] taste, judgment and style," Sheehy says. "Mine reflects my age [43], my years in theatre, and my interest in pop culture. I definitely have a bias towards contemporary art."

Luckily for Sheehy, the sponsors were also around his age and had similar sensibilities. Although some did not want to be aligned with the more controversial projects such as the adults-only Macbeth, Sheehy managed to raise $4.5 million in sponsorship, equalling last year's contribution.

The audience was even keener.

"Interestingly, the more edgy works were the more popular and sold out almost immediately," says Sheehy. "Sydney is hungry for that kind of work, hungry to be challenged and pushed in ways it has not been before."

Has he pushed them too far? Some works, such as Crying Baby, which illustrated an Aboriginal narrative from elder and chief storyteller Thompson Yulidjirri using indigenous dance and music combined with physical theatre, stilt work and visual effects - and was played out in a suburban carpark - was visually arresting but at times perplexing, while Battleship Potemkin can be hard to appreciate outside Film and Television Studies 101 tutorials.

"Directors frequently underestimate their audiences, patronise them. I don't do that. If I'm watching something and I understand it, I don't assume that others won't," he explains.

I T REMAINS to be seen whether the Auckland Festival can pull in everyone to contribute the way Sydney, in its 27th year, has managed. Across the ditch, restaurants, bars, local authorities including Tourism NSW, hotels, and other related businesses work together to support and promote the event. (Although some Sydney taxi drivers possibly undo some of that effort with their overly-aggressive manner.)

Scott Milne, chairman of the Auckland City Council's Recreations and Events Committee, believes there will be challenges the organisers of the Auckland Festival will face, most notably making the event "top of mind" during its run, sandwiched between the Louis Vuitton and America's Cup yacht races.

"There are a tiny minority of arts aficionados in Auckland, who are, admittedly, very active. But this festival will only be successful if the masses embrace the event - the biggest challenge will be getting people off their backsides," he says.

"We absolutely don't want people saying, 'Why did the council support this? Why aren't they fixing my drains with that money?' We have to have people saying, 'Crumbs, that sounds great, we need to go to that'."

He says the council delayed its involvement with a major arts festival in the search for the right people to run the event, adding that the festival will have "key performance indicators" to live up to - although it will not have to turn a profit, he insists. The inaugural festival is expected to have an economic impact on the city of at least $20 million, despite figures out of Wellington that show that city's 2000 festival generated an estimated $40 million.

Mayor Banks has not turned the screws on festival funding, although caveats have appeared.

"It's not a matter of the council waving a big stick or anything like that - the funding has been generous and we've given the festival everything it's asked for. It's just that we work with higher fiscal responsibilities now and have put in place systems where organisations - whatever they may be - do not repeatedly come back to the council for more and more funding."

Unlike the Sydney Festival, which director Sheehy says would feature potentially no Australian acts if they did not come up to scratch, and has no explicit mandate to include indigenous works, the Auckland festival has a certain quota of local, as well as local cultural acts, it will be obliged to feature as one of its "key performance indicators".

Rispoli is not about to disclose his local or international line-up just yet, although with arts-scene stalwarts Mike Mizrahi and Marie Adams as his artistic directors, there will be at least an intimate knowledge of the local arts scene for the Aussie import to draw on.

He can, at least, promise something the city has not seen. And, like the best of the Sydney festival, it won't be anything that requires a degree in metaphysics to understand.

"Too often festivals are introspective which isolates them from their constituency," he says. "That will not be the case with Auckland. The festival will be fun, it will be funky, and it will change the way many people will see the city."

* Dita De Boni attended the Sydney Arts Festival courtesy of Tourism NSW and Qantas.