Stalwart of Chch arts scene Jodi Wright receives royal honours
Saturday, 30 December 2023
When Jodi Wright received an email notifying her that she was to become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, she thought it was a practical joke by one of her many busker friends.
She even wrote back asking if it was real, after leaving it sitting in her inbox for more than a day.
“I thought, ‘someone’s playing a joke on me’, because I know a lot of comedians and a lot of performers from all around the world, and sometimes we tease each other,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
Wright is the mastermind behind some of Christchurch’s greatest festivals and shows.
The renowned World Buskers Festival, WORD Christchurch, and the International Jazz and Blues Festival are just some of the many acts that have been at the ends of her fingertips.
Always behind the stage and never on it, Wright joked that despite 30 years of working in the arts, she “never learned to juggle, I still can't sing, and there's been no tap dancing”.
But her service to the arts has been recognised in the New Year honours.
“If I wasn't producing a festival, I was planning it, or I was thinking about it, or I was going to another festival and seeing what I could take away and bring to Christchurch,” she said. “It was always [about] exploration.”
Wright moved to Christchurch, “the best city ever that I would never leave”, from the United States in 1989 with experience in event management.
Three years later, a job advertisement in The Press called for a director to create the city’s inaugural Festival of Romance.
Developed by Wright, it was a celebration of all things romantic, featuring a performance from Spanish singer-songwriter Julio Iglesias, a Mills & Boon writing workshop and a Valentine’s Day dances.
In the six years Wright produced the festival she started the Sidewalk Art Project, the Jazz Festival, the Christchurch Writers Festival and arguably the most successful of them all, the World Buskers Festival, which was born and bred from a little office in front of the Dux de Lux at The Arts Centre
“[That’s] the one that became this big thing, it grew so quickly and it was really hard to keep up,” Wright said.
“Even after the earthquake when we staged the festival in Hagley Park for three years it was just huge. There were hundreds of thousands of people who'd come over the 10 or 11 days and we had like 50 or 60 acts from all over the world.”
More often than not, shows were pulled off purely because people donated their time, she said.
“Most of us in the arts and events industry spend two or three months writing applications for funding with maybe a 20/25% success rate, where it used to be a 70% success rate 10 years ago.”
Her fondest memory is selling out the Town Hall when author Frank McCourt attended the writer’s festival to speak about his book Angela’s Ashes. “You could hear a pin drop in that place.”
Wright’s swan song was directing this year’s Jazz and Cabaret Festival in March. The trust behind it “closed up shop” after the event because it “could not secure enough funding to assure the quality of the festival we want to produce”, Wright said.
Since then, Wright has spent her time consulting or volunteering with other festival organisers, and said she hopes to leave a legacy encouraging “fun” and “energy” on Christchurch’s streets.