Art of the city comes out in the open as brothers reveal a golden Olympic vision

For the last year-and-a-half, trying to unearth even the most trivial detail about a major arts event planned for Leeds in May has been nigh on impossible.

Back in October 2009, the city beat off stiff competition to win £500,000 of Arts Council money, receiving one of 12 grants to fund high profile cultural events during Britain’s Olympic summer.

The Leeds Canvas project was the unlikely victor from a shortlist of five, which included a plan to build a five acre hill in East Yorkshire, a brief to carve an epic poem by Simon Armitage on to the rocks of Ilkley Moor and a proposal to build five urban playgrounds in five different Yorkshire cities. Even one of the people involved in the winning bid, Alex Chisholm of West Yorkshire Playhouse, admitted they were the outsiders.

In short, the bid involved eight of the city’s organisations working together with internationally renowned film-makers the Quay Brothers. What would be the end result? No-one seemed to know.

The Quays were told that Leeds was their canvas and were asked to devise a piece, an event, something that reflected the cultural celebrations of the Olympics for Yorkshire. Finally, the intangible is taking shape and those behind Leeds Canvas have announced Overworlds and Underworlds, a weekend of events will happen in Leeds city centre on May 18 to 20.

“The whole city will become a canvas on which the Quays will create work,” says Steve Dearden, the Leeds-based associate producer of Leeds Canvas who has a long and varied history with the arts in Yorkshire.

He moved to the region in 1988 to become the director of the Ilkley Literature Festival, before leaving to work as a literary officer for the Arts Council and now runs the Writing Squad, a project which was recently awarded National Portfolio Organisation status and which works with people across Yorkshire aged 16 to 20 years old.

Now as associate producer, his job has been to find a way to make the Quays Brothers’ ideas a reality – an unusual position says the experienced producer.

“As a producer, you often spend a lot of your time saying ‘no’. When an artist I am working with comes up with an idea, I’m used to looking at an alternative, often cheaper and more realistic, possibility.

“We said to the Quays, ‘If we gave you the city as a canvas, what would you do?’ It’s a scary thing to say as a producer because if they came back and said, ‘We want to turn that building upside down’, then we were committed to looking at how that might be possible, not simply saying that it couldn’t be done.

“The Arts Council called it Artists Taking the Lead – our bid said very clearly that we didn’t know what would happen if the bid was won, because we were literally going to let the artists take the lead and do whatever it was they wanted to do.”

Fortunately, the Quays have avoided any ideas as impossible as flipping a building up the wrong way – although there was at one point talk of flooding in the city. What the Pennsylvania-born London-based identical twins Stephen and Timothy have done is devise a programme, typically bold and ambitious from a pair who already have a huge international standing and following.

The Quays, Stephen and Timothy, resident in the UK for several decades, first came to the Leeds to work with Opera North in 2007, where they created a video piece based around the Greek myth of Orpheus.

However, when they were approached by the company’s projects director, Dominic Gray, to take part in Leeds Canvas, they were reticent.

“We thought it was too big a canvas for us,” they said on a recent visit to Leeds. “We resisted it until the last minute, but we knew of the Dark Arches from when we worked with Opera North, and were interested to create something for that space.”

The Dark Arches, underneath Leeds Railway Station, will provide one of two main focal points for the weekend’s events. Overworlds and Underworlds will be also be concentrated around the County Arcade just a short walk away in Briggate and in between there will be all manner of what the Quays describe as “interventions” curated by them, but involving the talents of other, Yorkshire-based artists.

There’s clearly much involved in staging this kind of event, but it’s impossible to ignore the cost. While the Legacy Trust has made money available to cultural organisations around the country to create a lasting impact from the Olympics – in Yorkshire iMove has already allocated £2.6m – Leeds Canvas is one of only 12 projects happening around the country funded by the Arts Council.

With the event less than three months away, you might have expected more details to have emerged indicating exactly how the money has been spent. The Quays insist they “want people to be surprised – one event will have a strange nightclub feel, but that’s all we can say at this point”.

Other cities have commissioned pieces of public art that will remain when the Games have finished, can at least claim to have a lasting monument. Leeds Canvas, by its very nature, will be fleeting – and all for £500,000? Accusations of wasting tax payers money are surely not far behind.

Dearden says: “I hope it will become a part of the way the city remembers itself. This is going to quite possibly become a series of cultural interventions that slip into the language of the city.

“Although it seems ephemeral, in the same way that the spider in Liverpool (in 2008, as part of the city’s Capital of Culture celebrations, a huge mechanical spider, created by a performance art company, walked through the streets of the city) created an experience so transformative that it became part of the memory of the city, I hope this will do the same for Leeds. Overworlds and Underworlds will create a series of memories that will entirely change the way people in Leeds look at where they live.”

There will also, hopes Dearden, be a tangible and lasting benefit to the Quays’ fleeting weekend of work. While those that witness the event may have lasting memories of that weekend, the city can, he says, benefit in the long term.

The eight organisations behind Leeds Canvas, all working together for the first time, are Opera North, Northern Ballet, Yorkshire Dance, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Phoenix Dance, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds City Council, and Leeds Met Gallery.

Dearden says that it has not necessarily been the “top dogs” of each organisation represented at the Canvas table, but instead the project has encouraged contributions from staff across the board. It has created, he says, a culture of co-operation that simply did not exist in the past.

“When you actually begin to work with all the organisations you realise the reason they haven’t worked together much before is because each of them is stretched to capacity to simply do what they do. Working together on this project has fostered real relationships between them, which will be a genuine lasting legacy.”

What Dearden won’t (can’t?) say is that nothing concentrates the mind like being given £500,000 of public money and a deadline. Perhaps Leeds Canvas wasn’t the most obvious choice to represent Yorkshire’s cultural contribution to the Olympics, but, with the strange and creative Quay Brothers on board and a new sense of partnership across the city, perhaps we will get a good return on that investment of public money.

The Arts Council and the Olympics

West Midlands: A 10m high carnival puppet of Lady Godiva powered by 50 cyclists will be unveiled this summer.

London: The Bus-Tops project will see art installations displayed on electronic screens across the citys’ bus shelters.

North East: The River Tyne is now home to a floating building containing instruments that generate sound and respond to the constantly changing environment of the river.

South East: In the Boat Project work is underway to construct a vessel from 1,200 pieces of wood donated by members of the public.

North West: A spinning column of cloud, the brainchild of artist Anthony McCall, will rise from the River Mersey into the sky in the run up to the Olympics.