Evie Manning Archives - North West End UK

Common Wealth stage a fashion show with a difference

14Oct

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Common Wealth stage a fashion show with a difference

Fast, Fast, Slow is a unique performance that Common Wealth Theatre company says will explore the complexity of our personal relationships to fashion, fast fashion and waste. Presented as part of British Textile Biennial 2023, the show has been conceived with community members in East Lancashire, which is an area built on a now almost defunct textile industry where an online fast fashion distributor is now one of the major employers. Fast, Fast, Slow is presented on a full-scale catwalk constructed from used clothing bales in Blackburn Cotton Exchange, which was completed in 1865 to sell cotton grown and picked by enslaved labour from Africa in the plantations of the American South. The catwalk will come to life in this multi-media performance featuring video art, cinematic ...

Peaceophobia – Oastler Market Car Park

When feminist Carol Hanisch observed that ‘the personal is political’ she could have looking into the distant future and seeing this powerful piece about the experiences of three British Pakistani men in a Britain increasingly at war with itself. One of the more depressing aspects of recent British theatre is its seeming reluctance to produce work that speaks truth to power, but that is not a charge that can be levelled at Bradford’s Common Wealth who were set up to do just that. Peaceophobia has its roots in local activism when Speakers Corner – who offer a safe space for local Asian women – ran a car meet with Bradford Modified Club to challenge Islamophobia after racist leaflets were shoved through doors. Tonight, we are huddled in a draughty soon to be demolished multi-story c...

Decades: 1970s/1980s/2000s – Leeds Playhouse

To kick off their delayed 50th birthday celebrations the Playhouse team commissioned both experienced and newer creatives to create short monologues boldly trying to meld the history of Leeds and events across the north over six decades since they opened their doors.. They are offering all six as the King Lear of monologues, or two lots of three like tonight’s offering spanning three decades. There may be some obscure artistic reasoning behind this but it seems odd to run them out of sequence as doing so might have added to their power. As a veteran of the eighties Leeds anarchist and squat scene it must have tempting for Alice Nutter to offer a sugar-coated version of that scene, but typically in Nicer Than Orange Squash she offers an often funny indictment of the hypocrisy an...