Tessa’s artistic licence to harness the creative energy of region for Olympics

Tessa Gordziejko should probably buy her postman a very nice gift.

For the past couple of years Gordziejko has been a very popular person, receiving invitations to the opening of pretty much every cultural event held in Yorkshire.

It’s hardly surprising that the great and good of the arts world have been keen to see her at their events – as the creative director of Imove, she has been holding the strings of a purse containing over £2.6m to spend on the arts in Yorkshire over the past two years.

Imove is the programme of the Legacy Trust, an independent charity whose mission is to create cultural events around the 2012 Olympics and to provide a legacy for the country following the Games.

While for many the modern Olympics are solely a competition in which individuals push their bodies to the limit of human achievement, some enlightened souls remembered that the ancient Games were as much about artistic expression as sporting excellence.

In ancient Greece, sculptors, poets and other artists would attend the games to display their own prowess, resulting in works such as Myron’s Discobolus and poets creating “epinicians” in celebration of the athletes who did their country proud.

As for as the modern Games, back in 1912 there was an actual Olympic arts contest, with artists competing for medals alongside their more physically-attuned athletic counterparts. This tradition, however, died out, with the arts only a small part of the Games, until Barcelona 1992, which were used to promote Catalan culture.

As we build inexorably to London 2012, the attendant cultural programme is coming together and the Yorkshire Post can exclusively reveal the first details of the artistic line-up that will help Yorkshire celebrate the Olympic Games.

In order to pull the programme together, Tessa Gordziejko has seen a lot of art in Yorkshire since her appointment as creative director of Imove.

“It’s been a busy couple of years,” she admits, taking a rare break from a packed cultural calendar. Already this week she’s been to a new production of Opera North, the opening of an exhibition in Sheffield and a dance performance in Leeds. Gordziejko was appointed by the Legacy Trust to head up Imove in February 2009, her job to seek out artists who will not only help Yorkshire celebrate the cultural spirit of the Olympics, but also create something a lasting legacy.

“It’s not just about a cultural events that will happen in Yorkshire while the Olympics are happening in London,” says Gordziejko.

“It’s about events that will have an impact that will last for many years. We have been very aware of creating events and using our funding to ensure that once the Olympics are over, there is something tangible left behind.”

This includes the training of a group of young producers who are working on the events – and who will use the skills they will learn to help create cultural programmes in the county in the future. And with the help of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage, poems by young people will be carved into stones and left across the Pennines.

Being given the task of bringing together such a huge collection of cultural events was a daunting one. However, Gordziejko, having worked in the arts in Yorkshire for almost two decades, was not fazed by the enormity of what she had to do.

Having worked as a producer in London, she moved north 20 years ago and embarked on a career which saw her work across companies in Yorkshire within arts development, as a project management, as an assessor for the Arts Council and often with dance companies, helping to form development strategies. Six years ago she was appointed chief executive of Arts and Business Yorkshire.

“Having been involved in the arts in Yorkshire for such a long time, I knew a lot of the people in the sector,” says Gordziejko.

“I knew once I was appointed as Imove creative director, that it would mean building a really in depth and far reaching knowledge of the arts sector across Yorkshire.” Hence the creative director’s packed calendar and a person who is perhaps one of the most culturally-informed individuals in Yorkshire.

Following her appointment with Imove, Gordziejko pulled together a team of creative directors to work on making the events happen. The team of three associate producers helping Gordziejko manage the 100-plus exhibitions, performances, debates, lectures and events are Steve Dearden, director of the National Association for Literature Development, David Edmunds, a former producer for Phoenix Dance and one of the country’s top dance producers, and Jenny Harris, director of Morley Literature Festival. Once these three were appointed they began to work with Gordziejko on what to commission, and a sense began to emerge of the sort of work that would help Yorkshire celebrate the Olympics. With the funding in place from the Legacy Trust – £2.24m, and £200,000 from both Yorkshire Forward and Arts Council England, it was a question of finding the artists to deliver the right projects.

Artists from across Yorkshire were invited to pitch their ideas – in any field – as long as they could fall under the broad umbrella of what the commissioners had decided would be the most appropriate theme for a cultural programme running alongside the Olympics – the human body in motion.

In order that the Yorkshire public wasn’t short-changed and didn’t simply get projects that artists and organisations had in the pipeline and were simply tweaking to fulfil the Imove criteria, the producers got involved with the projects from the very early stages, helping in some cases to develop ideas.

In an age of cuts and austerity it was also a way to safeguard against the public wondering why cultural additions can be paid for, while essential services are being reduced. Gordziejko says: “There are organisations and some artists who are good at filling in application forms. We were interested in finding artists who were going to really respond to the idea of movement and come up with something interesting.”

Among the artists who impressed were Northern Ballet, which will perform at the Hull Super League Rugby Derby in April, and Madani Younis, whose company, Freedom Studios, is creating The Mill – City of Dreams which will use the derelict Drummonds Mill in Bradford as a grand setting for a theatre production which explores the lives of the mill workers, using a cast and crew made up of the local community and ex-mill workers and their families. Yorkshire choreographer Balbir Singh has also been commissioned to create the project Synchronise, working both with dancers who specialise in Indian classical dance and with synchronised swimmers, combining both forms and leading to a large water performance at Ponds Forge in Sheffield, coinciding with the Olympic Synchronised Swimming Championships in 2012.

Gordziejko says: “I have been in a really privileged position of seeing just how much wonderful creativity and creative individuals we have here in Yorkshire,” she says. “The Yorkshire public will have a chance to experience that too over the coming two years when a mass of cultural events will take place across the county.”

For more details: www.imoveand.com