Where is your rage now?
Yesterday the Vice Chancellor of Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington announced that as a part of proposed redundancies to get the university out of the red, 230 full-time roles across the university would be cut, along with several programmes discontinued.
Theatre, the programme I got my Bachelors and Masters, in will lose several staff, and be subsumed into the English and Communications programme. This is nothing short of a tragedy.
Seeing my former colleagues, friends and mentors on the edge of an unstable precipice fills me with dread. Vic Uni Theatre, a programme that has grown the skills and careers of many of New Zealand’s greatest exports, will be slashed, with a team of ten being cut to four staff.
“This will wind the clock back to 2000 — the last time Vic theatre had a staff of this size.” Doctor James Wenley writes in The Big Idea, “”Back then, we had no first-year courses, nothing for postgraduates. We now have a dynamic range of courses at all levels and our MFA postgrads regularly work alongside industry professionals.”
I can say this with certainty — had I not studied theatre at Victoria University, I would have never found myself with the career and life I have today. Though any career in the arts requires determination, masochism and stubbornness, the foundation my studies gave me is what made me who I am now.
I’m a successful theatre artist. I’ve had work performed in many cities across three countries, have won and been nominated for multiple theatre awards, am performing in the Edinburgh Fringe this year and if we must quantify art in something as pallid as capital, I’ve made back the vast majority of what I’ve spent on my shows and had multiple fully sold out seasons.
During my studies at Vic, we performed Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Sartre, Aristophanes, alongside a variety of equally as important local writers, and devised or improvised works. If we are holding the tangibility of an arts career up to the standards of theatrical classicism, I’ve done it all.
The MFA programme tore me apart and put me back together as an artist who can fight for their work. It exhausted me, it shaped me, it gave me people and experiences I can never take for granted. The vast majority of the lecturers and staff within the Vic Theatre programme are kind, generous people, who are thoroughly overworked and underpaid, with dedication, passion and love for their craft.
I could wax lyrical about most of the Vic Theatre department for hours, but it comes down to this. Vic Uni Theatre took me from a high school drama student with dreams of grandeur to a working professional in a theatre field. It’s given me a home. It’s given me jobs and skills and people I love.
To those who wrote decades worth of think pieces crying that Shakespeare was being cancelled last year due to one role being lost by a reallocation of funds — where is your rage now?
To the government who gave a funding boost specifically to Shakespeare’s Globe NZ last year to stop that role from being lost — where is that eleventh hour arts grant? Where is the empathy you showed then? Where do your priorities lie?
Quoted in The Post this morning, Minister of Education Jan Tinetti said, “(Universities) have to adjust,” she said. “Changing what they teach and how they are organised is not unprecedented,” — a deeply callous remark from someone whose job it is to apparently care about education. These proposed cuts are not a change, they’re a decimation of jobs, livelihoods, and our future.
I am sad about these proposed changes, but most of all — I’m angry. I’m angry that the arts always are the first to get short changed when it comes to austerity. I’m angry that the first majority Labour government in years clearly sees the loss of important education as nothing more than an altered digit on an accounting spreadsheet.
I’m furious that we are, once again, relegating the future of tomorrow’s artists to an indeterminate point in time. Education cuts do not heal, and ten years down the road, I am certain we will regret this.
If you’re not angry, you should be, because our arts community in New Zealand will not recover from this for a very, very long time.
Vic Uni Theatre alumni are Oscar winners. They hold NZ Orders of Merit. They produce huge concerts, teach students the world over, stage intimate play readings in dark pubs, and, I’m sure, some of them work in professions quite unlike the one they studied — but their stories matter too.
To the Ministers Hipkins, Tinetti and Robertson, and to the government at large — we are the ones who write what people remember. How do you want to be seen?
