When Leeds was denied its chance to become European capital of culture in 2023 due to Brexit, it should have been the killing blow to what it had been hoped would be a massive year-long cultural celebration.
But, refusing to be beaten, cultural leaders ploughed ahead regardless, and now almost a decade of planning and ideating will culminate on Saturday in the launch of Leeds 2023, the city-wide cultural festival.
About 10,000 people will be packed into Headingley Stadium, normally the home of Leeds Rhinos rugby league club, for the Awakening, the opening ceremony.
Hosted by the television presenter and Leeds 2023 chair, Gabby Logan, and BBC radio’s Sanchez Payne, the show will feature the singer Corinne Bailey Rae and poet Simon Armitage, alongside Opera North, the percussionist Inder Goldfinger and the emerging rap artist Graft.
Logan said her home city had always been quieter about its talents than the neighbouring northern cultural powerhouses of Manchester and Liverpool, but she was looking forward to Leeds demonstrating what it had to offer.
“If you look at our noisy neighbours across the Pennines … Leeds has always been in the shadow of that and there’s a sense that there’s only so much room at the top table,” she said. “So that was probably a factor that kept Leeds a bit quiet.
“And now I meet people all the time that are like: ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realise it was so amazing until I got there,’ and you hear that all the time from southerners who don’t travel up north very often. I think Leeds surprises them.”
The Awakening is directed by chief executive Kully Thiarai and Alan Lane, the artistic director of the Royal Television Society award-winning theatre company Slung Low, and choreographed by Sharon Watson, the principal of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and Lucy Hind.
They are keeping tight-lipped about the evening’s full programme, billed as a “collision” of music, poetry, performance, comedy, dance and film, but some were given a clue on Thursday evening after spotting an eerie face made up of lights in the sky over Leeds, which was confirmed to be part of drone rehearsals for the event.
Unusually, local people were invited to apply for tickets in exchange for submitting pictures of their own works of art – whether a painting, a quilt, a TikTok dance routine or some baked biscuits – and the response was so great the organisers ended up with a waiting list.
Thiarai, the creative director of Leeds 2023, said the show was about telling an “epic story about the city in one night” and was just the first in a year-long series of events celebrating the city’s cultural history and future. “I’m excited for what that will do and what confidence that will generate and what it will act as a catalyst for other people to carry on doing, once the year is over.”
• This article was amended on 7 January 2023. An earlier version omitted to credit Kully Thiarai as a director of the Awakening, and Lucy Hind as a choreographer of the show.
