Manchester’s glimpse at the future arrives once more this week as FutureEverything takes over various venues to present a mix of music, design, art and performance to delight and confuse in equal measure. The sheer brilliance and bizarrely original nature of the festival means you get to see things that you would never expect throughout the rest of the calendar year. It’s a kaleidoscopic vision of a utopia that may never exist, but for one long weekend we catch a glimpse. We choose our top three events from the upcoming programme that really couldn’t exist if FutureEverything wasn’t a thing…
Robert Henke: Lumière
Is there anything more futuristic than lasers? Maybe mutants. Or giant robots that make us their fleshy slaves. But then definitely lasers. With this in mind, acclaimed sound artist and producer Robert Henke has created a live audiovisual performance using three powerful white lasers to draw ephemeral shapes floating in space. The data of these shapes will then be transformed into audible frequencies presenting a dance between the artist and the audiovisual machine (that he’s in charge of, there’ll definitely be no automaton uprising) that create sounds, shapes and structures. Henke has a history of ground-breaking techno productions under the Monolake moniker – and this is one definitely not to be missed.
Fri 28 Mar, RNCM Theatre, 124 Oxford Road, M13 9RD, 8pm, £12.50, www.rncm.ac.uk
Miwa Matreyek: This World Made Itself & Zoomwooz Live Cinema
There’s no better way to spend Mother’s Day than with this special matinee event combining live cinema with hundreds of small hand-painted paper models and live acting. It’s certainly one for the forward-thinking family. Alongside Miwa Matreyek’s entrancing mix of live performance, animation, performance and video installation, Karla and Andres invite the audience to view the making of a film while simultaneously witnessing the performance itself. A dazzling combination of art and what it is to create it, they will present ‘big themes to little people’.
Sun 30 Mar, RNCM Theatre, 124 Oxford Road, M13 9RD, 2pm, £9.50, www.rncm.ac.uk
Fireside Chat: The Space Lady (pictured)
An intimate chat, FDR-style, with the Colorado-based street performing singer who came to prominence in 1970s Boston and has recently begun playing again. An original outsider artist who’s winged helmet and Casio became synonymous with San Francisco’s Castro community through the 1990s. Though she has played around the states for the past four decades, her synth-laden pop and proto-techno sounds have never settled in their own time and evoke a future where freedom reigns.
Tue 1 Apr, Room 3 – Reception Room, Town Hall, M60 2LA, 2pm, FREE, futureeverything.org
- Words:
- John Stansfield
- Published on:
- Fri 28 Mar 2014
