In response to the pandemic-induced need for creative institutions to accompany live performance with remote access, the Lowry Theatre has launched its online platform, ‘Lowry Digital’. Going live with The Empty Auditorium, a curated season of exclusive lockdown performances by international creatives to mark the two-year anniversary of its enforced closure, the iconic venue will offer a range of commissioned digital works by renowned artists.
Petrichor, a “mindblowingly vivid” production by ThickSkin, presents a dystopian world in immersive VR where days are cyclically identical and emotionally neutral. Nothing bad ever happens, but the price is that nothing good happens either. That is, until an unlikely connection between two of its inhabitants begins to challenge the fundamentally inhumane logic at the core of their reality. Showing until the Sun 1 May, Petrichor is a timely study on the intangibles which give life colour.
Commissioned by The Lowry as part of its #LoveLowry programme, Medea/Worn is the second of two short films which reimagines a solo show from The Faction’s repertoire from 2016. Adapted from Euripides’ original work by Emily Juniper, the film revolves around a captivating dialogue about resistance and emancipation between Medea and her singing wedding dress.
Featuring Laura Murphy playing herself, this performance is all about space: taking it up as the spectacularised female body while also quite literally charting the cosmos. Murphy, in the vein of Bridget Jones, embarks on a study of personal virtue, self-doubt, identity and autobiography while drawing on her doctoral research into aerial work as a vehicle for social change.
Another exclusive Lowry commission, Dangerous Thing is an animated film featuring a pioneering mix of composition, contemporary performance and storytelling. A collaboration between Prototype Theater and visual artist Adam York Gregory, the work is a spellbinding interrogation of power, conspiracy, protest, democracy and its precarity in the modern world.
Tue 1 Mar, The Lowry, The Quays, Salford M50 3AZ
- Words:
- Wolf McFarlane
- Published on:
- Sat 12 Mar 2022
A film following the lives of an ex-con, a dementia care worker and a neuroscientist who specialises in physical human contact, this collaboration between Dante or Die and award-winning documentarian Pinny Grills explores the eternal importance of touch; a crucial aspect of our existence which was only recognised as a necessity once it became illegal. Skin Hunger on Film unpacks our tentative re-emergence from the pandemic and examines the significance of the arts in creating shared experience and reconnection.