The Lowry, Salford Sets Contemporary Season for Autumn 2023

From innovative digital technology to ghost stories by candlelight, an interactive on-stage performance/game show to role-playing lichen love stories, The Lowry, Salford has revealed its contemporary season for the Autumn 2023.  Featuring returning favourites and exciting new writing, dance, and circus - the varied programme is set to surprise, challenge, move, and inspire.

 

Matthew Eames, Head of Theatres (Contemporary and Commissioning) says: “This season, alongside established and loved productions already announced, represents our commitment to contemporary performance that surprises, inspires, challenges, and provokes. Featuring local companies like Hidden Track and Time & Again, nationally prominent artists like She Said Jump and ACE Dance and Music and returning masters like Nunkie and Ridiculusmus, we think there is something for everyone.”

 

The Cost of Everything from multi-award-winning game/theatre company Hidden Track is an interactive performance/game show for simultaneous live and online players which interrogates the cost-of-living crisis by building a brand-new model, live on stage. What would it take to change everything? What would it cost to stay the same? (Thursday 21 & Friday 22 September)

 

Time & Again Theatre Company presents Earwig. Marigold’s research into beetles is unparalleled but as a deaf woman in 1927, her work is ignored. Funny and fast-paced Earwig incorporates illustrated projections in the style of 1920s silent movies exploring what it meant to be deaf in the early 20th century against the art deco decadence of the inter-war years. (Thursday 28 & Friday 29 September)

 

I'm Muslamic, Don't Panik! Spoken word meets dance, live music meets clowning. An intimate spectacle of identity, where being British, Iranian, and a Hip-Hop head collide.   From Bristol to the Tehran marathon and back again, Bobak Champion invites us to join him on a journey to accept his own heritage, against a media culture which holds fast to the idea that the Middle East is a frightening and dangerous place. (Wednesday 4 October)

 

Multi-award-winning ensemble physical theatre company Spies Like Us bring their explosively physical comedy-thriller Speed Dial to The Lowry. After being set a series of mysterious puzzles by an ominous caller, a Professor must fight to save his missing daughter. Whodunnit? An explosively physical comedy-thriller amongst the spires and sideburns of a 1970s university.  (Friday 6 October)

 

The Forest Dream is a multi-dance style theatre work by choreographer and dance artist Payal Ramchandani. The Forest Dream aims to highlight the urgency of climatic trauma that is befalling us due to selfish acts like deforestation and rampant industrialisation. (Tuesday 10 October)

 

5 Years by Hayley Davis and presented by Inside Theatre asks if you would you exchange five years of your life for the perfect body? Yasmin has decided that she would. She is about to undertake a radical procedure that promises to deliver the perfect body and the happiness that seems just out of reach. But at what cost? 5 Years uses innovative digital technology to look at how we are bombarded with messages. A new comedy–drama that asks, ‘what do we lose in the pursuit of perfection?’ (Friday 13 October)

 

The Death & Life of All of Us comes to The Lowry after a sell-out premiere at Soho Theatre, London and a full run at Summerhall during Edinburgh Fringe 2023. Mixing documentary film footage, poignant and funny storytelling, and live music, Victor Esses explores family secrets, shame, and embracing our imperfections. At 19, Victor found his long-lost great-aunt Marcelle in Rome. She'd moved from Judaism to Christianity, Lebanon to Italy, changed her name, and kept a life-long secret. He started making a documentary about her life. 20 years later, he still hasn’t completed it… (Wednesday 18 & Thursday 19 October)

 

cheeky little brown by Papatango Prize winning playwright Nkenna Akunna (Some of Us Exist in the Future), is a failed night out, a musical, a show about heartbreak and queerness, taking place on a journey through the city Lady calls home. (Friday 20 & Saturday 21 October)

 

MUSHROOM LANGUAGE: A FUNGAL GOTHIC by Ali Matthews & Company is about the cycles that shape us - eruption, reproduction and decay. It’s about role-playing the lichen love stories, spore shoot-outs, and truffle siren songs found in our forests.  In an eerie and funny homage to folk horror, two human performers absorb and mimic 'mushroom language' through ritual and power dynamics. Who are these creatures, and what are the mushrooms trying to tell them? (Wednesday 25 & Thursday 26 October)

  

Gravest Fears: Two Ghost Stories by M R James. Master of the English ghost story M R James wrote many of his best tales to read aloud to friends by candlelight in Kings College, Cambridge in the early 20th century; since early in the 21st, Robert Lloyd Parry of Nunkie Theatre Company has been keeping the flame lit. (Friday 27 October)

 

Platform 4 presents Triffids! A gig theatre adventure in music sound and pictures! METEORS! KILLER PLANTS! B MOVIES! This remarkable collision of music, text and rich visual imagery takes the audience deep into John Wyndham's classic cold war novel: The Day of the Triffids. The live soundtrack is created with instruments including Moog, Double Bass, Theremin, Hammered Dulcimer and... a Cactus! The incredible team behind Triffids have worked with The National Theatre, Bellowhead, Southbank Centre, Kneehigh, BBC, and The Bone Ensemble. (Saturday 28 October)

 

The Guy in The Luggage Rack, the debut live show from She Said Jump is an aerial comedy about grief, memory and relationship. Suitable for adults and young people alike, the show combines physical comedy with striking aerial acrobatics and an original, constantly moving aerial set. (Wednesday 8 November)

 

Worklight Theatre presents FANBOY by award-winning writer-performer Joe Sellman-Leava and Directed by Yaz Al-Shaater. Joe has always been a nerd. In his teens, he hid it. In his twenties, he owned it. Now in his thirties, Joe is still obsessed with Star Wars, Nintendo and The Muppet Christmas Carol. But he’s started to sense something: a great disturbance in the fandom… (Thursday 9 November)

 

Ordinary Glory presents Joy Unspeakable. Chances are someone you know has an eating disorder. So why don’t you know, and why do we think they’re about skinny women who can’t eat?   An uplifting, all-female, gig-theatre show that explores disordered eating – why it’s all about food and nothing to do with food. (Friday 10 November)

 

UNKNOWN REALMS. Rooted in African and contemporary culture, ACE dance and music collaborate with two internationally acclaimed choreographers Serge Aimé Coulibaly and Vincent Mantsoe.  Performed against dynamic multidimensional soundscapes by Andy Garbi and Yvan Talbot, two stunning contrasting works examine the past and present. Six dancers rise from the ashes with powerful explosive dance that uncovers the rich history of lives lived; memories, human struggle and people letting go. (Friday 10 & Saturday 11 November)

 

Multi-award-winning theatre company RIDICULUSMUS presents So... Two long-lost brothers overcome their polarized perception and come together to get something done. Business, personal matters and the right connection for some vintage technology pepper a joyfully chaotic exchange that somehow embraces everything difficult and wrong in the world and proposes workable solutions that will definitely not “blow you away” but warm the cockles of your battered heart. (Friday 24 November)

 

Laura Murphy - A Spectacle of Herself Join Laura on a mission to serve herself up [in]appropriately for your consumption, in a bold, cinematic, acrobatic odyssey through the frontiers of mental health, queerness, rage & the 21st Century space race. Directed by Ursula Martinez, with Laura’s critical and cheeky signature mix of autobiography, lip-sync, video and aerial rope, A Spectacle of Herself navigates the personal and political to seek out new worlds and ways to be seen. (Tuesday 28 November)

 

Aunusthan is a celebration of Neo-Classical Indian Dance and Music. Step into a world of abstracted relationships, interweaved complex patterns, rigorous choreography, virtuosic performance and riotous rhythms. Featuring a cast of talented British Asian dance artists Aunusthan was conceived with the intention of portraying the multi-faceted nature of kathak (North Indian, Classical dance style). Aunusthan takes the audience on a vibrant journey through infectious rhythm and dance. (Tuesday 9 & Wednesday 10 January 2024)

 

For more information and to book tickets visit thelowry.com

 

 

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