Meet the man who gives the stars their sparkle

Unless you’re entrenched in the county’s arts world you’re unlikely to know his name. but if you are enjoying the Yorkshire performing arts boom at the moment, you need to tip your hat to this man.

David Edmunds, 38, is a theatre producer and his company DepArts a rare beast in this part of the world - a commercial producer working in the subsidized arts sector.

Producers are generally shadowy figures - shadowy because their work is in the background so they are rarely seen by audiences who enjoy the end product of their work.

“We’re like the glue that holds all the pieces together,” says Edmunds.

A good example of the sort of producing Edmunds does is his work with Balbir Singh Dance Company. A Leeds based company led by Yorkshire dancer Balbir Singh, it is one of the companies commissioned to create a piece for iMove, Yorkshire’s cultural Olympiad. On June 14 at Ponds Forge in Sheffield Synchronised, a piece of work featuring contemporary and classical Indian dance fused with synchronized swimming will receive its world premiere.

Edmunds has not only sold that as an idea, but pitched to and won the commission for the piece from iMove, a Legacy Trust scheme celebrating the Olympics in Yorkshire.

“When I first met Balbir I thought he was either crackers or a genius, but I have had people believe in me all the way through my career, so I decided to believe in him,” says Edmunds.

“If you put Balbir in a room with some dancers he will make something extraordinary and beautiful, but the administration of a company and pitching ideas like Synchronised aren’t necessarily his strong point. In Balbir’s case we pretty much do everything, from applying for funding to booking tours - so for him, that’s the sort of producers we are.

“In the case of a company like Vincent Dance we do less, so maybe we just help in booking the tours and organizing the marketing. As producers we essentially provide whatever the company needs.”

The journey for Edmunds to the man behind some of the region’s most interesting theatre work began in the unlikeliest of places. He grew up in Hinckley ‘a middle of nowhere place between Coventry and Leicester’.

His access to any kind of art was severely limited and many of his school friends followed their parents into either car manufacturing or the army, but when he was a teenager he started working in the local theatre.

“It was just am-dram, but I loved the idea of being part of a club and it was this special place that only a few could get in to,” he says. When he was 16 he joined Youth Arts Leicestershire, an organisation that worked with young people interested in theatre.

“It was a bit of a cultural desert, so to have something like that was so important for me. Every year they went to Edinburgh and in 1990 I went with them. I was 16 and my first time away from home was to spend three weeks at the Edinburgh Festival where I was doing all the technical stuff on all the shows.”

It was a steep learning curve and Edmunds was well and truly bitten by the theatre bug.

He attended a three year degree course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

“One of the first things I did when I arrived at university was get a part-time job at the Lyric Hammersmith theatre as a techie. Often I’d work all night on getting a show into the theatre and then go straight from there to lectures at 9am,” he says. “I realised I had to try do something to put myself ahead of the pack.”

He was so far ahead that by the time he graduated he was offered a job at the Lyric Hammersmith, working full time. The problem with the job was that Edmunds had recently married a girl he had met in his first week at university, he wanted to continue to work in the arts, but the young couple simply couldn’t afford to stay in London. So when a job came up at the RSC as production manager, it meant a return home and he snapped up the chance.

A year working with the RSC and the seemingly peripatetic Edmunds was offered another role of helping to run the then yet to be built Lowry Theatre in Salford. He loved the work, but there was a problem - the easily bored producer set the systems up so well that once they were in place things ticked along fairly easily.

It meant when he met a kindred spirit in Darshan Singh Bhuller - then artistic director of Phoenix Dance Theatre - another opportunity presented itself, he took it. The two got along and Singh Bhuller asked Edmunds to join his organisation. He crossed the Pennines to work with the famous Leeds dance company and it was as though everything had led to that moment.

“Before I got involved with theatre, when I was a kid, I remember an amazing teacher took us to see Rambert Dance Company,” he says.

“The moment I saw contemporary dance, I was just blown away. I was a young lad from the Midlands who hadn’t seen a lot of theatre, but there was something about contemporary dance and I just ‘got’ it.”

It meant when Darshan Singh Bhuller offered him a job with Phoenix, at the time going through one of its rebuilding stages Edmunds jumped at it. His impact was immediate.

“Within a few weeks I had to go home to my wife, our little boy was still a baby and tell her that we’d moved to Yorkshire and I’d lost my job - but I had a new one,” says Edmunds.

“Darshan had promoted me, told me that the job I was doing was that of a producer, gave me the title and a pay rise.”

When Singh Bhuller left the company Edmunds went freelance, supposedly temporarily, working as a producer for some of the companies who already knew him. That was six years ago in April and now DepArts has an office in Yorkshire Dance and a number of full time staff.

“Artists are great at making their work - they’re not necessarily the people to put the work in front of an audience - we help them do all that,” says Edmunds.

“It’s great when the companies we work with win awards and all, but what I really enjoy is when companies stay here in Yorkshire because we have helped to make it viable for them.”