Jude Kelly: 'You can’t go on pretending everything is equal when you secretly know it isn't'

The Southbank Centre’s Jude Kelly opens her Women of the World festival with a debate about women in the arts — we have to stop creating our own glass ceilings, she tells Liz Hoggard
MUST CREDIT: Adrian Lourie P82 EDITION 0503 *Evening Standard Only - Charges May Apply* Jude Kelly photographed at The Royal Festival Hall
5 March 2014

"I preside over an incredibly large centre where almost every genre of the arts is on display, which makes you aware that the canon is reiterating over and over again that male creativity is the centre of the universe," Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank Centre, observes.

Four years ago she founded Women of the World (WOW), an annual festival of talks, film and comedy, held in honour of International Women’s Day — “to ensure there was a high-profile cultural space where hundreds of women’s stories could be shared”.

This year’s festival, opening today, features Malala Yousafzai, Vivienne Westwood, Grayson Perry, Katie Price and Sarah Brown. For the first time there will also be an industry event focusing on Women in the Arts: 250 women, including Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, Orange Prize founder Kate Mosse, architect Zaha Hadid and violinist Tasmin Little, have been invited to debate what new steps need to be taken to achieve gender equality across the sector.

Our artistic institutions have been created by men who tend to appoint in their own image, Kelly argues. “If there’s a massive men’s network, they remember each other — if the woman is slightly outside of that, they forget she exists and is one of them.”

This means women are mainly facilitators in the arts, while men run the big organisations (National Gallery, Tate Modern, RSC, British Museum, Royal Opera House). Of course, we now have women heading the Royal Court, Tricyle, Donmar, Serpentine and Tate Britain but these are relative minnows.

No woman was seriously considered for Tony Hall’s job as head of the Royal Opera House or to succeed Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre after Marianne Elliott publicly ruled herself out. Why are there so few female candidates? “This is the territory that is the greyest and most difficult to discover,” Kelly says. “It was certainly possible to appoint a woman to the National — I don’t mean to say it isn’t Rufus Norris’s right to have that job. I would say at the very top of the industry there is now a recognition that women are capable of doing it, however I still think there is anxiety when a woman takes a top job. It is a source of comment — and when you’re a source of comment because you’re a woman, then all eyes are on you and that is just one more added pressure.”

Since she joined in 2005, Kelly, 59, has transformed the Southbank Centre (Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery and Purcell Room), inside and out, into one of the most vibrant arts centres in the country, with 28 million visitors a year. She manages a budget of £36 million. She’s brought up two children and has a job she adores, so no one could accuse her of sour grapes. But she feels passionately about inequality in what she calls her own “cultural backyard”.

She is aware that it’s unpopular to say that women hold themselves back, but she insists that the arts has traditionally been a safe space to discuss difficult issues. “Shrouded areas”, as she calls them, will not do. We can’t go on “pretending everything is equal when you secretly know it isn’t. I’m just asking women in the arts to be bolder about what they have been complicit in accepting”.

At WOW, the disparity in earnings of women and men will be under consideration, and the need for affordable childcare. “How do we make young women feel that not only is the world their oyster when they’re younger but [just as much] when they’re 33 and thinking about kids? When you’ve got a male and female artist side by side as a couple, whose creativity has to be managed more than the other?” She adds pertinently: “I’ve met a lot of women who hadn’t necessarily not wanted to have children, but had ended up not having them because they felt they had to choose.”

MUST CREDIT: Adrian Lourie P82 EDITION 0503 *Evening Standard Only - Charges May Apply* Jude Kelly photographed at The Royal Festival Hall

Fear of ambition, she believes, is something that creates personal glass ceilings for women. “We are taught that good girls are pious and tidy and fit in” — when actually to be an artist you need to be noisy and driven, to have an ego — “at a certain level, though, people who directly make work have to find at the very core of themselves what it is they wish to speak about. That means you have to feel entitled to have a voice.”

So women tend to be collegiate rather than competitive? “Even though I absolutely love the fact that women learn to listen and watch, and to be intuitive about certain ingredients of human dynamics, that leads to the kind of leadership that becomes quite consensual,” she says.

What about Kelly’s own experience? “I know, reputation-wise, people assume I must be tough and really difficult. I don’t think I am those things — people work with me for years — but people assume you can’t be driven without being some of the negative things they say about women.”

She’s had a bruising time with her £120 million Southbank redevelopment proposal (to create a Festival Wing with family art centre, studios and rehearsal spaces, providing free activities and arts access to London children). Despite initially backing the scheme, the Mayor joined in protests about moving the riverside skateboarding area underneath one of the walkways to create more retail space and Hytner publicly criticised the divisive impact of the architecture on the wider cultural quarter of the South Bank.

Couldn’t they just have had a quiet word with her? “It would seem the neighbourly thing to do,” she deadpans. The plans are currently being revised, and will have to be resubmitted for planning approval but she worries that loss of potential revenue without the shops may scupper the whole idea.

No one in her Liverpool family worked in the arts. As she has recalled, when she went to study drama at Birmingham University in the 1970s, determined to become a director, she was told she had just three female role models: “One’s a lesbian, one’s retired and one’s just killed herself — which would you like to be?” In fact she founded Battersea Arts Centre before running the West Yorkshire Playhouse. In 1997, she was awarded the OBE for her services to the theatre.

For a time Kelly was a serious contender to be the first woman director of the National. Although she wrote the bid for the Cultural Olympiad, she took a back seat after Ruth Mackenzie was put in charge. Was that painful? She pauses, then reveals that straight after London won the Olympics on July 6, 2005, she was offered the Southbank job, so she always knew it would need to appoint a full-time director but agrees it was sad that it was represented as a catfight between women.

In fact the Southbank has been the making of Kelly. WOW has proved so popular it has spread to cities across the globe including Sydney and Baltimore. Meanwhile, last month’s Being a Man festival was dedicated to her 25-year-old son (a dancer), her father, ex-husband and partner. She still holds the view that men benefit just as much as women from questioning stereotyped gender roles.

Everyone, she says, can learn from the gay community, who embrace a much wider view of sexuality. Gay rights are close to her heart; she tells me proudly that her 27-year-old daughter, Caroline, a poet, is gay and will be marrying her partner later this year.

Kelly is opening the Southbank as a wedding venue to straight and gay couples for the Power to be Wed weekend this summer. In the meantime she’ll be campaigning for zero tolerance on unfairness in the arts.

“Most of the conductors and playwrights and film-makers around the world are still basically talking about the world through male eyes,” she reiterates. As the makers of stories, artists choose and control the imagery that is all around us, which is precisely why we need more woman at the top.

WOW — Women of the World Festival runs from Mar 5-9 at the Southbank Centre, SE1 (0844 8750073; southbankcentre.co.uk/wow)

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