creativesoulchristchurch.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about the biggest stress when organising events in Christchurch. I’ve done my fair share, 4 craft fairs down, all in different venues, and dozens of all ages shows, you’d think by now I would have figured out good venues to hire for events.

The key thing with most of the events I’ve been involved with, it means ruling out using bars. They mostly have been all ages, and therefore alcohol free.

Lovecraft/Craftwerk is a craft fair, so the people are generally fairly mellow, tidy and just there to hang out. The first we did was in the Linwood Community Arts Centre in Stanmore Rd. It was a nice enough venue, and dirt cheap to hire, but very difficult to deal with due to it being run by volunteers. We never spoke to the same person twice about things and on the day we even had trouble finding someone who was in the city to let us into the venue. I’d love to use these guys again, just with a different way of contact with the people involved.

The second was in SOL Square, which was fun, but it lacked the communication factor again, we had one person as our contact, but we got the feeling the contact wasn’t fully communicating with the venue. The third fair was brilliant, at the Ya Ya Teahouse. The venue was lovely, clean, and very welcoming to people. The vendors couldn’t sell food which was a bummer, but that was a small price to pay for an otherwise awesome space. Then when organising Lovecraft in September this year, we found out that Ya Ya had closed down its tea house. Due to rent rises they couldn’t afford to keep their cute little space, so we went on a search again.

Luckily for us, Ashlin works for High Street Project and the overall venue was welcoming and very helpful. The only thing about working in a gallery, is that galleries by nature are very sterile spaces. I didn’t feel the crowds who came, felt comfortable hanging out. We have some methods by which we plan to improve this though.

The All Ages show issue is completely different. The main issue is people not wanting us, and the cost of hire. All Ages shows barely ever break even. You just can’t charge kids too much to come to a show, and they shouldn’t have to pay a fortune to see good music.

Most of our successful events have basically cost us a fortune to hire decent places. Most venues charge a lot because they reckon kids will be a mess. Generally we’ve found that this isn’t a problem. They very rarely show up drunk or are a pain… and as responsible hosts we have management plans for that stuff.

I just wish there were more centrally located, good venues who want to help people out who are doing things for people, who don’t have a lot of money, but care a lot.

There was an article in the weekend press that kind of said Youth venues wouldn’t work, and the council dismissed the chance for any involvement.

“ Christchurch City Council community support manager Catherine McDonald says fashions change so fast in the teen world that a purpose built centre would be uncool within a year. The council has already been caught out once with the expensive development of a youth website Drive Thru, which was almost immediately made redundant by the advent of Bebo and other social networking sites.

I think there is a lot wrong with statements like that. Internet phenomena cannot be created by people thinking that youth will latch on. Youth create their own thing. And that’s how a venue should work.

“so McDonald says the council is probably better off supporting individual events and projects rather than spending big on bricks and mortar.”

That too is a little dissapointing. Perhaps an invitation needs to be sent to people like this, who are frankly out of touch with the reality of what’s going on. I can imagine too, that they wasted a large sum of cash on a website some person convinced them was a winner, rather than looking at what already exists out there and offering to invest into something that has already grown naturally. I guess this is what it’s going to take to get a venue too. The problem then falls back on the lack of money in youth events.Somehow the funds need to be raised so there can be a cheap to hire, centrally located, easily accessible facility. So that organising anything from craft fairs to live music events which are aimed at all ages can be organised without having it feel like pulling teeth