London’s Southbank Center says it needs more than $200 million in repairs | Real Time Headlines

LONDON – From Michelle Obama to Anish Kapoor, Tracey Emin to Nina Simone, Southbank Centre, London (Southbank Centre) has been there and it’s one of them. Britain’s most popular attractions.

But to secure its future, the arts complex needs £165 million ($217 million) to restore the aging buildings, which include 11 acres of performance venues, galleries and public spaces on the south bank of the Thames, as it approaches 75 years old .^th Anniversary 2026.

In March, Elaine Bedell, chief executive of the Southbank Centre, appealed to the then-Conservative Party Government donates £27 million An article in London’s Evening Standard noted the “urgent” costs of repairing and upgrading the complex.

Southbank Center artistic director Mark Ballas said the restoration costs would involve “big conversations” with Britain’s new Labor government and other supporters – important part The center is funded by public grants, with the rest coming from donations, retail and partnerships. “We can’t let cultural infrastructure collapse in our hands because… without investment, it won’t exist,” Ball told CNBC.

Ball is responsible for curating performances and exhibitions for the centre’s four main venues (concert halls Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, smaller live music venues the Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery) and for the entire site Commissioned artwork for outdoor spaces. (The neighboring National Theater and BAFTA Southbank are not part of the Southbank Centre.)

Ball has held the role since January 2022 as creative director of the Manchester International Arts Festival. In his first year at the Southbank Centre, he oversaw more than 5,400 events and performances. The center is The fifth most visited attraction in the UKvisitor numbers will grow 8% to nearly 3.2 million by 2023, but like other arts institutions, the numbers have not yet returned to pre-COVID-19 levels. 4 millionaccording to the Association of Major Tourist Attractions.

The Royal Festival Hall was the centre’s first venue, opening in 1951 as part of Festivals of Britain, a government-funded event held across the UK to convey positive post-World War II sentiments. “This is a holiday established by a Labor government, in a country hit hard by austerity, and overwhelmingly victorious after the war. It requires cohesion and requires great optimism for the future,” Ball said.

“It turned a part of south London… that was abandoned, bombed out, into a huge cultural space,” he said. Ball hopes the new government will view arts institutions in a similarly optimistic manner, describing its Commitment to support arts subjects in schools “Very exciting.”

However, due to what Ball describes as a “real deduction” from public funding over the past few years, the center has sought commercial partnerships with: applethe Royal Festival Hall will host the BAFTA Awards from 2023. to £19.67 million in 2023.

Power attends new Culture Minister appointment Lisa Nandy’s talk at Manchester Museum of Science and Industry In July, she spoke about the government’s aims to support culture and creativity in a speech The background to the British riots.

CNBC spoke to Ball because the U.K. Plagued by summer violence. “We look at what’s happening now and it’s … very shocking, but I think it becomes even more important to understand that culture does play a real role in putting yourself in other people’s shoes,” he said. That’s what artists do all the time. They create stories about other people that make you empathize,” he said.

Ball shared his experiences at school in the 1980s in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “legendary” play Richard III, starring Anthony Sher. “As a young, closeted gay kid, seeing this representation of this outsider trying to find a way to be accepted, which was essentially the description Anthony gave him, totally resonated with me,” he said.

“It really changed my life… I became more actively involved in the arts. I dropped some science subjects and started doing drama. Twenty years later I was working at the Royal Shakespeare Company,” he said.

On Thursday, the Southbank Center announced its upcoming exhibition season, which includes major retrospectives of artists Gilbert Pruesch and George Passmore, better known as Gilbert and George.

The program also includes the classical music festival “Multitudes,” which will feature collaborations between contemporary artists and the center’s resident orchestra and other performers. Conceptual artist Marina Abramovic will perform approximately 16 hours of short piano piece “Vexations” with pianist Igor Levit; at another event , there will also be a screening of the film “All of this Unreal Time” starring Cillian Murphy and live music.

“One of the things that struck me when I came here was the amazing artists who came to this building, who were brought into this building by various art form teams. But they had never met,” Ball said. “One of the things I’ve been working on … is making our art form team more collaborative. Artists are now inherently less genre-specific,” he said.

Bauer hopes such collaborations will encourage new audiences to see and listen to classical music live. He said there had been a “massive increase” in the number of young people attending classical music, but that had not translated into attendance at performances. 2022 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Research Research shows that people under 35 listen to classical music more often than people over 55.

“[Young people]going to other contemporary music events don’t necessarily jump to live classical music events because they may not think it’s something for them,” Ball said.

Southbank Center is also developing an online platform game RobloxPeople will be able to create and share music — a “real experiment,” Ball said. “Audiences at the Southbank Center may never (come to the center in person), but they are fully legitimate spectators participating in cultural events in their own way,” Ball said.

Ball said that, besides the issues of raising funds for building repairs and ensuring teamwork, one of his biggest challenges was ensuring that people saw arts and culture as a central part of life. “How do we ensure that people benefit from the value of arts and culture, whether it takes them away from their daily lives, or provides moments of empathy where they can connect with other people, or where the economic opportunities to live a real life come from?” he said. explain.

“The two things I really want us to focus on are, how do we become a space where artists feel like they can create their most adventurous work… and secondly, how do we become… on the river’ People’s Palace ‘Do the locals particularly feel that this is their space?

With that, he began planning the center’s 75th anniversary celebration.