Sheena Wrigley on First Floor
January 27, 2009
“I think that a lot of theatres have a real desire to find a way to connect what they do – their craft bases – to young people in their cities,” says Sheena Wrigley. “It strikes me that this is particularly original because it’s a dedicated space – it’s specifically designed for young people and with a very informal approach to being there to support them and give them somewhere to go, but also to work together on creative projects. I’m not aware of anything exactly like this in other cities. It enhances what we do, because we work with young people quite a lot, but we haven’t had anywhere that’s so influenced in its conception and design by the young people who are going to use it before.”
The WYP’s general director is telling me about its new project, First Floor. The vision of artistic director Ian Brown and development director Sam Perkins, the conversion of the first floor of the St Peter’s building on Quarry Hill has been designed to enable it to host as many sorts of performing arts activities as possible. Since the Playhouse already owned the building, it was able to achieve this at a cost of £617,000, acquired through a fundraising campaign that received £100,000 grants from Arts Council England and The Linbury Trust and the official patronage of actors Christopher Eccleston and Jack P Shepherd, as well as Leeds Central MP Hilary Benn. It opened last week.
“They started with absolutely nothing except an idea and, by the time we’d moved our prop store and some of our costumes, a large, empty, derelict-looking warehouse,” says Wrigley. “It was about having a vision to do something different – looking at the building stock that we have – the main building, the St Peter’s building and St Patrick’s Church over the road – and re-ordering what we do with all our props and putting them into storage in the church rather than the warehouse. It’s that simple really.”
Consultation of young people has influenced both the design of First Floor and the uses to which it will be put. “A young people’s panel whose members are participants of our projects has been advising the creative development team on elements of the design, and now it will have some input into what kind of activities will be done,” Wrigley tells me. “We’ll only be creating activities where there seems to be an appetite in the market.”
Regular consultation of the young people’s panel seems to be an example of a general open-mindedness about how First Floor is to be utilised. “A lot of what the next six months will be about is really testing how people will respond to the space and what we can do in there – how many activities can be done simultaneously,” Wrigley says. Consequently, there are currently no clearly defined rules to determine how the Playhouse would discriminate between possible activities if demand for the use of First Floor were to outstrip supply. “It’s a question of looking at some kind of fairness in terms of what groups you work with and what activities you offer – trying to offer something slightly different to what you offered last term. There isn’t an overriding rule that we will only do this or that type of work yet.” However, she also highlights that often such decisions may not fall to the Playhouse. “At the moment we’re discussing various possible partnerships with the Youth Service, so it’s not necessarily going to be us that decides – it might be an agency with which we work in partnership.”
While the programme of activities up to Easter 2009, which has been project funded by Breeze Arts Foundation, West Yorkshire Police Community Trust and The John Thaw Foundation, consists of drop-in workshops, an arts foundation course, an open day on 14 February and a two-day course, the WYP hopes that the use of First Floor’s resources will eventually be maximised. Wrigley says that a “slow build-up programme over the next 18 months” is envisaged, whereby it eventually “reaches the stage of being open for six days a week and holding drop-in sessions. Gradually the number of days that it’s open on will increase, the number and variety of activities that it offers will build up and there’ll be periods like half term and holidays when we’ll tend to be able to generate more funding for specific projects, and therefore the building will be open for longer.”
While Wrigley tells me that “we hope that there will be a section of that group (First Floor users) that will be interested enough to, over time, become part of our audience”, it’s also evident that this is a fairly peripheral incentive. “The ultimate aim is about the way that the arts can affect people’s lives, and the way that young people can find something that they really associate with and a group of people that they fit into,” she suggests. “They discover their own talents and ambitions and get a sense of self-confidence and self-respect, and of valuing others. I suppose it’s about those individual transformations and the way that, collectively, they can affect communities and society.”
-Sheena Wrigley was talking to Simon Walker
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Fabulous, This is the sort of theatre we need to keep theatre alive, we are far too stuck in the old school, the likes of Pinter, ackbourne and the angry young men were born out of a society which was open minded and receptive to something new, if only to break away from the past.
In this age of the internet we are in danger of losing live entertainment unless it matches the bravery of those who broke the mould and if we keep regurgitating the old stuff without adding something new then eventually it will die.
good luck to you all at First Floor!