Transform 13

Katie Beswick (@ElfinKate) on her experience of Transform 13, West Yorkshire Playhouse’s recent theatre and performance festival.

This year’s Transform, an annual festival of theatre and performance hosted by the West Yorkshire Playhouse, was titled ‘My Leeds, My City’. I was a fan of this title because the use of the possessive pronoun made me feel like an active player in the event before I had even seen any theatre. I was an even bigger fan once I saw that Transform involved transforming the foyer of WYP into a park. I’m a sucker for fake foliage.

Unfortunately, my experience of the festival was overshadowed by a tedious and irritating first hour spent attending a roundtable discussion. The roundtable involved a collective of Very Important academics, critics and theatre makers discussing ways to ‘transform’ the city through theatre practice by ‘engaging with the community’. I vaguely remember attending an almost identical event at last year’s Transform, which had an almost identical set of people contributing to it. This year it was, as these things tend to be, repetitive, patronising and essentially pointless. At one point a certain member of the London media (who shall remain nameless) told us that though he’d not actually set foot in Leeds in the six years prior to this event, he did have ideas about how we could improve our attempts at community engagement – take theatre to the people by bringing it to the streets! Less than two hours later I observed theatre which took place on a real life street (Navigators – bravo to my University of Leeds students, you’ve clearly been well taught). FFS.

It would have seriously made more sense to ask a random shopper from Trinity to run the roundtable – because inviting London critics to curate the discussion is symptomatic of the thing I suspect about these kinds of ‘community focussed’ exercises: the people involved aren’t really that bothered about the ‘community’ (read: groups of poor or ethnic minority or unemployed or other supposedly marginalised people who theatre types think don’t go to the theatre). Mainstream theatres, theatre makers and critics – as opposed to community and applied theatre groups – are motivated by an interest in continuing to be paid for making and writing about theatre. They engage with the abstract idea of ‘community’ because for quite some time the Arts Council has prioritised funding for theatre that reaches ‘new audiences’. Which is…whatever. My point is not really a moral one – especially because I know that WYP do some committed and valuable work with local groups. I’m just saying I’d like to hear the Very Important academics, critics and theatre makers admit it. (Mainly because it would inject some brevity into the proceedings.) And also, I suppose what I am really saying is that if the organisers of Transform want to create interesting and worthwhile debates then they’d be better off inviting members of these elusive ‘communities’ to run roundtable sessions. Or else they could provide narcotics.

Fortunately, the majority of Transform was taken up with proper theatre and performance, which was altogether more pleasurable. My favourite event was the scratch I saw on the Saturday afternoon, where three artists offered fifteen minute showcases of emerging work. The surreal, deranged life coach Rudy Babylon (and his baby quorn), part of Horizon Art’s The Vanish Inquisition,  was the most memorable of these – and the first time I’ve cried with laughter at a live performance since, erm, some stand-up I saw in a pub when I was seventeen. Someone give that man a full length show. And the beautiful dances with words, WE (Spelt You and I) by Kate Cox, were enchanting, and made me wish I’d had the foresight to book tickets to the second scratch.

I was also lucky enough to get ticket to The Market, a sell-out performance which took place in Kirkgate Market and celebrated the various historical and contemporary locals who have contributed to Kirkgate’s character. Although, having never been inside before (I shop at Morrisons – I know supermarkets have destroyed the character of our towns and cites, but they are trés convenient), I enjoyed the tour of the market that the performance offered, I was less impressed by the content of the piece. There was little narrative beyond the obvious anti-progress message (‘corporations are bad, save our market’), and the ostensibly charming characters, who delivered monologues about their lives and work, were mostly really annoying – albeit admirably performed. Still, at the end of the performance, having spent the best part of an hour hearing stories of Leeds past and present, staring out at the spread of stalls from the grand height of Kirkgate’s iron-work balcony, I did feel like I was part of something. If not quite a community then something bigger – a city, perhaps.

*

I was unable to get to several of the events I’d like to have seen – notably Burmantofts Stories, a mash-up of spoken word, movement and music outside Shakespeare Towers, and The Cabaret Club – so please post your own reviews of these, and any tales from your own experiences of Transform, in the comments section.