From pop-up to permanent, Jay Miller explains what it was like opening a theatre in Hackney Wick, alongside poverty, diversity and the ultimate force of change: the Olympics
In the spring of 2011 we spent £11,000 building a theatre in a vacant warehouse in Hackney Wick, which once upon a time housed a print works. We called it The Yard Theatre. In the summer we hosted a season of theatre, dance and opera. That year an estimated 190 artists produced work for us and 6,000 people visited us.
Thanks to the quality of the work and the support of the local community, as well as our funders and landlords who had faith in what we were trying to achieve, we were able to keep our 'pop-up' theatre and maintain a permanent presence within this post-industrial landscape.
The warehouse has been split into two sections: one housing the theatre and the other holding the bar, to which the back ‘bowl’ of the seating rake is fully visible. Made with recycled and reclaimed material, the theatre seats 130 in a fully-raked amphitheatre. The stage is large – there are four performer entrances and exits – and there are excellent acoustics. In keeping with the honest aesthetic of the architecture, the dressing room is a semi-transparent light box that sits in the bar, revealing silhouettes preparing for the stage. We think there is beauty in the collision between Greek and Elizabethan architecture and in its juxtaposition in an industrial warehouse space where the concrete floor and corrugated roof are clearly visible.
Our neighbours are mechanics, vegetable peelers and fine artists – a perfect cross section of Hackney Wick and, incidentally, our audience. The Yard exists in relative poverty; we sit on the border between Tower Hamlets and Hackney, two of London's most deprived boroughs, with panic-inducing levels of child poverty and unemployment. We survive in this location by making our building, and our work, accessible and affordable. Tickets to a performance are never more than £10, meaning those with little disposable income are still able to visit us, and we produce theatre that is as raw and honest as its host building.
The elephant in the room is, of course, the Olympics. Since its conception The Yard has been communicating with the Olympic body and its associates in an attempt to gauge (and understand) the enormous upheaval the games are having on the local area. Ultimately it has brought, and will continue to bring, an enormous amount of change to the area, and times of change have always inspired artists. In these topsy-turvy times art has a vital role to play in helping us understand what is happening around us. The artists in our building are capturing this ‘zeitgeist of change’; this change that is taking place not only on our doorstep but also in the world at large. It’s tremendously exciting.
We are only in our second year but The Yard has felt, and continues to feel, like a pan simmering on a hob. Simmering with potential, with excitement and with change.