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(Image: Ralph Brown/additional design: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Ralph Brown/additional design: Tina Tiller)

PartnersAugust 10, 2023

Rodney Bell puts his energy in the right places

(Image: Ralph Brown/additional design: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Ralph Brown/additional design: Tina Tiller)

For the latest instalment of our Art Work series, dancer Rodney Bell talks about all the work that goes on behind the scenes of his art. 

Rodney Bell (Ngāti Maniapoto) is an internationally renowned dancer who has been working professionally since 1994. He is a founding member of Touch Compass, where he currently sits on the artistic director board. He has been a principal dancer for AXIS Dance Company, has won an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, and has taught dance across the world. His work Meremere, created with Movement of the Human, has toured consistently for almost a decade and will tour across the United Kingdom this year.

(Photography: Ralph Brown)

An average work week

First and foremost for me is the maintenance of my physicality. I sit in a routine of managing my disability and I have all of these priorities in place that no matter what I do throughout the week, these things have to be set in stone. My disability is one of my passions and that has all of these priorities that I need in place. That’s my main objective for the week – to plan around this vessel of mine, this body of mine, and that planning can be spontaneous week to week. 

On top of that, there’s all this cloaking for me to be able to pursue my passion. Cloaking for me is when people bestow good things around you. It’s meaningful in a way that’s going to impact your creative journey with all good things. 

Part of this cloaking is what I call “crip time”. Crip time is working in collaboration with people who are deep listeners and understand what crip time means for an artist with a disability. I might take a bit longer. I might simultaneously have other associated illnesses going on that can pop up spontaneously, and all these other associated injuries or associated energies that I need to pay respect to first and foremost. 

It’s all about managing what this body can do, keeping limber. I’ve been in a wheelchair now for 32 years just this month and without dance I don’t know where I would be. It’s kept me limber, it’s kept me dancing, I’m moving, I’m pushing my physicality.

Balancing it all

As an artist, I’m in many pockets of the creative world. 

In relation to arts, I’m on the artistic direction panel with Touch Compass and that’s ongoing day to day – it involves emails, collaboration, communication and also deep listening as well! I’m an independent artist who works with different companies, I’m working with Chloe Loftus and Movement of the Human with Malia (Johnston). With Meremere, we’ve created this beautiful wairua that’s got its own momentum. I tour UK next month with The Year Between Us, Wales, London, Hull and Spain, which is very exciting and will be new for me.

(Photography: Ralph Brown)

I also sit on a leadership group with Enabling Good Lives, which is a new leadership group moving through Aotearoa working around how disabled people are distributed funds and how disabled people can manage their funds for them to live a good life. The government has honoured that now so what it’s going to do is set an equitable, linear, more respectful relationship to people with a disability who are on ACC, but also disabled people who are born with a disability.

“Acquired” means someone who has an injury through their life like myself, and “congenital” means people who are born like that and at this moment in time there’s no equity between how the two are supported. Disabled people [with a congenital disability] on WINZ have to go into a kind of lottery, whereas I can go to ACC and say “hey, I need a stick to pick my nose, can you make me a stick?” That’s shifting now, the government will be able to go “Here, disabled whānau! Here’s a bunch of money, you do what you need to do with it to live a good life, hire whoever you want to look after you and we have someone you can lean on to help you manage that.” That’s really exciting for me.

The surprises of creativity

I never thought I would be touring the UK this year! During your week you’re plodding along and wondering why you’re doing this. In the back of your mind you’re thinking “Where am I going?” and then bam! The surprises, the oomphs that pop up. 

They’ve always come that way too, someone familiar will ring up and go “Guess what? You’re touring New Zealand,” and I go “Are you kidding me?” Then Chloe rings me up and goes “Guess what? We’re touring the UK.” That’s just another oomph to be alive. 

But also another oomph, because I’m in a little town of Te Kuiti, another highlight for me at home is my mum. I live behind my mum so every little surprise I give her. When I tell her “I’m going to the UK,” she jumps straight to the negatives: “When you going there?” But you give it a week and she comes back and nods her head and says, “That’s actually quite a good thing.” 

(Photography: Ralph Brown)

Why I do what I do

Creating makes me happy. Moving. Reacting and supporting. They’re the highlights of my week because I used to do this for me, selfishly. I went into the creative dance world wanting to be pushed and lent differently into the wind. Once I gained my balance in that wind I realised a lot of other people want to experience this. I feel like the brilliance of being in this creative space is that I am able to draw on my ancestors and bring them present in whatever I do. 

Part of why I do what I do is the sacrifice my ancestors went through for me to share the air with you right now in this creative space. That’s huge and it gets forgotten in this creative space because we get put off by a car cutting us off, the weather, there’s always something we want to dampen our blessings with but I always draw upon that. During the week I have the opportunity to draw upon that, which is a blessing. 

With dance as a creative, your mind and body have to be in tune to be present. It’s made me present, introduced me to cultures around the world. The best way to meet a community is through the arts – it’s political which is very important to me as a disabled person – to be able to have that voice without words where people are able to witness a disabled Māori man pursue something that’s very important not only within our culture, but within my life.

I feel very lucky and very blessed.

The hardest parts 

There’s two things that are hard for me. 

One is digging deep to look after my body. Sometimes it gets tiring because I get spasms at night. When my body is going against me and not with me, I understand that we’re just not in tune: something’s wrong. Maybe it’s my diet, maybe I’m getting sleepy, that’s one thing that’s like “Oh, here we go.”

(Photography: Ralph Brown)

The other thing is waiting for someone to get it. Waiting patiently for those people or organisations to get us has been an ongoing thing for me, and what that has taught me is patience. Patience and perseverance and what can you say without the words. Keep moving forward, keep dancing and then maybe what you pursue in that space, your silence might influence their silence when they go home and they might see things a bit differently. 

What would make it easier to be an artist

I’m in a small town! My family don’t really acknowledge my art very much, only if I say something, because it’s an agricultural town. Beef works, sheep works, gangs. There’s a loneliness there so I feel if I was based in Tāmaki it would be easier, but then I would be torn from the family. 

The other thing obviously is funding. I feel like I’m supported and acknowledged and respected but funding would always make it easier to access spaces.

Where do you want to put your energy, though? I could easily find a job that sits in an office, and in the long run sure, that might pay and buy you material things but it will never feed my soul in the way that creativity does. 

(Photography: Ralph Brown)

The moments that make it worth it

The first moment was Meremere – my life story. Malia (Johnston) believing in me and creating this life story that I feel part of now, but it’s mine, and the world acknowledging it and being able to shift something bigger than myself and my mouth and my presence can do.

The other moment was when I was in the USA and I was dancing for Axis Dance Company. We toured 32 states and we used to go to universities to teach mixed ability classes that used to come from the communities with the dance students there. There was this moment that this disabled dance student came in and he looked at me and we were moving around and dancing and he said to me: “I wanna be like you.” 

He was this intelligent young man, and he said, “I wanna be like you. I want to have culture and I want to be able to dance and I want to tour the world.”

I realised that I gotta never ever doubt the blessings that we have being from Aotearoa. There might be many conversations that people are having in the disabled community that will never have the opportunity to be on these stages. But for them to dream and have someone they can dream about, to have that… that’s why I do what I do.

(Photography: Ralph Brown)

– As told to Sam Brooks

Keep going!
Collage / design: Tina Tiller
Collage / design: Tina Tiller

PartnersAugust 3, 2023

Building momentum: how Velocity is bringing our entrepreneurs up to speed

Collage / design: Tina Tiller
Collage / design: Tina Tiller

New Zealand is known for its world-leading innovative thinkers. The tools necessary to turn those thoughts into successful businesses are taught through programmes like Velocity.

With customers ranging from Bunnings and Briscoes to Walmart and Woolworths, crime intelligence platform Auror is a local startup success. Used in more than 32,000 stores across New Zealand, Australia, North America and the UK, the company – whose technology has helped simplify the crime reporting and detection process – is now one of the fastest growing in Aotearoa, featuring on Deloitte’s Fast 50 index for the last two years and winning EY’s 2022 award for Entrepreneur of the Year. 

But before the accolades, before the global expansion, and before the millions of dollars in capital raised, Auror started off over a decade ago as little more than a simple idea between three friends: Phil Thomson, Tom Batterbury, and James Corbett. At the time, Corbett was still a student at the University of Auckland Business School and suggested the trio take their concept through Velocity – the University’s entrepreneurship development programme. 

Founded in 2003, Velocity (formerly known as Spark) has been helping foster young entrepreneurs for more than 20 years. Led by a student committee in partnership with the University of Auckland Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the wider business community, Velocity enables students and staff from across the University to bring their business ideas to life – supporting them to develop an entrepreneurial spirit that will live on throughout their lives.

Thomson and Batterbury agreed to try out Velocity, and it turned out to be a good move: Auror (known as EyeDentify at the time) were eventually named runners-up of the Velocity $100k Challenge in 2012, taking home a $15,000 chunk of the $100,000 in seed money up for grabs. 

“We saw the programme as an opportunity to test our thinking – a forcing function to get really deliberate around all the things we’d been talking about and actually put it down on paper,” recalls Thomson, who took part in the programme while working as a lawyer.

“Looking back, I think being given the opportunity as first time founders and young people to meet with different mentors and advisors and build a business plan was really invaluable … and I know there’s been some other really cool companies that have emerged from Velocity over the years, which I think speaks volumes of the programme itself.”

The programme involves a year-long schedule of talks, workshops, events and competitions, culminating with the programme’s flagship $100k Challenge which sees teams pitch their business ideas in front of a group of industry-leading judges for a share of the grand prize. 

Over the years, Velocity participants have ignited almost 300 ventures, attracted over $1.39 billion in investment and created more than 3,000 jobs with products and services in over 35 countries. In addition to Auror, notable past participants in the programme include education technology platform Kami, a 2013 finalist of the $100k Challenge which was recently named one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential companies of the year, and 2018 $100k challenge winner Zenno Astronautics, pioneers of a more sustainable form of space exploration that’s booked almost $80 million in pre-sales so far. 

“When the programme was first established back in 2003, its main purpose at the time was to change the culture at the university to one that was more innovative, entrepreneurial, and enterprising,” says Darsel Keane, director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

“Universities are hubs of new and innovative ideas, and the wider business community obviously want to support the next generation of innovators and ventures. The programme enables these two groups to come together, allowing entrepreneurs, investors, and others working in the ecosystem to see what students are working on and thinking about. Meanwhile, participants are connected with those who’ve been there before, accessing their support, advice, networks, and funding, all of which are really important in helping their ventures develop and grow.”

In addition to providing an impetus for Auror to sit down and carve out a concrete business plan, Thomson says Velocity was crucial in providing its founders with an initial sounding board for their thoughts and ideas. He says the programme also enabled the team to practice their pitching skills, draw on advice from their mentors, and meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. 

“During the programme, especially in the final stages, we were essentially pitching the business to a panel of people who were determining if our business was viable or not. That definitely gave us an early opportunity for us to test some ideas, and see what resonated with people,” Thomson says. “It was also a great chance to practice pitching our idea in public, especially in front of a large audience.”

While Velocity is based at the University of Auckland Business School, the programme is open to students from all faculties and academic levels, helping to foster a diverse range of ideas and entrepreneurs. Prior to becoming CEO of entertainment analytics company Parrot Analytics, Wared Segar took part in Velocity during his time as a science student. Angela Lim, co-founder of the free online mental health platform Clearhead, was studying medicine when she joined the programme back in 2015. Bowen Pan, who founded Facebook Marketplace during a stint with the Silicon Valley behemoth several years ago, started his entrepreneurial journey in 2006 with uniFriend – the country’s first social networking site for students. An engineering and property undergrad at the time, uniFriend would go on to place runner-up in Velocity’s $100k Challenge.

“Business, engineering, and science collectively make up between 80-90% of Velocity participants, and they’re pretty much equal in any given year. The remainder are made up of students from faculties like medicine, law, and the creative arts,” Keane explains. 

“Making sure people are connecting with participants from other disciplines is a really big part of the programme. One of the strongest bits of feedback we get from students is that this is one of the few places they can meet, engage and work with people from different faculties, and where they’re all bound together by this common desire to learn about innovation and entrepreneurship.”

A recent shift Keane says she’s observed in the programme over the past few years has been the increasing desire from participants to pursue ideas that “do well [in a business sense] by doing good”. While social entrepreneurship and commercial entrepreneurship were long viewed as two separate things, she says that differentiation doesn’t really exist anymore.

“What you see coming out of the student and research body is this really strong desire and motivation to have a positive impact on the world, so we see a lot of potential solutions that address issues like climate change, such as water quality, energy sources, and transport,” she says. 

“Nowadays, what we do is we use the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as part of our problem-solving space because we recognise students really do care about making a change in the world. They’re driven to use entrepreneurship as a way to do that.”

Having observed the programme over a number of years, Keane (who first became involved in Velocity during the late 2000s as a member of the student committee) says it’s a rewarding experience seeing so many of Velocity’s participants go on to achieve greater things. Not only has the programme managed to help turn “first class ideas into world class businesses”, but its arrival in 2003 also helped breathe life into New Zealand’s nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“There was a great need to create knowledge-based technology and creative businesses, but also to create talent that would go on to work in multiple parts of this entrepreneurial ecosystem. So you see people who’ve been through our programme now working at places like the Icehouse, venture capital firms, and professional services working with hi-tech businesses,” says Keane.

“I love seeing these early stage businesses, and the talent and ventures that go along with it, grow and develop over time. It’s remarkable seeing where these people go – and the impact they’re having on the New Zealand economy.”

Volunteer to be a Velocity speaker, competition judge or mentor.

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