Space2: CEOs reflect on 20 years of art and community projects before Leeds Playhouse goodbye

The duo, both 58, are celebrating 20 years of their arts and social change organisation, which these days goes by the title of Space2.

It collaboratively organises activities, programmes and events with communities and artists, from theatre productions - examples include Gipton the Musical and Oh I Do Like to be Beside the Seacroft - to the likes of men’s groups, gardening projects and crafting.

Their work has health and wellbeing at its heart and they have led campaigns across the city co-produced with young people.

But as Emma and Dawn prepare to step down after two decades, they will celebrate their achievements tomorrow with Ahead of the Wave, a performance at Leeds Playhouse involving a number of the city’s top cultural acts - a recognition of their collaborative approach.

Emma says: “We've always worked with others - always. We really believe in working with other organisations, artists; we're not the experts of everything. And it's far better that you come together …there's also that solidarity with others within this field of work as well, so we think that's really important, because we don't know it all, we can’t don't know it all.”

The performance, which starts at 7pm, has been co-created and will be performed by 200 residents, school children, artists, dancers, performance poets, arts and community organisations. It will include an appearance by Coronation Street actress Rayyah McCaul, who will be reading a poem about Emma and Dawn, written by Peter Spafford.

Despite working with Leeds communities for more than two decades, neither is native to the city. Dawn is from Margate and came to West Yorkshire at 18 to study geography and sociology at the University of Leeds, after which she volunteered with Yorkshire Women’s Theatre.

Meanwhile, Emma had grown up in London but ended up doing a fashion degree in Bristol and was involved in the peace movement’s Greenham Common protests.

“When I finished my boyfriend was working in the theatre in Oxford, and he was short of crew so I went in one day. I literally was there one day, and that was it, and then I ran away with the theatre.”

Eventually, a friend in Leeds recommended she apply for an assistant prop mistress role at Opera North and she got it.

The pair met 35 years ago at what is now Phoenix Dance Theatre, where Dawn was originally an administrator and Emma was company stage manager.

“The friendship grew,” says Emma. “Dawn had her children, I decided to adopt my daughter, Jess, and therefore had to retire from touring because it didn't quite work. And also Dawn became general manager of the company, and we decided that because we were both single mums, that we wanted to be able to be there for our children, be able to go to their sports days, and actually we wanted to be our own bosses.”

When they left Phoenix, they set up One Stop Touring from Emma’s bedroom in Harehills, offering arts administration, project management and development to freelance artists and small organisations across West Yorkshire.

“We wanted to work with artists and support artists, for them to have their voices and their work seen,” says Emma. “The art was our passion, really, so that's how we started and then the company grew organically. We moved from a bedroom to a cupboard.”

That’s when, a little over 20 years ago, the first iteration of Space began. Their children went to Bracken Edge Primary School, and Gill St Quintin, the former “visionary head”, collared Emma for a meeting.

Emma and Dawn worked with the school to win funding for new art spaces, designed with the pupils, but knowing money would need to keep coming in, they set up a charity and ran the new facilities too, inviting the community to all kinds of activities at Space@Bracken Edge.

“Once the school shut at 3.15 you could lock off both parts of the school and we would run the Space from after school into the evening. So we had loads of community classes, we had art classes, dance, taekwondo - you name it, it was in there. And then we develop programmes with the community.”

There were other Spaces at Little London and Hillcrest schools, and they started to produce large scale community shows with the likes of Phoenix’s former artistic director David Hamilton.

They were at Bracken Edge for five years from about 2002, but moved out to focus on a number of different communities, operating for a few years from Leeds Media Centre, eventually becoming Space2.

The pair also worked from The Host building in Chapeltown doing outreach work across the city for 10 years, while at Bracken Edge and Hillcrest Primary they joined up with policeman Bob Bowman, who supported targeted children and families, leading to commissions from Public Health to do work in schools around the issues of alcohol and healthy eating.

They were invited to develop their work in Richmond Hill and then the Seacroft and Gipton areas, with the aim of helping to create better health outcomes for the residents.

When the Old Fire Station opened in Gipton in 2017 - after it was saved for the community - the charity had a new home.

Asked what their biggest achievement has been, Emma says: “We’re still here.”

“We're not out there completely doing it on our own,” adds Dawn. “We're part of a movement and we've just created our own kind of space within that practice.”

They have always been led by certain principles, such as inclusivity, having a non-judgemental approach, being collaborative and community-focused.

Dawn says: “We have what's been referred to as a distinctive co-production practice. What that means is a lot of our artists have grown with us, but also have similar kinds of backgrounds or life experiences to the communities that we work with. When we move into a creative studio space, it's about leaving all of those labels at the door, and everybody's experience is valued equally within the creative process.

“For people who haven't necessarily had any experience of the arts or participating in the arts, you have to go through a period of confidence building and skills building. Again, it's about how you do that. So that people are willing and able to speak up in those spaces and make the contributions that then make the work that is relevant.”