Creative Kōrero, Multi-disciplinary

PANNZ Webinar – Festivals (COVID-19)

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.

Watch the recorded hui here

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