Recently I went to an event at our National Auditorium that infuriated me. Why is it that some people seem to think that being brillantly mediocre at your job is acceptable to the point where production values are non existant and pride in being a part of the creative industry means absolutely nothing.

To start with the show started 1 hour late. The stage hands walked acorss the stage pre-during and post performances. The projectionist thought the laptop desktop was the image to show as a default when he could not work out what was suppoed to be shown. and the sound tech had no idea on levels!!!! Come on people this is not acceptable. Never will be and makes the National Auditorium and the staff connected with it look like a Monty Python skit. Shameful when their are people in the community that take production and live performance seriously. If you do not know how to do it get some professionals in that do and stop mascarading as technicians, stage managers, and producers.

The topic for today is event bullying - yes you heard me right it seems that one of our event names has the same name as another event in another country on another island. The organisers contacted us and were extremely rude and condescending about requesting us to change the name of our event. Hmm we thought and then proceeded to contact our lawyers and all other people "said organiser" listed stating that they had been in contact with a number of people in our country and were in fact bringing events to our country and that we the Cooks Islands owned and run event company were jeopardising there the off shore not Cook Islands owned nor registered companies livelihood!  Now I find this all strange... if I had been that person I would have seen the opportunity to co- market (when relevant) our events  and get double exposure in an amicable and clever way. There event is in a completely different country to mine and in fact there is no confusion my country is called the Cook Islands there country which shall remain nameless at this time has a completely differnt name.  However the organiser began to stalk us over the internet and on facebook to the point where I had to ban the organiser from having access that was after the 10 aggressive posting in one day!  When I asked if any one was working with this organiser to bring events to the Cooks a loose story developed but nothing that was confirmed or real. What I have learnt from this is simple, the said event organiser is a bully plain and simple. We will change the name of our event next year ( we couldn't this year as all marketing had already been put in place).  The reason for the change is simple I really do not want to be stalked by this person anymore and I believe the quality of your event is what sells it not the name! If you are that protective of your name then trade mark it ( which said organiser had not done at the time of this publishing. Only because of our situatiuon did they finally buy the domain names for the event something we looked at but chose to focus on Motone as our domain.  Our Opera event is a stellar event that we are extremely proud of. We make Opera accessible to established and new audiences and as for the high brow approach that said organiser in said country that is being a stalker and event bullying us  well you can have it but just on message to anyone out there who is thinking of being a event bully our rules of business are that We  market professionally, we are at all times decent and respectful in our communications -  pulling high brow condescending language and behaviour out as your modus operandi only makes you look like a CLASS A TWAT!