WEEKEND COLUMN SATURDAY 21 FEBRUARY 2026
- STEVE COOKE AATA
- 2 minutes ago
- 9 min read
previews, reviews, interviews, and recommendations with Steve Cooke
WEEKEND COLUMN SATURDAY 21 SEPTEMBER 2026
Poetry Spotlight - Thomas M. Ryan
Thomas is a local writer living in Rochdale. He has a BA(Hons) degree in Creative Writing and currently works as a teacher. Thomas writes poetry, prose and scripts across genres including comedy, science fiction and fantasy often with LGBTQ+ themes. His writing often focuses themes of community, otherness and our place in an ever-increasing technological world. He has written poetry for projects including the Common Threads Project 2025 and the Buildings in Landscape Exhibition, both in collaboration with local artists.
You know what? Here’s the thing,
There’s only one of you,
Give it 100%,
That’s all that you can do.
Need broader shoulders than that,
If you’re gonna make it round here,
Once everything’s said and done,
That’s what it’s all about.
Because we are a family,
And we’ve all got our own stuff,
We all have to get on with it,
What will be will be.
Life’s a rollercoaster,
We’re all on our own paths,
At the end of the day, It is what it is,
Do you know what I mean?
Music Cafés from Manchester Camerata's Music in Mind
Preview by Steve Cooke
Music Cafés are organised and run by Manchester Camerata's Music in Mind programme to use music therapy-based principles to improve the health and wellbeing of people with dementia and their carers. Using handheld percussion instruments, participants find new ways to communicate and have fun, whilst also discovering further support within their community.
Music Cafés bring moments of joy, connection and true expression to people living with dementia, their carers, their family and friends. They’re designed to provide support to all who attend, delivering genuine care through the power of music.
Manchester Camerata are creating a growing community of Music Champions to set up and run their own music sessions in local community groups, day centres, supported living and care homes. If you, or your organisation, are interested in joining or supporting Music in Mind, you can learn more about the Music Champions programme by following the link below.
Music Champions will learn to inspire joy, confidence, and true expression through music, without needing any prior music experience through a programme that combines face-to-face and online training to use the proven therapeutic power of music as a part of dementia care, without needing any prior music experience.
The growing community of Music Champions learn and adopt music therapy-based practices into their own music sessions to support and care for people living with dementia at all stages and in all environments. They help people with dementia to find connection, enable true expression and create new ways to communicate and find joy.
In our borough we have Rochdale Music Café Castleton Community Centre
Every Thursday for people living with dementia and their carers! Please arrive 10am for a 10.30 - 11.30 music session. Free to attend and free tea, coffee & biscuits. No music experience required! To let THEM know you’re going to come, or for more information, please email: hello@hmrcircle.org.uk or phone: 01706 751165.
Castleton Community Centre Manchester Road Castleton OL11 3AF
10:00 – 11.30
Royal Exchange Theatre awarded National Lottery Heritage Fund grant for a major new costume exhibition and performance project
By Steve Cooke
The Royal Exchange Theatre has been awarded a £185,872 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for an exciting new project celebrating 50 years of storytelling, drawing on the theatres’ extensive costume archive to create and inspire new narratives while preserving their costume heritage and legacy.
Launching on 15 September 2026 and running until 21 November 2026, as part of the Royal Exchange Theatre’s 50th anniversary programme – A Homecoming, the project will bring the extraordinary costume archive to life through a free public exhibition in the Great Hall, alongside a new intergenerational community performance.
Showcasing costumes and accessories from five decades of Royal Exchange Theatre productions, the exhibition – Mythic Reinvention: Five Decades of Costume and Craft – will celebrate the skills and craft of designers, artisans and makers and share how storytelling, inspired by the idea of mythic reinvention, is embedded in every stitch, button and drape of costume.
Displayed within the unique architecture of the Great Hall, this visually spectacular and interactive exhibition will offer audiences fresh perspective on both the architecture of the theatre and the work created and performed by artists on and off stage. The exhibition will also highlight the lifecycle of costume, from initial design to reuse, reflecting their ongoing commitment to sustainability.
At the heart of the project are 50 participants, including members from the Royal Exchange Theatre’s Young Company and Elders Company who will play a central role, co-creating both the exhibition and a brand-new performance inspired by the costume archive, the theatre’s history and stories from Manchester communities.
Artistic Director, Selina Cartmell said “For 50 years, storytelling has been at the beating heart of this theatre, and our costume archive holds those stories in every seam. Thanks to this generous grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we’re able to bring that hidden history into public view and celebrate the extraordinary designers and makers who have shaped our work, while inviting new generations of artists and communities to reimagine it with us. As part of our 50th anniversary programme, it feels especially meaningful to celebrate the craft that has helped define our artistic identity.”
The immersive exhibition will be curated by Leslie Travers, an award-winning international set and costume designer based in London, whose work spans opera, dance, musical theatre and drama on some of the world’s most prestigious stages.
Curator, Leslie Travers said: “The Royal Exchange is unlike any other theatre. The proximity between audience and stage is both thrilling and deeply demanding and this epic and intimate experience means costume design is integral to storytelling – it is vital that we find ways to preserve its remarkable legacy. I’m thrilled at the prospect of collaborating once again with the Royal Exchange team and working with the company to curate an experience that promises to be both meaningful and transformative.”
Alongside the exhibition and performance, there will be programme of talks, backstage tours and hands-on workshops, offering behind-the-scenes insight into costume-making and sustainable design.
Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage. Mythic Reinvention: Five Decades of Costume and Craft is made possible with the Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able develop and deliver this project, celebrating 50 years of theatre-making, focused on preserving and sharing our costume heritage.
Helen Featherstone, Director, England, North at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: “We are thrilled to be supporting the Royal Exchange Theatre to celebrate their landmark 50th anniversary with this exciting exhibition. Thanks to money raised by National Lottery players, the stories behind the decades-strong collection of costumes will be showcased and brought to life in a new performance. This is a fantastic way to mark this wonderful theatre’s special birthday.”
This project is also supported by the Noël Coward Foundation and the Granada Foundation.
Creative Team:
Artistic Director: Selina Cartmell
Curator: Leslie Travers
Head of Costume: Tracy Dunk
Associate Director: Katie Greenall
About The National Lottery Heritage Fund
The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players we support projects that connect people and communities to heritage. Our vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. From historic buildings, our industrial legacy and the natural environment, to collections, traditions, stories and more. Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. We believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.
History, power and empire collide in Button Up! – a major new exhibition from the world-leading artist and activist Ai Weiwei
Preview by Steve Cooke
Internationally renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei turns his critical gaze to the last 200 years of global history with this major new exhibition. Monumental in scale and ambition, Ai Weiwei: Button Up! is the artist’s most expansive presentation in the North to date.
Ai Weiwei is known around the world for his uncompromising artistic vision and political activism. From a childhood in exile to surviving secret detention in China, his remarkable life and career have led him to global prominence. Using sculpture, installation, film, photography and architecture, his work is unafraid to ask urgent, critical questions.
In Button Up!, the artist turns his lens on two centuries of Chinese and British relations. Taking inspiration from Manchester, a city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, Button Up! explores how historic systems of trade, empire and exploitation resonate in today’s humanitarian and political crises.
Conceived as a total environment, Ai Weiwei: Button Up! brings together new and existing large-scale works on display in the UK for the first time. The monumental installation features porcelain, cotton, glass, bronze and even buttons and toy bricks. Each material contains a story of human invention and consumption. Together, they paint a picture of globalisation.
Both global and personal, the title Button Up! is a playful poke at the artist’s ongoing battle with censorship. The exhibition also features the world premiere of a new body of work created especially for the vast spaces of the Warehouse – Eight-Nation Alliance Flags made from hundreds of thousands of buttons, as well as a new version of History Of Bombs made entirely from toy bricks.
Button Up! immerses visitors in Ai Weiwei’s fearless interrogation of the forces past and present that drive today’s injustices – while championing art’s enduring power to challenge and inspire.
“I’m not interested in making very big things just for the sake of it. But in Manchester, that wonderful Warehouse space calls for monumental work. Visiting the city for this exhibition – the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution – and reflecting on Britain’s global territorial expansion made me realise I had to explore that history and understand how it connects to the forces driving today’s wars and global crises. The world today is deeply divided, with tragedy all around. Understanding history goes hand in hand with standing up for truth and justice.”
Ai Weiwei
Thursday 2 July – Sunday 6 September 2026
The Warehouse, Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester, M3 4JQ
Tickets
Earlybird Offer: £15
Standard from: £20
Concessions available including Aviva £10 Tickets
A booking fee of £1.50 applies to all tickets.
Artist talk
Thursday 2 July 2026
The Hall, Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester, M3 4JQ
Tickets
Standard: £30, £25 Affordable:
Concessions 50% Discount
Aviva £10 Tickets
A booking fee of £1.50 applies to all tickets.
Bog Witch by Bryony Kimmings at HOME
Preview by Steve Cooke
Following a hugely critically acclaimed London run, legendary performance artist Bryony Kimmings (I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, Fake It Till You Make It) brings her hit show ‘Bog Witch’ to HOME Manchester for a strictly limited run!
As with all her previous works Bog Witch follows a part of Kimmings’ real-life story… this time the journey of uprooting her and her son’s life to live in a tumbledown cottage in the wilderness… to plug back into nature as a last-ditch attempt to be happy and sane.
This promises to be a journey as unexpected and essential as it’s hilarious and heartfelt. Mixing songs, stand-up comedy, performance art making memorable, disturbing and wildly entertaining.
Tickets: £30.20 (inc. £1.20 cmsn) - £40.20 (inc. £1.20 cmsn)
Box Office 0161 200 1500
Restaurant 0161 212 3500
For general queries, email: info@homemcr.org
Thursday 26 March - Saturday 28 March
HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place Manchester M15 4FN.
RECOMMENDED
Saturday, 21 February 2026
Silk painting workshop with Aysha Yilmaz
In this workshop, motifs and designs from The Silk Road will be used to produce a silk painting. You will explore the origins of silk and some of the key motifs. Aysha will guide you in applying your design onto a silk fabric for you to take home.
This activity is designed as an exploration of Islamic arts to be enjoyed as a mindfulness activity during Ramadan - but everyone is welcome to join this fun session.
Adult tickets are £10 and they include a ticket to the Rochdale Pioneers Museum, which is valid for a year after the event. This means that you will be able to re-visit for free for 12 months after the event.
Child tickets are £3 and are for anyone under the age of 18, but all children MUST be accompanied by an adult. If accompanying adults attend without their own ticket, they must be in the room during the activity but will not be able to participate.
13:00
Rochdale Pioneers Museum, Rochdale, OL120NU
Wednesday, 25 February 2026
Toad Lane Concerts - Rochdale's Weekly Music at Lunchtime
This week we have - Feb 25 Margaret Ferguson soprano (Ghana, Poland & RNCM) & Mackenzie Paget piano RNCM
The concert series has been held at St Mary’s since 2001 and was granted the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service in 2020.
Running every Wednesday, Music at Lunchtime is a weekly live classical music concert series that has been going since the 1960s. The sessions were initially run at the old Rochdale Art Gallery by the local authority, but since May 2001 have been run by volunteer-enthusiasts and artistic director, Dr Joe Dawson.
£6
Phone: Dr Joe Dawson 01706 648872
Doors open 12noon, concert starts 12.30pm - 1.30pm
St Mary in the Baum, Toad Lane/St Mary's Gate, Rochdale OL16 1DZ
celebrating creative arts and artists - an oasis of positivity supporting individual and community wellbeing.
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