Panoply
An impressive and wide display
2.A complete suite of Armour
Decidedly Panoply for 2010’s October Free For Arts festival was successful at rearing a few performance artists heads towards new ideas of working in differing mediums.
Panoply is a performance art event based in costume, fashion design and theatre.
It is a new cultural masquerade.
The Volkov Commanders bring Panoply to the as of yet vacant, Piccadilly Place ground floor retail units. The space is brutalist in it's architectural style without any soft wood or polished floors. Replacing the lack of shop furnishings with progressive fashion design and live sculptural works displayed in front of an audience. Appropriating ‘commerce’ and the commercial in order to insert within it the hand made and conceptually driven.
Much like the Witworth Galleries’ seminal exhibition, Marina Abromovic presents, the audience must navigate a space within which the performers inhabit throughout the event, in Panoply however some performances stop and start, some only last a few minutes, some the entirety of the event, and so culminate in a throng of differing and staggered live pieces.
As the Volkov Commanders we purposefully want to create fiction for the sake of spectacle. Our aims are to look forwards, bringing artists and performers together whose work is dissident of contemporary cultural practices. Our intention is to perpetuate our events as a future ritual, as though free thinking and witty creatives inhabit underground enclaves oppressed and opposed by the droning masses. We want the audience to feel part of our future art cult and feel persuaded to join us.
March 31st 2011 6pm-10pm
3 Piccadilly Place, Aytoun Street, Manchester, M1 3BN
www.panoply-manchester.blogspot.com
