June 18, 2009

Helen Clark’s legacy to the arts

John Smythe      posted 18 Jun 2009, 06:11 PM / edited 18 Jun 2009, 06:32 PM

What interests me about Brannavan Gnanalingam’s Werewolf piece is that the live performing arts – theatre, opera, ballet, contemporary dance and live comedy – have not been mentioned (apart from Flight of the Conchords in the latter category, because it ‘made it’ on screen).

Is this because most of the output of the better-resourced Recurrently Funded Organisations (RFOs) – who benefited most from the $86, funding boost – has involved doing ‘covers’ of plays / operas / ballets created elsewhere? So nothing springs to mind as a great achievement over the time of Helen Clark’s reign.

There is something wrong with that picture, is there not? Perhaps, having announced the Peter Jackson-led review of the NZ Film Commission, Chris Finlayson will turn his attention to Creative New Zealand. But please, in both cases, let it not mean that work at the creative coalface comes to a grinding halt as the reviews proceed.

A fundamental objective must surely be that much more of ‘vote arts’ must find its way to the actual artists, rather than be soaked up by the arts bureaucracy. Lovely people though they are (and I mean that), they hold down relatively well-paid and secure jobs while routinely telling their funding applicants it is simply impossible to resource them to pay proper professional fees to the creative artists and production teams – even though they would not have those jobs without the very existence and persistence of those creative artists.