One of Manchester most well known and loved arts venues, Cornerhouse is set to go HOME this spring. Merging with the Library Theatre Company into one building, you’ll be able to see original new work in contemporary visual art, theatre and film under one roof.

HOME exterior © Mecanoo

HOME exterior, February 2015

Designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, HOME houses five cinema spaces, two theatre spaces, 500m2 gallery space, three café spaces, a contemporary function room, a bookshop and an outdoor terrace.

Douglas Coupland, installation view of Slogans for the 21st Century 2011-14 in Douglas Coupland’s everywhere is anywhere is everything, Vancouver Art Gallery 2014. Photo by Rachel Topham

For the first in a year of visual art exhibitions, projects and publications exploring the theme of Transactions of Desire, HOME presents The heart is deceitful above all things which is a group exhibition on display from 22 May – 26 July. See new work from artists including Jeremy Bailey, Declan Clarke, Basim Magdy (commission produced by Art in General in collaboration with HOME) and Jessey Tsang alongside existing work from Douglas Coupland, Irina Gheorghe and Wu Tsang amongst others.

The Funfair, credit Graeme Cooper

If theatre’s more your thing, there are three HOME theatre productions to look forward to including the world première of The Funfair, a new adaptation by Simon Stephens which sets the break-up of a youthful romance against the dizzying backdrop of the funfair, The Oresteia, directed by Blanche McIntyre – a radically stripped back version of Aeschylus’ masterpiece, and HOME’s Christmas production Inkheart, the UK première of a new stage adaptation of the bestselling novel by Cornelia Funke, directed by Walter Meierjohann.

HOME interior cinema space, February 2015

The cinema space will play host to a Music and Film season to include archive and experimental footage accompanied by soundtracks from Manchester’s most innovative musical talent. The first of which will be Lonesome directed by Pál Fejös with a live score by neo-classical composer Robin Richards accompanied by musicians from the Royal Northern College of Music on 24 May.

Also in the cinema will be this year’s ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival fiesta. The annual festival presents new filmmaking from Spain and Latin America and includes New Mexican Cinema, a four-day celebration of the best in film from Mexico.

HOME is situated at the First Street Development, just off Whitworth Street West and very close to Oxford Road and Castlefield, Manchester. For a full programme of events and exhibitions at HOME, please visit here.

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The Scottish Mental Health and Arts Film Festival (SMHAFF) returns for an eighth year, running from 1 – 19 of October. With over 300 events around Scotland, the festival celebrates the artistic achievements of people with experience of mental health issues. The theme for this year is power.

Ana Ana – a UK premiere in our core film programme C Petr Lom, Corinne van Egeraat

Including theatre, film, literature and music, this year’s festival will kick off with all-day event Moving Minds, followed in short succession by three UK film premieres. One of the premieres is Ana Ana, a cinematic poem following four young Egyptian women struggling to make sense of their post-Arab Spring world through filmmaking.

In the Theatre programme, see Emma Jayne Park’s tour Status Anxiety & Thinking in the First Person featuring a hip hop performance exploring who we become when hidden behind a computer screen. This year, the festival will also host its very first International Writing Awards with Bipolar Scotland. Learn the power of the writing process for the understanding of and recovery from mental ill health. Finally, don’t miss the extensive music programme which includes the release of Withered Hand’s new Scottish indie rock album ‘New Gods.’

Status Anxiety & Thinking in the first person C Maria Falconer

Watch the trailer for the upcoming festival here:

To find out more about the programme, see the SMHAFF website.

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Browse through our event bulletin to find more events.

Based in Edinburgh, the Traverse Theatre is Scotland’s new writing theatre. TravCast is a monthly podcast where host and associate director, Emma Callander picks the brains of well-known theatre-makers and playwrights whose work is featured in the Traverse Theatre programme. There’s nearly two years of podcasts to catch-up on where you can hear from writers such as David Leddy and John Byrne to name a few.

Listen to this month’s podcast here:

To start listening to TravCast, check out the Traverse Theatre SoundCloud here or subscribe via iTunes. 

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As it is the week of Big Dance, we decided to showcase What On Earth!? – Duck’s Dream Performance by the Scottish Dance Theatre. It features Graeme Hawkins’ (aka Retchy) animated projections in the background. Get your dancing shoes on and join in.

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The Wardrobe Department is a powerhouse of production. During a large main stage show there will be up to 6 staff employed in this department including a supervisor, cutters, assistants and a dresser, who will all work closely with the show’s designer.

Where possible costumes can be sourced from the theatre’s extensive costume store, which houses thousands of items of clothing, accessories and shoes from pretty much any period in history. There is a separate panto store for some of the more outlandish outfits.

The talented team make and fit bespoke costumes across a huge range of styles. Some of the most intricate and impressive work can be seen in period dresses, such as that worn by Siobhan Redmond in Mary Stuart.

Costumes made in-house then join the ever-growing costume store for potential re-use or adaptation at a later date.

The wardrobe department also houses a fitting room and laundry.

Visit Citizen Theatre website for more information about workshops and performances.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Last night I watched a documentary on BBC4 called The Joy of Stats. I also found out about Culture Hack Day, being held at the Royal Opera House in January, to play with data released by a number of creative institutions.

BBC also created a documentary about diagrams in here. I haven’t watched it yet, but imagine it deals with overlapping themes.

I suppose these things have got me wondering…

What do we (as in creative types) do with data, and why do we do it? Where are we going with it and what does it mean to audiences? I haven’t looked around much, but my gut feeling is that creative use of data is generally paper or screen-based at the moment. Is that true?

What happens if it moves into more immersive environments? So it all becomes that bit more experiential and…theatrical? Is there potential for exploring real-time relationships, representing them, and letting people interact within them?

Any more / better / bigger examples very gratefully received.

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Member comments transferred from previous website:

Neil McGuire- More on this topic here

Would echo the reference to tufte made earlier in this thread. His disassembly of the ‘cognitive style of powerpoint‘ sort of pre-dates some of the issues with the current vogue for data visualisation that often does little to bring clarity to the situation, and are instead an exercise in vector-based decoration.One the most powerful ‘data’ visualisations that i can think of, and which had a direct effect on the social/political activities of the day was this one which had a direct impact on public perception of slavery, and contributed in some way towards its abolition.
The interesting thing for me is as much in the politics – designers interacting with data but where the outcome isn’t necessarily a ‘neutral’ or benign rendering of it. Had the good fortune to be in amsterdam at the weekend and saw daniel van der velden of metahaven talking about their recent work on/with/for wikileaks… a complex set of data but the outcome of this project as much to do with the politics of the situation and ‘identity’ as to do with how the data works and how it is connected.

In terms of theatre, while in amsterdam met up with a friend who is now working at Lust / LustLab – they just did a project with an opera company using projections and voice triggered rss feeds as part of, and responding to the performance.
other useful resources: visual complexity.

MitchMiller: Well, data visualisation – in this case oral testimony and common perception – is the core of what I’ve been wrestling with on my  (shameless plug alert) dialectogramsproject. You can do fascinating stuff with quantitative data, but qualitative can be more tricky. My approach at the moment is quite ‘straight’ graphic art, but I think there’s interesting work to be done with interpersonal relationships and their representation – an idea I had was to use circuit schematics to depict social relationships then build whatever circuit results, to see if the world goes ‘pop’ when you switch it on..Check out the work of Edward Tufte – http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ he’s seen as the godfather of data visualisation in America, Mark Lombardi and the latest issue of Varoom magazine which has some amazing ‘word’ pictures.

clyde9: for info graphics try http://infosthetics.com/

unfortunately the bbc4 doc on diagrams was a bit of a lemon, 15 mins of story stretch out over half a hour, with regular “bite sized” recaps . . . what happened to actual documentary making?

His arrival at the Tron was a bold step for both theatre and director. After a few rocky years, the venue was caught between a populist past and a commitment to new, exciting work. Its annual pantomime, for example, is a Glasgow institute, and is nothing like any other pantomime in the UK. Yet across the year, it struggled to maintain a distinctive identity between the other theatres.

Arnold set to work immediately: within a year, he has instituted a new festival – Mayfesto – opened up the smaller spaces for younger companies, picked up praise for his direction of tough-talking scripts and reconceived The Tron as more than just a theatre. Taking advantage of the bar space, he has hosted cabarets, including Tam Dean Burn’s political variety, Lost in Digression and the old favourite Supper Club. Current advertising makes it clear that The Tron is more than just a theatre, but a restaurant, bar, community and gig venue rolled into one.

The theatre at the Tron follows a variety of strands. There are touring companies, visiting from across Scotland – recent guests have included Dogstar and Vox Motus. There are Tron company works, sometimes directed by Arnold himself, as in his successful Drawer Boy. Local companies such as Flatrate occupy the upstairs Counting House, while the Victoria bar has at least one variety night a month. Meanwhile, through their artist in residence Leann O’Kasi, they have one of the sharpest new directors already on call.

At the same time, The Tron has been experimenting with new ways of commissioning plays: a competition in association with the National Theatre of Scotland , Open Stage, led to the development of three new plays from established authors – including CATS award winner Rob Drummond –  and the winning entry, Sea and Land and Sky by Abigail Doherty premiered in October.

The energy and diversity of The Tron’s approaches and programming is perhaps best expressed through Arnold’s Mayfesto. Partially a revival of the old Glasgow Mayfest, it took a consciously political attitude to theatre, including work that discussed everything from Israel’s occupation of the Left Bank through to the interrogation techniques of the War Against Terror. With two or three plays per evening, it built into a comprehensive festival of political performance, accessing a wide variety of opinions and voice, and turning the bar into a late night mixture of a social networking club and discussion chamber.

Like many of the other theatres, The Tron expresses a particular strand of Glaswegian performance. Concentrating on the script perhaps more than The Arches or Tramway, it gives time to new writers and directors, and produces modern successes alongside new work. It still has a determinedly popular edge, but still has space for those awkward customers who insist on pushing the boundaries – rather like Arnold himself.

We know many of you are interested in details on the performance programme. However, at the moment we can’t say too much it is in the process of being finalised, but rest assured that the programme will showcase a variety of Scotland’s most innovative and talented performers. For those who register as delegates, you will also have access to a range of talks and late night social events. These will provide an opportunity to network and meet people involved in similar artistic disciplines.

If you are interested in any more information, you can:

- follow us on Twitter – @IETMGlasgow
- join us on Facebook – www.facebook.com
- email us – info@ietm-glasgow.eu
- check out our website – www.ietm-glasgow.eu

Scottish Dance Theatre are the biggest name on the programme: through their presence at the Fringe every year, and a relentless touring programme, the Dundee dancers have blazed a trail for contemporary dance. Led by artistic director Janet Smith, their mission seems to be to bring contemporary work to a wider public. Double bill The Life and Times of Girl A and NQR  is a typical combination of serious content – NQR stands for Not Quite Right, a medical term for those who don’t fit preconceived ideas of normality – and accessible choreography. 

Janis Claxton’s work is surprisingly playful: over the past few years, she has been concentrating on the idea of the human as an animal: for the Fringe 2008, this involved capturing dancers in Enclosure 44 of Edinburgh Zoo, while Torque set animal gestures to the score of Bach’s Partita #2.  Having recently toured China with an iteration of Human Animal – like Enclosure 44 it is a durational and site-responsive piece – she has moved from being one of Scotland’s rising stars to a strong international export.

Both Curious Seed and Room 2 Manoeuvre debuted their current shows at Dance Base in 2009: Curious Seed’s Found won a Herald Angel, while Tony Mill’s warning about the dangers of television has been touring consistently for the past eighteen months. While Mill’s Watch It! is a solo, Found is a fascinating collaboration between choreographer Christine Devaney and  musician/author Luke Sutherland. With live music, passages of speech alongside the dance, it represents a fine example of “dance theatre”, moving beyond the expected patterns of dance into a more immediate and direct style of performance.

PlanB’s revival of A Wee Home From Home proves how a work can retain its relevance, and popularity, even after twenty years. Another example of “dance theatre”, it works as a duet between dancer Frank McConnell and musician Michael Marra. Dealing with alienation and the problems of coming home to “Mother Glasgow”, it retains a certain poignancy, even though its vision of Scottishness belongs to an earlier era.  Directed by Communicado’s Gerry Mulgrew, it brings together  something of a performance supergroup and is recommended for its easy fusion of Marra’s stripped down melancholy and McConnell’s hyperkinetic movement.

Image: Sir Sean Connery arrives at the Festival Theatre for the opening gala of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival

The opening gala of the Edinburgh International Film Festival is usually held at Edinburgh’s Cineworld. Slightly out of town and in a former industrial area the cinema never quite felt right for such a glitzy event. Sir Sean Connery would step out of his chauffer driven car just by Pizza Hut and walk the red carpet with views of the car park and Nandos. So it was with great excitement that we heard earlier this year that the venue was to change to the Festival Theatre – a large theatre tucked into Edinburgh’s old town.

And what a change! It’s a beautiful theatre with old wooden seats and was a perfect match for last night’s film – Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist – which starts in an almost identical theatre as it sets out the story of an ageing magician struggling to fit into a changing world. The film looks beautiful and creates a very romantic depiction of Edinburgh, although the story is somewhat slight. Lots of lovely touches though and definitely one to hunt out if you liked the director’s previous film, Belleville Rendezvous.

One of the interesting things about The Illusionist being picked to open the festival is that it is yet another example of the greater profile being given to animation. A few years ago it would have been surprising for a prestigious festival to open with an animation. Yet last year Cannes Film Festival did just that with Pixar’s Up and what a success it was. Edinburgh has followed suit and it really looks like film festivals are embracing an artform that has traditionally been kept to the margins.