It's a challenge taking on the Otago Festival of the arts, but when you are told five of the usual venues are not available this year it throws a big spanner in the works.
Festival director Alec Wheeler, who took over as director from Nicholas McBryde last year, was not fazed.
"It would be easy to look at that and be quite overwhelmed but I think if you can approach that with a sense of creativity and an open mind, often what results from those challenges is quite spectacular.
"Something wonderful comes out of that."
The five unavailable venues are the Dunedin Town Hall, Glenroy Auditorium, Fullwood Room and the Otago Settlers Museum, which are being refurbished, and the Mayfair Theatre, which was prebooked.
Because two of those venues are large, there's a sense of intimacy with the new venues, she says.
A discovery was the little-known HMNZS Toroa Hall in Bow Lane behind Cadbury, which seats 150-200.
"When you enter through the double doors, the foyer is actually a naval museum and many members of the community probably don't even know this beautiful space exists," she says.
Another new venue, which has particularly good acoustics, is the Otago Girls' High School auditorium where music events will be held.
"Again, being a capacity of 550-600 you have the opportunity to have an intimate experience with the performers on stage, which is something you might not get, or only a portion of the audience would get, in a venue like the town hall."
The Fortune Theatre is providing its theatre as a venue for hire, allowing the festival to bring two strong theatre pieces, The Grimstones and Where we once belonged.
"What's more exciting is the Fortune has taken the opportunity to create their own innovative piece of work which they are taking outside the theatre walls.
"It's Samuel Beckett's Play, a really out-of-the-box hybrid of visual arts and performance that is really site-specific and genre-bending.
"They are doing it at the Standard Insurance building next door to the BNZ in Princes St [formerly the Canton restaurant]."
The festival club, which used to occupy the Fullwood room, will now be held in the ODT Gallery on the upper mezzanine in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Wheeler is originally from Sointula, a little Finnish fishing settlement off Vancouver Island in Canada.
She grew up loving the outdoors, riding horses and kayaking, and recently acquired her own horse here.
Seduced by theatre and acting at high school, she studied in New York and in the UK before returning to Victoria in British Columbia as a performer.
Then she realised she wanted to get into arts management.
"On stage as an actor and performer, you have those experiences where you realise the work you are presenting can affect or touch people or help people relate to a particular experience or time they might not be familiar with, and from a performance perspective, seeing that possibility in terms of impacting a community or group of people and wanting to actually explore that and take it further.
"The only way to do that is to create that work, or get behind the development in a wider context."
She found it humbling because although she had great ideas, she didn't have the skills to back them up so she returned to college to study business management.
Then she started her own production company, Smartalec Productions, to produce a 12-week summer festival.
Wheeler came to New Zealand on a working holiday in 2008 and after three months decided she didn't want to leave.
Based in Wellington, she found work in arts administration easily and organised events in Petone and was programme manager for the Young and Hungry Arts Trust.
"I think the past 10 years have been collecting a variety of skills from both on-stage, backstage and the management side of things that have all culminated and led to this exciting role here in Dunedin."
Like any other event, festivals have budgets, timelines, venues to be booked, services to be contracted and other less-glamorous tasks, but they differ in their programming.
"For me, it was about finding those two or three works that really stood out and had that wow factor to them, and had a unique quality, and from there the programme develops around those pieces."
There is also the need to balance the dance, music, theatre, and visual arts events, and to appeal to a broad range of audiences.
"That's always exciting and a learning process because sometimes you are exploring works that are really outside of your knowledge and comfort zone as well, and matching them with venues.
"A venue can make or break a show."
The festival collaborates with others, particularly the Nelson and Melbourne festivals that are on about the same time.
"I was looking specifically to fill that classical music spot but also have something unusual, a fresher spin on it.
"I sent off an email to Mike Harris at the Melbourne Arts Festival and said this is what I'm looking for, do you have anything coming your way?
"He sent back no words but just a link and I clicked on the website to see Hahn Bin.
"It was a very quick yes from me, then I contacted the Nelson Arts Festival and said I'm thinking of bringing Hahn Bin from the Melbourne Festival over here.
"He's one of the four acts we're sharing - there's a lot of networking and collaboration."
Ms Wheeler has been impressed with the collaborative spirit and sense of camaraderie she has found in Dunedin.
"Wellington's got a reputation as the arts and culture capital of New Zealand and of having the biggest and best of everything, and to a degree they've earned the reputation.
"I wasn't sure how Dunedin would compare with Wellington. I think there's a different approach here, there's an honesty and 'put your head down and do the work', and then all of a sudden this stuff comes out of nowhere and it's such high calibre and so refreshingly done and with such passion and commitment that I really think a lot of what Dunedin does could give Wellington a run for its money."
The programme, launched last night, has Wheeler bubbling with delight.
Its colourful programme of African-influenced Bahian folk music and dance has an energy and vibrancy and excitement that you have to see to understand, she says.
The group is performing its Bahia of All Colours show nowhere else in New Zealand but Dunedin.
She thinks the town will buzz with 20 vibrant dancing Brazilians, 25 boys from the Vienna Boys' Choir, and many other performers in town.
Don't miss the Monkeys, the festival ambassadors, two cheeky dancing actors in monkey costumes who will pop up in unusual places in the centre of town.
"The've only been given one instruction and that is to go out and play and cause mischief and maybe hand out a few brochures on the way," Wheeler says with a laugh.
The Chalktogon, in which children are encouraged to draw on the Octagon footpaths with the help of Otago Polytechnic art students, is one of several family activities.
The chalk drawings will hopefully remain all week.
Another family highlight is the gothic fairytale performed with puppets, The Grimstones Hatched from Australia, created by deaf artist Asphyxia.
"It's such a magical piece of theatre and a good example of a performance art work that has the ability to touch people and speak to specific groups.
"The whole premise of the play and the themes that run throughout are the support and love of family and accepting people with differences.
"The really exciting point comes at the end of the production when the two performers on stage, who are also the puppeteers, open up to questions from the audience.
Some of the questions that come from young people feel so uninhibited and [they are] so comfortable to ask questions they might not otherwise ask because society tells them it's not right. The questions are answered very honestly and truthfully," she says.
The festival opens with a scream in Live Live Cinema: Carnival of Souls, a B-grade silent horror movie transformed into an A-grade comedy, she says.
A team of 16 actors, musicians and a Foley box (sound effects) artist create a soundtrack to the cult 1960s film live in front of the audience.
A quirky music group that plays mostly Eastern European music, Comrade Z, sent an unusual press kit, she says.
"I'm at the office one day and along comes a courier with a massive box, I wasn't sure there was a person behind it the box was so big.
"It was beaten up and taped within a square inch of its life, so I opened up the box after getting through inches of tape and it's stuffed with straw and I dug through the hay and straw and it's flying everywhere through the office and I pull up this really old, really small TV with a built-in VCR.
"They had put their media pack on a VHS tape, which we then had to plug the TV in and play the tape.
Experiences like that are part of the show and give you a bit of the flavour, the weird and wonderful that often comes to the festival."
More information
• The Otago Festival of the Arts runs from October 5 to 14.
• Programmes for the festival are available now.
• Go to www.otagofestival.co.nz Bookings at www.ticketdirect.co.nz. There are no booking fees when you book online.
• Bookings can also be made at the Regent Theatre and other TicketDirect outlets.
