Christchurch/Nelson Busking fest 2019 report.
Hey-ho
I went to the Christchurch Busking fest and then the Nelson Busking fest and these are my thoughts on the matter.
I’m actually old enough to predate the Australasian and North American
applications of the various models of street theatre fests. I’ve worked
most of them more than once. That and my powers of observation are my
only qualifications of the opinions stated within.
In my defence I’d state that I’m only evil because I care.
Not about festivals but about street theater. It’s always fascinated me
in its richness and its unadulterated power and it’s potential for
socially acceptable rascality.
At their best Street theatre
fests are a community enriching enterprise wherein the locals get to be
entertained, families are provided that rare commodity where they are
all subsumed into a celebratory mass and collective joy is realised via
laughter and hooting and it’s free entertainment with the proviso that
they can directly contribute in a generous spirit if they are so moved
to do so as part of an honour system older than capitalism.
At
their best they are run primarily out of a respect and admiration for
the form of street theatre and the unique artists who populate it. Let’s
call this the Finkel attitude. Dick Finkel was the original director
and instigator of the original North American street theatre festival
and his protege was Shelley who has run it with his original attitude
for nearly 20 years after his health declined and after many years just
hanging out with us at the festival, he died.
The Finkel attitude
as far as performers went was a goodwill generator. You would be met
off the plane. A personalised party pack would be given to you and the
whole festival in no small part was designed to keep you happy. A green
room was rented in the hotel that would be open till 3am and volunteers
would pour you drinks.
As such it was a festival that could pick from
the world's best and the only imposition asked from us was an
interesting improvisational obligation where performers would be paired
together and tasked with coming up with 5 mins of new material for one
evening indoor performance that was ticketed but the performers did for
free.
As performers we would happily do this because it was novel
to be on the other side of the honour system equation and to return the
favor in the face of the generosity that permeated the festivals
attitude.
The Edmonton fest is still run as best it can be with this
same attitude and encompasses some satellite fests before and after in
smaller Canadian outposts so the ‘hang’ can be several weeks for those
chosen for these extra fests.
At their worst Street theatre fests
are self serving vehicles wherein the performers are seen as parts of
an individually expendable, collectively exploitable, commercially naive
nucleus upon which layers upon layers of revenue streams are carefully
constructed.
From fees charged to stallholders, tickets sold to
events in which the performers are contractually obliged to do free as a
kind of ‘add-on’ to the festival contract, to corporate events charged
separately and at corporate rates to which the performers are also
obliged to perform gratis, to the packaging and monetization of
promotional materials for advertising revenue to third parties-signed
away as template on most contracts,and the most blatantly venal, group
shows where the admin take a % of the hat, you know, like , on
principle.
A raft of schemes only restricted by the imaginations
of those who reap the benefits of performers being the ‘content
generators’ that they are with the temptingly low overhead that self
contained units of quality entertainment offer.
Our overheads are air travel/ accom/ retainer.
The designed economic engine we are the fuel for in these business
ventures disguised as barely surviving long suffering charities dwarfs
our expenses and it takes a tragic amount of naivety to ignore the
blatant arithmetic that a full time staff of 3 or 4, with their own
expenses of international scouting expeditions looking for talent and
just as importantly new revenue angles,
outweighs the collective
expense of the basic overheads irrespective of the grand slush of
marketing revenues which are proprietorial and therefore both an asset
in their own right and unknown unless purchased.
Sponsors require
quantifiable metrics, they purchase these using money. These metrics are
packaged and what I mean by marketing revenues.
"financial
instruments" such that you can sell a buskers fest without them and then
sell it again when the buyers realise these aren't included. Live and
learn dipshits.
#chchcitycounciltakenforaride
Halifax started the free corporate event to support the sponsors game
and then consulted with Jimmy in Singapore who made $3000us per
performer per corporate freeby in each of his festivals. [Ask me how I
know sometime, it’s a good story] Jodi was the first to try dipping into
our collective hats, she had the grace to shelve that notion after a year.. And on and on.
Fees
interestingly have not increased in over 20 years while it's pretty
straightforward to argue that airfares have increased in the same
period. It’s all about maximising revenue and Street performers are
kinda retarded commercially, they have more altruistic focus’s by and
large and are lambs to the slaughter to those that make bank on their
backs until the model gets exhausted and in Christchurch’s case turns
into…. Well let's talk about Christchurch specifically shall we.
Christchurch
Now a hybrid commercial fringe festival. First 10 days is street
performers until the evenings then indoor shows.
No more group evening
outdoor shows.
Outdoor stages finish by 8-30ish at the latest, most well
before that and theaters and a spiegel tent with ticketed shows take
over from there and after the first 10 days take over entirely for the
rest of the month with a couple of token exceptions.
It has no
cultural grounding as a Ch-ch fest any more as it’s been deemed to be
just too complicated and intricate an endeavor for the brains trust that
is NZ’s cerebral capacity to fathom.
Our collective cultural
inferiority complex has at last come out from it’s subtextural shadow
and been accepted as fact and the task of putting on an international
performance showcase has now been given to a young ambitious group of
Australians and that’s about the largest admission of our innate
inability to succeed as could starkly be admitted.
Add to that the
directors of Ch-ch, Nelson and Auckland fests are American/ British/
South-African expats and the underlying lack of cultural confidence is
kinda self evident.
Jodi started the Christchurch fest from
nothing and ran it for 20 [ish] years and should be commended for
putting NZ on the Street performance map. She was employed by the
Australians this year to run the heart of the operation while they made
bank at the ticket selling end. She also produces the Invercargill fest
that is much smaller and follows the Ch-ch fest and is where presumably
street theatre directors go to die. But you can never count Jodi out.
She’s a survivor and a canny cunning cultural combustualist. A force of nature.
NZ’s summer is North
Americas and European mid winter and NZ being what it is, and exotic and
beautiful holiday destination was a piece of leverage that was used and
is still used to make barely financially viable festival invitations
attractive.
Late night group shows used to be celebrations. NZ
audiences are diabolically difficult to bring to the boil, their natural
reticence often take more than one show to crack and the night-time
shows with 5 or 6 performances would often take a couple of sacrificial
shows before they would cross that threshold and cook and spark and
roar.
Although pre earthquake it was possible. Nick Nickolas once
did a rare triple peaker, [ a show with 3 crescendos, in effect 3
different shows inside one non stop performance] on Cashel street in the
early days.
But back to now, 2019
Christchurch this year
is a grin and bear it festival. You get a free trip to NZ, a fee that
amounts to a per diem of NZ $100/$150, stages with sound and a tech,
accom and a schedule.
You’ll also be contractually obliged [as some
were] to be available to do one free ‘bit’ at an evening show run by the
imported organisers who charge the public $125 a seat.
You also get potential add-ons of smaller fests in Nelson, Auckland and Invercargill.
The present rendition of the Christchurch Buskers festival is dead, a
zombified husk of a dead dream and no massaged metrics can convince me
otherwise. It’s been run into the ground, steered initially from a
busking fest into a commercial ticket selling enterprise and usurped by
foreign interests with no cultural investment in it.
Christchurch
is now daytime audiences only as the Australians now running the fest,
who I have been told specifically are not less than human as we have
been led to believe, are nuking any threat to their nightly ticketed
cash cows put on in their spiegeltent and elsewhere during the 10 days
of the buskers fest and the rest of the month that follows.
Also, this
year it wasn’t a buskers fest or a street theatre fest is was a new
branding exercise entirely. The whole month was labeled ‘Bread and
Circus’.
Which is apt and revealingly moronic [which is not to say
Australian in principle I hasten to add] as the phrase was first coined
as a cynical placebo during the collapse of the Roman Empire and
civilisation as it was then known.
So brain dead marketing presumption
of general ignorance or larrikinism, you be the judge.
To me it’s like
disaster capitalism has become self aware and honestly doesn’t give a
shit whether you know it or not.
The title, ‘Bread and circuses’,
comes from a line by the Roman satirist Juvenal, and refers to the
practice in ancient Rome of providing a regular free bread (or grain)
dole to the lower classes and free entertainment in the city's arenas
and circuses, both of which had the effect of preventing civil unrest in
the populace.
To me it’s a fin de siecle attitude, sometimes
known as fashionable despair. It’s the kind of cynicism the cultural
jackals that are Strut & Fret and it’s Bread & Circus producer
Jess Rankin employ to convince themselves they’re clever and it seems
to work.
They’ve strip mined Adelaide and now they’re raping
Christchurch but don’t worry there’s a really attractive tent on the other side
of the street staffed by people who couldn’t get into Cirque. [I did over a two day audition in NY and from 58 to the eventual 8 and passed and turned them down as a stilt clown soloist...just sharing..:) ..)
The Roman public as their social fabric dissolved and Christchurch
audiences have much in common. They both know what it’s like to have all
semblance of normality removed and replaced by blatant corruption and
nepotism.
The Christchurch public post earthquake have had to
put up with hastily trained $150 an hour evaluators punching multichoice
hastily configured software on hastily purchased iPads visiting their
broken homes followed by a 5+ year wait for essential repairs while
hastily created LLC’s syphoned off the rebuilding funds in a Russian
Dolled subcontracting ratfuck.
Venal Golems all the way down.
Coupled
with a collective metropolitan poltergeist in the form of aftershocks
that spat the contents of everyone's fridges and mantelpieces and
shelves onto the floor on a regular basis it’s no wonder the audiences
are shell shocked and in practical terms terminally withdrawn.
Strut & Fret have a well deserved reputation in the Australasian
variety population as not to put too fine a point on it, cunts.
They
employ physical performers but have successfully argued that if those
performers get injured they don’t actually employ them rather they
facilitate their employ with clients. Thus evading any medical insurance
costs.
Their business model, once you rip their emperor's new
clothes from them is the events management version of Microsoft's 80’s
mantra. Embrace, extend, and exterminate. How novel, how innovative.
They are gig economy middle-men parasites who tend to make a profit so
that’s attractive to some. They are also marketed as shiny and quirky
and various other superficial things.
The Christchurch city
council facilitates the whole affair, it’s desperate to have it’s
residents reinvest in its inner city. They have a new Art Gallery, they
have a new Library, neither of which are expected to make a profit but
the Buskers fest has run at a loss for a number of years and that’s just
not acceptable because presumably culture should pay for itself and
have enough left over for second hand mercedes for all concerned.
Whether running at a loss is simply code for financially mismanaged a
whisker short of fraud is not for me to say.
The fact remains that
Christchurch central is now ignored by many residents as it offers them
little and has all the rebuilt charm and architectural grace of Nicole
Kidman's botoxed face.
The city center is itself a commercial
conglomerate marinated in corporate welfare that ignores the rigorous
dictates it demands of the buskers fest, that it not run at a loss, and
whines like the little bitch it is to the degree that it receives 100’s
of thousands this coming winter alone to alleviate the reality that the
locals simply can’t be assed coming into town for their shopping because
parking costs and it’s cold and uninviting and has no soul or semblance
of a personality. The fact that the Christchurch city center has less
personality than any of the suburban shopping malls that compete with it
speaks volumes.
It’s going to take years and millions to seduce
the general public into readopting and reowning it’s center. It’s going
to take more than murals and a library and international street
performers on 5 ish stages during the daytime over 10 days.
So
after purchasing a $12 large flat white from a small wheeled wagon.
[Typically $5 but buskers fests are commercial dynamos] I catch a few
shows.
The sunlight itself is toxic, most of the shows have performers and audiences baking in it. Add that to the torpor index.
Crowds were small and the amount of energy required to transform them
from mildly lobotomized to collectively enthusiastic proved too much for
most of the performances I saw.
Fair enough too, we’re not miracle
workers. I saw performers with decades of experience struggling just to
hold audiences let alone take them on any collective journey.
There were performers whose shows were rote with verbiage that was the
lowest form of enchantment. Blah blah blah 20 minute skill reveal, blah
blah blah 37 minute 3 minute physical demonstration with uptempo music
to simulate the required climax. It was not always thus.
I didn’t
watch some shows, I simply sat behind the crowds and listened to the
patter and the energy levels of the responses. The festival had been
going a week before I got there and so I presumed had found its own
level. As performers you simply can’t fake it more than a few days
without positive feedback as a solo performer.
Daredevil Chickens kicked
ass because they are a double act who feed off each other and they were
the most successful show I saw for energy levels. Their pacing is
relentless, comically frantic, improvisational and they pick on the
unenthusiastic while blaming each other for having to which is canny as.
Slower shows that build moods struggled, they are my favorite shows
personally to watch and my two most favorite with about a combined 50
years of experience both struggled.
The kindest thing to say is it wasn’t what it could be nor was it anything it once was.
Of the performers I spoke to none were particularly happy, and these
are some of the worlds most self reliant happiness generators
I’d
recommend it still if it continues to exist simply because it offers
things beyond itself. A trip to NZ with the festival being the price you
have to pay. Your pound of flesh will be extracted, be prepared. Bring
motivational tapes!
Let me offer solutions, here freely and
ongoing at $1000 per day plus expenses as a consultant because why not
suck on the middle management teat myself and put any one of the
gormless pretenders out of a job on principle. Also in the spirit of
‘Keep your enemies closer’ I should be guaranteed employ. Maybe get to
label myself a Chief Momentum Architect.
The wider issue is that the general population don’t consider the city belongs to them any more.
The council and the retailers need to be reminded that cities exist
primarily for people to conduct their lives within and not all of life
is devoted to goods and services. I know!
Cities are places life
takes place and goods and services are in fact secondary to healthy
metropolitan life. Healthy metropolitan life celebrates itself and goods
and services take up the slack but it’s obvious no sociologists or
social anthropologists were involved in the cash grab that was
Christchurch's’ redesign which is why it sits an abandoned tourist
peppered husk.
It requires a cultural course correction.
Initially it took 5 years from it’s beginning before the people of
Christchurch adopted the original International Buskers fest as their
own.
This is average as seen also firsthand in both Ch-ch and Auckland
fests as well as many in North America.
It needs another 5 year plan with distinct objectives, qualitative metrics and a board that oversees its budget.
It needs to be primary aimed at the general public of Christchurch and their potential to celebrate themselves.
It needs to be spectacular and eccentric and ambitious.
It needs a digital component that strives to create an online audience that dwarfs Christchurch’s population of 396,700
This would provide significant return for sponsors and also allow the
festival to be placed under various commercial aid umbrellas associated
with tourist promotion and national identity.It would also foster local
digital production potential and help invigorate local creative
development which is at present bruised and languid.
I have a
good friend who last year recalibrated and reprogrammed the entire NY
subway ticketing system. Millions touch his code every day. He’s
interested.
I have another friend who’s produced festival based
ticketed live streaming events. That’s another branch of potential
development.
It will take significant investment to realise a vision
larger than individual bank accounts and significant intercommunication
to distill a vision ready for launch.
It could strive to be a
celebration of urban art in its widest definition and involve
installations/ 3D Projections, a wide range of public based
international performances both big and small and an adjacent skills
sharing component where workshops took place after the event drawing
both Local/ National and International students.
It all needs to be accessible to the public. Fuck this commercial caste system.
NZ’s successes include production and both real world and digital rendering [Weta and others]
The WOW festival ,Which in my opinion has been crippled by corporate
short sightedness the same way Christchurch has chosen to emulate by
focusing on ticketed sales rather than wider digital potential, taking a
pan culturally attractive extravaganza and deliberately crippling it’s
potential audience via a moronic lack of imagination.
NZ is
attractive for it’s natural beauty but also for it’s quirky understated
authentic self identity as evidenced by it’s comic successes and far
more overseas people are interested in it than those who can conceivably
afford air tickets. Sponsors and marketing bigwigs have ignored this
potential because they are retarded by the pressures of their immediate
ongoing metrics.
It’s hard to see the ocean when your pathetic small
fish lifestyle is dictated by your miniscule fishbowl.
So
Onto Nelson…
Nelson employed 5 acts, I only went to the last night-time show because
I’m still recovering from a major operation and Christchurch taught me
I’m only good for 5 hours or less or I have to spend the next day
recuperating.
The cast were all happy and bonded and most were all kept in a nearby rented victorian house with all the trimmings.
The night-time show was MC’d by Basketball Jones who, being of NZ
extraction and having decades of experience, took the time needed to
wake the audience up at their own pace and then do his solo show.
It was
evident and again a bit of a foregone conclusion, that it takes a while
to warm audiences here up.
By the end of the first half and throughout
the second it was cooking and the venue, with the audience seated on the
road and up into the church steps is as ideal as could be asked for.
It all went swimmingly well and then after the breakdown an Italian
restaurant owner invited the cast, myself and Robb Bloor and his dog,
inside for a feed. Prior to that, during the breakdown, various food
stalls had delivered free food to the performers and local sound and
breakdown crew and that kind of gesture, though small, is indicative of
gratitude and goodwill and community which as travelling performing folk
we find disproportionately heartwarming.
Even I, who was not
performing and now have a stomach the size of a room temperature scrotum
recognised this small act of love for what it was.
Nelson’s
small but coherent in a community sense. The festival’s management has
changed hands over the years and is now not directly run by the council
but subcontracted as its own entity.
I got a brief history but am not
really qualified on the in’s and outs.
The performers were all very
happy and really that’s my main concern.
That festivals treat their
performers well and the performers as a consequence put on more radiant
shows and fulfilled their brief of transforming willing individuals into
a celebratory mass.
There you go, I’m done.
