The PANNZ (Performing Arts Network of New Zealand) Arts Market is known as a place for pitching your latest performance or filling a festival lineup with next big things.

I am not well connected. I had nothing to peddle. I like people. They interest me, especially arty ones. 

So, last week's Arts Market became my playground. 

My immigrant parents discouraged me from a creative career. But all forms of the arts have kept calling me with lavender haze since I was a child, more strongly in the past 2 years since a near death experience drove me to middle-aged rebellion. 

Encouraged through Toipoto creative careers mentoring, I’ve become a working creative at midlife: writer, teacher, mother, maker…you are now reading my first go at professional journalism after trying to make a living out of it half my life ago, getting disenchanted after a handful of horrendous internships and turning my back on the industry in favour of of working in education. 

The past few years of COVID lockdowns means that currently, being in a crowd feels like a strange sort of luxury, compared to bubble life. Being in a room full of adults is also a luxury for most teachers, as is the price of an entry ticket actually being affordable (around $50 for the whole event).

PANNZ is for anyone associated with the performing arts: participants, advocates, industry professionals and creatives. There was plenty to look at as a wallflower. 

However, sharing a room with other people and working the room are two different things. Networking is important - it can lead to friendship, learning, work and money. People need people, especially in the performing arts.

However, it can be alienating and feel like rejection. Often awkward, sycophantic and sweat promoting, networking gets a bad wrap.  It doesn’t have to be a dirty word though, especially if you have the luxury of no agenda - and you play with the idea that we are all just people and there are no main characters.

I don’t know if powerful people were attracted to me or if it was beginner's luck. Was it the fresh-from-Trade-Me dress I was wearing, my post-chemo undercut or because I didn’t smell of stress? From the moment I sat down for Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal’s captivating keynote on Whare Tapere (a PAANZ highlight besides networking), people engaged with me. 

Within minutes, PANNZ Board Chair Louise Peacock-Coyle had introduced me to her whole table. Shona McCullagh sat under a tree with me at lunch, where we discussed how she came to be in the role of Artistic Director for Auckland Arts Festival and the general lack of curiosity that many white privileged people have in working towards equality in our creative communities.

Later on, I’d worked up enough courage to sit at the cool table. 

There I struck up a conversation with Netane Taukiavea, a leading light of No.3 Roskill Theatre. We discussed access, a centrally important issue for Taukiavea in his work and a theme that kept coming through at PANNZ. 

Funding and unequal distribution of it makes the arts scene prohibitive for many of our less economically empowered communities, when they are the ones who may need it most. Hearing Taukiavea speak to smashing barriers and getting theatre into the hearts and homes in his local community -even during COVID lockdowns - left me mixed with hope, and rage regarding inequity and what isn’t being done in the name of progress (yet) in Aotearoa. 

Feeling slightly deflated, I plonked myself in a beanbag just before closing speeches for a cup of tea and a lie down before my last chance to work the room at wrap up drinks. My face doesn’t lie, (resting-structural-inequality-frustration-face)…I know this because Jo Randerson came to ask if I was OK. Such a kind thing for a somebody to ask a nobody. 

We debriefed over a glass of bubbles together and discussed the highs and lows of the scene, the need for mentoring young people (of which we are nearly not), and the haters, who I wisely told her will always hate. I wouldn’t have preached if I had first read her bio.

PANNZ Arts Market was the greatest time I’ve had professionally and spiritually for 2 years. 

There was a lot to soak up from keynote speakers, panels and presentations. The thrill of networking surprised me. Perhaps if I’d been pitching and peddling, or hunting out talent, it would have felt more like work. With curiosity as my main agenda, I could position myself as worthy of talking to anyone I wanted, which is something I’m usually not good at with just a cup of tea on board.

I left the final day smelling of Jo Randerson’s perfume, not stress, high on creative fumes, without even taking any drugs. 

I’ll remember PANNZ for a lot of things: the dark underbelly of inequity that pervades our land, the generosity of strangers, and the time being a nobody gave me the upper hand.