A tour de force of the best of cultural life in Yorkshire

AS challenges go, they don’t come much bigger – curate an arts festival for the whole of Yorkshire that takes in all art forms and numerous venues across the county – but Matt Burman, appointed last autumn as artistic director of the Yorkshire Festival, certainly seems equal to that challenge.

The festival will run over 18 days this summer and if Burman’s energy, enthusiasm and commitment are anything to go by, not to mention his previous experience as one of the UK’s top arts programmers and producers, the project is in safe hands.

The aim is to present hundreds of shows, concerts and events celebrating the very best artists and companies from across Yorkshire and around the world. “I keep quoting Brian Clough who once said ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I don’t think I was on that particular job,’” says Burman, laughing.

“I’ve got a great team and Welcome to Yorkshire is a brilliant organisation to achieve the goals we have set ourselves. Because it is a countywide festival as opposed to citywide, it is a broad canvas and we are thinking about a series of shows and how they intersect with each other.”

The biennial festival was created by Welcome to Yorkshire and the inaugural event took place in 2014 as the first cultural festival ever to precede the Tour de France in its 111-year history. That was a huge success and Burman hopes this year’s festival, which has been awarded £1million of government funding through the Arts Council as part of the Northern Powerhouse initiative, will build on that success.

“We have ambition,” says Burman. “We want this festival to be mentioned in the same breath as Edinburgh and Manchester. We know that the festival will be bigger geographically but Yorkshire deserves a festival of that standing.

“We want to bring the best artists from around the world to Yorkshire and show visitors from around the world the best of Yorkshire. We hope long term to be able to provide the resources to raise capacity and increase ambition – there is so much potential for the festival to grow.”

In December, the first confirmed acts were announced – and you certainly can’t accuse Berman and his team of a lack of ambition in terms of scope and scale.

One of the events is The Big Disco which will see the world’s largest disco ball – 10m in diameter – suspended from a crane above Duke Studios in Leeds while more than 20,000 people dance to the same track, at the same time, at parties across Yorkshire.

DJs and venues are currently working on selecting a top 10 from which the public will select the track they want to dance to – the idea being to set a world record. Another is Clash of Drums which will see French and Basque performers come together in an explosion of fireworks, percussion and dance, while Bradford will host the European premiere of The Nile Project, a special collaboration featuring musicians from 11 countries along the Nile.

The eight brand new community commissions were announced last week and they include #ChipShopTheMusical with performers on tour entertaining audiences in chippies across Yorkshire; in Talking Statues Leeds passers by will receive a phone call from one of the city’s famous statues who will tell their story; The Brutalist Playground by 2015 Turner Prize winner Assemble and artist Simon Terrill will be taking place in Park Hill in Sheffield, exploring post-war design for play and the concrete playgrounds that were part of post-war housing estates in the mid-20th century, including Park Hill estate itself. Then there’s Recorded Delivery which will see award-winning writer, artist and Huddersfield postman Kevin Boniface take to the road to produce a series of monologues about the people and places he encounters on his rounds.

“The work in the community commissions is all from innovative artists who are thinking about how we can work with new and existing audiences,” says Burman.

“There’s a sense of surprise, the unusual and disruptive of the everyday – the events represent imaginative ways the artists have found to try and change people’s views of themselves and how they see the world around them.”

In the first three months after his appointment, Burman spent time meeting and talking to hundreds of people in arts organisations around the county, discovering the breadth and depth of creative talent in the region.

“One of the things I am really excited about is collaborating with all the wonderful theatre companies, arts organisations and arts festivals we have in Yorkshire,” he says.

“The question I have asked them all is ‘what is it we can do together that we can’t do separately?’ It’s been a brilliant reminder of how generous people are and seeing how much they share our passion for encouraging audiences and artists. We all believe in the power of the arts to change people’s lives.”

When it comes to the arts Yorkshire has an embarrassment of riches – there are numerous theatre and dance companies, orchestras, choirs, galleries, festivals and arts venues that are all producing, commissioning or hosting world-class work every day. How do you even begin to start making decisions about what should be included in an arts festival?

“It is like shaping an 18-day symphony,” says Burman. “You need your big crescendos as well as quiet, slow more contemplative moments. It’s somewhere between a symphony and a narrative that you are telling as a whole piece. I always talk about making people laugh and cry – we want to have that rich emotional palette to the festival and I am confident we have that.

“There will be lots of playful moments but also lots of thoughtful ones. It is about treating our audiences as the intelligent people they are. They will be given the opportunity to experience new work that will make them think as well as feel. I’m really pleased that a number of this year’s projects are festival originals and we have been involved in the creation of them from the very beginning.”

Having grown up in Leeds, Burman says that he is very happy to be back in the city where many of his own formative creative experiences took place.

“I remember being taken by my parents to listen to Itzhak Perlman at Leeds Town Hall when I was six,” he says. “And that’s what first got me interested in playing the violin.”

He went on to train, perform and tour as a classical musician, before moving into producing and programming.

“It felt like the right time to come back,” he says. “The cultural offer in Yorkshire is already so strong and it is great to have the opportunity to work with others to enhance that and broadcast it to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.”

A festival of culture

The biennial festival was created by Welcome to Yorkshire and the inaugural event took place in 2014 as the first ever cultural festival to precede the Tour de France in its 111-year history.

It proved to be a huge success – it attracted more than 800,000 people who attended over 2,000 arts events, while around 18,000 people took part.

This year’s Yorkshire Festival runs from June 16 to July 3 and includes events being held right across the whole of Yorkshire.

The full festival programme will be announced on April 14 and there are preview events scheduled around the Tour de Yorkshire weekend at the end of April. For more information visit www.yorkshirefestival.co.uk