The arts are the canary in the coal mine. They breathe their last as the carbon monoxide of tribute shows, social media, home entertainment and government intervention fill the tunnel. The “humanities,” as they are more broadly known, are ritually despatched on the altar of commerce by the priests and priestesses of neoliberalism and Business as Usual.
The recently announced Amplify, a draft cultural strategy for the arts in Aotearoa to 2030 from the Ministry for Culture & Heritage Manatū Taonga, reduces artforms to an international selling point with an emphasis on soft power and influence in overseas markets.
Here come the business buskers, the buglers and bellowing barrow boys to the market. The draft strategy appears to have little interest in the distribution of our own performing artists to the Hokitikas and Pohanginas of Aotearoa.
The beauty and refinement of music, theatre, poetry and dance is taken on one last desperate lunge towards the light, and has become a platform for identity politics, cultural reformation and a useful tool in the marketplace.
Where is the joy and transcendence? The communal celebration of all that is good in the world? Where are the emotions and sensations that are released in the random recognition of common humanity?
Such as when ballet great Maya Plisetskaya danced the dying swan in Dunedin’s Regent Theatre and the audience held its shared breath for a moment that seemed like an age. When Talking Heads ripped up the copy book at Sweetwaters South in 1984 and they stopped making sense. When Michael Hurst took Tom Scott’s The Daylight Atheist to a sticky-floored tavern in Alexandra, and Mervyn Thompson depicted the poverty of his West Coast family in Coaltown Blues in a Hanmer Springs hall. These are the threads of culture that bind beyond the bob’s worth.
I see these changes in 40 years of promoting live and local Kiwi artists to areas of the country that are deemed “the sticks,” rural communities artificially divided from the cities by distance and opportunity.
Artists relish their role as news gatherers and envoys moving from settlement to settlement, connecting the furthest points of Aotearoa in a grid of subtle stimulations and provocations. Through them, word travels and communities are strengthened, and feel included, via a common thread of stories.
Some of our greatest artists have travelled these roads with Arts On Tour NZ: Mervyn Thompson, Sir Jon Trimmer, Michael Hurst, Moana Maniapoto, Don McGlashan, Whirimako Black, Philip Dadson, Justine Smith, Margaret Mahy, Dame Kate Harcourt, Marlon Williams, Helen Moulder, Michele A’Court, Delaney Davidson, Anthonie Tonnon, Adam McGrath and too many others to mention who may not be listed in the household recognition category but who nevertheless deliver the finest of work.
The subtle themes of the travelling work might be social issues, such as the experience of dementia, perinatal anxiety and depression in young mothers, earthquake trauma, family observations, a puppet show dealing with a child’s sense of grief, or they may simply be foot-tapping fun.
The venues are often staffed by enthusiastic volunteers with their community at heart. The rooms are many and various, occasionally equipped with nothing more than a power supply and a few three-pin plugs.
Arts On Tour NZ liaises with local arts councils, repertory theatres and community groups to bring the best talent to country districts. The programme is environmentally sustainable – artists travel to their audiences rather than the reverse.
But Amplify threatens to turn the fire hose on the arts, and we will surely be drenched and discouraged. It may even put the fire out. l
Steve Thomas is a poet and artistic director of Arts on Tour NZ, based in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
