The Stage

Exclusive: Producing venues unite for London 2012 world theatre festival

Published Thursday 19 August 2010 at 10:51 by Matthew Hemley

Eight of London’s leading producing venues - including the Royal Court, Battersea Arts Centre and the Young Vic - have united for the first time to create a £3 million city-wide theatre festival for 2012, celebrating the multicultural nature of the capital in its Olympic year.

Also involved are the National Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Lyric Hammersmith, Somerset House and Sadler’s Wells, all of which are working together to create World Stages London, a series of theatre events with an international flavour that will take place in May 2012. The initiative, featuring new works based on traditional global stories, has received £67,375 of seed funding from Arts Council England and is being overseen by Young Vic artistic director David Lan and arts consultant Nicola Thorold.

Lan said the consortium would produce around five pieces of work that the venues might not be able to create independently.

“If we work together, it’s possible we will be able to produce something which in other circumstances we would not be able to,” he told The Stage. “We are looking at new ways of working and collaborating, and we hope to find new sources of finance, because of the way we are working to put this world-class group of theatres in a position to produce work-class work.”

He added that the consortium wanted to find a way of “expressing the complexity” of London in terms of its diversity.

Despite World Stages London taking place in the capital’s Olympic year, it is currently unclear to what extent the festival will be billed as being part of the official Cultural Olympiad.

ACE had originally awarded World Stages London £67,375 as part of a project it was planning called the London Festival, which it started to develop for the Cultural Olympiad using £3.5 million of funding in 2008. But in March this year, Cultural Olympiad director Ruth Mackenzie - who took up her position in January - announced plans for the London 2012 Festival, a 12-week event to conclude the Cultural Olympiad. Because of this, ACE’s London Festival will no longer take place as a separate event, with the arts council instead liaising with Mackenzie to see how projects it had begun to develop can be incorporated into her plans.

An ACE spokeswoman said it had committed to the projects that were to form part of its own festival, and added that those not included in Mackenzie’s London 2012 Festival will still run as stand-alone events. It is not yet clear whether they will fall under Cultural Olympiad branding.

“We believe that the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games provide a unique moment to recognise and celebrate London’s role as a world culture city,” she said. “To help achieve this, we are working with some of the capital’s leading arts organisations to develop a range of projects for London in 2012. These projects are some of the many ideas that Ruth Mackenzie is drawing from to form the London 2012 Festival and further details will be announced in the coming months.”

Lan said World Stages London was likely to run separately to Mackenzie’s event. But he added: “In good faith, and on extremely good terms, we will work it out over the next six months or so.”

He said the consortium was looking to foundations and corporate sponsors to raise the estimated £3 million cost of the event. Shows already being developed include BAC working with the Lyric, Somerset House and the Young Vic on a project with Wildworks, the theatre company launched by former Kneehigh artistic director Bill Mitchell, which creates large-scale outdoor productions. Called Babel, it is based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

BAC joint artistic director David Micklem said: “What has been fantastic about this consortium is that it sees a number of organisations working together for the first time and realising that different organisations can bring different strengths to each of those projects and we can be bigger than the sum of our parts through working in his way.”

Stratford East is working with Sadler’s Wells to create a Bollywood-inspired musical, written by Tanika Gupta.

She told The Stage her show will open at TRSE next year, prior to a run at Sadler’s Wells in 2012. Gupta, who has been out to Mumbai to research the project, said: “It’s not set in India, it’s going to be set in London, and will include lots of fusion, and the music will be less traditional.”