Spoken word artist Michelle Scally Clarke premieres Division, a new performance marking Leeds’s 400th anniversary, at Slunglow’s Warehouse in Holbeck on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 September.
Built from storytelling, poetry and song, the piece draws together voices from across the city to explore identity, belonging and disconnection, alongside what Scally Clarke describes as the resilience and diversity that define Leeds. Tickets are free to book, with audiences invited to pay what they decide once they’ve seen the show.
Scally Clarke, a Leeds-born writer and performer with more than 25 years’ experience running workshops and projects across schools, festivals and community groups, was awarded a grant to develop the piece around Leeds’s 400-year history — its people, its patterns of migration, its working-class roots and its long history of social activism.
The People’s Poem
Rather than start from a fixed conclusion, she says she set out simply wanting to listen, gathering what she calls the People’s Poem from conversations held across the city, including with taxi drivers, people she met on the street, people out at clubs, and those in support groups.
In her own account of the project, Scally Clarke describes going in sceptical of the idea that Leeds — or Britain more broadly — is as divided as media coverage often suggests, a question that took on new weight for her personally after far-right, anti-migrant riots broke out in her birth mother’s hometown of Ballymena partway through her research.
What she found, in her telling, was more layered than either a simple “divided” or “united” story: real barriers facing disabled people, real mistreatment of migrants and asylum seekers, and tension within Leeds’s own Black Arts scene, but rarely open hostility face to face — leaving her to wonder aloud where prejudice actually lives when it so often stays hidden from view.
Alongside that, she says she kept encountering community and connection among ordinary people, even as division persisted in the structures and opportunities around them.
Scally Clarke frames the finished piece as a tribute to the city and its people, describing Leeds’s history as a woven cloth with its residents as the threads holding it together, and hopes audiences will come away reflecting on what unites Leeds as much as what divides it.
Division plays at The Warehouse in Holbeck, Crosby Street, Leeds, on 18 and 19 September; tickets and further details are available online.
