The Board of the National Folk Festival is delighted to announce two new senior staff positions. Jared Wilkins, Production Manager of the Festival for the last three years has been appointed Managing Director and Dave O’Neill, Program Manager in 2000 and 2006, is now the Festival’s Artistic Director.
Both jobs are full time, fixed term contract positions. O’Neill, a music teacher and internationally acclaimed professional musician, a member of the Eric Bogle Band, has taken on an expanded role as artistic director. Wilkins began 10 years ago as a volunteer, then volunteer coordinator. I spoke to Wilkins as he stood in the middle of a paddock rapidly filling with tents as volunteers began arriving from all over Australia for the NFF, which will be opened on Thursday evening at 8pm by the Hon Barry Cohen, former Minister for the Arts in the Hawke Government.
1300 volunteers, grouped into teams managed by volunteer coordinators, work to a paid Volunteer Manager, one of only five paid staff in Wilkins’ office. I wondered on the one hand if, since the National Folk Festival was permanently based in Canberra in the early 1990s, the new positions represented a corporatisation of the NFF. On the other hand, here was the Managing Director in the field, literally, looking and sounding like just another groupie of the folk music community. How does it all work?
Wilkins’ personal history goes a long way to answering this question. Community, he says, is the key. Even he, who attended Narrabundah College, and O’Neill who went to Narrabundah High School work together as members of the Canberra community. Teaching, too, is a central component of their lives. Kids, says Wilkins, usually fantasise about growing up to run away with the circus (perhaps this is the story of O’Neill’s life as a musician), but being brought up in the household of well-known drama and art identities, Peter and Lola Wilkins, saw their son run away from the circus to become a chemistry teacher at Marist Brothers in Canberra for three years.
It was a hard struggle for Wilkins to succeed in chemistry and maths through secondary school and university, but he came to understand how to crack the code of scientific language and to appreciate the challenge his students faced. He clearly sees his managerial task in an educational light.
But he never really left the circus, working on events production at WOMADelaide, Adelaide Fringe and the real thing, Cirque du Soleil, to help pay his way through uni. The National Folk Festival had to become managed as a business to survive but, he says, the corporate-looking structure does not undermine the folk music community approach, even though there is great competition for places as performers. 2007 attracted 600 applications for 200 performing spots.
The way it works is that volunteers pay their own way to come from all over Australia, with even a few from overseas, because the quality of the program is guaranteed. Yet the program is designed deliberately to cover the range from performers at the beginning of their careers to those at their peak, with a strong emphasis on teaching and encouraging the young. The generations play and learn together so that the folk music community rolls on. We can hope that the NFF 40-year generational report will be more positive than Peter Costello’s announcement last Monday.
Even the three-year contract arrangements for the Artistic Director and Managing Director jobs are planned with the intention that these roles will be passed on to new people to maintain an invigorating folk music culture over the years. Each year, too, one of the states is the focus – this year Western Australia – so interest and personal involvement revolves around the country. And, as we reported in the Canberra Times Panorama last weekend (Lusty Lyricism and Politics), a relevant theme is chosen each year which helps to give the content of the Festival a direction and social purpose. For 2007 the Middle East is the focus.
Wilkins, says NFF Board President John Taylor, is “superbly able, committed and professional, and the Board has every confidence that the event will continue to prosper and grow under his leadership”. Wilkins claims it’s all just a matter of “nuts and bolts” putting the Festival together, connecting all the parts, working out how “everything affects everything else”.
All 1300 volunteers come together because “folk music is the music of the folk”. It’s all about community, the soul of the National Folk Festival, says the very model of a modern managing director, Jared Wilkins.
O’Neill’s understanding of the Festival’s program potential and his experience and personal status in the broader music industry is “enviable”, says John Taylor. “We are truly fortunate to have two highly skilled professionals to fill these roles”.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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