Art Avenue

Since the focus of this edition of Art Avenue is to establish and discuss the local arts scene here in Leeds it would have been rather a large oversight not to include the hot spot that is the Seven Arts Centre in Chapel Allerton. We asked the producer of Look North, Sean Stowell, to interview Penny Sanders and Anne Skevington to find out how it all began and what is current right now. Most poignantly the subject of funding, and the role of the Arts Council in establishments such as this, is called into question. Do innovations like Seven Arts Centre have to maintain themselves or can we rely on the council to help them flourish?

Sean Stowell – So, tell us how the Seven Arts Centre came about?
Penny Sanders – About ten years ago a group of us got together because we thought Chapel Allerton could be a lot better than it was. It was just a bit downbeat and we really liked living here but a certain sense of the community was disappearing. A group of us got together; thought of a few ideas and out of this came the Chapel Allerton Arts festival. [This was] around 1997/98 and was the first one. We found, running the festival, that there just wasn’t any good venues locally really.
S – So you were filling a vacuum?
Anne Skevington – We hoped so, yes.
P – So that’s how it started.
A – Yes that’s how it started. The very first festival we actually organised in six weeks with no money at all.
S – So how has a festival turned in a building and an auditorium and a restaurant?
A – Well we always had various artistic things going on at the festival and thought wouldn’t it be really good if we could do this all year round. During one of the festivals we hired a large marquee and put it on this very site that we are sitting in now.
S – How do you go about setting up a community centre, which is so fantastic?
A – Well you have to learn how to fill in an awful lot of forms.
S – Where did the funding come from?
P – It was a mixture of private funding, quite a lot of private funding, part of which was donations. [Also] we got into a partnership with a local developer who wanted to build flats on this site, who knew that he would struggle to find a commercial use that would be acceptable for the ground floor, and a community arts centre was quite attractive to him. This particular site was sold by the Leeds development agency so they wouldn’t just accept any bids. But we did what everybody does and applied for public funding and gradually we managed to build up a head of steam.
S – So did you find yourselves fighting against the cultural flow of Leeds City Council, because they are very much geared towards commercial profit making aren’t they?
S – Just talking in terms of what you’re actually providing now, it’s a fantastically successful thing that you have founded, but also in terms of outside London this type of centre is unique isn’t it, because there are plenty in and around London that have found funding but actually outside of London this phenomenon is not particularly well known - am I right?
P – I think your right. I think one of the benefits was that it took us a long time to get the project off the ground. [This] gave us a lot of time to actually raise money and assess other projects. [We were able to] work out what we wanted to be and what we wanted to achieve, so in some ways that has been actually a good thing. We’ve always been interested in models that aren’t very typical, because of our background, I think. [In my experience] particularly I’ve found there’s always another community centre being built somewhere, and the problem is not actually finding money to build buildings, its actually to make things sustainable. We just knew that from the beginning.
S – Can you list for us what events you’ve had?
A – We have a variety of events. We have very good cinema equipment and seating in the theatre for cinema. We’ve had art house films; ‘Lives of Others’, ’Tell No-one’. We had a film about the Iranian football team called ’Off Side’ this week. We have documentary films, classic films. In terms of musical events we’ve had Irish music, regular Jazz on a Sunday. Leeds Jazz hold some events here and they hire the venue from us in order to do that. We have Lemur jazz events, which are a bit more avant-garde. We have South Asian Arts (SAA UK) and a variety of Irish/Scottish folk music. We also have a spoken word evening that consists of poetry one Wednesday, comedy another Wednesday and drama another Wednesday.
S – So it’s a fantastic list that you have created. Lets not beat about the bush, it’s something that just wouldn’t have happened before you came along?

A – No it wouldn’t, but Penny is the artistic director, so you really ought to talk to her about it more.

S – So it takes two people who were living locally to do what Leeds City Council has been funded to do for a long time, but actually hasn’t achieved it?

A – I don’t think we can

take all the credit, we do have a board of directors and there are other people slightly involved but yes, we are the two that work at it full time and interestingly enough we both work at it without taking anything out of it. So neither of us drives an income from this business, which is quite interesting to know.

S – And so for all the Arts Council arguing this that and the other, actually you can do it yourself if you’re really that committed?

P – You can do it yourself, but we would like to think that we could get some public funding. You get worn out basically and at the end of the day they don’t seem very interested. I’m really surprised because this is very interesting!

A – You’ve only got to walk in the door to know that this is interesting, but on the other hand I also think that not having that sort of funding gives us a huge amount of freedom to choose the kinds of things that we would like to choose. We can get sponsors from other places hopefully, which we will have a go at when we get time.

S – So this is your platform? You’ve built one, and now you are going to go on to the next, do you think? Or are you quite happy where you are now?

A – I don’t think we’ll ever be happy where we are; it’s an ongoing sort of thing.

P – It’s very early days because we’ve only been here effectively less than six months. It’s a question of consolidating what we have got, making it work and knowing that it works. [Mainly] building on the program really.

A – And it building up organically. We have been on a steep learning curve and we have learned a lot. We are reviewing all the time really.

P – We have had to basically learn to run a restaurant and bar. We are overseeing the business and we have never done anything like that before.

S – So tell us how the centre is running. Are the bar and restaurant running the arts events?

P – No, in fact one interesting thing is that the arts side of it has done better than perhaps we originally anticipated. It’s actually harder the other side of the business than we probably anticipated originally, but [the bar and restaurant funding the arts events] is the aim. The idea is to build up the bar and restaurant side successfully enough that it can underpin the arts program.

A – Some [events] that we would say are our part of core mission, the things that we would like to do, we will use whatever funding we raise to pay for. Other arts organisations that want to use the venue can rent the venue from us. For example Opera North came and did an event here that was a cabaret event. It was absolutely amazing, completely packed out, and they rented the venue from us. We would like to think that other organisations would do that as well.

S – So are you aware of the blip that you have created on the arts radar? There’s quite a big blip here isn’t there?

P – Well that hasn’t really come back to us because we spend a lot of timing working and not getting feedback! I should mention Paul Fallon who has helped us hugely because there are three of us really. He has been our project manager and he does an awful lot on the programming side because he has got very good connections and he works hard.

S – So how many hours a day do you both work on this?

A – About eighteen!

P – I work more, Anne gets up really late!

A – But you know when you work in a business like this you just have to stay up until midnight, don’t you. And we always have really good company!

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