Performance: The Launching

Aotea Square, Auckland

Reviewer: Heath Lees

This event seemed to be launching not an arts festival but an Auckland Festival - still two years away.

Starting it off, the mayor reminded us all of Auckland's greatness, and pointed us beyond next year (and the forthcoming council elections) to the horizon of 2003, when, if everyone's still around, we'll get more of what we got during this weekend.

And what did we get? Well, there was The Pond, transforming a depressing, concrete skateway into a watery but versatile performing space.

Banks of floodlights (a word with new meaning) mixed with dry ice to yield mysterious effects, and the Auckland Philharmonia gleamed elegantly in a picture-postcard marquee.

We also got the anonymous winners of recent kapa haka competitions welcoming us in with energy and good spirits.

Then, on the principle that everyone loves everything now, the organisers had classical music (Lilburn's Landfall in Unknown Seas) cheek by jowl with a stylish hip-hop number (Che Fu) and Polynesian-based dance (Black Grace).

Of course, the young audience loved the last two, but they inevitably made the Lilburn/Curnow work seem postured and outdated by comparison, despite Raymond Hawthorne's valiant work at the microphone with the poems.

The idea that you can throw today's modern, energetic Pacific sounds alongside thoughtful and established European-based works needs examination. Something is bound to be damaged, even if the treatment does trumpet Auckland's "diversity."

Gareth Farr introduced his half-completed opera with collaborator Mike Mizrahi and invited us to "have fun." Certainly, everyone loved the packed horizon of this extravaganza with its fabulous lighting effects and historical enactments. And Robert Wiremu and Deborah Wai Kapohe sang beautifully against it all.

The 2003 Festival will obviously be a Great Big Show. Maybe that is indeed what Auckland wants.