AI Profile
Graham Sheffield, artistic director, Barbican Centre

Graham Sheffield has been credited with turning round the critical fortunes of the Barbican Centre, coming in as its first artistic director and developing its first proper programming.

He waved a petulant Royal Shakespeare Company off when they discarded their only London residency, and he introduced Bite, the theatre season which brings often avant garde drama from around the world, in its place.

He has also brought in associates like Cheek by Jowl, who have just opened a critically approved new production of Macbeth. He invited the BBC Symphony Orchestras to become an associate to work alongside the resident LSO, with Serious as associate music producers. Dance companies like the Michael Morris Company were brought in as favoured creatives, and he got a proper art gallery established. Each of the art forms was accorded its own director.

All this was in partnership with John Tusa, the managing director, who steered through a massive refurbishment programme built around better servicing the artistic offer of the place, and when Tusa retired in 2007 Sheffield was widely expected to get the job – in the gift of the City of London Corporation which owns and funds the centre. When, to his and Tusa’s dismay, he didn’t get it friends expected him to quit when the job went to Nicholas Kenyon, the former Proms director and Radio 3 CEO.

He didn’t, partly because Kenyon is an old friend from BBC days with whom he knew he could work, and a month ago they together launched an ambitious summer programme including jazz, open air concerts of east End music, an exhibition about architecture and surrealism, and a commission from the surreal multi-discipline artist John Bock.

It is a very primary colour schedule which has Sheffield’s signature on it, but he has also been leaving his fingerprints outside the Barbican’s precincts. Since 2006 he has been chairman of the venerable Royal Philharmonic Society, devoted to promoting musical composition and the word of younger artists, and last summer the British Council appointed him its first advisor for arts and a creative economy.

But, in a move that has surprised all but his closest confidants, he is leaving. After 15 year at the Barbican he is to go in August to become chief executive of the West Kowloon Cultural District.

It might seem a step down from programming the artistic life of an international multi-form venue to become what sounds like an old fashioned town clerk in a former Far Eastern colony. The truth is that there is no West Kowloon Cultural District yet, Sheffield has three years and £1.87 billion to make it.

It is, he says, the job of a lifetime. “In many ways the Barbican has been a dream job and there are not many I would consider giving it up for” he says, “but there are very few opportunities like West Kowloon and I couldn’t put it aside”.

His experiences running a multi-cultural arts centre might been a factor in his appointment, he thinks, “but this is creating something entirely new, in 16 buildings rather than one, and four times the size of the Barbican”.

His role at the British Council, taken up last year, will almost certainly have to be reassigned, but he won’t enlarge. “In six months we have had a measure of success with the arts and culture now at the centre of their thinking” is all he will say. “I’m sure I will be involved with the British Council, but in what capacity we have not yet discussed”. But the BC is very firmly entrenched in Hong Kong where it has a long history integrating education and the arts.

The West Kowloon Cultural District had been planned for a decade, since Hong Kong was handed back to Chinese control by Britain but with a large measure of autonomy, and was on the backburner when in 2006 the Hong Kong government’s consultative committee advised that the creation of the cultural quarter should go ahead immediately, with 15 performing arts venues and a museum/gallery/exhibitions centre. Legislation was put through two years ago.

Sheffield’s appointment will have a lot to do with how he set about creating an arts centre rather than what he is doing with it now. His success began with the RSC’s departure from the Barbican in 1997, early in his time there, and the end of outside control of one of his key venues, the Barbican Theatre. “We’re not going to sign another 17 volume residency agreement with someone like the RSC because we actually enjoy the freedom of being able to put on whatever we want” he told ai then.

When he arrived there was no artistic steerage at all, and the building was reviled and even hated, particularly by the resident RSC who had actually designed the theatre. He had begun with just the concert hall and cinema in his control: there was no education programme, the art gallery was run by a different department in the corporation, the RSC had the theatre, there was no sponsorship department at all, and marketing was run separately. He made a brand, created a team of artistic programmers, and consulted West End contacts like Thelma Holt about what to do with the theatre.

In 1998 he put on the huge Inventing America festival which put the Barbican on the map artistically. “Then we started the process of trying to build on events with a lot more thematic festivals, a bigger jazz programme, a bigger world music programme with festivals built around those”. Then they had to finish the improvements to the hall’s acoustic started by Larry Kirkegaard, so that now they can welcome orchestras like Berlin’s, Vienna’s and Amsterdam’s which had shunned the Barbican before. Resident “more as a lifelong friend than a lodger” is the LSO.

Sheffield’s first love is classical music. A product of Tonbridge School and Edinburgh University where he got a music degree, his ambition was to be an opera director. He became a stage manager but got “syphoned off” into the BBC where he was a Radio 3 producer, and then found himself head of music at the South Bank Centre. So his only opera production remains the one of Chabrier’s comic piece L’Etoile he did at university.

It was a big shift from music management to what was then called arts director of a place like the Barbican. “Each job I’ve done somebody has taken me on trust – before I went to the BBC I’d never been in studio before, I’d never worked in a concert hall until I went to the SBC, and here they took a risk on me and theatre” he said.

He changed his title from arts manager – “too bureaucratic sounding, I thought” – to artistic director, but the job has changed since then and he is no longer a programmer so much as a facilitator of programming, travelling widely to concerts, plays, exhibitions and performances.

A few mlonths after his arrival, John Tusa was installed as managing director and a double act was created. “We’ve done our damnedest to turn it into a silk purse” he says.

Now Sheffield has to repeat the process, to the power of four and a budget approximately three times everything he and Tusa spent on the Barbican transformation. He has to appoint executive directors for each of the disciplines, and the architectural leadership that will create the new buildings in what he intends will be the cultural crossroads between the Far East and the West. As he says, “Why wouldn’t I want to do that?”