Funding the arts in New Zealand can feel like a lolly scramble.
There’s never enough to go around, someone always misses out and ends up crying in the corner.
The biggest funder, Creative New Zealand, handed out more than $16 million last year to community arts, craft, Toi Māori, dance, literature, music, theatre, and visual arts.
“It’s so tough in a very small country like New Zealand to make anything work in the arts,” says CNZ chief executive Stephen Wainwright.
This year the government gave a one-off $22 million to Creative New Zealand to help the sector recover from Covid but there are many mouths to feed.
Earlier this year CNZ shut down its grant round in less than 24 hours because the maximum number of applications had already been submitted.
A total of 250 were accepted but another 150 were still in draft form and completely missed out.
Wainwright said: “We’re really at the limits of what we can support to grow at the moment. In an ideal world would there be more resources? Of course, there would, but that’s not, this is how things are at the current point.”
It means many of those trying to make a living out of the arts get no funding at all or not as much as they needed.
Creative New Zealand also has to walk a careful line over diversity and the audiences being served or it can very quickly find itself in the middle of a cultural war.
Cancelling Shakespeare
A decision not to fund a $30,000 grant for a secretary for the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand provoked claims that CNZ was cancelling the famous bard.
It’s the rural sector that now feels it’s not getting its fair share of the pie.
Arts On Tour, an organisation that takes acts like singers Moana Maniapoto and Jackie Clarke as well as actors such as Michael Hurst, out to New Zealand’s remote regions and small-town halls lost its three yearly CNZ funding.
It now has to compete for funding every year with around 250 others.
Founder Steve Thomas says it’s left Arts on Tour facing great uncertainty over its future.
“We’re on a wing and a prayer now,” he said.
They got $150,000 in this year’s funding round, well short of what they needed – they’d asked for $700,000 over three years.
Arts on Tour shows will go on but there’ll be fewer and, as Sunday found out, it’s left the heartland feeling like they’ve lost another service.
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