B of the Bang 2005-2009 RIP

MOST cities have their landmarks - Paris the Eiffel Tower, London Big Ben, Rio de Janeiro Christ the Redeemer etc.. For four years, B of the Bang performed that function in Manchester, a 56 metre reminder on the skyline, high as a twenty storey building, of what the city stood for. Commissioned in 2003 to celebrate the success of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Manchester’s chance to clean itself up and put itself back on the map after the IRA bomb, and built outside Manchester City's new Eastlands stadium, it took its name from the sprinter Linford Christie’s claim that he starts a race on the ‘B of the Bang’ of the starting pistol.

An audacious piece of public art by the innovative young designer Thomas Heatherwick, whose best known work is a folding bridge in London, B of the Bang was a bold and unmissable gesture in Manchester’s history for being a city of firsts and fitted right into its penchant for extravagant architecture. The sculpture had unmistakeable Manc swagger behind it, erected to capture ‘the city’s innovative and pioneering spirit’. A familiar and welcoming view, exploding like a firework over the city as passengers arrived into Piccadilly on trains from London or the south, it became as much a part of the Manchester skyline as the peaks in the background.

B of the Bang was an artwork, but it was also something more than that - an icon, a reminder of the new Manchester full of ambition and hope for the future, rebuilding itself after decades of decline. Spikes reached for new ambitions like arms, stretching across often grey skies for something in the distance beyond their reach. Splayed dramatically across Manchester postcards, it became one of the bold single images that represented Manchester to the outside world post-bomb (although, implausibly, in the pictures it‘s always sunny).

Its impact was made all the more powerful by its context: B of the Bang didn’t adorn the corridors of power, but was tucked away in Beswick, a suburb just outside the city centre that ranks amongst the most deprived areas of Manchester - according to the Government’s Multiple Indices of Deprivation for 2000, Beswick was in the top 1 per cent most deprived wards in the country - where little else would make it into tourist promotional material. It didn’t look out over grand municipal buildings or manicured lawns but busy roads and a giant Asda superstore. B of the Bang wasn’t built in the type of area people would visit for pleasure, (apart from Manchester City stadium), but it was a symbol of hope that gave the area something to be proud of (in theory).

Funded partly by the Northwest Development Agency and European Regional Development Agency, it was intended as part of the process of regeneration that was being undertaken in the area, and contains a time capsule in the centre so people opening it in three hundred years time will have a record of an area of Manchester that has been knocked down and rebuilt several times, with more of the same planned for the coming years.

At B of the Bang’s launch in January 2005, the Chief Executive of the urban regeneration company New East Manchester called the B of the Bang a "very clear and bold statement of intent”. He said: “The regeneration of east Manchester needed a monumental piece of public art to provide a sense of identity and place and to represent the physical, economic and social changes underway in the area."

It’s been suggested that B of the Bang could be reerected at a different site, possibly outside the City Art Gallery, although it would lose much of its impact submerged amongst the clutter and bustle of the city centre. (However, Salford Quays has been suggested as an alternative location, and B of the Bang could inject some much needed personality into that area.)

The sculpture had problems from the start and quickly became known, unkindly, as C of the Clang by residents, with people taking exception to its rusty appearance (although this was part of the design as the sculpture was, like Angel of the North near Gateshead, built in weathering steel that was supposed to gain a layer of oxide as it was exposed to the elements). The council has considered the option of rebuilding it in a lighter material, yet it wouldn't fit so well the redbrick fabric of the city.

B of the Bang cost £1.42 million to build - way over estimate - and was finally installed two years late. It lost one of its spikes soon after being erected and had to be fenced off from the public. Last year, the council settled for £1.7million compensation in an out of court settlement, which added to local people’s anger that £120,000 of their taxes went towards funding the sculpture - although there are many passionate admirers of B of the Bang who protested against the decision to take it down.

In total, 22 out of the 180 spikes had to be removed, and earlier this year work began on sawing off its hollow tubes. Now only a collection of stumps remain, looking like a bad homemade haircut, with one lone spike trailing limply like a rats tail ponytail. B of the Bang’s gravestone esque memorial is a meek notice apologising ‘for any inconvenience caused’ due to the sculpture’s ‘technical difficulties’. The official line is that "B of the Bang is a magnificent artistic statement that was just right for modern Manchester. It is regrettable that technical problems have undermined that artistic vision”, yet Anthony Gormley, the artist behind Angel of the North, and others have criticised the council for their loss of ‘nerve’ in choosing to dismantle, rather than make the investment to repair, the sculpture.
Unlike other statues, even big ones like Angel of the North, B of the Bang has an edge to it, elegant in its simplicity yet spiky as a Yucca plant. The Beetham Tower is the image most people have of a sky high Manchester, yet its only distinguishing feature is its height, and it couldn’t be said that it contributes any excitement or dynamism to the Manchester sky. B of the Bang didn’t passively watch over the city or, like Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach, near Liverpool, stare out to sea. It swayed in the wind like a trembling tree (an inbuilt design detail) and strange music whistled through its spikes on a windy night.

As the Heatherwick Studio website puts it, “the design reacts against the convention for passive-looking monuments to sporting events that celebrate peace and harmony, rather than the dynamism and explosiveness of physical competition”. 39 year old Heatherwick was no outside choice for Manchester either, as a former student at the Manchester Polytechnic. He said: “I love the city and I’m not interested in building it anywhere else.”

Ps, a few days after I wrote/ posted this, the Manchester Evening News printed this editorial on B of the Bang, which obviously I totally disagree with (as usual!)

My journey to Salford Job Centre (to which I am a regular visitor)

Whenever I go to the jobcentre, there seems to be a high likelihood it will be raining, and I will be soaked by the time I get there. I generally cut through shiny, new Spinningfields - although it seems to flood easily, and I often get wet feet in this area due to the poor drainage! - past the courts with hoodies grouped outside and onto Bridge Street, although sometimes I approach from Chapel Street as I like the views and getting to walk under railway arches. This is the view from Chapel Street looking towards the river, probably one of the most dramatic views in Manchester - it looks so modern, futuristic even!
The buildings gleam in the sunshine as much as the puddles in front of them. There are many other modernist buildings in Manchester but not really clustered as dramatically in one area as here.

The white 1960s buildings completely contrast with the dank, dark, dripping railway arches of Chapel Street, built in grimy redbrick, from which the photo was taken!

In this photo, you can see why the new Civil Justice centre is known as the 'filing cabinet!'.

I also like walking this way as there is a curious cluster of circles in one of the railway arches:

Manchester Modernist Society

From a grubby concrete wall hidden behind scrawny trees to a shabby former council building turned into a giant advertising hoarding, all across Manchester are iconic pieces of the city's fabric laying neglected and forlorn. Otherwise known as the Holloway sculptural wall on London Road, built in 1968 as a sound-buffer yet an artwork in its own right, and the former Unemployment and Benefits Office on Aytoun Street, these are just some of Manchester’s hidden treasures that we walk past on a daily basis.

Whilst to some these buildings rank amongst outdated eyesores that should be pulled down as soon as possible, many regard them fondly as a vital part of their personal experiences of the city.

Manchester Modernist Society was formed in April by Maureen Ward and Jack Hale, two Manchester enthusiasts, to inspire people to look again at the buildings which, while not necessarily beautiful in a conventional sense, are central to our cityscape.

The pair, who are members of the Twentieth Century Society, the organisation which campaigns to protect the architectural heritage of the last century, acknowledges there are already a lot of fragmented groups that look at how we relate to the city, but wants to encourage them to work together.

Maureen said: “Lots of really interesting things exist relating to how we live in the city in a variety of ways, but often they don’t know about the others. People are coming at the city from all sorts of different angles trying to do the same thing - CUBE, flâneurs, the Loiterers Resistance Movement, the North West branch of the Twentieth Century Society We wanted to get together with likeminded people who could give us ideas we hadn’t thought of.”

As the first modern city, Manchester is choc a bloc with modern buildings, which for the society's purposes are those built between 1914 and 1999. This encompasses a lot of different architectural styles and movements, from 30s Art Deco to 60s Brutalism.

We all know Manchester is renowned for its Victorian and Edwardian architecture - think about the attention conferred on buildings like Gorton Monastery and Victoria Baths, as well as its mills - but what about those buildings that get on with it quietly in the background, minding their own business? While often not as ostentatiously flashy as the grand redbrick Victorian buildings, they have a beauty all of their own.

Maureen said: “We‘re proud of the Victorian city but the modern city developed in a totally different way to the Victorian and Georgian cities. It’s based around cars and roadways, movement and speed and that’s reflected in the design.”

She continued: “Manchester is a really modern city - so modern it doesn’t seem to care about its history. It’s in love with the future but it thinks it’s good to remember the past. The city has no history of itself if it’s always changing.”

Maureen enthused: “I wanted to spend my tiny free time saving the city from itself. We share a real concern about our recent past and our place in the future of the city. We live in the city and it forms us, so us and the city are tied to each other.”

She continued: “Manchester is so in awe of the image it has of itself post bomb. It’s very glossy and glamorous but a lot of people are worried it isn’t really for them. We’re often interested in beleaguered buildings.”

Jack added: “We’re interested in the curious, hidden and quirky bits too.”

Often deserted, Manchester’s modernist icons are neglected and left to rot, until they’re torn down to make way for the new city of glass that’s taking over Manchester, street by street, turning it into something shiny and homogenous yet sometimes cheaply built. Jack said: “It’s expensive to use old buildings in a modern way - it’s cheaper to build new ones than to modernise 1930s buildings”.

Maureen added: “I’m not convinced we’re building really excellent new architecture. Often, new buildings look as if they’ve been wrapped in tinfoil.”

Tearing down these buildings often rips out a page from the city’s history. Maureen said: “The whole of the twentieth century is gone now. Modernism means a lot of different things to different people but the vernacular is fast disappearing without really being documented - we are trying to find people who are documenting it.”

Jack, a freelance arts project facilitator and fundraiser who has spent time working at CUBE, said: “I’m an urbanist. I’m not interested in the country or medieval churches, but I’m interested in recent history. It’s a part of our architectural heritage that needs caring for so we’re doing it ourselves.”

Maureen, who has an academic background in archaeology, agreed: “Our architectural heritage shows what we were. For example, the New Century Hall had a ballroom and scooter boys used to meet there. I’m interested in old cafes as well, and meeting places.” For example, pre-1967 cafes became spaces where gay men could meet when homosexuality was still illegal.

That’s what the buildings of modern Manchester capture - its recent history, from old cinemas to tower blocks and council estates. As Maureen says, they show the ‘machinery of how the city works'.

Two buildings stand out for the pair as epitomising the society’s fasincation with modernist architecture. Maureen said: “I’m obsessed with the UBO office and have been for years. It’s magnificent in a peculiar way but it’s increasingly being surrounded by very tawdry modern buildings and its beauty is becoming very obvious.”

Jack singled out the Daily Express building on Great Ancoats Street as ’unique’ in Manchester, saying: “I love the fact it’s one of only three of its kind built. The black glass they used has become very common since the 1930s but then it was radical. A successful building has to work as a building and be beautiful as well. The Express building is a great example as you could see the factory printing machines through it, the massive newspapers going on big conveyor belts.”

He elaborated: “Disappearing buildings are often part of what we’re proud of. Buildings aren’t very interesting by themselves - it’s about what they represent and what goes on in them. The Daily Express building was part of an alternative Fleet Street.”

Maureen agreed: “Manchester was the setting of lots of firsts - what are we first in now?”

Unfortunately, few of these buildings survive in their original purpose - the Express Building for one is now flats and offices. Lutyens’ magnificent former Midland Bank on King Street, built in the 1930s, is lying empty, having trouble finding someone to give it a new use, and the Coop is moving out of the CIS tower to a new, purpose built premises. Manchester University wants to sell off the former UMIST campus, home to many innovative buildings such as the Faraday Building - many students at the university are unaware North Campus even exists - and students will cease to study at the affectionately named Toast Rack in Fallowfield by 2010. Moberly Hall, the former refectory building, which Maureen praises for its 'lovely angles', is already on its way out.

The Manchester Modernist Society’s love of the mark modernism made on our city goes far beyond buildings, however, encompassing design classics such as the K8 Telephone Kiosk. Maureen said: “There are only four of them left in Manchester now as we don’t use payphones anymore. They are listed buildings but they’re in a terrible state. It’s sad.”

Their passion even extends to Manchester’s own Highway in the Sky, the Mancunian Way, with its flyovers and roads into nowhere, a built monument to utopianism and post war optimismMaureen explained: “There’s lots of interesting bits of history that aren’t buildings too. For example, the Holloway Wall, which is rather forlorn now.”
The society acknowledges it may not be able to save the buildings that are already condemned to be replaced, but hopes to raise awareness of them before they go forever through specially commissioned artwork and screenings of old films. There will also be talks and debates, walks and social events such as outings to other cities.

Maureen cautioned: “There will be virtually nothing left if we’re not careful. People always do just want to pull things down that we now think are national treasures. The city council thought they could sell or get rid of buildings on the quiet but we’re acting as their voice. We need to get together into a critical mass to try to save them.”

She concluded: “Even if we can’t save buildings, we’d like to have a celebration before they go.”

http://www.manchestermodernistsociety.org/

Join the facebook group here.

The CUBE website has a brilliant guide to Manchester's buildings, broken down into area/ theme/ architect, with an extensive building by building guide to its modernist architecture.

Manchester Confidential has often sung the praises of modernist buildings too, from the Holloway Wall to the UBO.

Toad Lane, Rochdale - the best museum I've been to in ages!

If you've ever wondered why Manchester has a Corporation Street or the area around Shudehill and Victoria is lined with grand old buildings advertising wholesale exchange across the country, it's because the Coop, the nationwide banking/ food/ insurance/ travel chain, has its roots in Greater Manchester.

The Cooperative Society we know today may have its headquarters in Manchester, with a statue of Robert Owen - perhaps the world's most famous cooperative thinker, best known for founding a workers' community in New Lanark and fighting for workers' rights - offering protection to a child outside, but it all started in a small street in Rochdale back in 1844. Today, the Coop's main office is just a stone's throw from Manchester Victoria, where trains to Rochdale take 15 minutes.

28 'ordinary men', who became known as the Rochdale Pioneers, took it upon themselves to open a shop for two hours, two evenings a week, concerned at the exploitation of the poor by unscrupulous traders who 'mixed sand with the grain and soil with the cocoa'.

Back then, the landlord wouldn't allow a group lease, but now the Coop is the biggest consumer owned company in the world and the building where the first shop was opened, which is tucked away behind Rochdale's present day shopping area, is a fascinating museum dedicated to one of the world's biggest social movements.

On arrival, a member of staff gives a brief history of the movement. I was told proudly ‘anything cooperative today is thanks to these lads here’ and given a background to the industrial landscape: 'During the hungry 40s, wages dropped 80 per cent, but this was a chance for workers to work their way out of poverty'.

The museum, which is mainly just one room, is crammed with artefacts like weavers' clogs and looms. Objects such as pamphlets, caps and truncheons used against workers and campaigners during strikes illustrate a timeline of the cooperative movement in Rochdale. Later, letters between different branches show its spread across the world.

There are explanations of divi day, when those who invested in the company could reap their share of the profits, and the principle behind the cooperative movement can be seen first hand through the commodity tokens and Labour notes - a form of currency used mainly by craftsmen that was equal to the amount of time it was estimated goods should take to make - on display.

Cooperativism is based on the idea that labour is exchanged for labour and noone should be able to make a profit out of others.

In the nineteenth centrury, it also offered a way for workers to be educated and improve their lives socially as well as economically.

Toad Lane doubled up as a reading room and classroom to promote the ‘educational, cultural, social traditions’ of the cooperative movement, and the museum has information relating to pageants and plays held by cooperative societies as well as cricket matches between different branches and copies of the Pioneer song book.

Upstairs is like an aladdin's cave of objects donated by people from all over the world, from displays of goods on sale in cooperative shops over the last two centuries - including, intriguingly, haemonglobin capsules - to bikes and banners and a 1920s magic lantern. There are photos of cooperation in action all over the world, from Sweden to South America.

A 1934 article from the Rochdale Observer entitled 'the Romance of the Coop' describes how the Coop ‘started on £28, now handles £346,000,000 a year’, and the Coop is just as successful today.

Cooperativsm based on the Rochdale Principles is practised worldwide, with over 800 million members in more than 100 countries, and a display on Fair Trade shows how the Coop is still helping the less fortunate today.

Rochdale Pioneers Museum
31 Toad Lane
Rochdale
Lancashire
OL12 0NU

The museum is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm and Sunday 2pm to 4pm.

Adults £1.00, children/students/senior citizens 50p, family ticket £2.00.

http://museum.co-op.ac.uk/
http://www.co-operative.coop/

En Plein Air: Knitted Nature, Touchstones, Rochdale

A small room in an art gallery, hung with canvases in muted colours. Though they range from small countryside scenes to large paintings of the seaside, what they all have is that they were created outside, in the moment, and were chosen to show how art can be alive and transport the outdoors inside. The exhibition brings together artists who have drawn their inspiration from the outdoors, yet something's lost in translation. There's something flat about them, like the effect you get when paint dries and the colours become less vibrant.

Your eye, however, is drawn to something incongruous, over by the door. It appears to be a window box or plant pot on the floor, from which are climbing tens of flowers in every colour you can think of, with reds and fluorescent yellows and oranges leaping out.

This artwork almost dances through the air, fragile tendrils twisting against the pane of glass in the door. It's more alive, somehow, than any of the other works in the room. When you get closer, you realise it's knitting, but not as you've seen it before. It's sort of a pop art take on flowers, remade in wool, shiny, fluffy and multicoloured.

The flowers are cartoonishly real - gaps are knitted into the pattern where the veins of the leaves would be, thread winds through the blooms like filaments, tiny clear beads glisten like a trail of dew and silvery embroidery trails across leaves.

Others are more obviously stylised, with buttons for centres. It’s like nature magnified, complete with perching bumblebees. A starburst flower is like a giant sun, a lacy, frayed flower looks indistuingishable from the real thing, whilst also resembling la sea sponge or anemone. Another seems like a floppy starfish. Bluebells and poppies are easily identifiable, and other flowers are plaited, clumped in clusters, coiled like roses and balls of colour.

Knitted Nature, and an accompanying tree adorned with knitted Valencia oranges in Broadfield Park across the road, is an installation by the Manchester knitting duo ArtYarn who invited knitters across the world to knit a leaf or flower and send it to be part of their indoor garden.

It stands out as a reminder of the beauty that’s in the everyday around us, both in nature and in traditional crafts like knitting. Knitted Nature is so striking because it uses the imagery of nature that’s all around us and recreates it in an art form that is so often practical and useful - so conventional and accessible.

In her 1974 essay In Search Of Our Mother’s Gardens, the African-American novelist Alice Walker uses an evocative description of her mother's garden to explain how African-American women of her mother and grandmother’s generations, who were denied a basic education because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, and were therefore often unable to even read or write, expressed their creativity in the only ways they could, often conventional crafts.

Walker raises fundamental questions about what it is to be an artist - many of these women were anonymous and would have never considered themselved to be artists - and concludes that her mother’s art was her garden, describing a type of woman who ‘left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only condition her position in society allowed her to use’.

Walker asks when he ‘overworked mother’ had time to ‘know or care about feeding the creative spirit', and challenges conventional ideas of who can be an artist, saying: "The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years."

Like a painter, her mother ‘adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in…she planted ambitious gardens - and still does - with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November’.

This garden instilled in Walker a love of beauty and art that transcended their poverty. She even implies it alleviated the hardship they had to endure: "Whatever she planted grew as if by magic … because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms - sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spinea, delphiniums, verbenas".

This special talent wasn't unique to Walker's mother, though - according to Walker, every women is an artist. She quotes Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist novel A Room of One’s Own, which explores the notion that inside every women is the potential to create art, when allowed to flourish.

Walker distinguishes between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, arguing that inside the traditions that were handed down from generation could be found works of art. She says: "Many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high - and low."

Walker touches on the rediscovery of craft as an art form in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by describing a quilt on display in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, saying: “It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination.”

Vernacular art is a common theme in Walker’s writing. In another of Walker’s shorter pieces, the 1973 story Everyday Use, Walker explores the reappropriation of folk art - in this case, quilts again - by scholars and the establishment.

She describes how quilts, whilst stitched from ostensibly worthless scrap fabric, can become more than a sum of their parts, often a stitched history containing within them the story told by their composite pieces.

The quilts in Everyday Use contain 'scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jattell's Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War'.

The story raises interesting questions about the value and authenticity of art, particularly folk art. The story is broadly based around the contrast between the old way of life and the new, featuring a mother with two daughters, one of whom, Maggie, stays at home with her mother and another, Dee, who leaves the family home to study.

Dee considers the quilts to be of no inherent value, 'old fashioned' and 'out of style', until she leaves the traditional way of life and realises their value as museum pieces. She reduces the role of the quilts to 'priceless' relics of a quaint way of life that is fast disappearing - once they are removed from the context in which they were made, of course, and hung on a wall.

Dee tries to remove the quilts from their place in the family home and is offended they are set aside to be handed down to Maggie instead of her. She says: "Maggie can't appreciate these quilts...she'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use."

She rejects newer quilts offered to her, saying: "I don't want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine." Her mother counters "That'll make them last better", but Dee insists "That's not the point".

The quilts had been set aside to be handed on to Maggie on her marriage, but the artform itself is also passed from generation to generation. Whilst Dee is sent away to be educated, it is Maggie who is taught the craft of quilt making. Even though Dee accuses her mother of not understanding her 'heritage' by keeping the quilts in everyday use, her mother is perpetuating the tradition that enabled the quilts to be made by handing it on to Maggie to keep alive certain aspects of her heritage.

In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker pays tribute to her own mother for the gift she left Walker - her mother ‘handed on the creative spark' and instilled in Walker ‘a heritage of the love of beauty’. She acknowledges the debt she owes the women who went before her. She says: ‘Art is her gift, the legacy of respect she left to me, for all that illustrates and illuminates life. She has handed down respect for the possibilities and the will to grasp them.’

In one of the defining images of the essay, Walker describes how her mother’s garden shared and disseminated the beauty she created, just as crafts and traditions are passed on from generation to generation and shared: ‘And I remember people coming to my mother’s yard to be given cuttings from her flowers. I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned it into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity that people…came to stand or walk among my mother’s art.’

That's why it's so interesting to see crafts like knitting and embroidery in a gallery setting, in this age of mass production - whether they are created to be used or just conceived as objects of beauty, knitted and crafted goods strengthen the relationship between creator and product. By inviting knitted and embroidered goods into a gallery, the tradition of the handmade is celebrated and kept alive.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens can be read here.

Knitted Nature (part of UK DIY)

Touchstones Gallery
The Esplanade
Rochdale
Lancashire
OL16 1AJ

http://www.link4life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=c.showPage&pageID=1452

Until September 6

http://www.artyarn-knittednature.blogspot.com/

http://www.artyarn.blogspot.com/

Manchester Art Crawl

While the Manchester International Festival brings famous names to the city's big venues, a group of artists will be reclaiming the city's forgotten spaces, turning the centre of town into a showcase for new artists.

Like the Venice Biennale, which returned to Venice this year, diverse venues city-wide will be crammed with art of every kind.

Manchester Art Crawl is part of the fringe festival Not Part Of, which runs alongside Manchester International Festival. It will turn unused shops units, deserted office blocks and a couple of bars and pubs into temporary gallery spaces for around 50 up and coming artists, mostly students.

So far, nine venues have been finalised, with more to be confirmed. Visitors will be given a map to find their way around all the venues, which stretch from Deansgate to the Northern Quarter.
The highlight of the crawl will be the opening night, on July 9, which will see artists collaborating with bands, and creative writing students from the University of Salford.

The Art Crawl is the brainchild of five art students at Manchester School of Art, who were inspired by the first Not Part of Festival two years ago and gave themselves just eight weeks to undertake the project.

Organiser Kelly Parish said: "We found that at the last Manchester International Festival there was no Manchester stuff. There was nothing for Manchester people to get involved with.

"We wanted to be part of the Not Part Of festival as you don't have to be particularly established or have a huge budget.

She explained the idea behind the art crawl: "We were bored of the traditional exhibition format and wanted to put on a more interactive event. Everyone and anyone is welcome to come and take part and show what ever they do. There's no selection process or interviews.

"We will be taking over the city centre for one night, turning it into a giant gallery."

Interest quickly spread through word of mouth, and the group have been fundraising with a two week long clothes sale in the Manchester Metropolitan University students' union and a clubnight at Trof.

As second year students, the organisers don't get an end of year show. Kelly said: "It's a shame everything stops at the end of term. There isn't enough excitement about the work we're producing at university. It's often left in someone's loft over the summer or stuck in a skip.

"It's not that easy for people like us to get a show or any exposure, especially not in the centre of town. It takes a long time before people will take you seriously."

Fellow organiser Sophie Coombs added: "It's a chance to make more of a name for yourself."

Kelly explained: "Although we're curating the show, we are on the same level as all the artists. We know most of the people we are working with."

Kelly and fellow organiser Sarah Gaffney have previously had a show at Islington Mill, and Sophie has exhibited her work in the Triangle shopping centre.

Sophie, who says she is especially interested in curating, explained: "We are making our own galleries. It's the perfect time with the recession - we get to use empty units in the Triangle shopping centre.

"When we used the Triangle before it attracted different people, like people who were shopping. There was less of a hierarchy."

"We're getting outside the idea of art galleries as always having white walls and being pristine places where you have to be quiet - those rules don't apply now. Some of the buildings have unusual fittings which we can use to our advantage."

She continued: "We're making art galleries more carefree and fun. We are following our own rules and don't have to answer to anyone. We can be as playful as we want."

Kelly agreed: "You don't have to wait for someone to invite you to hold a show. You find your own show."

One of Sophie's jobs was to phone around estate agents finding spaces for the crawl, many of which were offered for free. Sophie said: "Lots of the estate agents were bored - they don't have much to do at the moment!"

The group were also inspired by a school trip to New York, where they visited the Armory Art Fair and hundreds of fringe events in places like Soho and Williamsburg, where all the private views were on one night and the galleries were open late. Kelly said: "All the galleries were collaborating."

Manchester differs as there are less galleries clustered in one place - but it has abandoned buildings with unlocked potential.

Kelly said: "So many of the venues were bolted, gated and not used. I'm interested in pyschogeography too - the idea of exploring the city and reinventing it, changing the way you use your city and seeing it as a fun space.

"We found one venue and we couldn't believe it wasn't already a gallery!"

Kelly said: "We ask that people try and find their own venue. People can take the initiative - it's like staging your own show within the show, although we are always open to people who need advice or help."

The majority of venues will host group shows. Kelly said: "The different spaces reflect the different artists in different ways. We match artists up with those with similar interests"

Sophie elaborated: "It was a natural thing - introducing people to each other and bringing out the similarities in their work. It's a chance to swap ideas and get involved in each other's shows."

Kelly said: "It's surprisingly easy. You would be surprised by what you can do."

"We were intimidated about approaching people and we kept thinking 'is anyone going to come?' but it's evolved into an enormous thing that's like a festival within the festival.".

They concluded: "You have to be brave and get your foot in the door. We haven't got a reputation so we haven't got anything to lose!"

The Manchester Art Crawl is free and runs from July 9 - July 16. Opening times dependent on venues (check the facebook group for more information).

The preview takes place at the Triangle Shopping Centre, Exchange Square on Thursday July 9 from 5.30-8.30pm

Artists exhibiting include:

Sarah Gaffney
Sophie Coombs
Jo Ormiston
Sophie Titherington
Kelly Parish
Jamie Clough
Steve Beadle
Rachel Ashcroft
Harry Shotton
Gavin Sodo
Rachel Carroll
Elle brotherhood
Helen Collett
Lois Macdonald
Sarah Francis
Maria Kelly
Aneta Jarzebska
Andrew Brown
Daniel Pickles
Helena Barrett
Elinor Taylor
Adam Gimour
Kirsty Durbin
Stacey Groome
David Bray
Fiona Southwellt
Jo Lane
Aziza Mills
Rosanne Robertson
Sophie Lee
Caitlin Howard
Holyanda Phillips
Aimee Allen
Amy Poole
Daniel Taylor
Hannah Dargavel-leafe
Louie Lister
David Gaffney
Sophie Faulkner, Timothy Hughes, Joe Wheatley, Celila McGoldrick (Mizuki's Ashes)

Not Part Of runs from July 2 - 18

www.notpartof.org

Welcome to Rochdale

I went on a daytrip to Rochdale a few days ago. I really liked it, although I was a bit put off when one of the first things I saw was this sign telling me I was being filmed. The sign didn't seem to show the road I was on, or have a 'you are here' sticker, which would have been more useful!

Rogue Studios Open Weekend

One of my favourite things about Manchester is that, despite having lived here for three years or so, I still hardly know anything about it and am always discovering hidden surprises. One of them is that there is an artist's studios right on my doorstep, in the large knitwear building on Chapeltown Street that's covered in signs like 'Dream Knitwear' (pictured here with a boat called Iris).

This weekend, they threw their doors open to the public and I got to see inside this amazing building, climbing the stairs - layers of red, green, yellow and white paint flaking off the walls - up to a sunlight-flooded warren of studio spaces.

From the two floors of the building they occupy, the view is like a greatest hits of the Manchester skyline, with new layers and skeletons of buildings being gradually clad everywhere you look.

In one direction is Ancoats and and the intriguingly shaped rooftops of Urban Splash's New Islington devleopment, with the hills in the distance.

Directly in front are Piccadilly Train station, the canals of Piccadilly Basin complete with houseboats and even the top couple of floors of the Sackville Street Building and the Old Fire Station at its highest point if you look hard enough, plus the odd shaped roofs of Manchester University's North Campus. At the other extreme is the Arndale and CIS tower.

I spent a while just gazing down over the quirks of the building itself - interior rooftops and courtyards - such as a sign advertising 'A Pleating Co'.

I discovered both Margaret Cahill and Jan Chlebik, whose exhibition of out of focus Manchester enlarged in black and white and placed next to shots of New York I really enjoyed at Artland Gallery earlier last year, have studios here, but these are some of the highlights of artists I came across for the first time at the weekend.

Helen Plaumer's canvases look like line drawings, until you peer closer and realise they are carefully stitched embroideries.Helen is a former set designer at Cosgrove Hall in Chorlton. She has a background in graphic design and has also worked making prototypes for Sindy dolls.Her stitches immortalise moments of every day life like buskers, people queuing to enter a museum, a lady eating spaghetti and shoppers with trolleys. In many of the black and white embroideries, a tiny patch is illuminated in paint - a Gola sports bag on the arm of a nun, the stripes of a bikini bottom in a row of swimmers observed from the back.Helen said, who works by taking photos which become drawings which are then translated into stitches said: "I capture people going about their everyday business. Sometimes I spot something. I don't go out of my way to look for the extraordinary. I paint the point of focus, for example the nun with a Gola bag I saw walking down the high street in Altrincham."I do them a stitch at a time. The image becomes an integral part of the fabric - you can't rub it out."

I was also intrigued by The Obvious Manifesto by Mark Chavez-Dawson, in which actors playing estate agents took a tour group round the brilliant Subversive Spaces exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery earlier this year, trying to sell them exhibits such as the Schneider House.

Dave Griffiths, an artist who works with reclaimed film, said: "There's a really good community of artists here. It's good to have a space you can escape to away from home."

His exhibits were based around film reshown in new settings, the most unusual of which was a 16mm reel inside a toy gun from the 1970s - click the trigger and point it at the wall and a different image is projected.

He also used a 35mm projector to show found footage of a man walking a Dalmatian from a 1970s film reel he found in a "rusted old film container" in an abandoned cinema in Clitheroe. The film was projected into the corner of his studio. Dave said: "I'm interested in the tension of the film going from one wall to another.

"I'm fascinated by the degradation of old film - the texture of the scratches. The dirt, dust and scratching is part of the language and history of film - how it's traveled. I'm interested in what's at the edges, overlooked."

One such piece magnified cue dots - tiny dots in the corner of a cinema screen when the film reel changes - under a microfiche reader. Dave said: "They're beautiful but most people don't notice them. Now you will the next time you go to the cinema! I'm like an astronomer of film travelling through the stars and constellations of cue dots."

There was a lot of more conventional photography and painting, of which I found Sue Fox's subversive photography - a series of photographs of genitals with titles like Cunt with Teeth, and Rebbecca Sitar's still, striking paintings of objects like a shell, eraser and stick magnified to fill more of a canvas, and therefore conferred with much more attention than would normally have been given to them, the most interesting.

I would have liked to have had the chance to speak to Maeve Rendel about her photos of rows of magnifying glasses. I also liked Michelle Pouncey's prints of unusual objects like hair clips and Laura Frame's illustrations and books, including a retelling of Aesop's Fables.

I enjoyed some of the 3D work, including Tenneson and Dale's playful Rulers Manifesto, a collection of rulers in different colours according to the political representation of different groups in the House of Lords, and Nicola Dale's collection of flames rising from the open covers of books in a comment on the burning of books throughout time and how it relates to the closure of libraries, rise of the internet and ebooks.

Hilary Jack's Girl In A Party Dress Hanging by A Thread was strangely reminiscent of a woodland scene in a fairytale, suspending a disco ball, twigs and a figurine from a ceiling above a circular mirror that reminded me of an enchanted well. The rest of the room was strewn with glitter and broken objects.

One of my favourite pieces, though, was one which related directly to Manchester, with even its materials drawn from the fabric of the city. Old letters from the signs of Manchester buildings were rearranged - FRAIL was drawn from University of Salford and lit up orange letters rimmed in black boldy proclaimed Manchester Oddfellows was FOR SALE.

Rogue is also hosting an exhibition called All Change, a joint Manchester - Liverpool project, until June 28:

Rogue Project Space
66-72 Chapeltown Street
Manchester
M1 2WH

Viewing by appointment
Contact Hilary Jack 07957398451
Karen Gaskill 07980924422

The Royal Standard
Unit 3
Vauxhall Business Centre
131 Vauxhall Road
Liverpool
L3 6BN

Sunday June 21-Saturday July 4, open Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11am-5pm.

http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/

"They grew down the river, all bloody and wild" - Where the Wild Roses Grow (Ancoats)

It's finally summer. The goslings that patrol the the canal with their parents seem to become less like yellow balls of fluff everyday, getting bigger and more gooselike before my eyes and taking more and more confident steps, and the sunshine is ever bringing new flowers in different colours.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon walk along the Ashton Canal to see what destruction had been done to B of the Bang (more on this vandalism of Thomas Heatherwick's sculpture later!) I spied these wild roses, a few spots of bright colour growing out of a tangle of weeds, an unlikely sign of life against the backdrop of one of the many rows of boarded up houses in this area.

Naturally, I walked the rest of the way home with this song in my head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8srgfw7GDkM

Your Mama's Cookin' - Last of term!

Started by two friends with a shared love of rockabilly music, Your Mama’s Cookin’ is Manchester´s most action packed and energetic clubnight.

Draping Tiger Lounge in bunting, village fete style, the night offers old fashioned fun like Lindy Hop lessons, free cake, knitting lessons and card games.

Lora Avedian and Jonny Walsh started YMC at the Lost and Found squat in an old meat market in the Northern Quarter in 2006. They've since taken the vintage sounds of jump blues, rock ‘n’ roll, swing, jive and rockabilly to the Salford Arms, Kro Bar, Trof, the Green Room and, most recently, Sounds from the Other City and Eurocultured.

Lora says: “The idea sprang from my love for 1940s and 50s dancing and music. The night is influenced by the Viva Cake night in London, which I attended regularly. When I moved to Manchester I found myself at a loose end for this kind of event and thought it was the perfect opportunity to bring something new to Manchester’s night life.”

With everyone being encouraged to join in and regularly swap partners, Your Mama’s Cookin’ is ideal for those who want to dance away their inhibitions at the same time as meeting new people.Lora explains: “The dance lessons are a major part to the night, we like to think they are what make us different from any other event in Manchester. We like the idea that you can learn to dance with everyone in the room, and then afterwards, if you feel inclined you can ask someone to dance.”

She elaborates: “Jump blues, early R’n’B, and (later on) rock n roll were the original modern forms of dance music. They reflected a time when young people, en masse, first had the chance to escape the strictures society imposed upon them.

As a result, it still remains fantastically hedonistic music, perfect for a release in the form of dancing.”

Lora continues: “Lindy-hop is one of the most exciting and easy to learn dances from the 40s. There are so many different dances to learn but Lindy-hop is a good introduction.

We also sometimes teach the Charleston to keep people on their toes.”

The classes are taught by Don and Helen Woodwiss. Lora says: “They are a a wonderful couple we met through attending a Lindy Hop class in the Zion Centre. They are passionate about dance, and people who come to the lessons feed off that.”

The night isn't just for dance enthusiasts, though. Lora says: "Part of the appeal of putting on the night is the wide variety of people who come along. You would never think that most of them love '50s music if you saw them walking down the street. That’s what we love about it. You never know who’s going to turn up. We want to open up everyone’s awareness to the goodness of vintage sounds."

Part of the fun is people watching, and attendees often look the part.

Lora says: “Dressing up is a huge part of the evening. We love to dress up. Although we don't push people to do it and we don’t want the night to be too formal, it is certainly good to see strapping men with slicked back hair and dolled up girls with big skirted frocks walk onto the dance floor.”

For those with two left feet who prefer to watch from the sidelines, though, there are live bands every month.

Lora says: "We usually have one live band on at the club night, and two live acts at the bar-sessions in Odd bar. Our favourites include the Momeraths, JD Smith, Zacc Rogers and Serious Sam Barrett."

She enthuses: "Serious Sam's one to watch as he's played a few times now, and is getting better and better each time. His last performance was incredible!"

However, Lora says: "There aren't that many local acts that play that sort of 1940s/50s music we love. Leeds has a thriving scene, Birmingham's pretty good, and there' are the expected number of acts on the London scene. It’s a shame, so if there are any hiding in Manchester’s undergrowth we are willing them get in touch."

Your Mama’s Cookin’ is also a good place to show off your baking, as well as dancing skills, with a bake-off every month which earns the winner a record.

Lora says: “We like elaborate decorations the most. A girl called Lucy Needles made an unbelievable, heart shaped, strawberry decorated, delicious sponge cake a few months back. That one will be hard to top.”

For the less energetic, Lora says the monthly spinoff Your Mama's Cookin' bar sessions at Odd are ideal for anyone who wants a “chilled out Sunday afternoon”.

Lora explains: “The idea with the bar-sessions, on the first Sunday of every month, was to take the music to a new crowd and put the emphasis more upon live music than dancing. It’s also a really comfortable environment for the artists to perform in.”

Your Mama’s Cookin’, Tiger Lounge, Cooper Street, Wednesday June 10 (last of term).

Knitting lessons by Rebecca Manley start at 8pm.

http://www.myspace.com/yourmamascookin

The sad story of the local newspaper

Where do you to go find your news? The internet? Television? Or do you just live in an enclosed bubble of day to day life? Hearteningly, despite the growth of broadband, mobile phone internet access and web journalism, it still seems that the local rag is often the first place where many of us find out about the issues that effect us, with 40 million adults in the UK reading a daily or weekly newspaper.

Newspapers still perform a vital function, scrutinising the local council, holding the police and NHS to account and making sure that justice is seen to be done through coverage of court cases. The local paper can act as a unifying force, from publishing sport results, births, marriages and deaths and classified ads to running campaigns - for, example, the MEN’s current campaign to return money to the Christie Hospital lost in an Icelandic bank.

Over five decades ago, one local paper, the Wakefield Express commissioned director Lindsay Anderson to make a film to celebrate its centenary, resulting in the wonderful documentary Wakefield Express: The Portrait of a Newspaper.

Lasting just over thirty minutes, it offers a snapshot of Wakefield life, and the city’s expansion, which it was there to record at every moment - as the narrator notes proudly, ‘the Express has grown with Wakefield’.

Opening with the lines ‘The backbone of a local weekly news paper is the kind of news you get just by speaking to people - you can never really tell when you may uncover a story... in a little town, the newspaper man has to know pretty well everyone’, the film places the Wakefield Express squarely in the centre of the community. We’re told ‘the reporter’s pencil is always there, recording the varied display of the region’s way of life’.

The film also shows the steps that go into the finished product, through rows of typewriters and subeditors to the traditional rotary printing method.

Wakefield Express was rescreened in Wakefield in April as part of a protest against plans to move the Wakefield offices - based in the centre of town - to a location on the outskirts of the city, thus removing the newspaper from its rightful place at the centre of Wakefield life.

The film’s depictions of hot lead and galleys, linotype and mangles seem anachronistic now, but even more worryingly, the notion of the weekly newspaper itself could soon become obsolete.

The National Newspaper Society reported that last year 60 out of 1,300 regional newspapers closed, and those that remain are scaling back staff.

It’s happening all over the country, including Manchester, which, as birthplace of the Manchester Guardian, was once referred to as the 'Fleet Street of the North'.

In March, the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust, of which the Manchester Evening News group is a part, announced that 150 staff across the Greater Manchester newspapers, including 78 journalists, were to lose their jobs. This would be accompanied by the closure of all regional offices, with their remaining staff relocated to Deansgate, where the regional weeklies will be written and designed by a pool of journalists.

The Manchester Evening News is the UK’s biggest regional newspaper, operating 22 titles across Greater Manchester, stretching from Cheshire (Wilmslow and Stockport) and Derbyshire (Glossop) to Accrington and Rossendale in Lancashire.

The MEN chapel and Manchester branch of the National Union of Journalists took out a full page advert in the Guardian to protest the cuts, and managed to reduce the redundancies, although 28 journalists from the MEN will still lose their jobs and there were 36 voluntary redundancies at the weeklies.

They point out that, for many years, the MEN has proved profitable, unlike its loss-making mother paper. GMG Regional CEO Mark Dobson said the cuts were necessary, as the Guardian’s revenue from regional media fell by 85 per cent between 2007 and 2008, even though the NUJ claim the MEN Group is still expected to make a profit of £2million this year.

Local MPs and councillors are also worried about the loss of a vital part of the democratic process. Mark Hunter, Cheadle MP, passed an Early Day Motion against the cuts, signed by over 40 MPs. There are calls for the government to intervene, and culture secretary Andy Burnham has promised a review of what can be done to help.

In a Parliamentary debate on the future of regional news, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Barbara Follett said newspapers are “at the heart of the democratic process” and “the soul of local communities”.

In the same debate, Ann Coffey, Labour MP for Stockport, said the success of local newspapers lies in being “written by journalists who are constantly out and about and who know the local area and its people well.” She added: “Local newspapers also provide a forum for individuals and organisations to speak to each other.”

This is echoed by the National Union of Journalists. Jenny Lennox, of the Manchester branch, said: "We believe that you can't do good quality local journalism unless it's physically based in the area in which it serves. With the staff cuts, it will also be harder for journalists covering somewhere like Accrington or Macclesfield to get out of the Manchester office and travel to those areas."

Part of the problem, ironically, is that newspapers are increasingly coming under threat from publications produced by local government, which are in direct competition with local newspapers.

In addition, the public often expects to receive its news for free, whether through citizen blogs or in freesheets. Traditionally, newspapers have been funded by advertising, yet this has been hit doubly hard by the recession and a shift towards online advertising.

There’s also been a fundamental shift in the way news is delivered, with reporters nowadays often expected to function as photographers, filmmakers and bloggers as well as print journalists.

We might not always agree with a local newspaper, but we’ll miss them when we’re gone. Maybe it’s about time to start buying your local paper from time to time.

www.menchapel.org.uk
www.nujmanchester.org.uk

Vivian Girls, Ruby Lounge, Wednesday May 20

Amongst all Brooklyn’s current shoe gaze revivalists - Crystal Stilts and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart in particular drowning their songs in feedback and aping the scuzzy guitar sounds of the Jesus and Marychain like it’s 1986 all over again - it’s Vivian Girls who do it with the most style.

Part of Vivian Girls’ appeal, especially live, is that they look more like a girl gang having fun together - they watch support act Male Bonding from the front row with enthusiasm, dancing and offering calls of encouragement - than aloof rock band.

Vivian Girls are a punk band, in the best sense. Not because they play hard, or fast, or even particularly loud, but because they strip music down to its barest components and play like they don’t care, offering a f*** you to musical proficiency.

Songs like Second Date, woo oohing backing vocals lingering long after the song has finished, are the musical equivalent of walking along whistling, hands in pockets. Harmonies are sugar coated, 60s girl group style, but there's always a slight undercurrent of danger.

The trio play two note guitar solos, a bass that stalks the guitar and vocal lines almost obsessively and rudimentary, clack clacking drums that attempt to hold it all together.

Songs are short and judder to an abrupt halt, as if cut off mid sentence: they build to a gradual climax, say what they’ve got to say and then don’t press the point.

There's no profound message hidden in the music. Lyrics are largely indistinguishable; lead singer Cassie Ramone’s (yes, they wear their influences on the sleeve) vocals swim low in the mix as if purposefully fighting a losing battle against a current of reverb.

That’s not to say Vivian Girls aren’t exhilarating. Tell the World, a hypnotic, almost monotone chant, surges along in a tunnel of fuzz. Wild Eyes bursts towards the crowd like a tidal wave threatening to swell over the barrier that separates the band from the audience.

By the end, swapping instruments, smiling broadly and playing in the crowd, Vivian Girls resemble legendary punk girl group the Shaggs and bring to mind the best of the punk tradition.

http://www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc

Manchester on Film, the Cornerhouse, Thursday May 14

I’ve long wanted to go inside the North West Film Archive on Chorlton Street, intrigued by what celluloid time capsules of Manchester life lie within. Last night I got a taster, at a special screening of films from the archive at the Cornerhouse.

I’ve also long been meaning to write an article about the decline of the local press in relation to a film about one newspaper, the Wakefield Express, that was recently rescreened during protests against moving the Wakefield Express from its city centre site to an out of town location.

I’ve wanted to be a reporter for as long as I can remember, and finished my news writing training at the end of January, only to enter an industry in decline, every week bringing news of more and more redundancies on weekly and daily newspapers.

It was during my adventures in the film section of Central Library on an early day of unemployment that I discovered what is probably my new favourite film - Wakefield Express: Portrait of a Newspaper, directed by Lindsay Anderson in 1952.

Imagine my delight when last night I discovered that Manchester has its own version, produced by the Guardian in 1960. News Story is a short documentary film that explains the function of the paper - ‘to inform and entertain through news, comment and opinion’ - as well as how it was made (these were the days of Linotype and hot lead).

Lasting only twenty minutes, the film goes behind the scenes at the offices of the Manchester Evening News and Guardian, four years before the Guardian moved to London. It’s a portrait of the Manchester Guardian, tracing the history of the paper, from its formation in 1821, following the Peterloo Massacre, through its famous editor CP Scott to its status an international paper sending news, via Manchester, to cities all over Europe, from Vienna to Milan.

The film visits each section of the newspaper in turn, including the editor and subeditors. We meet the writers on the international news desk, where we hear about floods in India, and local reporters interviewing strikers, as well as being introduced to the sports desk, cartoon section and features writers.

Reporters call in stories from telephone boxes and copy is sent around the country by wire machine before the paper makes its journey across the United Kingdom by train.

All the films shown were fascinating, including a behind the scenes look at Manchester City in the days long before football was the big business it has become today.

My other favourite, though, was Late Hope Street, from 1968, a grainy black and white film - ‘deliberately arty’ according to the man who introduced it - showing the regeneration of Hulme and Moss Side, and the slum clearance of whole areas of terraced housing. The man warned us that it would be accompanied by pathos inducing music, and sad strings led us to sympathise with the narrator, a lady who was refusing to leave her home amongst boarded up shells and bulldozers. She spoke of the pride the people around her had in their houses, and clearly couldn’t understand why the council was trying to get rid of her home. Against shots of people carrying front doors on their backs over heaps of rubble where streets once stood and children removing salvageable furniture through front windows, she told us ‘all we wanted was a bathroom and an indoor toilet’. She spoke of communities split up and flung across the city, often miles from each other.

Our Friends the Police was more lighthearted, showing an almost unrecognisable Manchester of flat caps and cobblestones, horses and carts and double decker trams, adverts for Bovril everywhere.

We were shown some propaganda films too, from a fundraising film for Manchester Society for the Blind, humorous for its outdated attitudes, to Summer on the Farm, a wartime drive to get people working out in the fields that emphasised the interdependence between city and country. A City Speaks, from 1946, was the most exhilarating, a council produced film that set the rollercoasters of Belle Vue, speeding over the city, a wrestling bout and a football match against the Halle Orchestra playing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

One of the few colour films showed a 1970s Piccadilly Gardens as a riot of flowers in the sunshine - very different to how it is today! Smithfield Market, similarly, showed the activity of the now boarded up, deserted market on Swan Street in the days when it was a thriving place in which to buy flowers, meat and vegetables.

There was lots of architecture on display, including an unrecognisable Market Street, and landmark events like King George opening Central Library and laying the foundation stone of the Town Hall extension, but as ever it was the shots of ordinary people and day to day life that I liked best.

http://www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk/

You Who Will Emerge from the Flood - Juliana Snapper interview about her underwater opera at Victoria Baths

Once, sounds used to fly around Victoria Baths, filling out its huge space and soaring right up to its prism roof - from the laughter of children to the roaring excitement of swimming galas. Lying derelict and empty since 1993, now it’s more often overhung by a vast, thick hum of silence. This weekend, the pool will sing again, with far creepier sounds. Experimental but beautiful, they’re unlikely to be like anything you, let alone the baths, has ever heard before.

You Who Will Emerge from the Flood, which is billed as the world’s first underwater opera, is the most exciting event in this year’s Queer Up North programme. The festival invited Los Angeles based opera singer Juliana Snapper, who has been pioneering a method of underwater swimming during performances in Ljubljana and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to rise to the unique challenge of staging an opera in Victoria Baths. Snapper has performed miniatures of the opera in dunk tanks in galleries and theatres, but Manchester will be treated to the full story.

The Baths will be perfect. To start with, the largest pool, the First Class Males Pool where the performance will take place, had to be filled with water again especially for the occasion. You Who Will Emerge is set in a watery, post-apocalypse wasteland and is based around the character of aquatic creature Blorkra, played by Snapper, who is the sole survivor. Victoria Baths itself is in a strange limbo between deserted museum piece and being restored to some kind of use.

There’s an intense atmosphere in the building which will perfectly complement Snapper’s performance. Submerged underwater with an oxygen tank and projected onto screens by video cameras, for Snapper underwater singing is as much an endurance test as the acrobatic feats of sporting disciplines.

She explains: “Singing opera is so physical. What I’m doing needs the intensity and exactitude of opera singing - it would be hard to sing country underwater for example.” She continues: “Opera singing is a steady stream of sound that gets more and more powerful. What I’m doing is a mutation of opera - it takes it further.”

Snapper explains: “I’m trying to find ways to make my instrument work differently, to change the relationship between myself and my instrument and to make different sounds from the instrument.” She describes her style as ‘radical opera’, admitting: “It sits uncomfortably between disciplines.”

One of the biggest challenges for Snapper - who admits she hates the cold, will be that the water in Victoria Baths is “horribly cold”. Snapper describes a past performance: “I went into a weird trance - the water was too cold - but luckily no-one noticed.”

You Who Will Emerge is based on a line from a poem inspired by Dante’s Inferno, 'I want to die collectively'. 'Brave' volunteers from the public will comprise the chorus, based around the edges of the pool, playing the ghosts of Blorkra’s earthly predecessors. Snapper elaborates: “The opera explores what it’s like to listen to other people.” Thrown together four days before the performance, most of the choir are not experienced singers, but will create a soundscape of different textures through the interaction between their voices, part scripted and part improvised, after just three rehearsals.

Snapper is a voice teacher by trade. She explains: “Everybody knows how to use their voice, but sometimes trained singers, like opera singers, get locked in a genre”. “Working with people’s voices makes me feel like I’ve given them something. It might sound egotistical, but it gives me a sense of pride if I can make any group of random people sound wonderful.”

Snapper had a bohemian childhood, growing up just outside Berkeley in California with her opera singer mother. Opera has always been part of her life. She explains: “I spent my misspent youth studying opera mad then sneaking out of the house to play opera”. Snapper admits “I’m an opera whore, I’ll go and see anything - there’s something wonderful about the spectacle of it”, but it was whilst studying at the Oberlin Conservatory she realised traditional forms of opera are too confining.

“I rebelled against the conservatory. The machinery of the opera industry made me feel sad. It was all about creating products and I was not a good product at the time”, she admits.

“I made my professional debut when I was 17 in the chorus of Tosca, but I preferred baroque and modern opera which allowed me to be creative”, explains Snapper. “In other opera you’re just an interpreter.”

“I went to graduate school in San Diego to do critical studies and experimental practises. I went into sound, design and theatrical installation work and did performances on the side. I assumed I’d continue as a scholar.”

It’s this merging of disciplines that characterises Snapper’s work. In the past, Snapper, who is completing a PHD in Musicology, has worked closely with the performance artist Ron Athey. She confides that “artists are generally a lot more fun and curious than musicians”.

You Who Will Emerge will feature animated videos and the music of the composer Anthony Infanti, as well as ballet by dancers in flesh coloured wetsuits inspired by the 'wedding cake' style choreography of Busby Berkeley, although Snapper describes it as “my first real solo project”.

Snapper explains: “You have to collaborate with people in opera. You can’t do it all yourself. Every piece is an operation to set up.”

She continues: “It’s like what’s happening in pop music at the moment. People are buying less music so more attention is put on the show.” She adds: “In America especially, you can’t sell opera - there’s not appeal for buying the experience.”

Snapper elaborates: “I don’t believe in the idea of the genius work, the idea of receiving inspiration from above, or the notion of the composer as vessel - over history, there’s been too much of a ‘husband composer’, ‘singer wife’ relationship.”

According to Snapper, “didactic opera with a moral message is really boring”. You Who Will Emerge, in contrast, will “convey a moment in time”. Snapper explains: “It’s not a super narrative opera - you just kind of tune into bits along the way.”

There will be some conventional aspects to the opera, however. Snapper says it’s a tragedy: “It’s an opera, she has to die.”

Snapper describes herself as ‘a punk and a feminist and a queer’, which she says helps create the meaning of the opera.

She is fascinated by the history of Victoria Baths: “I love the generosity of the baths as a public institution, and I'm interested in the way it was so hierarchical.

"They had creepy ideas of hygiene and an even creepier hierarchy of genders. What day of the week you swam on depended on how clean your water was - the men’s water was recycled and given to the women to swim in, which meant they got all the cooties. It reminded me of what I read about old baths in California which were segregated by race.”

Snapper defines opera as the combination of “intimacy and excess”. She notes: “Queers are good at combining the two.”

You Who Will Emerge will certainly be an intimate and exhilarating performance for those who are lucky enough to watch from the Bath's galleries, seeing the pool beneath come to life once more.

You Who Will Emerge, Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Sunday May 17, 8.30 - 9.15 pm.

www.julianasnapper.com
http://www.myspace.com/jsnapper
www.queerupnorth.com