MIF25 – Live Art Alive

SURROUND SOUNDS

SOUTH WAREHOUSE, AVIVA STUDIOS

The South Warehouse at Aviva Studios transformed into an immersive, in-the-round venue for this late night takeover by Surround Sounds. Moody industrial ceilings, balconies for pop up performances and a circular stage for live music ensured a layout that invited movement and spontaneity.

The lineup was an eclectic curation with sets from cult Manchester band WU LYF (making a rare live return), North London’s Lex Amor, and a b2b DJ session by AFRODEUTSCHE with Jamz Supernova anchored the night. Rising talents like Reisner, Adisa Allen, Sophia Dignam (bringing jazz‑soul‑electronic fusion vibes), Che3kz, Jali Nyonkoling Kuyateh, plus collective walkabouts by Ghetto Fabulous, Club Clam, The Fvck Pigs, Banksie, and Coco Cannell ensured genre-blurring, high-energy variety.

The shift to an in-the-round stage helped cultivate a sense of communal celebration with the audience more a part of the perfomance than traditional music staging often allows for. There was no break in the momentum with live sets and DJ sets ensuring the programming unfolded like a continuous rave‑meets‑festival carousel, pulling you through waves of alt‑rock, rap, jazz‑infused textures, hard‑hitting bass, and art‑club mashups.

Surround Sounds was an electrifying fusion of Manchester’s independent spirit within a slick, warehouse‑scale space. It stayed true to Sounds From the Other City’s rebellious roots while embracing bold musical and spatial experimentation. A night built on energy, inclusivity, and audacious creativity—a fitting celebration of 20 years of underground culture.

SURROUND SOUNDS at AVIVA STUDIOS 19th July 2025

Juliet Ellis A Symphony of Flesh and Bones

Large Theatres, Photography

A Symphony of Flesh and Bones. MIF25
Image credit: Juliet Ellis

Devised by Juliet Ellis

South Warehouse, Aviva Studios

Juliet Ellis delivers a deeply meditative and heartfelt work in A Symphony of Flesh and Bones, in which she explores Buddhist philosophy alongside her use of film to question what it means to inhabit a body. Ellis uses photography and film of her father, a former bodybuilder, and her brother, a retired cage fighter to bring authenticity and tenderness to themes of masculinity, aging, and familial legacy.

Both intensely personal and universally resonant, this is a work whose impact lingers as beautiful images in a highly impactful setting. The images are striking and beautifully composed. The multi-screen layout mirrors a mandala’s visual symmetry, ephemeral, interwoven, and spiritually resonant. The blue-toned imagery evokes Buddhist symbolism of infinitude. The layers of screens that surround all four sides of the space adds to their impact and makes for a beautiful installation.

This is however where this production becomes frustrating and unsatisfactory. There is a slightness to the spoken element of this piece which is not helped by Ellis just reading out her thoughts from a printed document. The piece runs at 90 minutes and therefore the images on screen often linger for longer than needed and the pacing tends to drag. The staging and lighting are beautifully conceived but ultimately this piece feels confused, sitting somewhere between a TED talk with high production values and an art installation you feel obliged to observe at the artists’ pace. It’s a real shame as this would have worked brilliantly as a durational piece running on a loop with a recording of the artists’ thoughts playing with the audience being able to move around the space or lie on the floor just looking up at the screens.

AVIVA STUDIOS 11-13th July 2025

BLACKHAINE And Now I Know What Love Is

Contemporary Dance, Immersive Theatre

Devised and Choreographed by Blackhaine

DIECAST

There is something brutal and viscerally raw in Now I Know What Love Is. This latest unflinching offering from choreographer and experimental musician Tom Heyes, otherwise known Blackhaine is staged as part of the Manchester International Festival. This is a marmite piece not necessarily immersive in any traditional sense and its narrative is not easily explained as the audience is invited into to this “numb world”.

Blackhaine intentionally plunges the audience into a world where love is indistinguishable from violence, where tenderness coexists with terror, and where the physical body becomes both weapon and wound. The piece is a relentless assault on every level. Visually, sonically, emotionally, there is no escaping and any hint of a redemptive ending is fragile and uncertain. Here the narrative is pure sensation. There is no comfort to be found here but rather an invocation of feeling that stays long after the lights fade.

The performance opens in near darkness, soundscape throbbing with industrial menace as dancers slowly appear through the crowd moving blankly like zombies. Later bodies contort into jagged, frenetic shapes. Each movement seems torn from the flesh—jerking, spasming, collapsing. This is dance stripped to its rawest essence…survival. At times dancers pound the floor as though trying to summon the earth itself to respond. There is an urgency to the physicality that speaks of both personal and collective desperation, of lives lived on the brink. The sound design is punishing—waves of static, guttural noise, haunting synths—that builds and fragments, echoing the disintegration on stage. Lighting is stark, utilitarian: this is a space that refuses to comfort.

And yet, in the midst of this bleak landscape, there are fragile moments of strange beauty. The title Now I Know What Love Is hangs over the piece like a ghost. Love here is fragile and fleeting and always teetering on the edge of obliteration. The moments of guitar that creep in like cracks of light feel like a comforting homage to Vini Reilly and The Durutti Column but is just as quickly decimated by a screaming rant.

For some, the lack of narrative and the extremity of the aesthetic may prove alienating, however this is not a show that seeks approval. It is confrontational, even adversarial at times… there is no real guidance for anyone unfamiliar with immersive productions. For those willing to surrender to its fractured structure there offers something rare: a glimpse into the abyss.

In the end, Now I Know What Love Is is less about answers than about exposing discomfort. It scrapes away at the surface of performance, of identity, of the human condition, and dares you to look at what lies beneath. It is telling in an immersive performance that we the audience silently observe pain and possible death yet we do nothing to soothe or comfort. Faced with anguish we peer and occasionally photograph or film palpable distress before moving on to watch the next scene. Perhaps that makes us, the audience, the bleakest element of this production.

DIECAST 9th – 19th July 2025