11am, Monday 6 April 2020
CBOP tuned in on Monday to listen to the live broadcast by PANNZ industry Hui Session 2. A national arts and cultural events response network which convenes weekly on a Monday, at 11am over the next month, for the arts and cultural events community. The hui provides a space to gather remotely, and get up to date as a community.
These are the notes taken from the hui:
Speaker 1: Meg Williams, Executive Director of Tāwhiri and Chair of Arts Wellington
- Focus on keeping the funds that have already been confirmed to defer cancelled festivals to 2021, renegotiating terms and gathering more funding
Step 1 is crisis management and consolidation, eg postponing events and managing the impact on those involved
Step 2 is leadership and innovation so we can weather the impact of COVID-19 and emerge stronger. We need to ask questions of ourselves and think about the conversations we need to have. Specifically:
- How do we support Maori, Pasifika and the independent festival sector?
- How can we work better as an ecosystem? Larger organisations have a knock-on effect, how do we work together to add best value – it will take time.
- Reframe partnerships – with sponsors, with business, with suppliers, with performers.
- What is no longer important or vital?
- What can we fast track and what can we leave behind?
- What are the opportunities with digital / non-conventional encounters with art?
Learnings:
- Communication is vital – how do things land when you are communicating from different places? What is going on for the person you are communicating with?
- Gather ideas from all sources.
- You have permission to not know what is going to happen. However, it is important to know when to make decisions – drop dead dates when you need to cancel something or decide you can go ahead with it (eg festival cancellations/rescheduling).
- Focus on the short term. Link in with local government and philanthropic trusts. Currently, most are freezing their funds, but what is the long-term impact?
- Have a think about that the big issues will be in the medium to long term.
Speaker 2: Tama Waipara, musician and Artistic Director of Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival, Gisborne
- Second Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival scheduled for October. Not sure if the scale, shape and form will be the same or completely different to last year.
- The organisation still has the same focus: people, arts and providing a platform for connection.
- Great innovations are coming from artists – how can we support artist-led innovation and opportunities for NZers living overseas to connect back home? Focus on connections and recovery.
- Gisborne – first light is a bit of a theme.
- How can we make festivals a safe places to be? How can we create impactful live performances online?
Speaker 3: David Inns, Chief Executive of Auckland Festival
- Auckland Festival was in full swing when borders were closed – day 5 of the festival.
- How we get from Level 4 to Level 0 will be a different game.
- Kiwis are nimble and innovative.
- Auckland Festival planned for 2021 and is actively seeking ideas from artists for the next festival.
- Festivals take a leadership role.
Questions:
- How can we bring back a feeling of comfort for audiences after getting used to social distancing?
- We don’t have to stick with the traditional ways of delivering – outdoor venues, boutique audiences, flexible, big opportunities with visual arts in terms of digital screens.
- Who are the audiences and what are their needs? These are not the same thing. Maori, Pakeha, rich, poor, young, old. Understand your community and work to understand their needs.
- Support performance venues, including bars that host gigs which draw in their clientele.
- Undertake research around audiences, those that aren’t audiences and how could they be engaged, what is the new audience comfort?
- Venues – exposed, taking new risks with the change in audience behaviour.
- Opportunities for online platforms for performance, eg Boosted.
- How to engage in wairua (spiritual aspect of a person) when digitised? Tama says everything has a wairua whether you are in the same room or not.
- How do we best support artists to present their digital selves?
- Need to coordinate better, eg livestream times, who has the time and resource to support and connect.
- Festivals and venues, overseas and here, need to work together to look at scheduling acts.
- Impact of touring artists considering climate change?
- Development of a digital strategy.
