Venture Arts: Experiments in the Lab
- Joan Davies
- Jul 8
- 2 min read
Michael Beard, Company Chameleon, Manchester Camerata
Venture Arts, Manchester International Festival
The Lab at The Social, Aviva Studios, Manchester
July 6,8,15, 2025; 55 mins
The Lab is a pop-up, open studio set up by Venture Arts, an award-winning organisation that works with neuro-divergent and learning-disabled artists in Manchester.
The studio is open for the duration of MIF 25 featuring local, award-winning artist Michael Beard, allowing visitors to see Michael create his large-scale, colourful artworks. There are also bookable workshops and talks.
There are also three performances, during which Michael creates a 10 metre long painting accompanied by dance and music from Company Chameleon dancers (Kadafi Mulula, Shameer Rayes and Kevin Edward Turner) and a flautist from Manchester Camerata, Amina Hussain, who also composed the accompanying soundtrack with Camerata colleague Amy Dunning. I attended the first such performance.
The studio, under former railway arches looking across to the 1830 warehouse, is welcoming, accepting a seated audience and an array of tech, and encouraging interaction with the artists once the performance ends.
Michael’s work is bold and colourful, with elements of repetition. It reflects his love of travel and in particular London, New York and - of course - Manchester.
Company Chameleon's dancers are fascinating to watch, as always. Clearly responding to Michael and to the Camerata musician, they work both independently and collaboratively as Michael’s work changes to integrate further colours. As is usual for Company Chameleon, the dancers are strong and arresting individually, yet appear even stronger when support each another in exploration. I could watch them again, and probably again.
Flautist Amina Hussain influences and responds to Michael and the dancers. She also wrote the instrumental and occasionally percussive soundtrack, which adds further variety to the mix.
The artist is assisted by four participants, holding hairdryers. Their noise seems intrusive at the start but eventually merges with the background, reminiscent of constantly-plucked strings.
The work is haunting, evocative and at times mesmerising. In many ways the piece reminds me of the MIF 23 collaboration between artist Tino Sehgal and footballer Juan Mata, This Entry, another unexpected yet moving collaboration between artists who don’t always work together.
The Venture Arts: Michael Beard space will be a relaxed, creative free-admission space filled with art, movement and music throughout the festival.
Only two more, sold out, free performances remain. This is one of those types of work MIF can excel at, and so is maybe worth a punt at just turning up in the hope of admission - but of course this can't be guaranteed. If it’s full, there is still a variety of music and performance in Festival Square to enjoy.
Otherwise, just turn up and much of the time you will find Michael at work; when he isn't there, the lab will play host to a range of artists from Venture Arts.
The whole session raises the question of what will happen to the space once MIF is over? Could it become more long-term, even permanent artist studio, helping to address the current under-supply of such spaces in the city?
More info and tickets here
