How the capital’s arts festival lost its way
The Aotearoa Festival of the Arts is under attack, with Wellington mayor Andrew Little and councillor Nicola Young questioning why the biennial event this year had a smaller programme, lacking the buzz of previous years.
Little attended a few festival events between February 24 and March 15, which he enjoyed, but said that for Wellington to retain its status as the cultural capital of New Zealand, it needed an iconic arts festival.
“When I go back to the arts festivals from the late 80s and 90s, everyone knew the festival was on and you saw it around town. There were big events - and anchor events that drew people in. I didn’t see any of that sort of stuff [this year]. I’m keen to talk to the organisers about what their reflections are, what we can do better, what more might need to happen.’’
Arts charity Tāwhiri gets $1.45 million in ratepayer funding each year (via WellingtonNZ) to run the festival, which Young said was the council’s biggest spend on arts and culture in the city. That makes up about 40% of the festival’s overall income, although the festival board did not disclose its budget.
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Ratepayers deserved to know that money was being well spent, Young said, but there were gripes that this year’s programme was a disappointment, lacking the international content, free events, visibility and hype of previous festivals. She canvassed patrons and has heard concerns.
“The overall feeling is that the festival has lost its way. It’s been like a tyre slowly losing air. It used to be an international festival and the city really burst into life.’’
Young was a supporter of the Tāwhiri Warehouse (owned by the council and leased by the festival board), but said the location of many of the events there was disappointing because it took the buzz away from the central city. In 2020, waka came into the harbour, luring 35,000 people to watch the festival opening, and in years before that, the Spiegel tent was a focal point in Frank Kitts Park.
Little met with the Tāwhiri board this week and said he would be working on ways to get the festival more support, noting the board did not ask for more money.
Tāwhiri board chairperson Sarah Kemp said like other arts organisations, the festival was navigating challenging times and audiences were also changing.
Discussions with funders were a “constructive and ongoing conversation”.
Festival chief executive Angela Green pointed to funding pressures and a lack of corporate and public money for the reduced international content and beacon events. Audience satisfaction surveys showed 95% of ticket buyers were happy with the programme and 97% would attend again.
Local government funding makes up 40% of the budget, but that had stayed the same for 12 years - declining in real terms thanks to inflation. But it cost about three times as much to put on a show as a few years ago, Green said.
“We would have loved to have had a big flashy outdoor spectacle event like we’ve been able to do in the past, or a big ticket event like we did in the last festival such as Light Cycles. The reason is that we didn’t do that is not to do with ambition or desire, but simply to do with resources and access to additional funding and sponsorship.’’
She also argued local artists were front and centre in the festival programme, but the co-directors also try to bring in international acts who wouldn’t normally come to Wellington. This year the international star, Khalid Abdalla, of The Crown, brought his gripping solo show, Nowhere, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were part of the festival and exclusive to Wellington, thanks to a long relationship with the promoter, she says.
Anna Calver, chief economic and engagement manager at WellingtonNZ, said the $1.45m in funding was recognition of the festival’s economic, cultural and tourism benefits to the city - an amount which hasn’t grown in more than a decade. By comparison, Auckland Council gives $4.3mn a year to its annual arts festival.
“Tāwhiri is open to change, and the conversations we’ve had in recent months have been constructive around what its future might look like,’’ Calver said.
Young points to 2018 as the last time people had complete confidence in the festival programme and the co-directors. “It used to be clever, witty, joyful and unexpected. This is certainly not the time to increase funding, that’s for sure. It just needs a major rethink.’’
Supporters of the 2026 festival back its focus on indigenous and New Zealand artists, and the ideals of luring a broader - and new - arts audiences, such as the students from Wainuiomata College who gathered around artist Fonotī Pati Umaga after his show, A Musical Portrait of a Humble Disabled Samoan.
Artists commissioned to make works, such as Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, chief executive and artistic director of the New Zealand Dance Company, argued the festival played an important role in fostering contemporary works in New Zealand.
Patterson collaborated with a Perth-based dance company, Co3, for the triple bill, Gloria, which packed out St James Theatre over three nights. The production would not have happened without the festival’s backing, he said.
City councillor Laurie Foon, who chairs the council’s arts committee, raved about the five shows she attended.
She liked watching Julia Deans at the Tāwhiri Warehouse, describing the venue as“exceptional”, but said she could also see “some of the vibrancy that was in Courtenay Place last time was not there this year”.
Foon said Wellington was now jammed with many arts and cultural events in ways it wasn’t when the festival launched 40 years ago. One idea mooted was to run a series of events during the year, rather than in a concentrated calendar.
“Let’s embrace the change if that’s where we need to. If we limit ourselves to being one thing, we’re in trouble. If we want to claim the creative capital title, maybe spreading it out during a time of financial difficulty is not a bad idea.’
“I don’t think we should put things in a box. How do we bring in new audiences? What is the outcome we’re after and from there, we may decide we’re in an ebb and flow, until the flow is back. Things never stay exactly the same.’’
Former mayor Dame Kerry Prendergast and her husband are festival gold patrons, donating $7500 to the festival every two years.
She was also on the festival board for 24 years and said the current board should decide how to stage a city-wide, world-class arts festival in the current funding environment, possibly with more collaborations with arts festivals in Auckland and Australia.
“Now is the right time for the board to sit down and consider its purpose and vision.”
Peter and Mary Biggs stopped being platinum sponsors in 2022, because nothing in the programme appealed. Peter Biggs, a former advertising executive, said: “Either we’ve moved away from the festival or it has moved away us. It’s not the intoxicating, unmissable force it used to be.’’
“They need to get that vision back and they need to get their donors and funders really excited again. It needs to stop the drift to programming for what seems to be a small, elite, urban bourgeois audience, and focus on connecting to the mainstream.’’
Not all patrons are unhappy. A couple in their 30s signed up as patrons last year. They do not wish to be named as they work in the public sector, but said it was important the festival supported New Zealand culture and artists.
“We travel a bit and we can see international artists in Australia and when we go overseas. It’s awesome that there’s a channel for homegrown art and also international works. Whenever we go to a show, we’ve loved the quality of what we’ve seen.’’
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