Nelson Arts Festival 1994 to 2024
The Nelson Arts Festival is recognised as the first and oldest annual, regional, multi-arts festival in Aotearoa.
In 2024, we celebrated our 30th year of delivering epic annual festivals – all wrapped up in the warm embrace of manaakitanga that defines and holds us as people of Aotearoa and the Pacific. Today, the Nelson Arts Festival continues as a bright beacon for the arts and a strong pou for the creative community in Whakatū Nelson, the broader Te Tauihu region, and beyond.
The seeds are sown
When Dutch immigrant Eelco Boswijk Senior opened The Chez Eelco coffee house in Whakatū Nelson in 1960, it soon became a hub for the fledgling local artistic community. In 1969, the Nelson Provincial Arts Council (the predecessor of Arts Council Nelson) was founded, aspiring to put Whakatū Nelson on the map as the ‘Art Centre of New Zealand’. In 1977, it staged three weeks of events in venues across the city, from mid-August to early September. The programme included opera, dance, music, photography, painting and pottery. From there, the local art scene blossomed. In 1987, the first wearable art show (which went on to become World of WearableArt) took place.
Festival beginnings
The inaugural Nelson Arts Festival, in its current form, took place in 1995, envisioned as a wrap-around event for World of WearableArt (WOW) and to encourage visitors to the region to stay longer.
A few years earlier, WOW founder Dame Suzie Moncrieff had the idea of starting a festival but had no time to pursue it. Then she met Annabel Norman, who had moved to Nelson in the early 1990s and was looking for meaningful work that involved community.
Annabel joined the WOW team as a volunteer. Her first job was sweeping floors for WOW’s then set director, Bodhi Vincent. Recognising that Annabel had great people skills and a positive energy, Dame Suzie promoted her up the ranks until she volunteered alongside WOW’s core team of three.
Keen to support Annabel finding paid work (because WOW, which was largely run by volunteers at the time, wasn’t in the position to offer this), Dame Suzie asked her if she would be interested in running an arts festival and then suggested Annabel approach Philip Woollaston, who was Mayor of Nelson at the time, to see if Nelson City Council would sponsor it.
WOW clearly demonstrated the power of the arts in bringing together the community as well as delivering economic benefits to Whakatū Nelson businesses, and having a Nelson Arts Festival would extend those benefits beyond what was then only a two-night show.
‘Woollaston was a champion for the arts, and he could see the value in creating another cultural festival for Nelson,’ says Dame Suzie.
The Nelson City Council’s willingness to play a more active role, providing both funding and employing a team, made the festival possible.
In 1994, Annabel was appointed by Nelson City Council to research and develop what would become known as the Nelson Arts Festival. That year, a small trial was held over a weekend, called Off the Wall. It featured cabaret, talks and lectures, and art tours of artist’s galleries in the city.
Annabel became the inaugural director when the first Nelson Arts Festival was held the following year and remained in this role for the next 16 years.
Community celebration at its heart
In the mid-90s, every child in Nelson dreamed of being selected to appear in WOW but, by then, WOW was attracting such a high calibre of entries that it decided to set the minimum age for entrants to 18 years.
Not wanting school students to feel discouraged, and wanting to continue to encourage creativity, Dame Suzie suggested to Annabel the idea of a parade as the festival’s opening night community celebration. This would give school students the opportunity to create amazing masks that they could showcase, resulting in a colourful, vibrant and fun street parade for the whole community.
At the beginning, the Mask Parade was the festival’s key event. The Mask Parade would have not become the success it did without the combined creative energies of street performance and community theatre champions, the late Kim Merry (himself a professional mask maker) and Donna Chapman.
Like Annabel, Kim had played a key role at WOW, directing and staging pre-show theatre performances. In 1994, he was appointed to the role of community events organiser at Nelson City Council alongside Donna.
Kim remained a vibrant part of the festival team until 2009 and his early death, at age 46, from cancer. During his tenure, the Mask Parade became the biggest event of its kind in New Zealand and was embraced by the local community.
According to Dame Suzie and others, Whakatū Nelson became ‘party central’, with flags flying, street performers, sculpture in the park, and the town full of interesting, colourful characters. Thousands of people would line the streets during the Mask Parade.
On the map as an arts centre
Along with a growing community of local artists of all shapes and size, WOW and the Nelson Arts Festival had firmly positioned Whakatū as the cultural arts centre of Aotearoa by the turn of the new millennium. However, there was little evidence of public art on display in the Nelson outdoors, so Dame Suzie also proposed that NCC invest in public sculpture around the city. From there, the Nelson Arts Festival’s famed Sculpture Symposium was born. Anzac Park became its first home before it relocated to the top of Trafalgar Street and, later, near Albion Square off Bridge Street.
In 2004, Sophie Kelly joined the festival team as production coordinator. Over the next few years, she experimented with creating bespoke venues for the festival, the most memorable being the couple of years the team created its own version of a kind of Spiegeltent on the courthouse car park, near Albion Square.
Sophie says it was a small, tightknit team at this time, with Annabel, Kim, and herself, along with Antony Hodgson in the role of technical director and Jacquetta Bell, who had been the festival publicist for several years and became the Readers & Writers coordinator in 2003 (and served in these roles until 2015).
In 2005, WOW moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, after Dame Suzie realised it needed to move to a bigger city in order to grow and survive. This gave the Nelson Arts Festival the opportunity to move to slightly later in the year (from September to late October, when the days are longer and warmer), grow and to stand alone as the successful festival it has become.
As Annabel says,
‘We started bringing in international shows and a lot more diverse kind of program. We really became a fully-fledged arts festival at this point.’
In 2008, when both the Nelson School of Music (now Nelson Centre of Musical Arts) and Theatre Royal closed for refurbishment, the Nelson Arts Festival moved to Founders Park, with most of the events held at the Energy Centre and Granary along with street entertainers, artists, and food stalls around the park. Only the Mask Parade and occasional theatre shows took place in the central city.
In 2010, Michaela Blackman joined Nelson City Council’s festival team as an event coordinator for its Summer Programme. Initially working with Adi Tait, she continued to coordinate the Mask Parade for the following decade.
In 2018, following 24 successful years of development and support, a new community-based, autonomous organisation was established to take over the management of the festival. The first festival to run under the Nelson Festivals Trust was in 2019, our 25th year.
Growing talent
Throughout the past 30 years, the festival has provided training, mentoring and advancement opportunities for its team members and volunteers. And several founding team members have been known to return to the festival as volunteers.
When Annabel retired in 2011, Sophie took over as festival director and Charlie Unwin joined as producer. When Sophie left in 2017, Charlie took over as festival director until 2019, alongside Amanda Raine who worked first as marketing manager and then general manager.
In 2018, Kerry Sunderland joined as Readers & Writers coordinator (after Stella Chrysostomou curated the 2016 programme and Naomi Arnold the 2017 programme). In 2019, Readers & Writers was renamed Pukapuka Talks.
In 2019, Antony Hodgson stepped down from the role of technical director and fellow team member Wendy Clease – and, later, JR Richardson – took his place. Despite his attempts to retire, Antony continues in a more focused role as head of AV and deputy technical & production manager. Grant Ellis has been a key member of the technical team for many years.
A new decade of leadership
In 2020, Padma Naidu came on board as festival director and Annie Pokel joined as inaugural Night Vision coordinator. The festival moved from Founders and back into the heart of the city.
In 2021, a new leadership team – Lydia Zanetti, Rose Campbell and Shanine Hermsen – joined Annie (now head of marketing & communications) and Kerry (now Pukapuka Talks programme manager).
In 2022, Lydia Zanetti became executive & artistic director and Rose McGrannachan joined as head of business and operations, becoming a key member of the core team, alongside Annie and Kerry.
After two years of Covid-19 disruption in 2020 and 2012, when the Mask Carnivale was unable to run and smaller programmes were delivered, the Nelson Arts returned in 2022 and began to flourish, growing even bigger in 2023, when the Mask Carnivale returned to the city centre streets for the first time in four years.
In 2024, Ruth Roebuck joined the team as general manager to develop and direct the Nelson Festivals Trust’s new strategy, which looks ahead to the next 30 years, and is working alongside artistic director Zanetti to deliver the strategy.
And, in other ways, the seeds sown in the early days continue to blossom, with Eelco Boswijk Senior’s daughter-in-law Ali Boswijk heading up the Nelson Festivals Trust board.
Over the past three decades, the festival has developed a reputation for being audacious, awe-inspiring and, increasingly, accessible. It delivers big, bold and beautiful events.
And if you ask any of the team from years present and past, ‘What has been the key to the Nelson Arts Festival enduring success and longevity?’, they will tell you it is creativity, collaboration, constant reinvention, staying current and being courageous.
This article is, of course, only a snapshot of the past 30 years, and captures only a fraction of all the amazing people involved in the festivals to date. We will keep updating and growing