Wieke Eringa: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Wieke Eringa

Interviewed by Hari Jonkers

30th January 2019

HJ: So this is Hari Jonkers interviewing Wieke Eringa at Yorkshire Dance on the 30th of January 2019.

WE: Yeah, so, my name is Wieke Eringa. I was born in 1968, so I'm 50 years old and I was born in a hospital in Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. But I live – I've been living in Leeds for the last 15 years – slightly longer now and I identify as cisgender female and as a lesbian and as a gay adopter because I have adopted a little girl with my partner. That's me.

HJ: Thank you. And would you like to tell me about your role at Yorkshire –

WE: Oh yes, so I'm the Chief Executive and Artistic Director at Yorkshire Dance and I have been for 11 years. And what may be pertinent to this interview is that when I started ten years ago, or 11 years ago, I had a very broad outlook to what this organisation should be doing, sort of supporting dance orga – dance artists in general and being like a kind of very general support organisation to the sector. And that over the last years that has really changed. I think – my view, my outlook on it has become more activist.

As I've got older I've found – so I remember, this might be interesting, in the beginning when I started here long time ago, literally ten years ago, I met the editor of Diva magazine and I got suggested to sort of, like, have an article in Diva magazine as me as a lesbian kind of leader of an arts organisation. And I really wasn't sure about it. I kind of wanted to be proud but I also didn't want to pigeon-hole myself. And I think it wasn't serious, it just went away, I didn't make a big deal of it, we didn't do it. And I feel like, right now, I would look at that very differently, be quite happy to be pigeon-holed.

So, yeah, I think part of that more explicit activism has been because of the relationship with international promoters and programmers through the Performing Gender project. That has been developed much further. And also because of – in a response to the times and what's happening around us. And also in response to, sort of in a dance sector, so there are – when we were – you know originally we were the only dance development outfit if you like, and now there are lots of others doing their own things so we can be really specific about what we really want to pursue. And I also got a strong whiff of the fact that the more specific we are the more easy it is to tell our story to potential audience members. So yeah it's been a personal journey I suppose.

HJ: Fabulous. So, I know that Yorkshire Dance in the last few years has been very proactive about being more inclusive to the LGBT community, and you mentioned Performing Gender –

WE: Yeah –

HJ: How did Yorkshire Dance get involved with that?

WE: So, I've always felt that if you – so dance and the arts are a very international field aren't they and I've always felt that if you are going to develop dance in a context that it needs to be done – in a local context, so Leeds and Yorkshire – that you need to be a conduit for internationalism and for international exchange and dialogue. And, so, I've tried various international networks and settled on the Aerowaves network where I for years have been attending an annual showcase and where I met people and built relationships with people that are interested in European collaboration. And from those conversations I was invited to take part in a project about gender, which is led by an Italian partner festival called Gender Bender and also includes partners in Spain, Holland and Slovenia. So I was really thrilled but it costs a lot of money, you don't get the all the money from the European Union you have to fundraise a lot yourself locally [clears throat]. And – but I was thrilled with the opportunity to work collab – to learn myself and I do find it deeply inspiring to work with these people – really, really inspiring people, peers, who are trying to make things happen in really different contexts and such different and also difficult situations. If you compare the situation in Slovenia, for example.

And so that learning for myself personally but then also to see what it does for the organisation, the profile, the prestige, the excitement, hosting international artists here, new opportunities for local artists, local dance-makers, we had ten local dance-makers involved in October in a workshop here with a Slovenian artist. Their learning was phenomenal, what was achieved in those seven days was just great. And then of course we've had a local artist – Yorkshire artist – go over to Madrid, you know, Tilberg, Slove– Ljubljana and Lezano and Bologna. [door opening] So the personal development of that artist has been phenomenal as well so I was very excited – [door opening/closing] for all those reasons to take part.

HJ: And what was the name of the Yorkshire artist?

WE: So the Yorkshire artist that we chose to work with to start with was Sophie Unwin who doesn't identify as a queer artist but does unusually identify as a working class dance artist 'cos that's another whole issue. And with a real interest in, well a strong interest in feminism and gender. So she's started taking part, had to drop out for health reasons, and then the other artist that we support a lot around gender development, she's also really explicitly interested in gender and feminism, is Hannah Buckley. So she stepped in to the second year. So they're sort of both involved really, still. And they're both cis identifying straight women and so that in itself was a huge thing.

But who owns the conversation about gender? Because the project wasn't looking at LGBT, and dance, it looked at gender and dance and of course dance has a massive problem with gender because it is such a gendered art form but also because the training of dancers who will eventually be the choreographers and the artists is so specific. And it puts people in a straight-jacket from the moment before they can talk really. So, so yeah.

HJ: Thank you.

WE: Could talk about that for a long time. [both laugh]

HJ: And I know alongside Performing Gender you ran Gender Moves?

WE: Yes, so what happened was Performing Gender was this international thing. We had money for a local dance artist and a local dramaturg and myself to be involved and I realised if we didn't do anything locally it wouldn't have a big impact so we worked locally with organisations, we rang a whole bunch of organisations, MESMAC included, and we, we set up a project supported by Leeds Inspired to work with a local LGBT community through dance around issues of embodiment, mental health, physical health, happiness, joy through movement and really explore, explore, all of that –

[door opening]

WE: sorry the door keeps opening – with the local community, so, we framed it around the two visits by the international project. So that when the international people came here the local people could get the most out of that exchange and that the international artists – so there were five international artists – could get the most out of that exchange with local people. So we had a kind of like, what we like, a 'create' phase in the spring, then we had a pause – no we had an 'explore' phase in the spring when the international artist first came, and then we had, after the summer, we had a 'create' phase. And when the piece of work with the professional dancers was presented – before – on the same day – the piece of work with the local LGBT community was presented.

And it feels like from the evaluation there was a lot of joy out of the exchange and a lot of connection by the LGBT people taking part with the international work and element. So from that point of view for me it was super successful. As for my – it so happens that all the other panel organisations also ended in Leeds on the first of June so they saw the first – the Gender Moves people being part of the audience and they were just really astonished by how articulate the audience were, how engaged, how diverse the audience was because we really had reached out to the trans community and to the older LGBT [unclear] older community, older people. So yeah it felt like a really diverse group of people in the audience watching the work so that was really exciting.

HJ: Fabulous. And I just wondered if you could tell a bit more about the piece that the participants created?

WE: Yeah, now that's interesting because I probably am quite superficial on that because Kirsty Redhead is the – she would be able to tell you much more about that. So what they did is they worked with local artists. We had a big discussion about who leads this kind of stuff because there are certain elements, certainly for the trans community, who say that they will only turn up if trans people are leading which if you are dealing with a highly specialised art form and contemporary dance is quite hard to find somebody in Leeds, you might find somebody in London, but, so we worked with local artists Phil Sanger and Fernanda Prata who have both got a real interest in gender and Phil identifies as gay – gay, make up. So we wanted to at least make sure there were two genders present and they led the group through a series of whole like discussions and exercises and ideas but it was really the group's proposal and their interests that created the piece. And what was nice about it is that there was elements of visual art, so one of the members brought this whole idea of a piece of canvas at the back that was being painted on whilst the project was developing, whilst the dance [unclear] – and there was also film. There was some really interesting collaboration with the film, or sort of like proposals through film.

HJ: Fabulous. And I also wondered if any of the participants have stayed involved in Yorkshire Dance?

WE: Yes. Well what's really nice is because we also, at the beginning of Performing Gender in 2017, in that first year, we also happened to be doing this really high profile project in Hull so, LGBT 50, which I'll tell about later. And we made sure that for Performing Gender some of the Hull participants came to Leeds, so there was a writer, Michelle Dee, who came over and some other people also. So it felt like the Leeds people already had [clears throat] the Leeds and the Hull people could really work together on this. And that felt artistically really exciting because they had a lot to contribute already. And, yes, have they stayed involved, yes. So we are – we finished in October with that thing. People have definitely come back. We don't have a regular performance group that people can feed in to, but that's something we are looking at for the future. And on whether people are going to come back, I already know that Nicola, for example, who took part, was in a conversation here on Monday morning to do with consent. And we are now holding our first feminist festival in March. So I hope plenty of the Performing Gender people are going to turn up to that. [laughs]

HJ: And can you just remind me, is the festival, is that Encounters?

WE: Yeah.

HJ: Yes. Would you like to talk a little about that?

WE: Well, so Encounters is our new thing where we scrapped our previous performance programme, Friday Firsts, and we are now looking at kind of like a mini-festival three times a year around a theme. And we're going to have another themed one around gender and identity in June. But I haven't programmed it yet, so, but that's a commitment. One of the things that's quite hard for us is – we're going to do three of these a year but we always want to have a strong programme element for LGBT or around gender but what we can't do is just have a third of all of Encounters taken up by that so we're figuring out what our next steps are to really develop. Now also Performing Gender's coming to an end in April in Italy – it's really trying to figure out what our next steps are around this. We haven't quite worked that out yet.

HJ: Thank you. And are there any queer artists that you know of programmed to be involved in Encounters?

WE: In March they're not queer, it's a feminist thing and they're all straight. The three – in fact there's four cis identifying straight women presenting. There are queer artists involved with delivering workshops, for example, on the Sunday. And definitely looking for queer artists for in the June. Yeah, they'll all be queer of some kind, yeah.

HJ: Thank you. And you mentioned Hull earlier, can you tell me a bit more about that?

WE: Yes, so we were super lucky in the context of Hull Culture, City of Culture 2017, to be invited to contribute a big community dance element as part of their LGBT 50 celebrations. Martin Green, who's the Director, asked us to present – to create a group community performance. So we were both interested in the same choreographer so that helps – Gary Clarke who is our Associate Artist, who has a body of work that is quite, that is queer, and a body of work that is more 'straight' if you like, or more general. We are both interested in him, so that was a good starting point. We worked together with Duckie, from London, so they're the – I think they're the only queer identifying NPO in the country, Duckie. Do you know them? They – so we were invited to, well, the way we shaped up was we wanted to work with a group of professionals. So we were able to work with ten professionals, or eight, and then 40 local LGBT people. So in order to meet them we contracted a local project assistant that was present in night clubs and in coffee shops and sort of just talking on the ground to people. So we did recruit everybody that we wanted and we had a cast of 50 people presenting a piece on the Queen Victoria statue in the centre of Hull on the 29th of July. And there was a programme – and it was all broadcast by BBC Radio Two and also on the red button live, the evening performance, so it was all very exciting.

And it was just – we made a film, which is on the website and what's just lovely about it is the impact upon the people that took part. We often talk about legacy. And we sit and scratch our head and think what is legacy and how can a project really have legacy, you know, 'cos it finished as we all know. And then what's just been amazing is to see the legacy of the proj – even though we parachuted in, we did the thing, and then we more or less buggered off.

We did have another follow up meeting, we had a social event, we presented the film. We then invited [unclear] people to Leeds to do the other project. But what was amazing was really the legacy of just taking part in that really high profile [door opening] had with people who [door closing] had totally different sense of connection with their local community. Literally said, 'Well I never really took part', 'I never really knew anybody else here', and just that sense of community. We are part of a Facebook group; people still post in to that Facebook group. And that can be about, 'Oh my God I've got nowhere to sleep tonight' 'cos some of the trans people were literally living on the knife edge, like, homeless. But it could also be, 'Hey I'm performing here and there, who's coming to watch me perform?' and all that sort of – so there's a real, massive legacy that the project had that is very exciting.

HJ: And do you think there's also been impact in general on Yorkshire Dance, its own staff, artists, professionals? –

WE: Yeah –

HJ: This feeling of working in a slightly different culture.

WE: I don't know because I think we've always been very open. I think externally absolutely, we're now seen [phone beeps] to be that's sort of like our specialism. And also there's definitely increased confidence in the staff team because of course we really had to make [door opening] it up as went along, I mean [door closes] Kirsty, the project manager for this, she had, you know, making sure that all of these people were together. And then on the first day what do you do? Do you go and sit in a circle and do pronouns? 'How do you identify yourself?' Do you do pronouns every time because it might have changed? [laughs] You know? So that whole practice and not managing – and not wanting to offend people, and not wanting to upset people. How do you look after people that are living through really, really awful – like I just mentioned homelessness – that are living through really volatile – especially the older teenagers who were just, you know, in a really fragile place. How do you look after them and provide that pastoral support? So we had to do a lot of learning.

So I think, I mean we've always been open about our sexuality and there's a number of people as logically in the arts that are, that are gay, I think. It was really fortunate we were also employing trans front of house staff. I don't know whether that had to do with that project work, I should ask Natasha whether that's why she applied, don't know. But, and of course Natasha herself is a strong advocate. She's a trainer in trans awareness. She [works / worked - unclear] for MESMAC so that's really helped – so I think in amongst the whole staff team, yes, perhaps. But not so much that I now know of people because they identify differently than they were before.

We're also carrying on, by the way, we've got a project, a voguing project at the end of next week. Again looking really at non-binary and also people of colour. So trans people of colour and non-binary people of colour, and sort of how that, how we reach out to that group. But that's driven by an artist rather than driven by us, we're just helping to facilitate that.

HJ: And is that artist and event, is that Darren Prichar–

WE: Darren Pritchard. Yeah. From Manchester.

HJ: Yes. And would you mind telling me a bit more about the event?

WE: So, I barely know anything about it myself. I know that Darren is obviously a voguing expert and he has a fantastic community of people around him and when he does these parties that he does in Manchester, like a thousand people turn up. So, they're very popular, very high quality, sort of, expressive dance content. And, so he wanted to train, he wanted to sort of have an opportunity to train people for – better for those opportunities, and also for people that otherwise might not take part. So he's working here with a group of people all week and then, that's how I understand it, and then on Friday night they're sharing what they've been working on. So it's very much like, a – it's not a full blown party. But there will be DJ, a DJ, and there will be a vibe and a feel that they’ll create with that and they'll be sharing the work that they've been training on. And then it will go to Manchester two weeks later I think.

HJ: Fantastic, thank you. I wonder if there's anything else you want to tell us about, in terms of projects or work that Yorkshire Dance is doing?

WE: In this field, in particular. [pauses] No, I think maybe it's just worth helping to reflect – this might be of interest [laughs] to whoever, is that when we started – so all of this sort of started – I mentioned Gary Clarke, an artist we've been associated with for a long time. He proposed this years ago when we were running this regular Friday Firsts programme, to do one of them, that he would help us curate, called Bend It. 'Cos he had this desire to bring people together, in a practice together that looked at gender and gender bending. So we did a Bend It which was really successful and it had everybody – loads of men I had never seen before turned up and loads of woman that I'd never seen turned up, like, loads of gay women and men basically from Leeds – white, and we had a good night and we had a compère and I was – a bit of scratch, a bit of visual art going on over there and it had a sort of buzzy feel to it. Did one again the year after but it attracted a very, quite a Leedsy, blokey audience, or certainly quite white audience.

And, and then two years later we asked an artist, Amy Bell, to curate it, and she did two of them – she also did one – so we had four Bend Its in a year, and by the time Amy had done the second one we were back to our dance audience, we had lost all our LGBT audience as such. And, that's not a criticism, or, it was more a journey because her interests were much more nuanced and subtle in a way, in terms of the body and how you deal with the, you know, with gender, through the body and through a physical exploration of choreography. So it was much less visually appealing or directly appropriate to people – to what they themselves identify as the gay community here. So that kind of like hanging out in Viaduct where the, where the drag queens with the – you know, all the cliches around screaming in to a microphone and, the sort of cliches of gay, male, white culture with dog collars or with bondage, SM – SM, that sort of disappeared by the end 'cos it was a more nuanced story.

And so I think that's for us now the question, do, so – I'm talking to you about June, about Encounters. I've literally I can could go in different directions with it. It could become very, very queer and, it means that I won't be able to do anything for our families who come here because it will be quite experimental, quite live arty, and very queer looking. But there'll probably be quite of lot of queer people – Live Art Bistro, Wharf Chambers – the kind of people that hang out in that scene, they will probably come. Or we could do something a bit broader, that really also looks at a more nuanced, maybe, women's presence or non-binary and yes. So I think it's a tricky one because we're a dance organisation and ultimately we really want to celebrate dance. So, and how to we keep – and how do we take our families and our other audiences on that journey with us? I think is a question.

HJ: Absolutely.

WE: Because it would be so easy to do something, you know, that's really quite radical, and really quite queer, and then 50 people turn up and I'm – and, you know, and so what! Yeah.

HJ: Thank you Wieke. I think that covers everything I was going to ask you about Yorkshire Dance –

WE: – Okay.

HJ: I don't know if there is anything you want to add from a personal perspective? It's up to you.

WE: No I suppose I'm just – the little bit, maybe, I spoke less about was the – that learning when you are abroad. For example, in Italy, when we work with a partner in Bologna, they have a big LGBT centre slap bang in the most – one of the most beautiful old ruins in the centre of the city, with this huge rainbow flag, you know, hanging over the top. And we don't have any of that in Leeds. And, so what – how is that different? You know, and how [pauses] so I know that at the moment there is a conversation going in the city about that – that there isn't a place. I mean MESMAC is the closest but it really is for a very particular group. It's not for a bigger group of families or kids or – and then at the same time, like, I can just – I know so many gay adopters in the city and, like, every training I've ever been to even there's been other lesbians or gay men there. And I know of loads of them. So – and that's unthinkable in any of the other European countries we work with! I mean it's literally unthinkable. In Holland there are no kids for adoption. In Slovenia you wouldn't be allowed near them as a gay person! Nor in Italy.

So there's just all these different reflections about how as a community of people and as a city we celebrate these things and make them visible and make them okay because on the one hand I think we're miles ahead from other places – in fact – and I don't know whether we celebrate it enough. You know, the city's commitment to Pride, and closing the – and the funding, closing the streets and I just don't think we necessarily celebrate it enough – how good it is! [laughs]

HJ: Thank you.

WE: Thanks.

HJ: Any final thoughts you'd like to add?

WE: No!

HJ: Thank you very much Wieke.

WE: Okay.

[END]