Women's festival La Fiesta still able to run under red light setting

Carla Donson during the performance of 'Flow: Beautrais+De Vegt' at the Royal Whanganui Operas House on January 12. Photo / Steve Caudwell

Annual women's festival La Fiesta will be going ahead, regardless of the traffic light setting.

Organiser Carla Donson, of the Women's Network Whanganui, said it was fortunate that the festival was made up primarily of small, niche events, meaning capacity limits wouldn't be a problem.

"It made sense to me to plan the whole thing so that we could run at red or orange.

"As a community sector, we are really good at being innovative. That idea of adapting to your circumstances and the conditions around you gives you opportunities to be creative and diversify in different ways.

"There are still opportunities to do stuff."

Donson said despite the current Covid-19 climate, this year's festival was shaping up to be the second largest in its 13-year history.

There will be 95 events in 2022.

"We are still attracting 2,000 to 3,000 people across these events each festival.

"There are a number of people from out of town who come too, including presenters who are running activities within the festival.

"It's really cool that people are still prepared to do that."

As for the events themselves, Donson said there had already been a huge response to the 'Walking with Donkeys' activities, run by Pauline Neilson.

Donson said she was looking forward to the return of the Whanganui Zinefest at Article Cafe, the album release show for 'Flow: Beautrais+De Vegt' at St Peter's church, and the annual Frocks on Bikes event.

"For our amazingly extensive arts community there are three different La Fiesta exhibitions that will be running during the festival as well.

"That will be a nice lead-in to (Artists) Open Studios season, if indeed it goes ahead."

Vaccine passes would be required across the entire festival, as per government guidelines, Donson said.

"I think that's really important, given that we have an Omicron spread imminent.

"We lost one festival partner after we communicated with everybody that we needed to use vaccine passes, and that particular person had quite a response to that.

"One out of about 60 festival partners is pretty good going, though."

Requiring vaccine passes afforded her a lot of protection as the organiser, Donson said.

"I don't want to end up in a situation where something happens to people participating in our event and that leads to super-spreading or some other kind of unsafe thing.

"If we had significant spread across our community, and a significant number of our festival partners said 'actually, we don't want to do this', then of course we will respond to that.

"Where we are right now, we are all good to go."

The festival runs from February 11 to March 13.