Gothic Manchester Festival returns!

Work by photographer Paul Koudounaris will be available to buy

FOLLOWING the huge success of last year’s Gothic Manchester Festival the event will return again this month as part of this year’s Humanities in Public Festival. 

Once again, the programme is designed to showcase MMU’s expertise in the gothic and foreground Manchester’s rich vein of gothic talent.

This year’s festival includes a vampire themed pub quiz at Fab Café, a steampunk club night, a one day conference on the theme of Gothic Spaces/Gothic Places at the Anthony Burgess Foundation, walking tours, author events and exhibitions.

Dr Linnie Blake, Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, said: “This year’s programme is a little different to last year’s but retains the mixture of rigorous academic focus and raucous gothic fun.

Manchester’s “darkness”

Dr Blake says that Manchester is the ideal home for a festival of this type.

She said: “As the first city of industrial modernity, Manchester’s dark satanic mills cast a long shadow across the nineteenth-century. Unsurprisingly, our town hall is one of the most splendid Victorian gothic buildings in the world and our streets and ginnels, canals and entries are themselves haunted by the ghosts of the industrial past.

“So, for all the ‘Madchester’ years made us appear to the outside world to be exceptionally dayglo, we Mancunians are no strangers to the darkness. Our rainy city has produced some of the most haunting music of the last thirty years whilst our galleries, performance spaces, clubs and streets consistently revisit that darker Manchester that lies behind the plate-glass and concrete exterior of the contemporary city.

“The Gothic Manchester Festival sets out to introduce people to this darker side of the city, drawing on a wealth of local talent whilst capitalising on the architectural resources of the city itself.”

Challenging austerity

The festival starts on Thursday, October 23m with the exhibition Gothic Curiosity Shop at the Anthony Burgess Foundation.

Works by Paul Koudounaris and Jonathan Hargreaves will be on display and available to buy, and later in the evening visitors will have the chance to watch a film and Victorian lantern show.

On Friday, October 24, Waterstones will host “Twisted Tales of Austerity”, an event featuring authors from the horror anthology Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease.

Tom Johnstone, one of the authors featured in the event, said: “If there’s an appetite to challenge the ruling consensus, it’s that of the editors, possibly the writers and, hopefully, the readers, who may wish to translate their horror at what they read into some kind of collective action.”

At the same time, over at the Museum of Science and Industry, curious minds will be able to find out more about the steampunk movement and enjoy afternoon tea in a lovingly recreated Victorian parlour, complete with steampunk trimmings.

Conference and club night

Friday evening sees writers and musicians Memento Moriatas over at the Anthony Burgess Foundation, and goth club night VictoriArA at Sacred Trinity Church, in Salford.

On Saturday the Gothic Spaces/Gothic Places conference – which is open both to academics and members of the public – will take place at the Anthony Burgess Foundation while Manchester Guided Tours will be hosting a Gothic Manchester Tour and goth icon Rosa Lugosi will be talking about her life as a musician, poet and performer at the John Rylands Library.

The festival will conclude on Sunday with a “Gothic Splendour” tour of the John Rylands Library, a Monstrous Manchester Tour and the Vampire Pub Quiz at the Fab Café – specially renamed the “Fang Café” for the event.
Throughout the duration of the festival The Corpse Collective will present their exhibition, Aerial Burglars of Cottonopolis, at Sacred Trinity Church.

Full details of all the events can be found at http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/gothicmmu/gothic-manchester-festival-2014/