Apologies for the tardiness of this posting of the results of the Arts Foundation 2006 Laureate Awards, which Chris and I attended last night. It took a while to get going today, what with feeling a little tired and emotional (a.k.a. hung over).

We thought they were going to feed us, so we arrived at 6.30, ravenous. Only to file into the theatre, with no sign of starched white tablecloths. Never mind. Straight into the opening acts, courtesy of previous Laureates, which began with Michael Hurst, lit by a single spotlight, performing a menacing poem in cockney about murder and the gallows, with lots of ‘Damn your oiyes’ action. Great. Except the sound kept cutting out.

Then the irrepressible mezzo soprano Helen Medlyn in head-to-toe scarlet and fishnets, with a wonderfully comic operatic song about ‘Making a living from dying’ including lots of OTT death scene action. Great. Except the sound kept cutting out. And finally a clip from Gaylene Preston’s movie Perfect Strangers where Sam Neill dies in the storm. Great. And the sound didn’t cut out!

Then it was on with the show. With the sound cutting out. The general format was like this: patron reads citation about mystery Laureate while we all tried to guess who it was (some were easy). Then short video about mystery Laureate’s work, then announcement of Laureate; Laureate accepts envelope with whopping cheque plus glorious Terry Stringer statuette, walks stage left and sits down for quick interviewette with an appropriate existing Laureate. Tripping over Laureates all over the bleedin’ place.

First up was John Reynolds in pork-pie hat and trainers. He told a long story to Michael Hurst about his first ‘art’ moment in a ‘mental hospital’ in Napier (I think), where he and his twin brother (ages 6) were on holiday as his Mum was a psychiatrist. He and bro were painting the white lines on the lawn tennis court with one of the patients when it all went predictably haywire, white lines interestingly everywhere – enter little John’s epiphany.

Then Ian Wedde, bless him. He talked to Kate de Goldi (god, she’s good) about his Sense of Place (growing up in Blenheim and the Sounds, oh, and Pakistan), and luck (having the sort of parents who would up sticks and take two smallish boys to live in Pakistan). His video bit was a brilliant piece of photomontaging, while he read his lovely poem to his twin brother (second set of twin brothers, interestingly). I saw him read this at Going West – it’s a beautiful love poem, and he called it just that.

Then the delectably nerdy Alastair Galbraith, musician, who is largely unknown in this country but apparently lauded internationally. When he was questioned by another hairy sound-based artist (Phil Dadson) about what he would do with his 50 grand, Al said he’d like to build a glass harmonica.

This esoteric instrument was apparently invented by Benjamin Franklin using the old ‘glass of wine with wet finger running around the edge’ routine. Only with enough glasses to make two octaves. You join them together at the bottom somehow … ‘They’re making them in the States’ he said, ‘but they cost about 30 grand. I reckon I can set one up for a couple of hundred bucks – I’ve been collecting crystal glasses from the local op-shop and I think if I just cut off the stems and use corks for the inner bits it should work a treat.’ Or words to that effect.

The audience was in stitches, and from my angle it was laughter fuelled with love for the endearing, number-eight-wire earnestness of this extraordinary, brilliant musician, who lives in the middle of nowhere, has achieved so much, and thanked his wife so beautifully (as indeed they all did).

That set us up nicely for the next Laureate, the quite unbelievable cinematographer Alun Bollinger (Alboll, as he is affectionately known). Unbelievably, Alun’s video short induced the equipment to come up with the ultimate nightmare: a Macromedia Projector error message followed by a big, blue Windows screen asking if we would like to submit an error report!! Oh, the shame. We sat, heckling mildly, in darkness for about seven hungry minutes while the cringing ‘tech’ team tried to fix it, but then had to carry on. Tsk, tsk, tsk, and yet another tsk. Ya gotta laugh.

Alun was interviewed by Gaylene Preston, who is an old mate of his – he was behind the camera for the aforementioned Perfect Strangers. As he was for most of the best NZ movies ever made, from Goodbye Pork Pie, through Vigil to Lord of the Rings. Alun was er, casually dressed, in wrinkled shorts and bush shirt, but it was the sight of his unshod feet in their black socks which held the audience spellbound. Those feet had a life of their own, rubbing against and over each other, stretching and arching while he spoke. Again, almost painfully endearing to a bunch of proud Kiwis.

It transpired that Alboll is colour-blind - ‘Not the first thing I mention when I meet a director’ - but it was this fact that dictated the colour of the mini in Pork Pie. He and director Ian Mune (also red/green colour-blind – one in ten males apparently) were driving round some locations thinking of the red Mini that was cast in the movie, and they both suddenly said, ‘That car will disappear in this landscape!’ So yellow it was. Alun said he just has to hope that someone will tell him if there’s a traffic cone in the shot …

And so to the final Laureate of the evening: the all-consuming, multi-talented Oscar Kightly – writer, actor, director, the works. His mum brought him over to NZ from Samoa when he was four, leaving him with extended whanau in Te Atatu ‘for his big chance’. He took it.

His mum was in the audience last night, responding to his heartfelt thanks with a big shout out right back at him. That was good. As was his outfit – big white Nike hi-tops fresh outta da box, plaid flat cap, basketball shirt and chunky necklace. He was dead-pan however, with Helen Medlyn, who was ‘a bit freaked’ as she said to moi afterwards – she thought he’d be a chatterbox. She asked him if his collaborators (Naked Samoans, etc) were a source of creative juice for him, and he said yup – ‘plus they makes me look good, and they can fill in if I have to go and pick up kids or whatever’. You can’t hide it Oscar – you’re busted as a warm, funny and very clever man I’m afraid.

So that was it – a group clap and off we all went for a glass of bubbles, for whom we should thank the boys and girls from sponsor Forsyth Barr. And as it was the eve of my birthday, Chris then insisted on taking me to The Grove for dinner, the dear chap. Fell into bed, replete at last (crispy roasted duck breast with chestnut ravioli in a lavender and balsamic reduction) ten minutes into my birthday. Ahh ...