Beinghuman Interviews Jude Kelly

BEINGHUMAN

BEINGHUMAN

DIRECTOR / FOUNDER

FOUNDER

EDITOR

SOUND / TECH

ASSISTANT PRODUCER

GAYNOR O'FLYNN

CHRIS LOVELL

LUCY MANNING

NICK ROTHWELL

RACHEL STRONACH

INTERVIEW LOCATION: LONDON

BEINGHUMAN

ISSUE NO. 1

ISSUE NO. 2

ISSUE NO. 3

ISSUE NO. 4

AILEEN GONSALVES

NICOLE YERSHON

VALERIA BULLO

JUDE KELLY

BEINGHUMAN

BEINGHUMAN IS A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN BEINGHUMAN FOUNDER GAYNOR O'FLYNN & COOL, CLEVER CREATIVES WHO CARE.

GAYNOR EXPLORES THESE EXCEPTIONAL, ELUSIVE, ETHICAL HUMANS THROUGH THE LENS OF THEIR CREATIVE WORK, LIFE & PRACTICE.

THEY INVESTIGATE WORKS THAT INFORM WHO THAT PERSON IS, WHAT THEY DO, HOW THEY DO IT & WHY.

ONCE A YEAR, BEINGHUMAN RELEASES A LIMITEDEDITION PHYSICAL MAGAZINE OF LIFE.

COOL, CLEVER, CREATIVE JUDE KELLY

JUDE

When the young Jude Kelly CBE started to dream of being a theatre director, she had few female role models. Even when she went to university, male drama lecturers labelled her ‘a little firecracker’ and ‘a pocket rocket’. Tired of being objectified, she set out on her own. And she quickly realised she was better off starting new projects than trying to fit her ideas into the constraints of existing structures.

After founding the Solent People’s Theatre and the Battersea Arts Centre, and directing well over 100 productions on international stages, she became artistic director of the Southbank Centre in 2006. Four years later, she launched the Women of the World (WOW) Festival, which turned into an annual – and global – celebration of women and girls in arts and science. The WOW Foundation continues to fight gender injustice around the world.

Gaynor O’Flynn, founder of Beinghuman, sat down with Jude for a coffee and a chat at the National Theatre to talk humble beginnings, knock-backs, women’s rights and telling the stories of all humanity.

GAYNOR: You've had a very eclectic career. Can you start with telling us about where you started?

JUDE: Well, I think one of the most significant things is just the fact that I'm from Liverpool. My dad's one of 14 children, with eight sisters. And in three generations, we went from my grandmother leaving school at 12, to my mother leaving school at 14, then to me leaving school at 18, going to university, and then actually being able to have a career I’d dreamed about. For me, that's a really significant thing to say, because we wouldn't have been having this interview 40 years ago with someone from that background.

GAYNOR: No. I'm a ‘woolly back’ [someone from the area surrounding Liverpool], and only about 6 percent of people went to uni... So I was a grammar school girl.

JUDE: When you ' re growing up, you ' re not thinking about those histories at all. You just think about your dreams. Now I look back and think: wow, how lucky am I that people – to an extent – took girls' dreams seriously. When I was little – right from when I was about six – I was so interested in people's stories, and how to turn those stories outwards so that audiences could experience the stories. I couldn't have said then that I want to be a theatre director.

JUDE: But essentially, all my life I’ve done the same thing: collect up stories, fictional or nonfictional, and present them back out to an audience for thinking about.

GAYNOR: So what did you actually study at university?

JUDE: Drama. When I went to university at 18, I already knew I wanted to be a theatre director. I didn't know the response I’d get from the lecturers would be: there are no women theatre directors. The famous thing I often quote is one of them saying to me: "There are three women theatre directors: [Jo XXX – I can't hear this name. Sounds like Knight??], a lesbian. Joan Littlewood, who's retired. And Buzz Goodbody, who's just killed herself. Which would you like to be? That was the response from one of them.

GAYNOR: I think I'd go for lesbian!

JUDE: The notion that all of them were disparaging ideas – it felt sort of repugnant. And there was an attitude of: kind of good luck, but we ' re not really with you and we haven't got your back. That was a really dismaying feeling.

GAYNOR: Did that come from men and women? Or were there just no women there?

JUDE: There were no women lecturers. This just came from men. And I was five foot two, a northern girl, blonde... So there was also an idea of: gosh, she's a little firecracker. These phrases that people use... They take your enthusiasm, and they use words like 'vim', or 'fiery', or ‘a little pocket rocket’ –none of which I would use about myself. But these phrases have formed women. There are plenty of other versions of these phrases, depending on your size and shape. But essentially, it's the objectification of you as a female. And therefore, the intellectual basis of what you ' re trying to do as a director – it was hard to get that to be taken seriously.

GAYNOR: So when did you first realise you were a feminist? Did you use that word?

JUDE: I did use that word. When I was 14, my girls' school went comprehensive, and that meant that we were in mixed classrooms, which I hadn't been in since I was at primary school. And it was immediately clear that all the female teachers retired or became deputies to the male teachers from the school we combined with. And we were, like, in biology classes, where people were saying that men ' s brains are different from women ' s brains. This binary idea was sort of emerging. I was retaliating against it even then. I'm one of four daughters, so from my mum and dad, I already had the sense that, of course – girls should be able to do everything.

JUDE: But I mean, the word 'feminism' wasn't around. Then Germaine Greer's book came out – I think it was when I was at university. And I left some of the courses in my degree. I opted out of them without permission and formed a women ' s theatre company – a street theatre company. And I basically made my own work with women from my course and from other parts of the university. Because I just thought: this isn't fair. So I always knew that this was an injustice. And I always knew that the only way I could do what I wanted to do was just stick to my guns, my feelings and my ideas. But each time I got a pushback, I thought it would be the only pushback I got. I didn't see it as systemic.

GAYNOR: And when did you start to see it as more systemic – that it was a societal problem, not just a series of men making life difficult for you?

JUDE: I think I saw it as generally a male issue quite early on. But I didn't understand the nature of patriarchy. I didn't investigate the canon. And with all the plays I was studying, I didn't investigate how the women are contextualised or placed. It took me a long time to do that.

GAYNOR: You were looking at women ' s stories, though...

JUDE: Yes – so that was the 70s. But my main dream wasn't to solve gender equity. My main dream was to solve equity. It was to add in the stories of humanity to make the world more just. And, particularly, it was to tackle who the audiences were and whose stories mattered. That idea of legitimacy... I began to piece together the politics of who art is for, who's perceived to be a legitimate artist, what background you have to have... All of that.

And so my political thrust as an artist was really always about reframing the context in which art happens, and for whom it happens. It wasn't particularly a feminist agenda. It was really much more of a class agenda. An equality agenda. And my desire was to be allowed to get on with that. So, in other words, to create situations for myself where I could realise the things I believed in. And that tended to mean that I founded things. I founded the Solent People's Theatre, I founded the Battersea Arts Centre. It was so I could actually build the context of what I believed in from scratch. Because you got most pushback when you went into a space that was already fully formed. You were made to feel it was inconvenient to do the things you wanted to do. Whereas when you were in charge, you didn't notice as much – because you were in charge!

GAYNOR: We know the statistics around women who study the arts, but why do they not get into positions where they can make decisions, be seen more, be heard more and have more power and say?

JUDE: It's a complete unvirtuous circle. That's the problem. If you establish a world order that says men are more important than women... Or even, that men are the real humans and women are assistant humans... And, symbolically, you have paintings like Michelangelo's touching hands – God and Adam – and the belief that there is where creativity exists... Then you ' re really saying that the divine right to the creative understanding of humanity goes through a male. And that women have an experience of humanity, but it's essentially a woman ' s experience. One of the things I've talked about in my career is that people speak of things as if they are the human experience. But what they mean is that they're the male experience. Hamlet is an obvious example. A quintessential human experience? No, a quintessential adolescent male experience.

There's that idea that women didn't have the legitimacy to tell the human story – they could only tell the female story. And the female story of itself was not of interest to men. That's the root of the problem.

JUDE: Lots of women have had the experience of going to the male 'structures' and saying: "I want to do this." And they're told: "Well, you ' re not really a legitimate artist, but we have got this female project on the side – this education project, community project, children's project, youth project, etc.” So everything that's happened in society, in terms of what is considered to be hard – I mean kind of muscular, as opposed to soft – has a value to it. And that's applied in the arts, too.

GAYNOR: So what do you think the solution is to this? Obviously, you established WOW. Was that part of your solution?

JUDE: Yes. So, when I came to the Southbank Centre, I was really, really interested in the democratic history of art. After the Second World War, the Southbank Centre was intended to be this incredibly ecumenical space. You can see that from the architecture. And I was really interested in how you could reshape that space for everybody. And I noticed that no matter how many women you ' re employing, most of the actual stories – whether it be Brahms played by an orchestra, or Mick Jagger, or whoever it is – they're male stories. So you ' re enabling all kinds of things to happen, but you ' re still maintaining a kind of canon.

JUDE: It was about 13 years ago that I started WOW. And here I was with probably one of the biggest jobs you can have as a woman in Europe. And no matter how many jobs I gave to women, we hadn't really solved the problem of legitimacy. Feminism goes through fashions, and the lad culture of the 80s had really undermined the idea of feminism. I had so many young women coming to me saying: "I'm not a feminist." It was a dirty word, really. And I just wanted to say: "Look, no way have we finished!"

And it's the same all over the world – the same core values of a man ' s power and a woman ' s lesser power. It's just some societies act it out in different ways. So I really wanted to bring together girls and women of all ages and backgrounds. Not just activists, not just lobbyists and politicians, but the flotsam and jetsam of all of us. And I wanted to say: "We must join the dots." Because it's one thing fighting for rights around domestic violence. But that same person might need to solve other issues, like childcare. It was at a time when there was an awful lot of emphasis on women getting into top corporate positions, which is fine. But women also need to be paid for domestic labour. And unless you join all those people together, they're not on the same journey.I wanted to celebrate everything that girls and women have done, which is amazing! I mean, think about filmmaking, just as an example.

JUDE: Despite being told what you couldn't do, shouldn't, oughtn't do, what's appropriate, women have done it anyway. Women have done everything. And the history books close over them. And that's awful. But we know that women have done these things. The resilience, the tenacity, the imagination... It's phenomenal. We must keep celebrating that. And that gives you the stamina and the optimism to keep going.

We also have to stop being naive and thinking that just because we ' ve got there, that's it. All the human rights that women have won are totally conditional still, because the basic script of theology is that we ' re not equal. And that's a huge problem. The law is constantly having to be adjusted, but still is manmade.

I started WOW as a one-year celebration of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. Then it was such a kind of wonderful, vigorous experience for me, as well as everybody else, I thought: shall we do it again? And then it started ricocheting. For example, somebody wanted to do it in Baltimore, then in Australia, then in Egypt, and then in Somalia. And it's just grown – creating this mosaic of real stories. I also began to feel that there was no one play – or even as a series of plays – that could even touch the surface of what the complexity of women ' s experiences really were.

GAYNOR: And why is it so important that women stories are heard?

JUDE: Because that is where human rights lie. I mean, if women ' s stories and women’s rights are perceived to be of less significance than men ' s, then men don’t have to look at women ' s stories. They haven't had to find out what women are thinking and doing. Because they haven't thought it was essential or necessary. But we ' ve had to think about men ' s stories – not just because we ' re raising boys and living with men, but because actually, it's dangerous not to know what men think and do. And also, in order to move our careers forward, we have to negotiate their emotional space.

So to get equal rights, you have to have equal stories. So it isn't just a question of: wouldn't it be nice if more theatres did more plays by women. It's not really plays by women, it's plays about humanity, which reflect humanity. A key issue is that 50 percent of humanity is made up of women.

GAYNOR: And what do you think you ' ve achieved with WOW?

JUDE: Well, I think we have contributed – a lot, actually – to the confidence of the reinvigoration of the language of feminism in this country.

JUDE: It's a lot more confident. I mean, we ' re not the only people, but I think we helped give people a sense of: OK, this is on the agenda again, and it's fun. There have been lots of offshoots and people have formed lots of organisations as a result of it. I mean, the Women's Equality Party started because of WOW. There have been all kinds of projects on FGM... Loads of things began because of it.

GAYNOR: And what have you personally achieved? Or is WOW you?

JUDE: Well, it isn't me anymore. I mean, WOW is more than me – because it's in lots of countries run by lots of other women. It's all connected up. Of course, it is my creative project. It was the project I committed myself to as an artist – to make something that was a celebration of multiple women ' s stories. And I am proud of it. And I do think it's had an impact.

And from it, I've got a huge understanding of the complexity of the lives of women. And also a connection to women who I wouldn't have had in my friendship group automatically. It's incredibly important to me that my friendship group encompasses all ages, all backgrounds – including trans and non-binary people – everybody. Because I have to not be the problem. I'm not saying I'm the solution, or that WOW is the solution. But it has to be on the side of solutions.

GAYNOR: So one last thing… For the women who are struggling out there in the cultural industries –whatever age, whatever background – feeling unseen or unheard... What's your advice?

JUDE: Get together with other people, all the time. We all have that impostor syndrome sometimes. But if you can find one bit of courage, then join or start networks. Not because you need a full address book. But because you need friendships that will keep you going, so you can share your experiences.

I'd really also say that the experiences we ' re told are almost de-legitimising – like having children, being out of work, being a grandmother, growing older... They are the stories that you can draw on. What you have to use is things you understand. So don't ever devalue your experience by wishing you were somebody else.

GAYNOR

Gaynor O'Flynn is a performer, writer, director & maverick.

In her extensive career, she has worked with luminaries including Anton Corbijn, Björk, the Dalai Lama, Stomp, Terry Gilliam, The Verve, New Order, PJ Harvey & Eddie Izzard. She has collaborated with organisations such as UNESCO, the BBC, Channel 4, Canal+, the BFI, the British Council & Google.

The BBC called her ‘that conscious, cathartic voice’, Artrocker ‘bloody brilliant', Le Cool London 'hugely fnlightening' & Frieze ‘exhilarating’.

She is founder of Beinghuman Ltd & The Beinghuman Collective CiC & has campaigned & spoken to millions globally on humanitarian & environmental issues. Gaynor is a student of Dzogchen, a Himalayan philosophy she embeds in her life, work & art.