Nick Ahad: Why no recognition for signifcant culture events happening in the North?
WITH the opening of the Hepworth Wakefield, the bestowing of Capital of Culture on Liverpool, the creation of MediaCity in Salford, the opening of the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield, the continuing success of the Northern Art Prize and an endless list of other projects, ideas, initiatives, and flagship buildings, a significant movement has happened over the past decade.
That movement has been away from a centralisation and toward a democratisation of culture.
Art for All was the clarion call of successive government administrations and of cultural public bodies.
It was a slogan that carried with it an innate sense of justice. Of course art should be available to everyone. Why shouldn’t Antony Gormley take a significant work to a beach in Liverpool? Why wouldn’t Kenneth Branagh tackle Richard III on a stage in Sheffield?
Where once the capital ruled all and the “provinces” were somewhere an actor with a conscience would make an effort to perform every couple of years, there has been a real and conscious shift away from London-centric thought and behaviour in terms of our cultural life.
The importance of a shift away from single city dominance and the recognition of the importance of the rest of the country in which 90 percent of the population reside, appears to have been lost in translation just recently.
Collecting together the festive season newspapers to look at what the cultural thinkers and journalists on national, London-based, newspapers were recommending as their personal cultural higlights, a pattern emerged.
It would seem that nothing culturally interesting is happening in Yorkshire this year.
When it came to the theatre shows all our national newspaper journalists were most excited about, each seemed to pick one, two in extremis, that will be presented here in the North. Maybe it is justified?
It’s not like we have an enormous presentation of the Mystery plays in York, a whole season of work by Michael Frayn in Sheffield and an all black cast performing one of the most significant works in the British theatrical canon with Waiting for Godot at West Yorkshire Playhouse.
No, wait a moment. Those three are exact examples of the sort of art waiting for us in theatres here inYorkshire this winter-spring season.
And yet, the London-centric national critics seem to ignore the works originating here.
Perhaps it’s for the best. The longer they act like we’re not significant, the more we get to keep this great art for ourselves.
That’s the spin a proud Tyke puts on the situation, truth is, it feels like these critics are biting their thumbs at us each time this happens.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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