Leeds International Festival of Ideas 2024 Preview
36 speakers, 10 events, 1 venue - Festival Director Martin Dickson discusses what you can expect from the Leeds International Festival of Ideas this year.
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00:00Hello everyone, I'm Martin Dixon, the Director of Brand for Leeds PID and we're here with
00:05the magnificent Leeds Playhouse behind us because we're thrilled to be telling the world
00:10that we're bringing back the Leeds International Festival of Ideas to the Playhouse. We were
00:15here 12 months ago and in only a little over three weeks we were back here again with Liffey24.
00:22Excited would be an underestimation. Everything pretty much is close to selling out now, so
00:27we're very excited and just delighted that the city seems to be taking the festival to
00:31its heart. It's very much about what we can do to promote Leeds this festival and really
00:36bring the eyes of the world to Leeds and look at the city and go, they've really got something
00:41cool going on there, I need to be a part of it. We want to try and make that programme
00:45really broad and diverse but make it relevant to subjects that we're all talking about at
00:50home and at work. Things in society that are very important to us all. So this year we're
00:55taking on the subjects of reality TV, something that clearly rules a lot of lives and clearly
01:00takes over life, but it's fantasy. We're also taking on the subjects of neurodiversity,
01:05I think a word that lots of people have become more familiar with in recent years but perhaps
01:10don't quite understand what that means. Nile Rodgers, probably one of the most famous faces
01:14in the world, coming to talk about the creativity of music and how much influence it can have
01:19on people's lives and that's only a few of them. I think we're so pleased and excited
01:24by people's reaction because Leeds Bid as an organisation is very much about bringing
01:29people into Leeds City Centre and experiencing the city on a broader range of activities
01:34and fun events really. It's about enjoying that city centre that's all around us here.
01:39So in a broad sense we're just delighted that Liffey as one of the projects in that is now
01:44growing in its appeal. The audience will be something around 5,000 people in that playhouse
01:49over four nights and the buzz of that, given that the majority of these people live and
01:54work in this city every day, is just something really special.