Why the Leeds-based Compass Festival is a symbol of the North's thriving cultural life

The story of the Brick Man has always felt emblematic to me of a moment which summed up the attitude the city had towards culture over a period of time.

The story (well documented in the pages of The Yorkshire Post down the years) in a nutshell is this: Antony Gormley offered to create what would have been an iconic structure for Leeds, the city council said ‘no thanks’, Gormley went off and created the Angel of the North.

The happened in 1988, but it informed the city’s attitude to culture for some time, and was still reverberating at the start of the Millennium, when I returned home. Leeds by then was the financial capital of the North, what need for culture?

These days culture is far more valued by the city’s leaders and citizens, but when it was shunned, the city’s cultural life pulsed and survived and led to events like Light Night, Transform and the place I arrive in my lockdown series today, Compass Festival.

A biennial festival of live and interactive projects that take place all over Leeds, it more than belongs in this series not least because it brings the city alive with art every couple of years.

Compass is the company that commissions and presents live art projects in Leeds, running an artist residency programme, projects and exhibitions and is the driving force behind the Compass Festival.

Co-directors of Compass, Peter Reed and Annie Lloyd, have been working hard to make sure this year’s events don’t scupper the chances of next year’s festival, the fifth edition, which is due to come to the city in Spring 2021.

Reed says: “All our projects have some kind of live element and some kind of interactive way for people to get involved, but this could really mean anything; as big, small, grand or intimate as the imaginations of the artists we commission and the people they meet when they’re here in Leeds.

“Interactivity might mean anything from making a handshake sculpture with a stranger in Leeds Bus Station, to working with us for many months to create a bespoke, guided tour of your weekly shop.”

The city where the Brick Man doesn’t stand now understands the importance of culture – it is valued. “All the projects we present publicly during our festival programmes are free to the public. We already receive a lot of our support from public funding and believe people shouldn’t have to pay twice,” says Reed.

“Much of our work takes place beyond traditional art settings. Compass Festival programmes have unfolded on water taxis, in courtrooms, shopping centres and on neighbourhood streets. Also, most of our programme can be stumbled across without needing to know about it in advance, allowing for a lot of spontaneity in the events and projects we present.”

It’s true – I tend to go to events at Compass Festival because, well it’s my job to know when and where they are happening, but one of the joys of witnessing performances at the festival is seeing other audience members who had no idea minutes before that art was about to insert itself into their lives. It leads to some impressive figures: in 2018 more than forty percent of the 13,000 people who joined in a project were not regular attendees of arts events.

It’s one of the things Reed loves about working with Compass.

“I was attracted to join because of the potential for it to offer artists the space to work with specialists from other fields – lawyers, market traders, collectors – and time to embed themselves with those people, their groups and communities for meaningful lengths of time. It always results in richer experiences for audiences in the finished projects.”

So what does a Compass Festival project look like?

Well, there was the epic Forced Entertainment six hour project called And On the Thousandth Night in 2011. And in 2018 it also presented Four Legs Good by Jack Tan. “That was a defining project for us,” says Reed.

“It was a contemporary revival of the medieval animal trials which took place in Britain and Europe where animals who had been accused of committing crimes were brought to court, provided defence counsel and prosecuted in full hearings before a judge. We worked for a long time with Jack, the lawyers and local animal rights and ecological groups to explore cases including a Jack Russel accused of sheep worrying.

“Jack reimagined Leeds Town Hall as the site of a fictional Department of Animal Justice and staged a series of live animal trials where practising barristers argued claims brought by or against their animal clients before a judge and a jury of Compass Festival audience members.” Safe to say, if you were in the audience, it’s the kind of live art event you won’t forget.

“Compass is important to Leeds because ordinary people who live and work here are so fundamental to the development and outcomes of its projects. The arts and culture sector scene in Leeds has grown and developed in myriad ways over the last ten years, but there’s really still nothing else like it,” says Reed.

“In the last five years I think there has been a shift in focus to Leeds and its points of difference from other cities across the UK and Europe: the indies, the pop-ups, the artists that have fed extensively into the development of things like Leeds 2023.”

Ah yes, 2023, a year of celebrating culture and what feels like it could be a pinnacle to rival that nadir when we said no to the Brick Man. Compass Festival will be an integral part of that.

Compass Festival 2021

The fifth edition of the Compass Festival is slated for March 19-28, 2021. It will feature:

Museums in People’s Homes: Artist Joshua Sofaer has created a series of unique artworks looking at how collectors engage with the world.

Pick Me Up and Hold Me Tight: part of a national project to make the 34,000 public phones across the UK ring at once.

The Yorkshire Square, a fully operational 12x12 pop up pub which looks at the importance of pubs in our lives.

More details at www.compassliveart.org.uk