COMMENT:
If I was asked to identify the origin of the divide that exists in New Zealand between sport and the performing and visual arts, I would say the Darwinian tribe-forming of high school. All sorts of pressures cause young people to pick a group of friends to hang out with in their early teens. The sporty kids go to the field or the court, the arty kids to the theatre or the cafe and the nerds to their books or their rooms.
The dominant culture in New Zealand, no matter how much te reo we speak or Polynesian art we admire, remains Anglo-American and we have inherited our educational and social prejudices from that. New Zealand's educational philosophy, curriculum and teaching methods are mostly derived from English public schools in the Victorian era, which sought to prepare young men to contribute to the ruling of the British Empire. Sport was central to this. Children were taught to aspire to lead through sport and to be good team players able to treat victory and disaster just the same.
Educational attitudes to the performing and visual arts in the English tradition, and hence in our schools today, were very different to sport. While sport was a mainstream contributor to educational goals, the performing arts were an entertaining diversion, an optional extra. This divide between sport and the arts is established early and it is hard to bridge. Children in their mid-teens who choose a tribe to hang out with are not simply choosing what they like to do and who they like to do it with, but how they see themselves. They are establishing their identity.
Often, when I toured with the All Blacks in London or Paris or Buenos Aires, I would suggest to a team mate that we go and check out an art gallery. The look of shock and reflex rejection was pretty quickly replaced by a shrug and "okay" and off we would go. I cannot think of a single time when my team mate didn't love the experience. They had been conditioned to think that arts were not their thing. But really, they had no idea. Arts were their thing, they just didn't know it.