Slung Low do fabulous things…and this is an extra brilliant post from Artistic Director Alan Lane at a time when they are very busy over in Liverpool, wowing everyone with Anthology
I’ve been following the discussions about Leeds as a city and its cultural/lifestyle offer on this site with distant interest.
Interest because I live in Armley, my company’s base is in Holbeck (The Holbeck Underground Ballroom) and I decided 5 years ago to make Leeds home for me and my family. Distant because I have been over in Liverpool for the last 3 months making Anthology with my company Slung Low.
Slung Low were invited to make something by the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. We made a show called Anthology with them. 7 shows that start simultaneously in the theatre building but then go out on to 7 different routes around the city of Liverpool (or more specifically the square mile around the theatre). It’s taken up every waking moment for 3 months. As you can imagine making 7 new shows in 7 different places is an undertaking.
It’s also meant that we’ve spent 3 months not only in Liverpool but engaging totally with its geography (in choosing the show’s routes), in its architecture (in choosing the show’s set pieces), its people, its press, its art scene.
And I was impressed. The Biennial is a huge art event showing new art in found spaces throughout the city that happened last month and was hugely exciting. The local press really got behind- with confidence and intelligence- not only Anthology but the whole idea that Slung Low (with its airstream caravan and Billy the Dog) had moved to Liverpool for 3 months. Liverpool Playhouse (The Everyman’s sister theatre) was producing a powerhouse production of Antony and Cleopatra with Kim Cattral. The Unity Theatre presented a great theatre installation by its extensive company of emerging artists which delighted the whole of Slung Low. There was the Hope Street Feast with its brilliant food and excellent street theatre, restaurants of delight, friendly people, a Philarmonic Hall with a truly mixed programme, concerts by Sense of Sound choir, visits to cathedrals, Gormley statues on the beach and… well you get the point.
Liverpool really is a genuinely brilliant city in which on any given night all your appetites can be sated. And I have to be honest I was starting to think that maybe a move along the M62 westward might not be such a stupid idea.
And then- as is so often the way I find- my wife stopped me short; “You just don’t notice Leeds anymore- you don’t engage with it because you’re too busy racing around.” That can’t be right, can it?
I mean I’m a big fan of the West Yorkshire Playhouse- well I would be they sometimes employ me. But actually the hugely successful Othello last year was as triumphant as Antony and Cleopatra- and being in Liverpool I was gutted to have missed Ian Brown’s As You Like It which by all accounts was a powerhouse piece of classic theatre. And the plans they have for next year that I have heard whispered are excellent, true.
And Opera North’s output was given a huge alternative boost by the opening of the Howard Assembly Room and I have seen some brilliant things there, true.
And actually Leeds does have a plethora of brilliant restaurants; Hansas, Anthony’s 1 and 2, The Reliance, that Tapas Bar on Kirkstall Road. True.
And the Henry Moore Institue… The Art Gallery, oh and the cafe they have in there- love that place.
And Phoenix Dance– they’re hitting back aren’t they. And that brilliant graffiti thing I went to at the Temple Works. Oh and Leeds’ Rash Dash just won a fringe first- they’re this great new dance theatre company which you probably haven’t seen yet- but you’re going to now because they went off to Edinburgh Fringe and got the prize.
Light Night. I missed bloody Light Night. I don’t think they do it here in Liverpool. Light Night is always good fun.
And the Art in Unusual Spaces is a bit like the Biennial. Without the faux European types swanning about.
And Nick Ahad– just like his counterparts here at the Liverpool Echo and Post– can always be relied upon to throw his support behind a good idea that genuinely tries to engage with Leeds- especially through his much over looked but rather marvellous podcasts.
I love West Leeds Festival- that’s just ace and I bet they don’t have a West Leeds festival in Liverpool!
Oh and…you get the idea.
Okay Leeds doesn’t have many things. Whilst it would be the height of hypocrisy to pretend that Im not often frustrated by the quality of national coverage of most of the arts scene in Leeds, the Leeds Guardian website is doing sterling work alongside The CultureVulture to try and give a centre point to the myriad of activities. From my point of view Leeds lacks a centre ground and meeting place for progressive art, the people who make it and the audiences that support it. A lot of what we do in Leeds slogs up the hill of public awareness on its own as a stand alone event. But that- in many different ways- is starting to shift; that was the logic behind Slung Low moving in to The Holbeck Underground Ballroom, the drive behind this website I am writing this for, a whole host of people are trying to make a change.
Leeds is made up brilliant things, wonderful places, exciting events. Absolutely. Fact. Google it. Look it up.
You know what Liverpool has got that Leeds hasn’t? Narrative.
You are not two minutes off the train before someone is telling you about what Liverpool is like. In Leeds you are not two minutes off the train before someone is telling you what Manchester has got that Leeds hasn’t.
Liverpool understands that its cultural offer, its idiosyncrasies of architecture, of tone, of attitude are mostly what made people come in the first place (if it wasn’t the bloody Beatles).
Being European Capital of Culture in 2008 must have helped- created a sense of narrative around the city and a central set of activities that created a rallying point for everyone.
And in Leeds we got Live it/Love it/Lump it.
Okay.
The irony is that ‘doing it’ is the hard part. Leeds has the goods. Now we’ve just got to start telling people about them. And before we do that we probably have to start believing it ourselves.
In the meantime Slung Low are in Liverpool with Anthology until the end of October- check www.everymanplayhouse.com for performance dates and details.
Then in November Slung Low are coming home to Leeds and the Holbeck Underground Ballroom. Check ww.slunglow.org for more details about the HUB and the company.
The images on this blog are of Anthology by Slung Low and The Liverpool Everyman. Photos by Sam Heath
A fascinating blog that I would largely agree with: narrative is such a powerful word.
A couple of observations: firstly, I think there is something in the character of Yorkshire that doesn’t like to crow about its achievements. I genuinely think we somehow regard it as big-headed or a sign of someone being up themselves. I also wonder if cities in Yorkshire suffer from the very strong identity of the county crowding out each city’s individual identities. No one in Manchester goes on about Lancashire. Over here, Yorkshire-ness is our unifying identity.
Secondly, I agree that Liverpool is a genuine culture centre, but I actually find its endless capacity for aggrandising incredibly tedious. I worked in Liverpool for over 3 years and grew so tired of every taxi driver telling me it was ‘the best city in the world’ when you knew full well they’d never been further than Wales. And I didn’t find that Liverpool really matches its fine words half the time. It is, god bless it, a bit of a dump, with a peculiar city centre that doesn’t quite work. Of course, the dock road is amazing and its 18th Century architecture quite breathtaking, but I think it’s still a city in transition and one that has still not really overcome the air of grinding long-term poverty.
But despite that, it does have an amazing capacity for cultural expression. It’s particularly strong on the visual arts and it’s certainly a city on the up in many ways. I’m sure there is much we can learn but I also think we need to appreciate – as ever in Leeds – that the grass isn’t always THAT much greener elsewhere, no matter what the taxi drivers tell you!
Just to say, we do have Light Night in Liverpool but ours is a springtime offer and took place back in May when the evenings are still light. Liverpool has two late night cultural festival and the second is Long Night, coming up on November 18th. Hope you can make it! Christina
Hi,
I’ve just stumbled across this blog on Google.
Really great analysis I think of the lessons that can be learned from Liverpool’s experience. I think the real lesson is quality and a wide cultural offer.
Sorry David Allison for self aggrandising again but Liverpool really does have world class art collections, theatre and music. Check out the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under the leadership of Vasily Petrenko one of the leading orchestras in Europe right now.
The advantage Liverpool has is a strong sense of itself. This identity can be irritating to outsiders but it does give the local people a unity and makes people want to make art that is distinctly Liverpudlian.
My advice to Leeds or any other city trying to promote its cultural offer is to decide who you are. Are you Leeds as a city on its own (this is how Liverpool sees itself) or are you Leeds as the capital of Yorkshire. I think that when the identity is defined then a way forward will fall out of that.
Thanks Paul!
Just happened upon your blog too and now following you on Twitter
There is plenty of scope for companies like Slung Low, which skilfully weave together some of the narrative threads that Alan sees as missing from Leeds.
But I am not at all sure Leeds lacks narratives. One of the strongest is picked up and twisted for all it’s worth by Anthony Clavane in The Promised Land, which sees the football club as symbolic of a wider identity. Another narrator who absolutely nails it, in football again, is David Peace in The Damned United. More widely both explore loss and decline, even while quietly being at home with the feeling, much like the John Cleese character who observes, ‘it’s not the despair, it the hope I can’t stand’. These are common themes in any Northern industrial city, Liverpool included, and this contributes to their sense of self-reliance, worth and identity. The way T Dan Smith becomes a hero as well as a villain on contemporary Tyneside, thanks largely to the brilliant plotting of Peter Flannery in the BBC’s epic Our Friends in the North, shows how this is not about being relentlessly positive – it’s about being authentic and not rubbing out the conflicts and contradictions. The same could be said of Phil Redmond’s phlegmatic remark that the sometime chaotic Cultural Capital was like a ‘scouse wedding’.
We certainly need writers, musicians, architects, choreographers, film makers and others to keep telling us (our) stories, but the creative geography of Leeds, in my view anyway, seems a lot like the ‘back to front, upside down, inside out’ city that initially mystified the planner Patrick Nuttgens back in the 1970s. Our slightly mad railway station, half hotel and shopping street, jettied out over a river, is what he had in mind. Capturing the contradictions, and the many intercultural, and intergenerational, stories, may be better than looking in vain for a single dominating narrative.
Good piece Alan and I absolutely agree on the lack of a Leeds narrative. Narratives are constructs and I personally can see an extremely strong Leeds narrative that links into the city, it’s history and it’s present.
David Allison I completely agree about the nature of Leeds people being reared not to brag. I’ve just submitted a blog/article to CV on this (connected to writing) and what I call ‘Leedsness’ that goes into that topic in a bit of depth, it certainly exists, I’ve been around it all my life. This over modesty is part of why Leeds doesn’t have a narrative, people don’t brag or pass on or create a Leeds consciousness, they just ‘get on with it’.
Paul I for one am not seeing or aiming to promote Leeds as ‘the capital of Yorkshire’ more the capital of the north but also with an unique character. 😉
I spent a lot of time in Liverpool in the early ’90s and I love the city and the people (I met a lot of them and as an aside,they loved my Leeds humour which was very different to their own) but I was shocked by poverty of and run down nature of the city, it was like Leeds 10 years previously and this touches on something I think is important for the future. Compared to other cities Leeds relies less on central government and always has, it’s a comparatively independent city with a large and strong private sector. Now I don’t it’s too big a jump to speculate that in the current economic climate ‘the arts’ may take a bit of a battering – unless of course Clegg and Cable rediscover their beliefs – and Leeds’ cultural exponents and the strong private sector need to forge bonds. I think with imagination and drive Leeds may be better placed to ride out the on-coming period of austerity.
On the Yorkshire thing, we need to step out of the shadow of Yorkshire which I agree had been and still is an issue. I think in a national (maybe even international) consciousness Yorkshire, in part, equates the past, with tradition, ‘it were all fields round ere, when I w’a lad. Hovis, Last of The Summer Wine and All Creatures Great and Small, rightly or wrongly, it’s not equated with dynamism, sophistication, with the future, which I think for Leeds is particularly bright.
Sorry, I should have proofed that before I posted….I got a bit giddy, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.