Festival: Manchester Weekender 2010, various venues, Manchester, October 1 – 3 2010
Art, music, literature, theatre, history, architecture, food, drink and spectacle make for a weekender of cultural excess in Manchester this October.
Visitors will have little more than 48 hours to take in no less than eight international festivals, spread across dozens of venues, with hundreds of artists and performers.
Inevitably, the genres collide. Krysko and Kashiwagi stage an event which is part club night, part performance art. He DJs; she does something with wind-up gramophones.
At the Imperial War Museum North, the sound of 1960s Gil Evans/Miles Davis jazz meets Northern brass band in the contemporary Daniel Libeskind building.
Lawrence Malstaf plans to seal himself off in vacuum packed plastic at the Freemason's Hall
Whitworth Art Gallery is a venue for Manchester Literature Festival, where Jonathan Franzen reads from his new book, Freedom, and chats to DJ and writer Dave Haslam.
The Whitworth also hosts a show of 19th century masters JMW Turner, William Holman Hunt and Samuel Palmer alongside contemporary names such as Rachel Whiteread and Olafur Eliasson, who is installing part of a real forest.
As part of AND festival, Gillian Wearing has made a feature film to be premiered at the Cornerhouse. Self Made is about 12 participants in a method acting workshop in Newcastle.
Cornerhouse is also staging an exhibition with a historical slant as Phil Collins looks at the afterlife of Marxism studies, once a core curriculum subject in the Eastern Bloc.
Kate Rich introduces art to catering in her Feral Trade Café at Castlefield Gallery, where all the produce has been creatively gathered from friends and friends of friends.
An interactive exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery brings together art and digital culture, courtesy of Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
And live art combines with experimental theatre for a micro-festival at the greenroom. Expect more than 40 free performances which could spill out onto the street.
Elsewhere, music dabbles with geography. The city’s less explored spaces host acts such as Jarvis Cocker, Bill Drummond and Jah Wobble as part of the Un-convention festival.
Music and photography are both involved in a show at The Lowry. Philip Townsend’s iconic shots from the 1960s star the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
But it’s East and West at the Manchester Museum. A show on China from the British Museum covers three millennia of the superpower’s history and culture, while photos document a jungle trek made to a village called Manchester in Bolivia in an exhibition by Liz Peel and Chris Smith.
Architecture students will be responsible for the temporary settlement outside the Museum. The Reflective Room, as the name suggests, has been designed for quiet contemplation.
There’s more photography at the People’s History Museum, where the final days of a show about public protests coincides with the Weekender. And John Rylands Library casts light on the social networks of writer Elizabeth Gaskell in context of Manchester in the time of the industrial revolution.
So the unexpected connections continue. Perhaps in response to this melee of entertainment, artist Lawrence Malstaf plans to seal himself off in vacuum packed plastic in a performance at the neo-classical Freemason’s Hall. Everyone else should expect a busy weekend.
Images courtesy the festival
For opening times, admission prices and directions visit Creative Tourist.
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