Never has a shopping experience been so stressful. Along with our wardrobe, hair and make-up supervisor Di Lucille Campbell, I’d negotiated a one-hour ‘supermarket sweep’ inside the extensive Costume Store of The Library Theatre Company; a long-estabished Manchester based performance company (founded 1952) and recent merger under the mega-arts umbrella of the Greater Manchester Arts Centre.
Cue fugue
Will you look at the state of those fingernails?! In my excuse, the place hadn’t been dusted for years… fifty-odd years to be precise. Much to my surprise I make it into the exhibition poster for Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba‘s forthcoming exhibition at Cornerhouse: Subject To Constant Change. Including a new film commission in partnership with Turner Contemporary, Margate, where I pop up again in ghostly, semi-transparent form… Also starring 84 year-old Sean O’Callaghan, also known as ‘Dad’, as an old timer who can’t play the same giant pipe organ for toffee. No, not even a Werther’s Original.
Rosa Barba film shoot
All images in this post copyright Jamie Alun Price
Umm, what just happened there? One minute I’m shuffling papers around the desk, contracts, assisting with a call for participants for an artist film shoot to support a new co-commission betweeen Cornerhouse and Turner Contemporary, Margate for Berlin artist Rosa Barba, the next I’m IN the film itself… accompanied by my 83 year-old Dad! Didn’t see this one coming. Filming took place in the previously abandoned Albert Hall, a beautiful Victorian former Methodist Hall with a humongous dust-infused pipe organ, where Rosa instructed our eclectic group of volunteers. We were responding to a limited but intriguing brief that we may well be the last people alive on Earth, and had sought shelter and companionship within… but could no longer step outside. For what reason? Nobody knew. There were mutterings about radiation, infection, TV Licence detector vans.
Afterglow
A selection of images from the closing night performance-party of AND: trixxie carr’s The Right to RULE. And what a night it was! Glorious. Incredible. Stupendous. Flawless. These words don’t even come close. Write-up, video clips and image galleries coming when we recover… all images in this post courtesy of Roshana Rubin-Mayhew.