Editorial: Our turn to put fizz into the festival

Aucklanders might imagine their city to be just a little culturally deficient: a beautiful, lively place to be sure, particularly in its maritime features, but lacking a cultural dimension. That has not been entirely true. Polynesian Aucklanders give the city regular feasts of art, music and dance and the Auckland Theatre Company has restored drama to good heart. But the city has sorely needed a festival to call its own. Starting today, it has one.

The programme arranged for the next fortnight suggests that Auckland will have a festival that fits its character. It promises to be fun, not stuffy, and it will be accessible. This is not a festival that will be hidden from all but ticket-holders. Art will be in the streets, on bus windows and in the foyers of city buildings. If all goes well, it will infect the city with high spirits befitting a spring festival.

The timing might not be ideal. If this month's unsettled weather does not improve, the event might struggle. It was, of course, originally intended to happen during the America's Cup carnival last summer. As things turned out, the festival's future might not have been enhanced by that association.

The festival was no more buoyant than the black boat until March, when Simon Prast, former artistic director of the Auckland Theatre Company, decided he would not let the festival sink. Rescheduled to September and with a $5 million budget reduced to $3 million, the festival has materialised remarkably in just six months. Mr Prast inherited much of the programme and kept to its theme of Pacific rim culture, reflecting Auckland's place in the world.

"Given a blank canvas," he has said, "I might not have placed such emphasis on works from the United Kingdom." Yet the programme is hardly overburdened with big international names and that may be a good thing. The festival needs first to establish itself and to do that it needs performers and audiences who will work hard to make the most of it. Local artists are much more likely to make the effort than established performers riding on their status. Audiences, too, might find they take more value from an unexpected home-grown triumph than from watching a star's routine.

Not that the Auckland festival will be devoid of international talent. German cabaret performer Ute Lemper is a major attraction. Less conventionally, there are static artists from Britain who will enliven the cityscape. Among the indigenous acts, the first combined concert of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia should be a highlight.

The festival will be a fortnight of discoveries, from the common urban objects transformed, apparently, into plasticine by the sculptor of Ponsonby's "buried ruins", to a virtual hedge that will respond to sound, to the work of Elam students in commercial foyers and vinyl banners of art on the buses.

There will, naturally, be theatre, pantomime, music and drama for children too, comedy, films and dance. Not all will be to everybody's taste; the best festivals are challenging, experimental, delivering the crass and indulgent along with the sublime.

Aucklanders of more than 30 years standing know this is not a festival in their name. From the early 1950s until the 1970s the Auckland Festival Society gave the city the event it needed. Since then, the Wellington Festival has come into its own, attracting visitors from Auckland who would return lamenting the lack in their home town. The revived Auckland Festival needs their enthusiasm as much as it needs its performers.

If the city gets into the swing of things, it will be a glorious way to dispel a rather cold winter and look forward to summer. The stage is set, the acts are here. It needs only the spirit of the Aucklanders to make it fizz.