As the treasurer of Inangahua Community Arts Council, which is made up of mostly women volunteers over 50 and hosts Arts on Tour shows in Reefton, Lois Williams vents on defunding by Creative New Zealand.
Opinion: Middle-class women over 50 are accustomed to not being terribly important.
And they can make some people nervous: male middle managers, for instance.
But as the mainstay of community arts groups and audiences around the motu you’d think they might reasonably expect to be valued by Creative New Zealand.
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You’d think.
But the numbers of senior women in audiences for Arts on Tour concerts around the country is cited as something of an “issue” in Creative NZ reports.
In the word of one of two assessors: “Audience make-up is noted as ‘primarily middle-Aotearoa-New Zealand … tertiary educated … 70 percent female and over the age of 50.”
Furthermore, the assessor speculates, grey-haired local organisers may actually be the cause of alleged low turnouts for the shows.
“I wonder if low attendances are the result of the business model itself … reliant on a high degree of involvement from the voluntary sector - often an older cohort,” he/she hints, darkly.
The anonymous assessor scored Arts on Tour a grudging three out of five for relevance to the communities it serves.
It’s tempting to mark him (I’m guessing) five out of five for ageism and sexism.
Check out the grey-haired arts supporters – and the bald ones – at any NZSO concert.
And in small towns all over Aotearoa, grey-haired volunteers welcome Arts on Tour performers, open the halls, put out the chairs, sell the tickets, make and serve the supper, clean up, do the banking and schmooze local businesses for donations to stay solvent.
But Arts on Tour concerts should be reaching a more “diverse” audience, the assessor worries.
That’s a nod to to Creative NZ’s entirely worthy aim of ensuring equity for Māori and Pasifika audiences and artists.
But on Stewart Island Rakiura, veteran arts organiser Gwen Neave is indignant at what she sees as “elitist” assumptions.
“How do they know who’s in our audience? Or on our committees? I’m Māori from Ngāti Kahungunu and well over 50, and we don’t ask people for their whakapapa – a lot of Ngāi Tahu people down here are fair and blue-eyed.”
As for low audience numbers, Creative NZ needs to look at the bigger picture she says.
“We might get 35 people at a concert, but that’s nearly 10 percent of our population. I’d like to see them get 10 percent of Auckland to a show.”
The Rakiura arts group makes a point of introducing all touring artists to local kaumatua at pre-concert functions, Neave says.
And diversity can sometimes be hiding in plain sight.
In remote Millers Flat in Central Otago, the local arts committee treasurer is well-known children’s author Kyle Mewburn who transitioned to womanhood in her 50s.
“If Arts on Tour goes, we’re reduced to the annual school production and cover bands down at the local pub,” Mewburn says.
It would be wrong to suggest that Creative NZ’s advisory panel was moved to scrap funding for Arts on Tour based on the views of one assessor.
But it’s surely disappointing that Creative NZ’s decision was informed by assumptions that are arguably ill-founded and disparage a small army of arts volunteers in the provinces.
