Transforming the Southbank
By Alison Kirkman
This month sees the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall, marking the completion of the
first phase of a major redevelopment taking place in and around London’s Southbank Centre. The project, which began in 1999 with improvements made to walkways bordering the site, looks at the Centre as a whole and will cost a total of £111million. In this article I look back at the history of the site, present a summary of the recent and pending improvements and,
in speaking to Julia Carruthers, head of dance and performance at Southbank Centre, discover what these improvements will mean for dance in particular
As part of a plan to promote optimism and a sense of recovery in the British public after World War II, the idea for the Festival of Britain was born. Previously the south bank of the Thames was home only to a group of warehouses, many of which had been destroyed during the Blitz. In 1951, London County Council designed and constructed the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) on the site, along with a number of other buildings, and the south bank was transformed. The Modernist style of the new buildings acted as a showcase for the elements of design that would feature in the post-war rebuilding of London. Unlike the other buildings, constructed only for the duration of the festival, the RFH was designed to remain as a permanent feature. All the others have been demolished and replaced over the years but the RFH has survived and, in 1988, became the first post-war public building to be awarded Grade I listing. It now forms the core of the 21-acre arts complex, situated between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge, whose buildings are collectively known as Southbank Centre.
To clarify, as well as the RFH, the venues that officially form Southbank Centre are the Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH), the Purcell Room, the Hayward Gallery and the Poetry Library. The British Film Institute (formerly known as the National Film Theatre) and National Theatre are not part of the organisation, but complement it nicely all the same, and complete the package of arts available all in one place.
Funding for the redevelopment has come from a number of sources. Arts Council England Lottery Funds provided £25 million; the Heritage Lottery Fund, £22.2 million and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport put up a one-off grant of £5 million.
A hugely successful fundraising effort raised £2 million from audience members, making it the most successful audience campaign in the arts, and the rest has been raised from many major companies, trusts and foundations including the London Development Agency, Transport for London, the Waterloo Project Board and the Cross River Partnership.
The most obvious alterations to Southbank’s site so far are the improved walkways, the opening of the Festival Square Café in 2003, and the addition of a row of retail outlets comprising a book shop, restaurants, and cafés, which together form Festival Riverside and which opened in the summer of 2005.
Alterations that have taken place inside the RFH, which closed in 2005, include renovation of the foyers, vast improvements to the acoustics to improve sound inside the auditorium (as well as keeping external sounds out), and also the installation of 11 new stage-lifts to make access for performers and companies much quicker and easier. Audiences will have more legroom in the stalls and more comfortable seating – alterations that will also benefit the acoustics by reducing sound absorption. Wheelchair spaces have been increased from 8 to 32 and more toilets have been installed for ladies and disabled visitors.
A completely new building has also been constructed alongside Hungerford Terrace to house the administrative and production needs of the Centre. It opened in 2006 and it is here that Julia Carruthers, head of dance and performance at Southbank, is now based. “It’s wonderful because we’ve got all the art forms working together here and we’re all sitting together in this open plan office, so I’ve got colleagues around me working in music, visual arts, and literature... I find that tremendously exciting.”
Julia began work at Southbank Centre in 2000, having already amassed a wealth of arts, and particularly dance, experience. Previously, she worked as dance officer for Arts Council England, festival coordinator for Dance Umbrella, and also as programme coordinator at Riverside Studios in London during the 1980s when Michael Clark was choreographer in residence.
“What I’ve always enjoyed about this job is that it’s not a constant programme. There are probably two or three, sometimes four, dance projects on here each month so there is time for me to be off watching dance somewhere else. I don’t have physically to be here all the time. It also means that because you’re not providing a programme 52 weeks a year, you can really cherry pick and look around for the things that are very special and unusual and the things that you feel really passionate about. The other thing that’s very important is that dance here is very much an equal partner; it’s not like music is using dance as décor.”
Celebrations to mark the reopening of the RFH begin at dusk on Friday June 8 with The Overture, a huge, free, 48-hour gala incorporating dance, music, spoken word, film, and visual arts. Dance events taking place throughout the weekend include Lea Anderson’s Flag, recreated on a grand scale with 230 performers, works by Akademi, Gauri Sharma Tripathi, and Southbank’s artists in residence Rafael Bonachela and Maresa Von Stockert, and a performance by Southbank’s resident company Stan Won’t Dance.
The majority of dance at Southbank now takes place either in the QEH or the Purcell Room, these being the smaller venues of the complex, seating 917 and 300 people respectively. However, with refurbishments to the RFH complete, there are already plans in place to present more dance events here as well.
The first of these, a 21st century take on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, takes place on June 26 and 27. The London Philharmonic Orchestra will play the score as a single dancer performs amidst a series of virtual images created by digital artist Klaus Obermaier. It certainly sounds intriguing and even more so when you learn that audience members are required to wear 3D glasses to complete the experience. “It’s a slightly mad event but we can already see from the box office figures that it’s going to be busy!” Obermaier’s earlier works, DAVE, Vivisector, and Apparation, have been presented by Julia Carruthers in the QEH and Purcell Room.
Another dance event marking the official opening of the RFH takes place on June 29 and 30 and is the culmination of a three-year collaboration between Southbank Centre, CandoCo Dance Company and Newham Sixth Form College. Entitled Spaces Between and incorporating a 100-strong cast, it takes place on the Ballroom Floor of the RFH. It is a site-specific performance based on the physical changes across Southbank Centre during its refurbishment.
“Did you know the Ballroom Floor is London’s largest sprung floor?” Julia asks proudly. “I always tell people that! It’s such a fantastic space for us because it makes things very easily available. The audience turns up, maybe to get a coffee or to meet friends, not expecting to be an audience, and all of a sudden they find themselves watching something on the Ballroom Floor.”
There are plans in progress to utilise this space for dance in future, although a revival of the popular Ballroom Blitz does not seem to be in the offing just yet: “The closure of the RFH gave us an ideal opportunity to reconsider Ballroom Blitz because the format really needed a fresh look. The dance scene is moving forward so rapidly, there are lots of new things to present. There are a few things in the pipeline, like interactive installations involving dance people, but there’s nothing I can announce formally at the moment. For me, the Ballroom Floor represents a very brilliant public space where people can just bump into something and really be engaged. It’s where CandoCo started its life, where Wayne McGregor has tried things out – lots of people have done experimental work there, so we have to maintain that. It’s the perfect place to introduce an emerging artist to what can seem like this rather big, scary organisation.”
A further major event to celebrate the RFH opening will take place on July 14 and 15 – a gala evening produced by The Ballet Boyz. “What’s really nice is that [The Ballet Boyz] are involving most of the British [dance] companies – ENB, Rambert, BRB. Christopher Wheeldon’s coming too and William Tuckett’s involved so I feel like what we’re offering the public is a really nice assortment and also the Brits’ rallying cry for the RFH. On a strategic level we wanted to do a big ballet event very soon in the schedule of the hall reopening to get that audience in and show them the hall and show them how it can work for so many different types of performance.”
The final big production in the current schedule, which includes an element of music, dance and theatre, is Carmen Jones. Choreographed by Rafael Bonachela, one of Southbank’s artists in residence, the musical will preview at the RFH on July 25 and runs for the whole summer until September 2, providing a “really great chance for everyone to see [the RFH] with a fully-staged musical featuring wonderful dancing and a big cast”. Indeed, the cast comprises over 40 performers accompanied by Southbank resident orchestras, the Philharmonia and London Philharmonic Orchestra.
These events all show that the new RFH, its refurbishments having cost a total of £91 million, is now a venue that can really cater for all manner and variety of performances. Education facilities have also been greatly improved on the site with the addition of a new Education Centre inside the RFH in an area previously used for storage. Amongst other things, it will contain a dance studio for rehearsals and workshops. “It’s going to be very nice to have a studio on site for rehearsals and education projects,” Julia explained, “and there is a dance specialist in the education team – Rachel Harris. It’s fabulous that I have an ally and another ‘dance nut’ in such an important role. We consult each other on a lot of things.”
As the RFH is the largest of the three venues, being able to take a capacity audience of 2,900, the QEH and Purcell Room will still cater for the majority of dance works and these have not been forgotten: “They’ve lowered the stage in the QEH a little so the sight lines are better – I quite like seeing dance from above,” said Julia, “and the foyer of the QEH has been remodelled.” (The foyer of the QEH now incorporates a performance space called the Front Room, which opened in October 2006.) “There’s this little stage area and screens and colours so that has provided another facility for dance. You have to be careful what you’re doing in there though because it does only suit particular kinds of dance – we’ve done things like hip hop in there because since the stage isn’t huge, it has to be something that doesn’t travel, something that is quite static. I’m also talking to someone about doing Irish Dance and music in there as a sort of foyer concert.”
This month, the QEH will play host to Les Ballets C de la B from June 12-14, and Zeroculture perform choreography by Darshan Singh Bhuller in the Purcell Room on June 28 and 29.
Work still to be completed on Southbank’s site includes extensive landscaping of Jubilee Gardens and the walkways around the RFH, Festival Square, Festival Riverside, and also between the Hayward Gallery and the QEH. Some of this is already in progress and some will begin next year.
Altogether the project seems to have been a hugely successful venture and considering the planning, costs, and work involved, improvements have been completed in a relatively short space of time with minimal disruption to other performances and exhibitions taking place at Southbank Centre. Southbank has always been a very pleasant place to spend an afternoon but now it should prove even more so and is certainly worth a visit.
If you would like more information on any of the events taking place at Southbank Centre, visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk
and keep an eye on our news and calendar pages too. To book tickets for any of the events mentioned above – including free tickets for the gala opening weekend – call the box office on 0871 663 2585.
