David Inns, chief executive of the Auckland Arts Festival, in Silo Park with a pop-up sculpture. Photo / Alex Burton
He's the guy at the back of the room you didn't notice. Loose-fitting dark grey suit, open-necked shirt, not tall, not short, a lock of grey hair twisted across the forehead. Perhaps he's in a corner in the Spiegeltent, near the bar, just standing there.
What he's doing, in his words, is "trying to read the audience".
It's his job. What sort of people have come to this show? He's probably seen it before, in London or Hong Kong or Sydney, and he knows who went to see it there. Are we the same? Are we different? And if we like it, or don't like it, what will that tell him about shows like this, for next time?
Because for 30 years, for David Inns, there's always been a next time. Since 2009 Inns has been chief executive of the Auckland Arts Festival. The kaiwhakahaere matua. It's a job he did in Wellington for the seven previous years for the International Festival of the Arts there, and in New Plymouth for the Taranaki Arts Festival, while also helping to start and run Womad.
Year after year, festival after festival, it's been Inns' job to make everything work.
He doesn't do the programming but he does decide the venues, the budgets, the resources, how it all fits together. Who to employ and how to help the festival survive and grow, culturally, financially and in our hearts, all of it against the odds, because it's always against the odds.
He doesn't say you can ever know for sure what people will like, but he's better at guessing than most of us.
And now there won't be a next time. Not for him. Inns, who might just have had a bigger hand than any other single person in the growth of the professional performing arts all round this country, is retiring.
On his watch, the big festivals have begat smaller festivals, everywhere from Gisborne to Wānaka, with an ecosystem of commissions and bookings and people with the skills to help them all to prosper. On his watch, for many arts groups, the festival circuit has become a foundation for their planning, funding and the way they confront artistic challenges, find their audiences and build themselves a future, not just here but out in the world.
Also on his watch, Covid has devastated the performing arts. The 2022 festival is on right now, with no live shows.
It hurts. Talking to Inns, it's like he's carrying an injury. But what can you do but soldier on?
"I grew up in the arts," he said a couple of weeks ago, as we sat in the Terrace Cafe overlooking Aotea Square. The place was deserted. The town hall and Aotea Centre were scheduled to remain empty, no Spiegeltent was being erected and no mass singalongs or outdoor films or family days or any other events would be taking place.
The Auckland Arts Festival does have some online shows, some exhibitions and some amazing pop-up outdoor sculpture, and it's remarkable that it's happening at all. But this is not the fabulous finale about which Inns may once have dreamed.
As a lad, he really was a dreamer, although of the practical sort.
"Dad was an operatic singer, so I worked in the Bowl of Brooklands from the age of 8 or 9, first on rubbish pickup, then I moved to lawn mowing at 11. By 15 I was in stage management. All this time I was still in school and I became the flyman at the New Plymouth Opera House at the age of 16."
Did he want to tread the boards?
A small pause. "I was in the cast of The Crucifixion at the Bowl at the age of 12, they did all these big shows in those days. And I played the trumpet, I was in the school band and things. But that was it really. I did production, management, lighting. I guess lighting was the thing I did."
The careers officer at school suggested teaching would be better than a life backstage, so he did that, rising to become principal at a couple of small schools and then deputy principal of an intermediate.
"I loved teaching, I did it for 15 years and, in many ways, the education role in what I do now hasn't gone. But I didn't need to be a principal."
And he stayed connected to the arts. By the time the 90s arrived, Inns was chairman of the Taranaki Arts Festival Trust and back at the Bowl of Brooklands, now as venue manager and head of production. Lulu came and sang To Sir with Love (it's about teachers). Glen Campbell came. So many big tours.
Inns travelled himself, relief teaching in London, then starting a job "unloading trucks" that quickly turned into head electrician for an opera production in Scotland.
"That was my first full-time, every day round-the-clock work in the arts, and I've done it every day since. Well, apart from weekends."
That job led to another, as technical director for the Assembly Theatre in Edinburgh, which gave him a boots-and-all association with the Edinburgh Festival. Not long after, visiting Peter Gabriel's studio to meet the guy who ran Womad, Inns pitched New Plymouth as a venue.
"They thought it was too small. Womad tends to be in cities with a population of several hundred thousand, not 40,000. So we convinced the then-CEO of the New Plymouth District Council to bring them out and have a look."
What did the Womad people like? "The beauty of the venue. And the Bowl had a history and the Taranaki Arts Festival was getting a name."
So was Inns. By 2001, in addition to the Edinburgh job, which was seasonal, he was executive director of the Taranaki Arts Festival and technical director, soon to be chief executive, of the International Festival of the Arts in Wellington.
"There was a lot of flying around in circles."
In 2002 this quietly spoken, unassuming man brought out the raucously exciting Afro Celt Sound System and put them into the Bowl of Brooklands. Smash hit. Womad launched in New Plymouth the following year.
Clearly, it's more than just the town he happened to grow up in. What's special?
"There's a strong sense of theatre in that place, and a strong sense of music. The productions at the Bowl were huge. They had elephants in one of them. Though that was before my time."
So you're the man who came after the elephants?
"And it's where I first got introduced to pyrotechnics."
Inns has a thing for fire: it's been there right through his festival career, including four visits by the pyrotechnicians of Groupe F: two each to Wellington and Auckland.
The modern arts festival began in Edinburgh in 1946 as a way to "reunite artists across Europe" after World War II, and shortly after Adelaide introduced the idea to this part of the world. Festivals spread. Bringing international touring acts was always an important focus, but so was developing local work and the skills to present it.
Inns mentioned teaching often as we talked. Passing on skills, helping people learn how to run things.
"I guess what I've been doing these last few years is making sure those opportunities and skills are widespread through the whole sector. There's a long history now of people who've come through the festivals, they've gone on to have opportunities in their own right, to establish other festivals, to work in arts companies and lead them."
Some are overseas, others here. He mentioned Tama Waipara, who runs Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival in Gisborne and worked as a programmer and producer for the Auckland festival for many years.
Festivals have changed the way things are done for the artists too. "The change I've seen is that partnerships now are really core. With venues, with arts companies."
Every year, performing arts groups pitch their proposals to festivals, venues, funding agencies, everyone who can help them get things made. The festivals often work together, looking for shows they hope will do well around the country.
"It's important this exists, for the artists, because it gives them more work; for the production staff, for the audiences. For the investment in the arts, too, it's a better return at the end of the day. And more than one outing makes a work better."
He talked about Lysander's Aunty, a show by Wellington's Trick of the Light company, which was commissioned with the Court Theatre in Christchurch and then developed for the festival circuit by the Auckland Theatre Company and the festivals in Wellington and Auckland.
"Because of Covid, it hasn't got up, but that's not to say it won't get up. It got a lot of development done. And work of that standard is possible because we've worked together."
Do arts festivals live in a niche?
"Well, it's not niche for the big things. We had 55,000 people for Groupe F in the Domain."
Is it middle class? "Everybody went to that show. And if you look at the investment and where the effort is, it's not middle class."
Inns listed the big programme of community-led participatory events, called Whānui. Hip-hop Shakespeare from Chicago in the Vodafone Events Centre in Manukau. "That got a big crowd." The massive commitment to Māori and Pasifika work that sits outside the usual confines of "Pākehā culture".
"And we've had photographers working with school kids. All sorts of phenomenal projects. They mightn't have the headlines, but they're core to what we do and the community engagement is very big."
Are festivals changing? Inns pointed at the massive construction site next to the Aotea Centre, where the City Rail Link's Aotea station is being built. "I think the great opportunity is when that little project is finished. It's what's happened everywhere else. You have good public transport, you bring people to the space."
Everything's changed anyway. In the first year of Covid, they got through 50 per cent of the programme before lockdown. "It was boom, you know, we got the Spiegeltent loaded out at five to 12, on the trucks, when the curfew was midnight. The commitment was huge. We had artists, front-of-house staff, everybody helping on that."
Last year they lost some shows and had to reshuffle – Reb Fountain didn't play until weeks after the festival ended. This year it was Omicron and it's been the worst of all.
"We did our best to look at it differently. We had two works from the UK that were made for the digital space, so we could put them out online in the original timeslots. And there were two local works we could do that with too. There's a dual purpose. You want to get the work finished and get it out, and you can build a different audience nationwide."
One of those shows, Stab in the Dark by the Nightsong company, got bookings from schools in the South Island. "That was good. They'd never have been able to come to Auckland to see it."
One evening, angels appear overhead, flying with no visible support, and shower you with feathers. Another, a crowd of dancers, covered in mud, takes on all the suffering of the world. Elsewhere, a man is suspended above a bath tub full of water and he dances, in the air and in the bath - and in the front rows the audience gets a bit wet.
Songs that turn you inside out. Puppets that reduce you to tears, both happy and sad. One night, you sit at tables, rip sheets of paper into little pieces and throw them in the air, and the show begins and it is snowing.
An arts festival is a celebration of the soul. Live performance: the transporting moment, happening in real life, in real time, for you. How much we have been missing.
And now what?
"When colour television came to Taranaki," said Inns, "it had an effect on live shows. I guess Netflix is the modern version of that."
But it's not the same.
"I think we have a key role in making sure the sector survives. It's not just the artists, it's all aspects. Production staff, technical staff, marketers, many of them have moved across to other areas. It's a challenge to keep the skill and expertise within the sector. And it's worldwide."
"I think the core thing in this environment is to keep commissioning work, keep creating work. Where possible, give it a chance to develop through to the finish. That's probably a different emphasis than the season on stage, which is always the goal. But if you don't keep developing ... "
Will people lose the habit of going to shows?
"The audience will come back, but there's always some churn, you know, and I think the new audience that would have started coming in the closedown period, they may not come at all."
But, he added, the Melbourne Arts Centre is back in action with no audience limits, "and it's picking up quite fast".
He's been watching arts companies pitch their new shows. "There's certainly a – positivity is probably not quite the right word – there's a real enthusiasm and hope in the sector. To be back onstage."
Inns has worked with four artistic directors and three board chair people at the Auckland festival, and more of both in Wellington. Shona McCullagh became the new artistic director here last year and she still hasn't had a chance to run an ordinary festival, let alone one fulfilling her own vision.
She's a fan: "David has devoted his career to strengthening whatever arts organisation has been fortunate enough to work with him. His contribution is so immense it's hard to articulate a worthy enough accolade and, as our festival guru, he will be sorely missed.
"He leaves a huge legacy, having not only significantly developed many festivals, but having discreetly supported and guided so many in our arts whānau, here and across the globe."
What will he do now? "I'll probably end up with a few projects I probably shouldn't do. I wouldn't mind being the technical runner, driving round in a van."
It doesn't seem likely. But he will still be there, sitting in the crowd, maybe even standing quietly at the back. No longer checking out the audience, because what Inns really loves is the show.
Not going back to lighting? "To be honest, the last time I did that, the lights didn't move. They laugh at me at work."
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