There's been a huge outcry over Creative New Zealand's decision to turn down a funding application from the organisation that runs a high school Shakespeare festival. But was the Bard really going to be cancelled?
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After dominating discourse in New Zealand for the better part of 72 hours, the saga of the missing thousands for an organisation that holds an annual high school Shakespeare festival reached its conclusion.
The conclusion? The government coming to the party, saying it'll cover the shortfall.
So, all's well that ends well? Not quite.
Questions persist over some of the themes this story threw up - including what the phrase 'decolonising the arts' actually means, and why many media outlets seemed willing to misrepresent the facts of the case.
The Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand (SGCNZ) describes itself as a 'life skills enhancing organisation through Shakespeare'.
It interacts and collaborates with Shakespeare's Globe in London, and it runs a prominent festival each year showcasing high schools performing Shakespeare plays, commonly known as the Sheilah Winn Festival.
The organisation runs on a budget of about $750,000 per year, and for several years now a component of that has come from Creative New Zealand.
For the past three years, CNZ's contribution has been a touch over $31,000 per year.
However, in the most recent funding round, SGCNZ's application was knocked back. Creative New Zealand said this was because there were a lot of applicants, and it has a limited budget (CNZ is funded through a combination of government grants and lottery grants).
There was never any suggestion the future of the Sheilah Winn festival was in jeopardy: in fact, SGCNZ's chief executive Dawn Sanders said the application was for an administrative assistant to help Sanders in her day-to-day duties, and to help develop a succession plan for when Sanders calls it a day.
But quotes from an advisory panel assessing SGCNZ's application made their way into the media.
One said the centre "did not demonstrate the relevance to the contemporary art context of Aotearoa in this time and place and landscape".
Another assessor said the application made them "question whether a singular focus on an Elizabethan playwright is most relevant for a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond".
Shakespeare expert and Massey University senior lecturer Dr Hannah August says these quotes, which were plucked from a more fulsome document without context, may well have riled people up, as they could be seen as questioning the continued relevance of the Bard's work - a sore point for many.
But she says this whole saga has been unedifying to witness - even if it seems to have come to a superficially satisfying conclusion.
"I think that sets a really bad precedent. I think the idea that public outcry based on misinformation could cause the prime minister to step in and offer extra funding when someone’s been unsuccessful in a contestable funding bid...I don't know, do we really want to be doing that?"
Asked for what we take from this story moving forward, August suggest two things.
"I hope that some of the journalism that fed the misinformation that led to everybody getting up on their high horse about the so-called cancellation of Shakespeare...I hope there's some reflection as to the inaccuracies of that reporting.
"I'd also like to see a wider conversation about what we might mean by 'decolonising the arts' and what that looks like - and a conversation that includes people that perhaps feel anxious about that term, or not as clued up on some of the theory around it.
"We could think about what the place of Shakespeare and other writers [is] going forward.
"Can we come to some sort of clearer understanding of what type of arts ecosystem we're hoping to have, and the place of English writers within it, that doesn't involve everybody chucking their reckons on this bonfire that has been burning so brightly for the past few days."
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