Artists sharing their creative juices

TANIA MCCAULEY
Barry Barclay spent his first night as a filmmaker with a pack and a pair of tramping boots under a Napier band rotunda.
Or rather, it was the first night of his journey toward film-making, and the start of a year-long hike around New Zealand as he waited for the telephone call to say he had a job as a cameraman, he told a captivated 250-strong crowd at the Century Theatre, Napier, last night.
Barclay was one of a trio of Arts Foundation of New Zealand laureates, the others being composer Gillian Whitehead and children and teens' writer Kate de Goldi, all award winners in their own fields. All three said they appreciated the chance by principal sponsor and investment house Forsyth Barr to share work and get a little of their creative thought processes across to the Hawke's Bay art community.
"Directing is a bit like jumping across a crack in the ground. Once you've done it there's no going back. That night in Napier I count as my first night as a filmmaker, because I'd stepped over the crack," said Barclay.
The highly politicised writer/director of last year's thought-provoking The Kaipara Affair, about a community fight to ban commercial fishing, had a message for young film wannabes, that it was possible for anyone with a camera to start filming and create something out of it, no matter how small their resources.
"It's creating a visual poem ... and at the end of the day, that's what makes people cry at the end of a movie."
The audience heard two movements from Alice, the story told in music of a young English immigrant in 1907, Whitehead's composition performed by Helen Medlyn and the Auckland Philharmonia, which she described as a musical monodrama.
There was also the opening minutes of Hinerakatauri, named for the Maori goddess of music and dance, and a musical collaboration of flute, piccolo and Maori instruments invoking the dawn native bird chorus.
Procrastination was dangerous, but Whitehead said the only ways to fix it was to get up early and get on with it, and to have several projects on the go.
As Whitehead described the constant reworking that was a composer's lot, de Goldi too put paid to the notion that children's writing was simple.
She could rewrite a picture book story 30 times before it felt right, using as a case in point, Billy, the sequel to her award-winning Lolly Leopold picture book illustrated by Jacqui Colley, due to be released in October, her reading of which made the crowd laugh countless times.
She later said the key to successful creative writing for young age groups was, she believed, rediscovering, seeing and questioning in a way that adults often forgot to. "People who write or make things are questioning the world in some way."