Culture Diary w/c 29-04-2024
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…
Monday – Performance: Ka Baird, Rosie Terry Toogood & Dialect, and Ancient Plastix 7pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – £17.50
An evening full of innovative and experimental music and dance. The exciting line up features New York-based multi-instrumentalist Ka Baird, a one-off performance from choreographer and dancer Rosie Terry Toogood alongside Liverpool-based sound-collagist and composer Andrew PM Hunt, and a first hometown outing for Paul Rafferty’s ‘music for the nighttime’ pseudonym, Ancient Plastix. This looks to be a great, varied start to a week in culture.
Rope 6.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8
Not one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous or celebrated works, this 1948 film is nonetheless dripping with his trademark suspense. Adapted from a 1929 play (and said to have been inspired by a real life case), Rope is a study of murder as supposed intellectual exercise.
Tuesday – Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8
Georgian director Elene Naveriani’s film of midlife decisions finds stoically and happily independent Etero considering passion, and maybe even love, following a too close for comfort brush with the grim reaper.
Wednesday – The Legend of Ned Ludd + Post-Show Discussion from 7.30pm @ Everyman Theatre, Liverpool – £15
We stand on the precipice of AI-inspired automated society. No longer a statement from futurology or science fiction, this timely play asks ‘will we survive when our work, and our worth, are under threat?’ The evening’s ticket price includes a post show discussion in which the audience will hear from experts from the fields of AI, automated work and the performing arts.
Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Michelle Williams Gamaker and Dahong Hongxuan Wang 6pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE
Part of Bluecoat’s The Lives of Artists strand, this pairing of exhibitions has been on our radar for some time. Using moving image works to explore cinema and retell the stories of cast members’ characters marginalised by colonial narratives, Williams Gamaker celebrates and interrogates the movies she grew up with. Hongxuan Wang – who has played Hollywood’s ‘first Chinese American film star’ Anna May Wong in Williams Gamaker’s works – exhibits Role Model, a film reflecting on and paying homage to the star’s career and afterlife.
Three Minutes to Save the Planet 7pm @ Metal Liverpool – £5
This year’s WoWFest gets underway. Subtitled Fahrenheit 2024, foremost on the literature festival’s agenda this time: climate emergency, culture wars and global conflicts; so this evening’s event is apt. Giving the floor to 10 speakers (with three minutes each), the goal is to produce ‘an idea, a notion, a proposed action, a policy, a something which will help us all to pull clear of the zero-sum game of ecological disaster.’ We have our fingers crossed.
Friday – Jon Ronson: Things Fell Apart 7.30pm @ the Tung Auditorium, Liverpool (via livestream) – £15
Jon Ronson’s latest podcast, Things Fell Apart, looks at the culture wars from the kind of skewed angle few others can. Here (albeit it virtually), as part of WoWFest and hosted by journalist Ben Zand, the award winning writer unpicks and unpacks some of the threads and stories that led us here, to our present day reality of conspiracy and discord. Read our 2015 interview with Jon Ronson
Saturday – Zine Station 1pm @ Metal Liverpool – FREE
The rumours of the death of print are so old and have been repeated so often as to have fallen into cliché. Even in the case of legacy media’s eventual demise (perhaps, on balance, no bad thing), we’re confident that the humble zine – be they niche, subversive, celebratory or a combination of all of those things and more – will endure. Which brings us to this weekend’s Zine Station, showcasing a thriving scene hosted by Liverpool Community Print Station and Prints N Tha.
Exhibition Opening: Municipal 5pm @ 50 MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE
The latest exhibition, and first of 2024, at Crosby’s 50 MV. Municipal showcases work by nine artists including Emily Speed, Brendan Lyons and Emma Bennett, and promises a richly textured, varied experience.
Exhibition Opening: Creatures of the Nile @ Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool – FREE
Exhibition ‘representing the important role animals played and how their existence shaped’ ancient Egyptian and Sudanese civilisations. Among more than 250 objects, many of which are on display for the first time, highlights include a sheet from the 3,500-year-old Book of the Dead and a bronze statue which once entombed a mummified cat.
Saturday & Sunday – Exhibition Continues: Shuffle X Tobacco Warehouse 12pm-6pm @ Stanley Dock, Liverpool – FREE
The first Shuffle exhibition I saw was in the old Natwest bank in Toxteth. A run of well received shows later has seen them raise their sights higher still, to currently occupy Stanley Dock’s Tobacco Warehouse. Exhibiting artists include Colette Lilley, Gareth Kemp, Max Mallender, Katie Sadler, Megan Sparkes and many more.
Liverpool Sound City @ venues across the city centre – from £34.95
Return of the metropolitan (yay, no camping!) music festival prioritising emerging talent. This year’s line up includes the likes of singer-songwriter Caity Baser, Scottish indie swagger from The Snuts, locals done good, Red Rum Club, and punk rocking throwbacks (in a good way), Yee Loi.
Mike Pinnington
Images/media, from top: Ka Baird poster; trailer for Rope; Michelle Williams Gamaker, Thieves, (behind the scenes), 2022. Photo Ellen Jane Rogers; Jon Ronson. Image courtesy Emli Bendixen; VGM: Creatures of the Nile
