'It
was an enchanted place and although no longer as it was, the vintage fittings
and humidor cigar counter long gone, replaced by rows of Pot Noodles, I still
visit in my mind’s eye.'
What’s your name?
What
do you do?
There is something delightfully,
incurably wrong with my head, fuelling a compulsion to create, dream and
conjure the most ridiculous and absurd of activities, events and installations.
I am powerless to resist the flow of ideas. In other words, I do stuff. I make
things. I ask people to help me out and very often they do. On paper, I am a producer, curator and artist-maker, currently the Visual Arts
Programme Manager at Cornerhouse and HOME, Manchester’s international centre
for cinema, theatre and contemporary visual art. My background is in a mixture
of arts production, including ten years at the BBC. In my day job I support an
international roster of emerging and mid-career artists, covering experimental
film and video, installation, live performance and public participation.
It’s been a bumpy but incredible eighteen
months following the relocation of a close friend to the lure of sunny Oz,
coupled with an abrupt finish to a relationship. There’s a term I use, ‘raft building’,
to describe the process of lashing myself to an all-consuming project to carry
me through rough waters, when swimming isn’t enough to keep from floundering. Fortunately,
it was at this exact moment I was asked to produce my first feature-length
movie. Jamie Shovlin’s Rough Cut is a
hybrid of fiction and documentary capturing the process of recreating/reimagining
a 1970s horror movie that never actually existed. I even appear in it myself,
as a polo-necked villain, and as a pair of hands inside a fog-wreathed cabin in
the woods…
The
project was reviewed in the leading cinema press – from Sight and Sound to a full-page feature in the Guardian Guide to Empire
and Total Film – and selected for the
Rotterdam International Film Festival, and continues to screen on the
international festival circuit, most recently in New York. I’m exceptionally
proud of what we achieved, and the memories of tramping about the Lake
District, doubling for Argento’s Italy and slasher-camp America, will stay with
me always: plagued by clouds of razor-fanged midges, clambering through quarries
and caves, blowing up scale models on the moors and slathering a giant, monster
worm with buckets of sexual lubricant for slime.
I also squeezed in some projects of my
own, including That Dame Upstairs, a
noir-styled monochrome life drawing class and performance with The Sisters
Gorgeous, and Nicho Nativity, a
Mexican-themed Christmas grotto in the basement of Oklahoma, the latter thanks
to a grant from The Paul Hamlyn Foundation. I kicked the year in the nuts with
a sell-out 300 seat screening of my recurring Scratch and Sniff Cinema series, this time for The Wicker Man, with odours ranging from village orgy (crushed
rosemary) to burning virgin (roasting meat). I did say I was compulsive…
All rafts sink by the nature of their transitory
purpose, so there always needs to be another one waiting. Before I reach The
Other Side, I’m aiming for a personal best score. We only get one attempt at this
game. There are no start-agains.
Where do you live?
In
leafy Old Trafford, the nearly-Chorlton but most definitely not-Hulme neighbourhood where you get
more square foot per butt. It’s close to the city and I prefer old Victorian
housing stock to charmless, city-centre shoeboxes, plus I’m around the corner
from the Hong Kong Chippy. They make the best chips and gravy in South
Manchester with a free side of highly personalised criticism delivered in
Cantonese.
Tell us the story of how
you ended up in Manchester.
I’m
from here, raised in Rusholme and Salford, though no one seems to believe me. I
lack the requisite accent (even though my vowels are distinctly Northern) and right
from the playground I was accused of being ‘posh’. What this actually meant was
that I loved to read, and because I was partly raised by my surrogate television
family (Floella Benjamin, Derek Griffiths, Johnny Ball, Fingerbobs, Bagpuss) I
unconsciously imitated them, particularly when called upon to read aloud, or at
bedtime, hence ‘posh’.
Somewhat incredibly, I’ve been
attending Cornerhouse for over twenty years. This attendance was initially prompted
by an older woman – we’ll call her Sylvia – who drove a Porsche and had a husband
stashed in the attic. Sylvia befriended me at the video rental shop and would
drive my friend Moira and I to watch French people shout at each other and have
miserable sex (which describes about 80% of independent cinema, then and now).
I last saw Sylvia when, as an asexual young adult, I was turned out of her
house when her husband accused us of having an affair. ‘You’d better go,’ she
urged, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow’. To my relief she never did call.
Around this time I took a self-funded gap
year to work as a teacher in Varna, on the coast of the Black Sea, which wasn’t
as edifying as I’d hoped, underscored as it was by a diet of stale bread and
Nutella. On returning to England I moved to Newcastle to study literature, working
at Northern Stage as an usher and spending summers with the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe Office. From there I went to Belfast, a lonely period in which everyone
seemed to return to their hometowns at the weekend, leaving me to wander around
Belfast Zoo where more frequently than not I would be pursued by a rogue Pelican
that took a dislike to me and would wait, hissing, around the corner of public
footpaths.
I’ve been back in Manchester for a long
time now, and I think if I were to relocate again, I’d make it a big one –
across the sea and far away. But Manchester will always be the soil that clings
to my roots.
What’s great about this
city?
It
is a city in its truest sense, indifferent to human suffering or achievement,
built on opportunism, greed, poverty and wealth, the unremarked-upon lives of the
many, and marble-hewn egos of a few. It is an ill-planned, clumsy, mismatched
patchwork of pre-war Victoriana and post-war concrete, dotted with
boom-and-bust glass-walled hives of hipster drones. There are enough ‘quarters’
to create more than one whole, no skyline to speak of, and we are baptised
nightly in bodily fluids as the populous knock back their over-priced cocktails
and finish with a bollock burger on the way home. Despite, or because of this, Manchester
is at the very least authentic; an ugly truth, a beautiful lie, and so
forgivably flawed. It is a city of human scale that refuses to stop playing and
come in for tea.
Do
you have a favourite Manchester building?
There’s
an unassuming shop front in the warrens of Rusholme that will always be a
symbolic beacon for me. It’s my parent’s old newsagents, which I lived above as
a child. The last time I paid a pilgrimage there it was dilapidated and near
ruinous… the windows plastered with discounted phone card adverts. But the
refuse sacks that litter the adjacent streets appear, to me, like a
black-capped fairy circle, hinting at the residue of magic within. It was the
late 1970s when we lived there, before the rash of supermarkets and out-of-town
shopping centres, when corner shops were also the local toy store, and the stock
changed according to season; rows of eggs at Easter, monster masks at Halloween,
and ‘Standard Firework’ selection boxes in the run up to Bonfire Night. At
Christmas I would sit on towers of Quality Street tins, reading about the
application of natural yogurt as a cure-all in the problem pages of Just Seventeen. It was an enchanted place
and although no longer as it was, the vintage fittings and humidor cigar counter
long gone, replaced by rows of Pot Noodles, I still visit in my mind’s eye.
Do you have a favourite
Mancunian?
My
twin sister, Katie. She would never turn her back on me, nor I her, no matter
our documented attempts to kill one another (the first when we were two years
old, and I maintain that she pushed me down the stairs first). We have a shared
memory as infants of a lampshade swinging between our beds, seemingly by an
invisible force. Read into that what you will, but cross us together at your
peril, and beware sewing needles that mysteriously appear in wet facecloths. Come
the apocalypse we will stand back to back, wielding kitchen knives, making a
detour into All Saints for slimming survivalist fashion, all the while arguing
furiously about who is having the harder time of it.
What’s
your favourite pub/bar/club/restaurant/park/venue?
There’s
a small swimming pool where I swim most lunchtimes that I’m not prepared to promote
the existence of, for fear it will be invaded by people with better bodies. But
I’ll happily give the thumbs-up to Fred Aldous, The Briton’s Protection, The
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, TwentyTwentyTwo and the Ray
Harryhausen-like mural and statue of a terrifying, anorexic Christ in St
Augustine’s Catholic Church, built of WWII bomb debris… and really, who can
live without Stitches off Deansgate for swift clothing alterations?
What do you think is
missing from Manchester?
Ask not what your city
can do for you, but what you can do for your city. There’s far too much white noise
nostalgia for times past, coupled with a lot of ‘what-if’ but very little direct
action. I love what the Manchester Modernist Society and Loiterers Resistance Movement
are doing, aiding interpretation and facilitating engagement, not placing the
past underneath a bell jar. They should be championed as civic superheroes,
instead of marginalised as black sheep. There’s also a growing, infuriating
trend towards ghettoisation amongst audiences for live events of any kind,
sticking to one venue or scene instead of getting out there. I’ve had people
complain to me that they didn’t know such-and-such a thing was happening
because they were not directly invited via Facebook. People need to seek out
and support a wider cultural ecology with exposure to new ideas and unfamiliar
disciplines. It is each and every person’s responsibility to make your city a
better place.
If
I was Mayor for a day I would …
Give
that guy who works at Cornerhouse the keys to the little shuttered-up shop
under a railway arch facing Monroes, beneath Piccadilly Station, and allow him to
use it rent free as a sit-and-drift reading room, along the lines of the
Prelinger Archive in San Francisco. There would be books, photo albums, VHS
tapes, music mix cassettes, redundant media players, records, part-completed Panini
sticker albums and shoeboxes filled with the ephemera of others, curated and rotated
with the sole intention of encouraging the mind to wander. A bank of cubicles
with curtains would allow privacy for those who needed a little cry for
whatever reason, with a 50p sob box on trust to help pay for the electric. Outside,
a neon light installation and quote from Shirley Conran’s Lace would read, Which one of you bitches is my mother?
Who
else would you like to nominate to answer this questionnaire?
Sharon
of Sharon’s Flowers, next to Big Hands on Oxford Road, but you’d need to enter
backwards holding up a mirrored shield. Do not look into her eyes.
Bren’s next project has
been commissioned by the North West Central Film Hub, part of the British Film
Institute Film Audience Network. In his first outing as director, a cinema
audience will be plunged into total darkness for a filmic experience without visuals,
instead wearing wireless headphones using binaural audio, a specialised method of audio capture that
creates a 360º spatial soundscape, best described as a form of aural
ventriloquism. The unfolding tale is that of a classic haunting...
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