Jazz Fest’s Eva and her army of women

Published Mar 27, 2015

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Cape Town - It’s the Wednesday before the Cape Town International Jazz Festival weekend and Eva Domingo’s stress levels are at a nine out of 10 (10 being a meltdown).

The scene is organised chaos at the Cape Town International Convention Centre and Eva has a two-way radio in one hand and a cellphone in the other. Her job: she manages everything at the jazz festival – from looking after decor, logistics, artists and the hospitality suites (absolutely everything!) – and has been doing it for the last 16 years.

There’s that cliché that behind every successful man… But for the jazz festival it’s a case of behind this event is Eva, festival operations manager, and her colleagues from EspAfrika.

“It’s an army of women, I promise you,” she says over the noise of drills and saws where the hospitality section is being assembled – a virtual mini town of opulence for festival guests.

“It’s about what you look for in a teammate or people. With almost no exception, the entire festival team is led by a female. These are strong women. In fact, if you walked into our office two weeks ago and just looked around you would see only women.

“We do have significant men in the office. One of whom is Billy Domingo (who is Eva’s husband and the festival director). He is the visionary of the company. The second man is our CFO (chief financial officer), Sooren Ramdenee. He gives us good financial structure. And of course, the third one is Khalid Abdulla, acting CEO, who is an awesome leader.

“But let’s be honest now – we all like to think that we in fact manage them.”

A great source of pride for Eva is that many of her all-women heads of department started as trainees. The team includes finance project manager Charmane Creamer, Janine Slingers in corporate, Carenza van Willingh in marketing, marketing project manager Anthea Thys, Chantel Windvogel in technical and Henlene Barends, the production and compliance head of department. EspAfrika’s office is also supported by Rashieda Ismail Davids, Nikki Segers, Hadjiera Jabaar and Nondumiso Dlelapantsi.

Barends, in particular, has to get by in a man’s world.

“Henlene, who started as a trainee, handles the safety and security component with Billy. She sits in the priority committee meetings made up of police, traffic, metro and all the services. All of these roleplayers are men,” says Eva.

“In fact Billy, a couple of months ago, came back from a priority committee meeting and said; ‘Eva, you have no idea. I just sat there and Henlene just took control of the room’.”

Back to those stress levels, the calls to Eva’s phone don’t stop. Some 37 000 people will come through the doors at the weekend. The festival brings in about half a billion rand to the economy of the Cape and employs, directly and indirectly, about 2 700 people on a permanent, long-term and casual basis.

The stress levels will rocket to a 12 out of 10 about 10 minutes before the first audience member arrives, and a lot can go wrong. But Eva has lived through every imaginable scenario.

“I just want to find a hiding place. Everybody is in… I don’t want to use the words panic mode… but everything that can go wrong seems to wait for the last 10 minutes before you open the doors.

“I will be on the radio, I’ll call every department, and check if we can open the doors. The food court might come back and say the fences have blown over. Kippies will say sorry we’ve just blown the sound, it will take an hour to fix, etcetera, etcetera. In the meantime, the clients are arriving at the gates, already queueing, expecting the doors to open on time and we can’t actually open.

“One of the worst things to happen before doors opened was when I did that radio call and the Kippies production team said a cherry picker was in the middle of the hall and they couldn’t find the key or the driver. They couldn’t move it. At the same time some people had delivered into the marshalling yard at the Manenberg’s Stage, left their vehicles and we couldn’t find them. We had to move the cars by towing them away.”

How does she deal with the stress? By laughing it off.

“It sounds pathetic, ridiculous and childish. I find in life that when things really go wrong, I will find one or two of my colleagues and we’ll share the going-wrongs, then we will laugh.

“The worse it becomes, the more we’ll laugh. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Somebody kills you, and so we role play from death down.”

“To be able to produce events like this, you need your whole team motivated, you need to be positive, you need to love your work and you need to be able to troubleshoot on the fly a thousand times a day and you need to laugh – a lot.

“It’s choosing your friends, choosing the people you feel give the best energy to a situation, but also it’s being able and willing to share your knowledge and having the patience to impart skills.

“There is always that discussion that goes around, should you employ somebody who is qualified for a position or should you look at employing somebody who is not qualified but has the right attributes, the right attitude? For me, it’s very much a bit of both but, unless you want to become a brain surgeon, most jobs you can learn.

“I would rather have a team around who are prepared and willing to learn and to learn the right way from the start, because it also doesn’t help sometimes to put together a team of people with inherent bad habits.

“What is the most important thing for the success of any event, your work or business? If you ask me that question, my answer is teamwork. Without that, nothing is ever going to get done. You can’t have an ego in this business.”

There have been tremendous successes along Eva’s journey with the jazz festival that cancel out the lowlights.

The worst lowlights are when invited dignitaries arrive at the door without tickets to a sold-out event because their tickets haven’t been issued. The answer: deal with the situation as it arises. There has also been the ever-present threat of Eskom and power cuts, which was an issue in the past. Luckily, the festival now uses back up on back-up generators.

“I would definitely say the standout moment for me is the first time we sold out way in advance, when we sold out six weeks before, last year. Then we almost sold out this year without even releasing the full artist line-up. That told me that while people love the artists, they actually just love to be at the festival. They don’t even know who is performing but they are buying tickets. That for me is absolutely awesome, it is a brand that really works.

“The brand works because of the quality we produce. We have nothing really to benchmark ourselves against in terms of other events. We are constantly trying to improve our quality.

“That keeps you on your toes and makes you work a little bit harder to make it a little bit better each time.”

The highlights for Eva were Miriam Makeba’s last performance at the jazz festival and also the last time Hugh Masakela performed on the main stage. She says South Africans support South African artists as much as they support international artists.

Sometimes, Eva admits, husband Billy gets annoyed because she does everything herself.

“I grew up in Noordhoek and essentially I’m a farm girl. I grew up riding horses and loving sport and swimming. I have the most amazing father, Arie Klootwyk, who is my mentor. He is now 88 years old and the last time he worked was 12 months ago in Angola – at his age.

“We just call him ‘Crocodile Dundee’. He is still climbing on the roof and chopping down trees. That’s where I get my character from. This can really irritate Billy at times. He doesn’t get it that I want to simply do everything myself even when help is offered.”

The couple, who have two sons aged 19 and 23, met when Eva was employed by Sun City’s entertainment outfit in 1987 and Billy was the entertainment manager. It was where she learnt her trade because at the time it was the only venue bringing in international acts. She worked closely with Computicket founder Percy Tucker and counts Hazel Feldman of Showtime International, then Sun International’s entertainment director, as a mentor.

Fortunately for artists, Eva is not indiscreet but was prepared to share a few of the gems among the weird backstage demands.

“Last year, one of the female international artists, with a band size I think of 14 or 15 people, had requested 500 chicken wings. What are you going to do with 500 chicken wings? But the chicken wings became an issue because before they arrive you think: are they being serious? No, man, let’s just make it 30, but you don’t know until they arrive. So they walk in and they’re like: ‘Where are our 500 chicken wings?’

“They’re always asking for French champagne, French wines… they really and truly believe they’re the best in the world. They haven’t tried South African yet. It’s mainly around the food and the drinks that I think the requests are the weirdest.

“Oh, and we do have an international artist this year who is travelling with a dog as a partner.”

Cape Argus

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