Black Gold Arts Festival ft. dance, drama + poetry at Z-arts

The Black Gold Arts Festival curates recent work from a selection of black artists based in the North into a three-day event at Hulme’s Z-arts. Mixing dance, spoken word, drama, visual spectacle and performance poetry across four unique shows, the festival aims to ‘celebrate the success of culturally diverse performances’ in the region. The work on show has been developed with STUN (Sustained Theatre Up North) who will host the performances at their Z-arts studio space. Cheryl Martin’s Alaska takes a sustained look at depression and its aftermath in the life of a black lesbian. Keisha Thompson’s I Wish I Had a Moustache (pictured) tackles topics like body hair and gender identity through a contemporary feminist lens with frank comedy and challenging insight. Dancer, choreographer and director Darren Pritchard performs his own Body Of Light, a dance piece fusing movement, technology and projected imagery into a part-human, part-technological mode of free expression. Amsterdam by poet Chanje Kunda adapts the artist’s own writing into a tangled love/lust story organised around movement, words and music. Even in this modest sized festival, the diversity of subject, voice and artistic discipline within our community of black artists is inspiring stuff.

Thu 22 – Sat 24 Oct, Z-arts, 335 Stretford Road, Hulme, M15 5ZA, Times vary, Tickets £5 per performance from stunlive.com/black-gold-festival, www.facebook.com