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A burning ambition
Very few similarities spring to mind when comparing Nuneaton and Bedworth to the Nevada desert.
But that could all change in the next few years if Jane Hytch gets her wish of continuing to work with London-based Artichoke, to create a major festival in the north Warwickshire borough inspired by the world-famous Burning Man that takes place in the USA every year.
Hytch, the CEO of Coventry-based Imagineer, said: “Three of us took a trip to see the festival in Nevada. It was incredible and had 400 installations across the desert which took days to visit.
“To give examples, there was a tower of cars – maybe 15 cars piled up – with a caravan on top and people would be climbing up because it turns out the caravan is a café at the top of the pile. A health and safety nightmare!
“Then there was a giant polar bear just sitting there in the desert. The whole thing is a surreal experience - installations appear through the desert sand and dust, it’s like walking through a Salvadore Dali painting.
“Our idea is to create a similar festival that shows the engineering and technology innovation of the West Midlands, and we want to do it at Hawkesbury Fields and in and around Nuneaton and Bedworth.”
The region’s own ‘Burning Man’ is earmarked for 2024 but a project called Sanctuary is coming to Bedworth’s Miners Welfare Park this spring (May 21-28) as the precursor to the festival.
Sanctuary will see the erection of a beautiful 60ft wooden structure in the park that will invite people to leave messages or items – relating to the Covid crisis of the past two years – and then, after seven days, it will all be burned.
“It’s an installation that is being designed by David Best,” said Hytch. “He designs and builds many of the temples that are the central part of the Burning Man Festival.
“They are like giant cathedrals that are built over ten days. They are places where people can go and can leave messages.
“Around 80,000 people go to Burning Man and they live there for 10 days and then the city they build is taken away – leaving no trace behind. They go to the temples that David has made and at the end of the festival they burn them. It’s incredible. It’s a human catharsis. Everyone puts all of the awful and hopeful things in there and they let go.
“Sanctuary is a collaboration with Artichoke who are the lead organisation. I’ve always wanted to work with them and we wanted to do this in a place that we felt meaningful and where there are less affluent communities.
“Covid has hit communities like Nuneaton and Bedworth and that made the site special to us. David has designed Sanctuary which is a beautiful, 60 ft tall gateway to the future. People can come and leave things – artworks, words, thoughts about people – and they pass through it and it’s a gateway to a better time ahead.
“It will sit on a mound in the park and will be like a beacon to people – we’re expecting thousands to visit – and then it will be burnt after seven days.
“I spoke to a woman who lost her mother during Covid and couldn’t see her for the last days of her life and, through tears, she told me she would go to Sanctuary and that is where she would let go.
“There are so many stories that people are telling us about their experiences, and it’s really starting to attract attention.”
For Hytch, it’s another step on the road to helping to build creative, confident people and communities – something that has underpinned her whole career. In fact, her whole life.
Her father was a lecturer at Worcester College of Higher Education and the family lived on the college campus. From the age of just eight, Hytch and her friends would sneak into an old theatre building on the campus and create shows during the day and perform them to an audience at night.
“We used to get into those spaces when the students weren’t around and we’d make theatre and tell stories,” she said. “Then we’d get the students to come and see it.
“So, it is really rooted in me. A love of theatre. There were old red curtains that I used to open and close that made it feel like a proper theatre.
“We used to get in there in the holidays by climbing through the windows. It was magical. I was probably about eight at the time through to the age of 14. There was a group of us on the campus that all belonged to lecturers and we used to go round with a football rattle telling people that there was a play on. We’d do a play in a day and then draw in an audience in the evening.
“I went to a school on the campus where they were rather more experimental and we’d learn through the arts. I used to run a little puppet theatre in the school and we’d learn other subjects like history and maths through the puppetry.
“It was an unusual education but it equipped me for the journey I’ve had in my life.”
That journey led to Hytch becoming arts director at Worcester Arts Workshop, a community arts centre.
“My commitment was to work with people who didn’t have much opportunity to engage with the arts or didn’t go to theatres. Our work was on the estates in and around Worcester. It must have been around 1986. We were way ahead,” she said.
There, she met David Beidas, who was managing the Swan Theatre in Worcester. He later moved to the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry and that was when Hytch got the call that would see her move to the city.
“David called me to say there was an opportunity to head up their community work,” Hytch said.
“It felt like a good transition at that time in my life. I wasn’t 100 per cent sure about working in a mainstream theatre. The audiences felt similar – there was a regular programme and regular subscribers – so we started to break the mould.
“We developed a whole outdoor programme of work that was largely free to come and see. It was on in the summer and you’d get families coming in to see it.
“We started working with a lot of European companies and some from Australia and New Zealand – the best in the world – because they had more experience in doing it.
“We learnt so much from them and the theatre became very committed to working that way because we could engage and impact so many more people. That was really important. I love the theatre and the whole experience of going to the theatre but, for me, I wanted the work to engage more broadly.
“I’m interested in people who have never done theatre with stories to tell or young people with raw talent but they haven’t been able to express it.”
A change of direction at the Belgrade saw Hytch and three colleagues take the plunge to set up Imagineer in 2007, again with the ambition of reaching a broader range of people.
“There were four of us when we started,” she said. “We all came from the Belgrade. I was a producer there for 20 years and we had been doing a lot of outdoor work, such as the mystery plays.
“The focus changed to building a second theatre and less on outdoor work so we were given £100,000 to set up a new company called Imagineer. After four years, I was voted as Chief Executive.
“The initial ambition was to make high level, outdoor work and reach as many people as possible.
“The heart of it is about the transformational power of art. If you engage people in the work you do, you can see them developing in confidence. So many people lack confidence and, if that’s the case, it makes it so difficult to make progressions in your life.”
Imagineer’s own confidence boost came in 2010 when it was chosen to be part of the 2012 Olympic Games procession, creating a giant Godiva that went the length and breadth of the country.
“We had a major breakthrough when we worked on the Olympics with the giant Godiva which everyone remembers,” Hytch said.
“That changed everything. We stopped working with carnival making materials and got much more into partnering engineering and technology companies like NP Aerospace, Arup and MIRA.
“We found that improved the overall quality of what we could produce. When you’ve made a puppet like Godiva, you can’t go back to working with sticks, cardboard, kite cane and tissue paper.
“Everything, for me, started at that point. Before, we were a local events organisation, but now we work nationally and have lots of international partners and we were discovering the wealth of technology in Coventry and the sub region.
“We performed to the largest audience outside London during the Olympic year as we travelled to so many cities with Godiva. People came out en-masse and it was a huge confidence builder. We worked with 17 engineering companies across the West Midlands and Coventry University, to create Godiva and her Cyclopedia (36 interconnected tricycles which powered Godiva along the A5 to London).
“We wanted to discover new relationships with business and industry. We’ve found a way into those places and all of the skills and knowledge they have within them and are using them in our work. Isn’t that amazing?
“The company has grown through collaborations with engineering and business, and universities. We work a lot with Coventry and Birmingham and are looking at a wider partnership with West Midlands Combined Universities.
“They support us from a research perspective but in other ways too, such as collaborations with students.”
The latest phase of Imagineer’s growth has been the opening of the new Daimler Powerhouse during Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture.
It’s a new £2.5 million creative hub for artists and creatives in a former industrial building on the bank of Coventry Canal.
And Hytch hopes it will help to inspire the next generation of artists and engineers in the city who want to work in the outdoor arts sector.
“Having the Daimler Powerhouse has enabled us to develop all of our work with young, new talent,” she said. “This building is equipped for young people, particularly vulnerable young people, to come in and to train in the work we do and the building process.
“We have some high-level equipment now and the creative industries are growing so fast, creating all kinds of jobs for young people, but they wouldn’t necessarily know those jobs are there. So, we feel like we are opening doors for young people and we want to do more of that.
“Young people gain experience in the building and then on the outdoor productions we create. We often employ them as apprentices or on work training placements. They come into the building just thinking they want to work in the arts, not really knowing what they want to do, but we help them find their way and then they get employment or other opportunities.
“It’s about creating a pipeline of talent – and I don’t mean that in a ‘showy’ way. You only have to look at the number of people listed on film credits to know how many jobs there are in the arts.
“Looking forward, we are doing some really exciting things. We are hoping to become National Portfolio clients of the Arts Council because, right now, we are project funded.
“That would enable us to know where we are going much more clearly and allow us to build our ten-year plan. We'’re only working six months ahead at the moment and having the building has given us a different kind of status.”
