Beyond the fringe: Yorkshire’s most daring new theatre (with audio debate)

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IT’S hard to put your finger on it, but something is definitely in the air in theatre spaces across West Yorkshire

While 2011 will inevitiably remembered as the year of the Arts council funding cuts and the time when many companies whether, the last 12 months has also seen a renaissance in fringe theatre, particularly in West Yorkshire.

“No-one in the middle of a movement thinks they are part of the movement, you only realise in retrospect, so instead of questioning if we are, why not let’s just say yes, keep the momentum going and make the most of it,” says Annie Lloyd, a Leeds-based independent producer who ran the Studio Theatre at Leeds Met for 20 years.

Lloyd was one of five people invited to the Yorkshire Post to talk about the rise of underground or fringe, theatre. Alongside her were Amy Letman, producer at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Iain Bloomfield, artistic director of Bradford’s Theatre in the Mill, David Edmunds, director of production company DepArts and Alan Lane, artistic director of Leeds based company Slung Low.

The five were brought together because, over the past 12 months, many have sensed a shift in the kind of theatre coming out of the county. The tent-pole of theatre in West Yorkshire is obviously the Playhouse. The Leeds-based theatre is the largest in the region, receives the most Arts Council funding and stages the most high profile productions.

However, this past year, some of the best theatre has been performed outstide traditional auditoriums. There was The Mill: City of Dreams, a performance that led audiences around an old mill in Bradford. There was a radio play, performed live, in another Mill, this time in Farsley and over the course of five nights in May a select few were led a merry dance around the streets of Hull by a Leeds based theatre company.

It was in October that all of this crystallised into something that might be recognised as a ‘movement’. Transform was the name of a festival of new work which arrived at West Yorkshire Playhouse in autumn.

Experimental in nature, some of the work was actually created during the weekend, but the most significant part of the event was a symposium which featured a number of the people involved in making this experimental theatre.

That there were enough people to gather together in the Playhouse’s Courtyard theatre to discuss the apparent renaissance spoke volumes.

As Lloyd says, we might not be able to define exactly what that thing is right now, but it is worth recognising that something is certainly going on and it is entirely possible that a decade hence, this epoch will be marked as a significant moment in creating a new landscape of theatre in West Yorkshire.

“We have hit a rich vein of form,” says David Edmunds. “What seems to have happened is that there has been a building of critical mass and over the last 12 months and many voices have started to come together and speak up for the kind of work which is outside the boundaries of tradtional theatre. I’ve been working in this area for ten years now and it feels like there is the right mix of people hitting a critical moment in their work all at the same time.”

So, what is this work and who are these people?

Rash Dash, Paper Birds, Slung Low, Unlimited, Invisible Flock, Freedom Studios - these are just some of the companies in West Yorkshire creating work that can be described as bold, new and which deliberately plays with the traditional ideas of theatre.

Invisible Flock gathered information for a performance in Leeds Market and Slung Low have staged a vampire story in a car park. They are far from the only ones.

The work of Lloyd, Letman, Bloomfield, Edmunds and Lane is representative of the change the scene is undergoing, but they are just the tip of the ice berg. There are people like Dick Bonham, responsible for programming the Carriageworks and instrumental in bringing new work to the theatre through the Emerge festival and others making things happen like writer Emma Adams, producers Jane Earnshaw and Peter Reed and the Arts Council’s Ralph Dartford.

Iain Bloomfield says: “There is a perjorative sense to the word community, but that is what has happened over the last few years, there has been a real development and sense of community between all the artists working in the region which has led to a lot more communication and this development of a ‘group’.

“What’s important about it, though, is that it has happened organically.”

David Edmunds agrees: “None of us have sat down and said, ‘Right, this is happening and we need to have a steering committee’. We’ve just looked around and realised there are other companies and people who are doing similar stuff, making similar work and we’ve all started talking to each other.”

This sense of co-operation could mean applying for funding together or something as simple as what happened the weekend before we met - Slung Low has a van and Alan Lane has insured it so that anyone over 25 can drive it - the previous weekend three theatre companies in Leeds had borrowed it from Lane, completely free of charge. It all feeds in to a growing sense of what Bloomfield says is the philosophy “that together we are stronger.”

Amy Letman has perhaps the most interesting take on all of this, as she is the stranger from out of town and as result brings a perspective which those already here may have missed.

A few years ago she was working in London and was becoming a quickly rising figure in theatre. Looking for the right city where she could continue working as a producer and make an impact, she left London, initially for the South West.

“I went to Bristol, because I had heard things were happening there, but didn’t really find the community I was looking for,” says Letman, now a producer at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

“I went to New York and again there wasn’t the right thing happening. When I came back I spoke to the guys from Rash Dash and they said that I should really think about coming to Leeds.”

Rash Dash are Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen, graduates of Hull University, who like Letman were also looking for somewhere to call home when they decided to set up a theatre company. With several major hits at the Edinburgh Festival, they could have chosen anywhere to be based.

They came to West Yorkshire.

Letman says: “When they told me about coming to Leeds, I was sceptical, but I came to the Christmas Fayre held at the HUB (Slung Low’s base in Holbeck, south of Leeds) and saw it for myself. Abbi and Helen were speaking to their Arts Council officer - I couldn’t have imagined that even happening in London.”

Alan Lane says Letman’s impressions of the swell of work and sense of community in the city are not particular to her.

Lane’s company Slung Low was this year made a National Portfolio Organisation, which means it is now regularly funded by the Arts Council. The company started at Theatre in the Mill, the venue Iain Bloomfield runs.

He says: “There was a time when you would go to other cities to work and almost be embarassed to say you were from Leeds or Bradford.

“What’s really important about this is not just that we could easily have had 30 people in a room talking about how they are working together in West Yorkshire to create work, but that people outside are starting to take notice. Now when you go anywhere in the country - and all of us work outside the region - people say that they are aware of things happening in West Yorkshire.”

In November Lloyd produced the Compass festival, a weekend of ‘Live Art’ which saw Forced Entertainment from Sheffield perform in the Leeds Grand Howard Assembly Rooms and Jenny Lawson baking cakes in the Light Shopping Centre. She boasts that the weekend saw 2,500 engage with the kind of ‘fringe’ theatre which is, possibly, going through a renaissance.

Perhaps underground theatre is about to go overground and into the spotlight.

HUB: Slung Low’s base is a series of former railway arches in Holbeck. As well as being home to other companies, the HUB hosts an annual Christmas Fayre, rehearsals and performances.

Theatre in the Mill: Bradford University’s on campus theatre is the home of some of the boldest and most interesting work in the region.

Transform: West Yorkshire Playhouse hosted this festival of new work for the first time last year. It was so popular it returns in April, this time taking place over two weekends.

Invisible Flock: Starting in Bradford, the company creates live art, interactive games and won rave reviews for its latest show Bring the Happy.

Paper Birds: Jemma McDonnell and Kylie Walsh create devised work. Their piece Thirsty was a major hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.