What do you see in 2020?

Mike Chunn - Play It Strange

In 1999, in the thick of the debate about NZ music being ‘low quality’, quotas and the government’s happy stance on the “free market philosophies” of the day, one Dr Michael Higgins came to New Zealand. He had been the Minister for the Arts in Ireland. He spoke at the “Counting The Cultural Beat” symposium in Wellington. Back to him shortly.

   In May this year, I was asked by a journalist if I would be going to lots more gigs seeing as it was Music Month. I said “No. Music Month isn’t about listening to music. It’s about writing and playing it”  - in the same way that sport has evolved in this country. The culture of sport here is about participation not watching it. Many funding bodies support amateur sport on the basis that participants will play it.  So to – in all areas of the arts, we at Play It Strange believe that primary funding philosophies should be engineered to arts participation rather than being a member of an audience. Back to Dr Michael Higgins.

   In 1999, just prior to the NZ music renaissance, he said :

“At the bases of the choices we will make in the next few years are some fundamental value choices involving such questions as –

1.    What value do we put on the public world?

2.    What value do we put on issues beyond the immediate, beyond a single life span?

3.    How do we wish to remember and be remembered?

4.    What do we wish to be free to imagine?

Such value choices raise questions about the cultural space, its relationship to the economic space, how it is to be defined; is it to be open or closed, democratic or autocratic, fixed by tradition or flexible to the contemporary and the as yet unremembered?

   One of the aims of a comprehensive arts policy might be to combat the growing compartmentalisation of the modern economic systems and to restore expressive freedom to the individual, so that every man and woman can again in some sense be an artist.”

While we now live in special times, there are still choices to be made. Choices that will impact on our evolution and dictate who we will be – as a single person, as a local community and as a nation. They are all interconnected.

Play It Strange has a vision of 2020. Many people walk the streets with tin whistles in their pockets and a guitar over their shoulder. Every school (including principals and staff) celebrates the original music, art and literature of its students as much as they celebrate the senior netball team and 1st XV winning their Saturday afternoon games. The prime minister stands up in parliament and proclaims his (and his colleague’s) pride in whatever recent success in the world of the arts might be brought to his or her attention. We are a proud nation .

It won’t be all about money. We will see SPARC doing what it does. But the energy and support of our imaginative activities will be on a par with the sporting infrastructure.

In the end it will be about our ‘belief’;  belief in ourselves as creative individuals in an exciting and imaginative society. And funding bodies will have played a huge role in growing that evolution. By financial support, yes -  but also by standing up and saying “This is important in our small country. We must all share that belief”.

As Dr Higgins said: “How do we wish to remember and be remembered?”.

   The future of an over-arching dream and an under-pinning strategy in fostering a pro-active world in which young people create, practice and master the world that their imaginations proffers…….   That will give us much to remember – and be remembered for.