Pride in Trafford is now in its 5th year. How has the festival developed over that time?

Darren: “We had somewhat humble beginnings as small hyper-local festival, but we hopefully remain loyal to being a place to explore and celebrate identity and LGBTQ+ life.

“The festival is very different to more traditional Pride festival formats and art and creativity are really at the heart of what we do here in Trafford. We’ve built up some brilliant new elements including some brand-new commissioning of new work by theatre-maker Sam Danson, we’ve also grown our Pride on the Plaza family day following the inauguration last year, this year we will loads of interactive performances, plenty of information stalls and Mini Pride with Curious Arts in Sale Library. For the first time this year we’ll have an outdoor exhibition created by and for young LGBTQ+ people and a celebratory cabaret night to close the festival”.

The festival launches on The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. What is the global outlook of the festival?

Darren: “Whilst we can celebrate the change and advancements we have made here in the UK with regard to acceptance and inclusivity, there still remains so many inequalities across the world and indeed we can never take equal rights for granted, as the dangerous rhetoric that continues can and will have a detrimental impact on the lives of our community.

“Whilst of course our festival doesn’t have global reach, we believe that by increasing awareness and challenging stigma at a local level, this contributes nationally and shows solidarity internationally.

“We’re really proud that our festival focuses on children and young people and giving them an opportunity to celebrate and have their voices heard”.

Launching on the festival’s opening night and running across all four nights, is the world premiere of BI-TOPIA. What is it about?

Darren: “Bi-Topia is a brand new piece of work that is semi-autobiographical. The show explores the links between sexuality and mental health while also challenging societal norms.

“The piece has been commissioned by Pride in Trafford/Creative Industries Trafford and is being developed here in Trafford specifically for our festival audiences. The work is by Sam Danson, an amazing local artist who is taking their first steps into a solo show and follows in the footsteps of previous artists we’ve supported such as musician Minute Taker, theatre-makers, Dibby Theatre with First Time and the brilliant Girl Gang’s Millennial Pink.

“Supporting queer artists has and always will be a key ambition of our work at Pride in Trafford”.

What do you hope people will take from this event?

Darren: “Well, we hope everyone has a great time for starters.

“We want the community to celebrate just how brilliant and diverse our borough is and help us build resilience in the community and with our allies.

If we help one person to see their place in the world through the work we do, then we’ve done what we set-out to do!”

What else can people expect over the four days?

Darren: “Always a popular part of our festival programme; Laugh Riot, is an evening of alternative comedy talent (Stephen Bailey, Rosie Wilby, Marie Goulbourne and Jonathan Mayor on the bill).

“As mentioned, children and young people are at the heart of our celebrations and young LGBTQ+ people of Trafford have created a special youth pride event over at Gorse Hill Studios – activities include cardboard catwalk and drag race, screen printing, banner making and LGBTQ+ film screenings.

“We know that Pride events have the power to change hearts and minds, whilst raising awareness through activism. Emergency is a project based around young queer voices, culminating in an outdoor exhibition, highlighting the matters that are important to them around sexuality and gender identity.

“Jesus, Jane, Mother and Me – a twisted coming-of-age story by award-winning playwright Philip Stokes (Heroin(e) for Breakfast) that explores family dynamics, who our idols (a well known Yorkshire songstress) are, and just how hard life can be when you’re a little bit different.

“The final day of the festival we have a bumper programme of free activity, specifically for children and their families. High Tea with a Twist; a camp, glittery outdoor show. MiniPride – including story-time, arts and crafts with the brilliant Curious Arts team, Compact Disco; a mobile disco (complete with glitter ball) roaming the streams, plus loads of information stalls and activities for all ages.

“The festival will close with a party at Mano a Bocca featuring pizza, comedy, cabaret, and disco, as well as an appearance from legendary Manchester drag queen, Belinda Scandal”.

What is Mini-Pride and how can people get involved?

Darren: “Mini-Pride is new to the festival this year, we’re working with Curious Arts to deliver a celebration specifically for children in conjunction with Sale Library. There’ll be crafts and arts based activities, badge making and story-time sessions. Mini-Pride is a drop in event on Saturday 20 May from 12:00 – 16:00 and is open to all families of all ages”.

Pride in Trafford runs at Waterside, Sale from 17-20 May 2023.

The post New commissions for Pride in Trafford’s fabulous 5th festival appeared first on Quays Life.

As a child, my Disney-inspired view of wild animals made this story seem believable. The idea of having a cute penguin as a pet, even if just for a short while, would be a dream come true.

This childhood fantasy is at the heart of Mr Popper’s Penguins. Mr Popper (Will Kelly) is one of those ever-lasting dreamers who never grows up. He earns his living painting and decorating while day dreaming about life in the Antarctic. For Mr Popper, life is all books and imagination until one day an unusual parcel arrives making his dream a reality when out pops a fully-grown, live penguin he names, Captain Cook. Now the new visitor has arrived the cosy town of Stillwater is about to feel some ripples.

Sensible Mrs Popper (Monica Nash) has all kinds of objections at first, not least to do with keeping the house neat and tidy. But soon too she is won over by the cute little guy’s mischief and all normal rules are relaxed, particularly around table manners.

A second parcel brings Captain Cook a mate, and soon there are tiny chicks everywhere. The chaos that ensues has the youngsters in hysterics and the adults wondering if having a penguin family is much different from their own children as the little ones turn all their routines upside-down, bringing both joy and sleep deprivation.

The creation of this unlikely family is a heart-warming story that originated as a children’s book by Richard and Florence Atwater and later won Hollywood movie success with zany Jim Carry as Mr Popper.

The musical version sticks closely to the book for the story, driving the narrative with original tunes by Luke Bateman and Richy Hughes and giving a comical nod to big Broadway musicals like The Producers, particularly in some even more wildly imaginative final scenes.

At one-hour straight through the time whizzes by. And while this tightly-directed production leaves no room for interaction from the youngsters, the audience do get to join-in a penguin dance for a cool finale that can’t fail to warm the spirits.

Mr Popper’s Penguins is at Waterside, Sale from 27 November to 31 December 2019. Cookies and milk packs are available to pre-order along with your tickets for an extra £2.50 each for all shows.

Read our interview with director, Emma Earle.

The post Mr Popper’s Penguins: Review appeared first on Quays Life.

Why did you choose the name Minute Taker?

I used to work in offices for years while I was trying to figure out how to get my music career off the ground.  I used to spend a lot of time daydreaming and coming up with ideas for songs. I worked for a while as a minute taker and I liked how the name sounded simultaneously mundane and fantastical, like someone taking minutes in a meeting or an almighty time lord reaching down to steel time (haha!), or perhaps a song taking the minutes away as you listen. I felt it summed my music up quite well, kind of otherworldly but inspired by everyday things. 

How would you describe your sound?

Well I always struggle with this one because it’s quite eclectic really and doesn’t really comfortably sit in any one genre. I guess alternative singer-songwriter about covers it, although that is probably pretty vague! I would say it is quite haunting and ethereal at times, very much escapist music, with layers of vocals, piano, synths, electronic beats and distorted guitars.  

What are your musical influences and how has your work developed over time?

My biggest musical influences I would say are imaginative artists such as Kate Bush, David Bowie, Bjork and Tori Amos but I’m also really into 80’s synth pop, and particularly for this project I have been drawing influence from artists such as Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Fleetwood Mac. Visually this project has been very inspired by retro horror movies such as Italian giallo filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Also, Hitchcock, Kubrick, David Lynch and older surrealist filmmakers like Maya Deren.  

I released my first album 10 years ago which was quite folktronic sounding with lots of acoustic instruments and weird samples of found sounds. Over time I would say my music has become more synth-pop orientated.  

You are a multi-instrumentalist – how many instruments do you play?

Piano and voice are my main instruments. I also play a bit of guitar and glockenspiel. I definitely lean more towards piano and that’s usually what I use to write songs on. It was the first instrument I learnt and always was the one that came most natural to me. I think that’s often the way with people. Your musical brain moulds around whichever instrument you learn first. People who learn guitar first often seem to never quite take to piano in the same way, as I don’t with guitar. My brain always has to work harder to find the exact chord/sound I want.

What part do visuals play in experiencing your live performances?

Over the past few years I’ve been becoming increasingly interested in adding a visual dimension to my songs in order to further communicate the concepts I’m working with. I collaborated with an animation artist called Ana Staniank a few years ago on a concept album I wrote (but haven’t released yet) called To Love Somebody Melancholy. We toured that in 2014-15 and it was a really positive experience to bring that visual element to the stage when performing the songs. I’ve recently been getting into making my own music videos and this Wolf Hours project has been a way of collaborating with various filmmakers and animation artists for both the live show and music video releases too. This time the visuals are a very central part of the show and really I feel like I’m accompanying the films with music, as opposed to the other way round.     

What is Wolf Hours about?

It’s designed to give a depiction of the inner worlds of gay men at different points in time over the past century in the style of dream sequences, as often used in films to give a sense of a character’s fears, anxieties, desires, etc. The idea is that it’s all the things that go through the mind as we lie awake at night.  

Where did the idea come from?

I’d been wanting to create a show based on the experiences of gay men for some time now. Since I started playing the piano when I was 12 or so I have been using music to channel my feelings in relation to my sexuality. It was really a saving grace for me when I was growing up, often struggling to make sense of my feelings and getting very depressed I really wanted to develop visuals for songs I had written over the years, as well as new ones, to explore these feelings further, and learn more about how they connect with the experiences of other gay men at various points in recent history.

Are the stories, exploring the psyches of several gay men, based on real people?

The characters and their stories draw inspiration from real people and events but don’t specifically depict any actual real-life stories. Over the past couple of years I have been researching LGBT history, reading autobiographies of gay men, watching documentaries and more recently I have also been interviewing gay men about their own experiences. All of this along with my own personal experiences has inspired the content of the show.

How does your own life weave into your work?

My songs tend to be pretty autobiographical. Even when I write from the perspective of characters or about specific subject matter I still find my own experiences and viewpoints creeping in. I tend to find myself writing about things that have been in the back of my mind for years, like the ideas take quite a long time to form before they find their way into songs when they’re ready.

What do you hope people will take from the show?

I hope to draw people into the inner worlds of these characters and that the content will connect with their own experiences, specifically people in the LGBT community but also more widely, everyone. Hopefully it will get people thinking about the similarities and differences between the worlds of gay and straight people. I’m really interested in exploring feelings and stories that don’t normally get explored and doing that in quite abstract ways at times to connect with people in ways that are hard to do with words alone. I also hope to give an insight into the struggles of gay people at various points in time over the past century and highlight really how lucky we are now in this country with the level of acceptance we have reached and the freedom we enjoy.

How has it been to work with Waterside Arts?

Great, they’ve been very supportive of me as an artist and the project. I actually played at their Refract festival last year too, doing more of a stand-alone gig. That was the first time I’d worked with Waterside and it was a really positive experience, which was why I approached them about developing the audiovisual show for this year’s festival.

Are there plans to take Wolf Hours anywhere else?

I will be taking the show to London in Autumn. I’m planning on releasing the tickets next week. I may also tour the show. Right now, I can’t think much past finishing it in time for the Manchester premiere as there’s still a long way to go!

How does it feel to be premiering Wolf Hours as the opening to the Refract festival?

Great! It was very kind of them to put the first night of my show on the festival opening night.

Wolf Hours is supported by a grant from Superbia at Manchester Pride – what has that support meant to you?

It’s fantastic to get some support from a local LGBTQ charity and I’m honoured that they decided the project was worth contributing to.

Minute Taker: Wolf Hours is at Waterside Arts Centre, Sale, opening 10-day arts festival, Refract:19 on 18-19 July 2019.

Refract:19 runs from Thursday 18 to Saturday 27 July 2019.

The post Minute Taker aka Ben McGarvey talks Wolf Hours appeared first on Quays Life.

Tell us a little about the show?

It’s about two abandoned children: a brother who at 13 makes an impossible promise to his three-year-old sister. He does this for the most genuine, humane and compassionate reasons, but doesn’t know it’s impossible when he makes it.

By the time he realises, he knows that in breaking it he’ll destroy the only thing that has made their joint experience of a cruel world bearable. But without surrendering that thing, he can’t fulfil his own needs as a human being. Can he sacrifice his needs to maintain someone else’s happiness, and can he keep the biggest promise he’s ever made to the one person he’s vowed to protect?

On a larger scale, the play is exploring how we use fictions and play to protect our children from the realities of the world. It questions how much is too much, and what happens when you use storytelling to survive in an inhumane world, but it ends up isolating you from facing up to reality.

What was the inspiration for the story?

I became a Dad. I was spending hours and hours making up stories with my daughter when she was two-and-a-half, and that story world is in good health now: she’s five-and-a-half but bath time is still full of hundreds of interconnected characters and backstories and sub-plots!

We live behind a cemetery and it’s very beautiful – we go walking in there all the time. She was an early reader, and at a very early age after reading the gravestones one day and asking us what they were for, suddenly grasped the concept of death and was utterly inconsolable.

At least, she was inconsolable until we told her all bodies go back into the ground and help the flowers grow, and she said as long as the flower was purple that would be fine and then she seemed fine with her own mortality after all.

I’ve always been gripped by the power of story – particularly through theatre – to transform our perception of reality, but having a child ended up putting that question front and centre in my daily life.

Which questions should be answered with a full truth? What are the ones where the answers require subtleties of language to circumvent or dampen the severity of the truth? How much truth is too much?

The play takes place between 2016 and 2023. What does this the seven-year span reveal about the characters?

It reveals how their values change, as they continue to discover more about themselves in conversation with the world around them. It reveals a burgeoning understanding of compassion being the greatest political tool that they can wield in an unjust world.

It also reveals what both of them choose to do when, like many of us, they have made incredibly bold life choices with a huge amount of self-belief and confidence and desire to follow-through, then at some point have those choices challenges as misguided, erroneous and ill-judged.

I wanted to drag Connor – the brother – through a wrenching period of self-doubt and horrible compromise, where the person for whom he cares most in the world suddenly becomes an obstacle to his own deeper needs.

That felt like a darker side of becoming a parent that a lot of people don’t talk about – and I should add that whilst it’s a dramatic amplification of anything I’ve ever felt, I know it’s not an unreasonable fiction to suggest that this can sometimes be the case for new parents.

The play is written in a mixture of prose and verse. Why is this and what does each writing style bring to the piece?

I first began exploring the layout of monologue and dialogue more like verse years and years ago, but it came to the fore when I was writing Free for Half Moon back in 2013-14, and was searching for a notation of theatrical language that could communicate more to the performer about the play’s subject matter – parkour and free-running – and that could score not just action but rhythm, movement, tempo, physicality, moving image and music.

Quite a few people say my writing can be listened to as much as watched, which I take as a compliment! But I’m interested in how the rhythm of free verse can add to our journey through a story, and how one performer’s voice in the space can utterly transport us through image, metaphor and poetry.

In Off The Grid however, I needed to ground the piece linguistically by way of contrast to Connor’s wild and imaginative fictions – the prose sections offer a much more grounded experience of the story world, as witnessed by onlookers rather than Connor.

As an audience, that means quite a few times we get to understand the same moment in the plot from very different perspectives: and to me that’s a stylistic choice that supports the blurred lines between fiction, reality and truth that the piece is exploring.

I’m always curious to see how form, style, structure and metaphor can coalesce in a play’s dramaturgy to fundamentally support its themes and narrative. Writing is so much more than just plotting the story, and in theatre I think we’re able to really push those boundaries of what it means to communicate a human experience.

What process do you go through when writing a new play?

Usually there’s a curiosity or question that leads to a huge amount of research – interviews, reading, taking photographs, embedding myself in the subject matter, then sifting back through it and distilling down to the essence of the story – but with this play, because of the amount of myth-making and story-creating involved, I resisted it.

I wrote up the idea quite quickly and tried to write more instinctively: which was aided by Half Moon’s incredible Careers in Theatre programme where playwrights are able to hear very early work – just a page or two of exploratory and very open writing – responded to by over 100 school children of the target age range in a matter of days, via music, image, design, lighting and performance. The muscularity that brings to the formation of an idea is tremendous, and it always brings you belief as a writer in what you’re doing.

After that I become very diagrammatic and structure-oriented, looking for the metaphor at the heart of the work and starting to play with story designs and shapes that can allow me to see the whole shape of the play on a single (often very large!) sheet of paper.

Then it’s about using that to create the first drafts, and then onwards via feedback with actors and a director draft by draft to hone, trim, edit, shift and ultimately nudge the work closer and closer towards being rehearsal-room ready. I find first drafts the slowest and hardest part of the process – I much prefer re-writing to originating material.

What inspired your career as a writer? What advice would you give to young people hoping to follow in your footsteps?

The number one thing that inspired me is the same number one piece of advice I give to people wanting to be writers now: permission. Seek out permission from others or from within yourself to be a writer, or the writer, in an environment that supports you to do so.

I first wrote plays for my Scout troop when I was 12, and then the local amateur dramatic company when I was 14 and 15 – just skits and sketches and rip-offs from Black Adder and Monty Python mostly – but that desire (although the product was often flawed!) was lent so much integrity by the support of those around me, that they were essentially giving me permission to give it a go.

If you can seek out or give yourself validation as a writer, a creator of fictions that can translate your unique experience of the world to others, then you’ll naturally gravitate towards more and more environments that can support you – be they environments of learning, professional experience, work experience, mentoring, or just trying things out with your mates in your room.

Finally, what would you like audiences to take with them after seeing the show?

A feeling of hopefulness and a renewed belief in little creative gestures having big impacts.

Off the Grid comes to Waterside, Sale in Trafford on 20 November 2018. Visit website for full tour details.

Off the Grid: David Lane (playwright) from Half Moon Theatre on Vimeo.

The post David Lane talks about creating Off the Grid, immersive theatre for teens appeared first on Quays Life.