Brian Rudman: Thanks to Victoria Carter, our festival is on again

Over the past month, the long-running Auckland Festival circus moved into the big tent to give veteran trouper Victoria Carter a tryout on the high wire.

It was the do-or-die show. The last hurrah. If she failed, it was to be curtains on yet another attempt in Auckland to launch a city festival.

Somehow, and don't ask me how, Ms Carter did it. Made it across without one bounce on the safety net. As a councillor it was Ms Carter who first persuaded her colleagues to go along with her plans for a festival back in early 2000. She is also a trustee of the festival trust board and lately has been filling in as executive director.

Her task over the past month had been to raise $900,000 of cash sponsorship to add to the miserable $610,000 pledged in the previous nine months.

If she had failed, Auckland City was poised to rip out the life-support system that had been drip-feeding funds into the project. The council has now been told Ms Carter has done the near-impossible and collected in excess of the the sponsorship target.

Indeed, trust chairman Lex Henry is so upbeat he anticipates sucking in a total of $3 million in sponsorship pledges by the end of the year.

For an organisation that just 10 months ago was predicting sponsorship income of $4.4 million and with three weeks to deadline had collected only $610,000, you have to admire his continuing optimism.

But he and the trust have proved us doubters wrong once already, so I'll shut up and hope their hard work pays off again.

Having canned the proposed January-February 2003 festival, which was to be slotted in between the Louis Vuitton Cup series and the America's Cup races proper, the new date is September 13 through to October 4 next year.

This will enable the festival to share acts and costs with the annual Melbourne Festival and avoid a clash of dates with the Rugby World Cup.

The postponement will also give it time to find a new executive director to replace the missing Renato Rispoli. Can I suggest that this time they look locally.

Mr Rispoli arrived from Australia last December to take command of the festival after a worldwide search that had caused "phenomenal interest" and attracted "outstanding applications".

Outstanding he might have been in Australia, but Mr Rispoli failed to work his magic here and was one of the first casualties when the funds dried up a couple of months back.

It's difficult to accept there is not someone in this city of a million people who has the flair and ability to be appointed to this job.

Or at least an expatriate Aucklander, living elsewhere in New Zealand or overseas - someone who knows the ins and outs of local politics, arts and business.

Mr Henry says: "We're now getting on with the important job of getting the festival off the ground - including working with the arts community to develop an exciting and innovative programme for 2003 that reflects the part of the world we live in."

The person to do that at short notice is someone who knows his or her way around the local scene. Someone who appreciates the mixed feelings within the artistic community towards this potential rival for scarce arts funds.

Just how involved the theatre and music companies will be is yet to be announced. With their subscription seasons planned and about to be launched, it will be a bit hit-and-miss how they fit into the inaugural festival anyway.

Also to be announced, or even indicated, is what sort of festival this is going to be. All we're getting so far is the hyperbole, which is a risky tactic.

Take this from a press release: "The Auckland Festival will be the greatest exponent of New Zealand work this country has ever seen." It will "showcase the very best of this country's artists and performers alongside their international peers". It will "provide a broad programme of events ... with the very best international and New Zealand work ... "

If that's not gee whizz enough, it will also "physically change Auckland's landscape ... "

How? Invite Saddam Hussein to test some of his weapons of mass destruction over Mt Eden? Trigger off a volcano?

This sort of hype is only going to disappoint when Rangitoto doesn't erupt as promised. Not even Wellington's international arts festival, now well-established on the world festival circuit and more justified in reaching for the superlatives, would risk such exaggeration.

Perhaps those aims will be achievable in 2020 or 2050. But for now let's just aim for the possible - like launching it.