Jude Kelly, telling it as it might be... 2012 Olympics

“I’m the Joan of Arc of the Southbank”

Here’s a taster from the Guardian online click here for the original.

“As artistic head of the resurgent Southbank Centre, Jude Kelly has confounded her critics - and there were many. She tells Lyn Gardner how they had her all wrong.‘Do I think that having the Olympics here in 2012 is damaging the arts? No, I don’t,” says Jude Kelly, so firmly that I feel like a heretic summoned before the thought police for having allowed such a dangerous notion to enter my head. The former artistic director of West Yorkshire Playhouse, Kelly is one of the most powerful people in the arts. Not only is she chair of culture, ceremonies and education at the London organising committee for the Olympic games, she is also the artistic director of the recently reopened Southbank Centre, the 21-acre site which encompasses the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery. She is a woman who has always had a finger in many pies and whose mantra of access and diversity has chimed well with New Labour’s agenda over the past decade as it has increasingly seized upon the arts as a vehicle for delivering social policy. (At one point it looked as if Kelly might be the first woman to run the National Theatre. Instead, she has had to settle for the Southbank, potentially the more far-reaching empire.) …

…”Do I think that doing the Olympics is easy? No - it’s messy, chaotic and difficult. I don’t underestimate how people whose grants have been affected must feel. But am I personally responsible? No. Should we not have bid for the Olympics? No. Is it a paradox one has to live with? Yes,” says Kelly…