Manchester Collective: Neon

Manchester Collective’s 2022-23 season is on sale now.

As the sun starts to dip below the horizon, our cities change.

One by one, streetlights and neon signs flicker into life. This nocturnal world, this Neon world, is a place of mystery where anything is possible.

Built around Steve Reich’s monumental Double Sextet, this show interrogates the darker side of our urban dreams, evoking the intrigue and momentum of sleepless nights and crowded streets. These tunes are darkly swaggering, dirty, and sly.

A pair of Manchester Collective commissions lie at the heart of the programme – Hannah Peel’s titular Neon is inspired by light and life, fusing layers of live electronics and field recordings from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo with the acoustic performances of the Collective. In her first major chamber commission, Berlin-based Lyra Pramuk presents a sensual world premiere, a meditation on the nature of time, memory and human experience.

Elsewhere, David Lang’s underhand masterpiece Cheating, Lying, Stealing paints a picture of everything that can be wrong with a composer, and Julius Eastman’s much-maligned Joy Boy presents a totally unique musical world of ‘ticker-tape music’.

Opening the programme, The Age of Spiritual Machines is a new work for strings, electronics and two dancers by composer Daniel Elms and choreographer Alexander Whitley, exploring the relationship between music, movement and technology.

Fast. Slow. Fast. Keep up. Don’t be late.

Please note: Hannah Peel and Lyra Pramuk will not be performing live. They have been commissioned by Manchester Collective to compose some of the music in this programme.