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Queer Up North’s Jonathan Best talks to WOS Manchester

May 9, 2008

jonathanbest.jpgJonathan Best (pictured) is the artistic director for Queer Up North. Following the Arts Council’s U-turn, the festival will go ahead, as planned from 9th -25th May.

This year’s programme includes Tough Time, Nice Time, by radical theatre troupe Ridiculusmus and The Fairy Godfather of Hollywood, avant-garde performer Bette Bourne’s show about the life and times of Hollywood screen icon Rock Hudson.

Opening the festival is controversial comedienne, Sandra Bernhard, who we will be interviewing shortly.

In the meantine, we caught up with Jonathan recently and he talks about the organising the festival, his love of Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter, the funding crisis and what you can look forward to at Queer Up North. This is Best’s second year as artistic director and he is confident that the programme is the best yet.

Place Of Birth
Grimsby, Lincolnshire

Live now in
Manchester

How did you first get involved with Queer Up North?
I became artistic director in 2006, so this is my second festival.

What would you have done professionally if you weren’t doing this?
If I wasn’t working in the arts at all I would have liked to be a pilot.

You have met some very famous gay people through Queer Up North like Armistead Maupin, Patrick Gale and Ian McKellen. Is there anyone you would still like to meet and why?
Working with authors and actors and artists is all very well, but I’d really like to meet rugby players. Tends not to happen in this line of work, though.

You often have to address the audience. Does it make you want to perform?
No, definitely not. I have no ambitions in that area.

What would are the highlights of the festival this year?
I think this year we’ve a very interesting combination of people – all of whom have made their own very individual and unique way as artists. Kicking off with Sandra Bernhard sets the tone – here’s a barnstorming performer who has ignored boundaries and categories for thirty years. She blazed a trail for downtown New York performance and influenced a whole generation of queer artists and performers – some of whom are with Queer up North this year. Take Justin Bond, for example – Kiki and Herb, the act that Justin created with Kenny Mellman, owes so much to Bernhard’s work. John Cameron Mitchell’s work – Hedwig and the Angry Inch particularly – I don’t think he’d have made that show without Bernhard. So having Sandra Bernhard here to get us started with the world premiere of her new show is great. And from there, we go on to a series of iconoclastic, maverick talents; the great Bette Bourne, Justin Bond, Taylor Mac, Bitch, Ridiculusmus, Dennis Cooper, Stephen Petronio.

What was the last thing you saw on stage that you really enjoyed and why?
This is an easy question to answer – and I’ll bet that thousands of people right now will have the same answer. It has to be Emma Rice’s heartbreaking, life-affirming new version of Brief Encounter. I went with a large group of friends and we were all, without exception, rapt. She got completely inside that play, every moment was fully alive. And I found her very democratic approach to the characters’ inner lives extremely moving – minor characters in the Coward having their moments down of the frontcloth, in those very cleverly thought out musical numbers. She has a very humane vision, and she’s given this already very beautiful miniature play a thrilling new life. It’s a beautiful piece of work. If you know anyone who thinks they don’t like theatre really, this is the one to take them to, this is how rich and affecting theatre can be.

And the first?
Also an easy one to answer. Nicholas Hytner’s production of Schiller’s Don Carlos at the Royal Exchange in 1988. I’d just arrived in Manchester as a student at Chetham’s School of Music and I’d quickly figured out that something special was going on at the Exchange. There was a sort of perfect storm of new talent happening – Nicholas Hytner, Iain McDiarmid, Jonathan Kent, Michael Grandage, Alex Jennings, Jeremy Sams – a whole bunch of great shows one after the other – Edward II, Country Wife, Don Juan, and Carlos was the best of them.

If you could swap places with one person (living or dead) for a day, who would it be?
I don’t want to do that. It’s a bit creepy.

Favourite books
I read lots of politics. Nick Cohen’s What’s Left is a brilliant dissection of the failure of principle that’s devastating the British left. My favourite novelists at the moment are Howard Jacobson – Kalooki Nights is wonderful – and Paul Auster (just finishing Timbuktu). And I think all the Modern Toss books are brilliant.

Favourite haunts in Manchester
Hunters curry house. It doesn’t look so great, admittedly, but it’s the best curry in town.

How do you decide the programme for Queer Up North?
It’s a process, an ongoing conversation. This is only my second festival and I think I’m just starting to find my feet. Particular themes and ideas emerge and seem to be important and I try to follow them through, see where they lead. I like the idea of an arts festival that asks questions, disrupts things a little, and I hope this year we manage to challenge a little our audiences’ expectations of what a queer festival is about and for. I think this year we’ve been drawn to performers and artists with a dissident edge to them. I suppose a queer festival will always do that, and it’s absolutely the role I see for Queer up North… to be a sort of cultural trouble maker, but constructively.

Why do think Queer Up North is still so important?
This year we’re stepping back a little and publicly asking a more dangerous question – is Queer up North important? What’s it for? Who values it and why? The scuffle with the Arts Council at the end of 2007 while utterly unwelcome and frustrating in almost every way, did force me, and everyone who works with and attends Queer up North, to go back to first principles and reflect on whether it was, in fact, still worth keeping alive. I’m firmly of the conviction that it is, but during the final weekend of this year’s festival we’ll be debating this subject specifically. Is queer culture obsolete? It might seem perverse, to be giving space in the festival to arguments in favour of our demise, but I’m a great believer in the value of argument, of debate. And I’m committed to a Queer up North that embraces that.

How do you plan to fund the festival after this year?
I’m hopeful that ACE will continue funding, and we continue to have passionate support from Manchester City Council, and several key sponsors and generous givers. We’ll find a way.

What do you think the government should do to ensure events like Queer Up North continue to be seen?
I think, and I hope, that we’re on the brink of a reformation of cultural policy and arts funding in the UK – this story is much bigger than what happens with Queer up North. I’d like to see the Department of Culture release Arts Council England from some of its ideological shackles and allow it to dismantle the target driven mechanisms it’s currently in thrall to. The recent McMaster report is a decent first step, but we’ll have to see where it leads and what sort of commitment to positive change really exists, both in the Department of Culture and at the Arts Council.

Stonewall’s play Fit toured schools. How successful was this as a venture?
Very successful, and not at all. By which I mean, yes, it was hugely successful in the schools that we were able to visit – a total of about 9000 teenagers over ten weeks. But it was just a drop in the ocean – anti gay bullying is a massive problem in UK schools, and challenging it effectively is a continuing challenge. Stonewall is doing an excellent job of this and has been for several years now – they need all the support they can get. But, really, I think that until we untangle religion from the education system we’ll never be rid of this problem.

How do you convince someone like Sandra Bernhard to perform as part of Queer Up North?
You ask nicely.

What can Manchester audiences do to ensure that the festival continues?
If what we’re doing appeals, then people will come and we’ll continue. If you like what you experience with us this year, do fill in one of the audience survey sheets or go online to www.queerupnorth.com to do it – audiences’ responses to the festival will form an important part of planning for the future.

What are your plans when the festival is over?
Sleep. Long, long nights of sleep.

Jonathan Best was talking to Glenn Meads.

For further information on the festival, please visit www.queerupnorth.com

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