Give yourself a round of applause
Curtain Up captures the experience of being part of an audience at Lowry in Salford
Have you heard of the “frequency illusion” - when you become hyperaware of a specific word, item or concept after something has drawn your attention to it? Like when someone tells you that green cars are really rare and you start seeing them everywhere?
I’m currently experiencing that with paintings of curtains. In the last Stored Honey, I wrote about Louise Giovanelli’s exhibition at The Grundy in Blackpool, and today we have Lowry’s very different but equally drape-themed Curtain Up show. Next week’s Stored Honey will be curtain-free, apart for those in the theatre as I have a review coming your way as well as a new way of looking at the nature world around us.
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Curtain comes up on Lowry’s exhibition exploring the audience’s experience
There are two opposing sensations of being part of an audience - either you’re swept along by the shared experience, laughing or gasping together as one collective being, or you’re conspicuously alone in your own little bubble of detachment, mentally at odds with the crowd around you.
As a centre of both performing and visual arts, Lowry aims to capture the essence of the former in its new exhibition Curtain Up, while at the same time acknowledging that each audience member brings with them their own individual references, values and experiences.
There are three new commissions. Ulla von Brandenberg’s Spirits are Matter, an enormous pair of curtains handpainted in glorious harlequin hues, frame the largest space. Pulled back they offer peaks at the works beyond, as though viewed from backstage.
In Give Yourself a Round of Applause, filmmaker Chris Paul Daniels choreographs archive footage of stage shows to a monologue about self-discovery. The montage of clips would be mesmerising by themselves - a pretty girl thickly applying lipstick, an egotistical sorcerer glowering into the camera, a performer capering in a huge cauldron - but the interplay between the images and the audio transforms it into an incantation.
Rowland’s Hill’s Relic perhaps best captures the weirdness of mentally breaking out of a shared experience, and regathering the sense of yourself as an individual person. In this new work, she continues to explore her fascination with Loughborough Fair, which returns annually to the streets where she grew up.
You walk around a shadowy tube to press your face against one of the holes, and are immediately absorbed - like a time slip - into a whirl of images of the fair mixed with animation and an eerie soundtrack. Then, as your eyes get used to the whirligig sensation, you notice fellow viewer’s faces poking through other holes in the structure - and with a jolt you realise you are able to be observed.
It is a relief after this to let your mind be swept away on a current of blue in Bridget Smith cyanotype, Blueprint for a Curtain, or to tap your feet to the silent yet perceptible music of Joy Labinjo’s painting Enjoyment.
Curtain Up is at Lowry, Salford until Sunday 21 June.
See your work featured in Stored Honey
If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event by sending details and an image to laura@lauracdavis.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A or if you don’t like filling in forms I can send you the questions via email.
In case you missed it
Opening this week
The UK tour of musical Miss Saigon is calling into the Liverpool Empire this week. In the last days of the Vietnam War, 17 year-old Kim is forced to work in a Saigon bar where she falls in love with American GI Chris. After they are torn apart by the fall of Saigon, Kim goes on a journey of survival to find her way back to Chris, who has no idea he’s fathered a son. It will also be at Blackpool Winter Gardens from Tuesday 30 June to Saturday 4 July, and at Manchester Palace Theatre from Tuesday 4 August to Saturday 8 August.
Now booking
The World Premiere of The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor created by Tony award-winning choreographer and director Sonya Tayeh (Moulin Rouge:The Musical!) will take place at Aviva Studios, Manchester, opening from Thursday 25 June to Saturday 27 June. The dance work is set to the music of Sinéad O’Connor and is a mediation on voice, protest and the courage to live a life that defies the norm performed by a company of 10 women.
A festival
Angel Field Festival is taking place at Liverpool Hope University’s Creative Campus until Saturday 25 April with a range of performances, exhibitions and events. They include Together We Create, an exhibition by Neston Art Club created in collaboration with Hope students, Cathy Waller Company’s You and Us, a performance about invisible disability.
Thank you for reading the 175th edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed this week’s then please hit the ❤️ button so more people get to see it.
I’m off now to North Yorkshire for a BBQ with a mixture of artists and journalists - it’s like a mash-up of my two worlds.
Have a great week,
Laura
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