Arts head: Paul Kaynes, Birmingham Hippodrome

Hi Paul, what can you tell me about Birmingham Hippodrome?

Birmingham Hippodrome is a large scale receiving theatre that has been going for 115 years since its opening in 1899. It has nearly 1,900 seats and plays host to the top West End musicals, dance and opera.

We’re the home of Birmingham Royal Ballet, which plays for around nine weeks a year on our main stage. We’re also the English home of Welsh National Opera, which presents its entire repertoire here. Our resident partners DanceXchange take the lead in programming the Patrick Centre and since 2008 we’ve worked together to present the biennial International Dance Festival Birmingham, which takes place across the city.

The theatre is highly successful, with over 625,000 paid attendances last year: the highest since records began. Our mission is to provide the best possible theatre experience, which means not only what’s on stage but also the experience that audiences have when they arrive in the theatre foyers, bars and restaurants, as well as the experience that visiting companies have backstage. We want both audiences and touring companies to remember their time here – and to come back.

Birmingham Hippodrome is a registered charity: what are the implications of this on the work you do as director of creative programmes?

It means that the work I’m responsible for – creating special commissions, animating the building beyond the main stage and creating an exciting learning and community programme – is dependent on the financial success of the theatre. As well as maintaining reserves to realise the long-term ambitions of the charity, the theatre reinvests a significant amount of the surpluses it earns, alongside the proceeds of the fundraising it undertakes, into Hippodrome Plus, the name we’ve given to our programme for everything that happens beyond the main stage.

The work can only happen if the main stage programme is successful, which (fortunately) it is. Being in charge of our own catering, conferences and hospitality is beneficial both in terms of customer service and financial opportunity.

How do you keep the Hippodrome Plus programme fresh, creative and entertaining each year?

We start with the audience: who we want to reach this year, how people responded to programmes last time and the kinds of engagement we created. We also want to have some fun; the artistic personality of the theatre is about music, dance and entertainment. It’s important we embody that spirit.

Part of what we do, especially with schools and young people, is shaped by the main stage programme, which varies enormously year to year. This year we’ve had a large number of international dance shows. For example, in May we staged Matthew Bourne’s Lord of the Flies, featuring 22 locally-recruited boys performing alongside the professional cast. It was an intense and rewarding experience for them and for the enthusiastic audiences who came to see young local performers surpass expectation.

The other inspiration is the range of different contexts and landscapes in which we create work. Next month we’re presenting world-class video art in collaboration with Ikon Gallery in a range of spaces around the theatre, including car parks, a National Trust property and in our own foyers, while the visit of Wagner’s Ring Cycle from St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Opera gives us the chance to create a game to be played on the streets of Birmingham (check out the mermaid in the fish market!). With such a varied canvas, it would be difficult not to be fresh and creative; artists always have interesting ideas for unlikely spaces.

You worked on the Cultural Olympiad: what were the big lessons from that which you’ve carried over into this role?

Audiences see arts activities differently when they’re linked to a major public celebration or moment. In 2012 we saw a much wider range of people attend events that they wouldn’t have considered without the link to the Games and the chance to be part of a nationwide conversation. The audiences who took part in 2012 were also younger, more culturally diverse and from a broader social background than is the arts norm, fired up by a chance to be part of something bigger.

London 2012 also helped bridge the “credibility gap” with agencies and partners outside the arts. The partnerships we made with sports people, local authorities, retail, transport and universities have persisted. The trust and knowledge about what the arts sector can do – not just economically, though that does help – is there and it isn’t going away. We spent a lot of time at the end of 2012 documenting the impact of the Cultural Olympiad: socially, economically and in terms of audience makeup. People haven’t forgotten.

You’re working with Ikon on November’s About Town, a video art exhibition. With this year’s Turner Prize featuring three video artists, are we seeing an increased appetite for this kind of work?

We alighted on video work for our autumn visual arts installation programme long before the Turner Prize shortlist was announced, but I was struck by the coincidence. As we’re not primarily a visual arts organisation, we wanted to present a contemporary visual arts programme of world standing, but we also wanted it to be accessible and engaging for all our audiences.

The video programme that the Ikon is curating for us exemplifies that desire to show work that audiences feel confident enough to approach, even if it’s in a draughty car park. They’ll be taken on a journey of discovery with video work by Gillian Wearing, Beat Streuli, Ivan Morison and Yang Zhenzhong among others. Some of the works are quite long and will demand time and focus, but people like that; they want to immerse themselves in work that rewards their investment. Video work seems to offer that.

Tell me about the Birmingham arts scene: is it in good health?

There’s a real vibrancy in the arts scene in Birmingham right now, despite the economic gloom, and that’s largely because the work organisations are creating is new and exciting. The digital work coming out of organisations like Sampad, the sheer volume and range of the musical offer from Town Hall Symphony Hall, but also outfits such as Capsule lend a sense of surprise and energy. The arrival of Roxana Silbert at the Rep has also reinforced its reputation for being a powerhouse of theatre-making of all types and scales.

What’s most exciting about all of this is the way in which the arts organisations are adjusting what they do and how they work to reflect the fact that Birmingham is the youngest city in Europe and the most culturally diverse outside London. There’s a sense in which Birmingham can be a lab for trying out all kinds of ideas before everyone else. Of course, there’s a risk to that; new things don’t always work first time, but the sense of experimentation and risk is thrilling.

Paul Kaynes is director of creative programmes at Birmingham Hippodrome, which you can follow on Twitter @brumhippodrome

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