December 31, 2020

2020 WRAP UP: How the Performing Arts Sector Negotiated COVID-19  

A personal statement from the Managing Editor.  

With so much commentary calling 2020 ‘horrendous’, I feel compelled to recall what happened with Aotearoa New Zealand’s professional-level performing arts practice over what has turned out to be a remarkably impressive year.

Despite COVID-19 and the levels of Lockdown, Theatreview commissioned and published 443 reviews plus 48 teasers and links to other reviews: 491 in total – an average of 1.3 per day. And that’s without Auckland Theatre in the mix (dropped, initially at least, due to limits on available funding), although Dance has continued to be reviewed nationwide.

The year began with a fertile flourish.

Kiwi critics in New York gave Theatreview a global reach with reviews of a New Zealand season at the Soho Playhouse, where Ana Chaya Scotney performed her solo The Contours of Heaven and an ensemble of fafine malosi delivered Tusiata Avia’s Wild Dogs Under My Skirt.

Back home in NZ, the Lyttelton Arts Factory Theatre kicked off the year with Gladys and Alfie: an Invercargill love story. In Christchurch the annual Bread & Circus Busker’s Festival (click through the numbers at the bottom of the page) took off while Hutt Valley families were treated to Geraldine Brophy’s Snowbright and the Oopsie Woopsies.

Wellington audiences saw Barnaby Olson’s A Traveller’s Guide to Turkish Dogs at Circa Two, Dave Armstrong’s The Surprise Party at Circa One foreshadowed election year and Brynley Stent and Eli Matthewson brought their Exes down from Auckland to BATS, which then hosted this year’s Six Degrees Festival.

Before January ended, Anthony Harper Summer Theatre was offering families Treasure Island at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and Romeo and Juliet had launched the Summer Shakespeare season with two separate productions, in Nelson and Dunedin. Wellington would follow in mid-February with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Meanwhile Te Rakau presented a development season of Helen Pearse-Otene’s The Swing and Dean Parker’s Wonderful opened a new season at Circa Two.

The Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival was the next of this year’s Arts Festivals to launch. I just managed to catch the Pop-Up Globe’s Auckland swansong season of Emilia, as their plans to set up overseas became threatened by an increasingly global pandemic. Nevertheless the New Zealand Festival of the Arts and the NZ Fringe got through most of their programmes before COVID-19 hit NZ and caused cancellations.

And agile Creative NZ’s COVID-19 response offered a life raft to the sector. Companies and groups issued a range of COVID-19 Statements as various creative solutions were explored to keep the performing arts alive, if not live in our theatres.

Theatreview’s editors and nationwide team of voluntary reviewers committed themselves to covering whatever was being made available to audiences online. What we called the COVID-19 Lockdown Festival 2020, followed by the COVID-19 Level 2 Festival, ranged from livestream improv and a rich selection of RNZ Radio Plays*, through international theatre and dance (i.e. a virtual international arts festival) to an impressive range of innovative homegrown works – generating 82 reviews.

*[The shock of Dean Parker’s untimely death was somewhat alleviated by being able to listen to his radio plays, Richard Interred and 25 April: a true fiction.]

By mid-June I was able to impress visitors to the global review site Theatre Times with NEW ZEALAND’S VIRTUAL COVID-19 LOCKDOWN FESTIVAL – adding to NZ’s growing reputation as a world leader in its response to the pandemic. The article concluded: “Now, much earlier than most modelling had predicted, New Zealanders are navigating back to relatively normal life, albeit within a nationwide bubble with strict controls at the inbound border. Shattered performing arts schedules are being reassembled with inevitable alterations and we look forward to being able to gather once more in public venues to share the vital, vibrant and irreplaceable experience of live performance.” 

In the latter weeks of June, solo shows were the first to entice us back to live venues: George Fenn’s WANTED: Blaze of Glory in Wellington; Cian Gardner’s Sorry For Your Loss in Hamilton; Thom Monkton’s The Artist in Wellington; Lainet Swann in Tatty Hennessey’s A Hundred Words for Snow in Dunedin. Meanwhile youth theatre groups came to the fore with promenade performances: Palmerston North’s 2020 Basement Company with A Museum Beyond Boundaries; Christchurch’s The Court Youth Company with The Quarantine Diaries.  

While the Tempo Dance Festival 2020 went digital, NZ’s July school holiday shows were able to proceed as live shows and Arts On Tour NZ 2020 got back on the road for the rest of the year. The Nelson Fringe Festival and the Kōanga Festival 2020 opted to go online. Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival 2020 went live on stage – as did Auckland Theatre Company’s Back on the Boards Mini Festival, the Hawkes Bay Arts Festival and, in Wellington, the NZ Improv Festival: Close to Home without its usual international participants, and the Tahi Festival. 2020’s final festival was Experimental Dance Week Aotearoa (EDWA), in Auckland.

A scroll through our July to December reviews (click through the numbers at the bottom of the page) will reveal more about how our live performing arts came back to our stages as most of the rest of the world remained – and still remains – in various levels of lockdown. It’s interesting to note that Christchurch, having started the years with a rush, also ends the year with good range of shows.

You will also note Theatreview picked up Auckland theatre as the year rolled on. Initially this was to honour the ATC’s exceptional responses to Lockdown with Eli Kent and Eleanor Bishop’s new online version of Chekhov’s The Seagull – serialised weekly through Act One, Act Two, Act Three and Act Four – and Ibsen’s The Master Builder directed by Colin McColl. We continued in anticipation of our being able to secure funding to add an Auckland Theatre Editor to our small team.

Unfortunately Creative NZ has declined our entire application for funding from mid-November 2020 to mid-November 2021 (the strange date range being an anomaly of the rules at the time). Despite our many attempts to resolve it, Theatreview remains obliged to apply to CNZ as a one-off creative project when we are neither one-off (we have published 12,413 reviews of 7,192 productions over the past 15 years) nor creative (we offer a service to the sector, its audiences and all who seek the information stored in our freely accessible archive).

So Theatreview faces 2021 with funding only from Wellington City Council to ensure Wellington performing arts are reviewed. All we know about the few other options that may be available to us is that they are very limited and any funds that may be forthcoming would be months away. Theatreview’s three contractors, seven voluntary Trustees and multiple voluntary reviewers have delivered, and aimed to deliver over the next 12 months, nationwide review coverage for less than one average public service salary. By any objective measure, the return on public investment is extremely high.

After all the creative energy, innovation and resilience we have been able to celebrate and share this year – with huge thanks and congratulations to all involved in creating the productions and reviewing them – this is a sad note to end on.

I feel sure 2021 will witness a robust range of professional-level performing arts practice and sincerely regret that we will be unable to play our part in ensuring they are comprehensively reviewed on the widely available and permanent public record that Theatreview offers.

Kia kaha
Arohanui
John Smythe, Managing Editor