Food: Food Fight Friday, Upper Campfield Market Hall, Castlefield, Fri 7 March, 5-8pm and 8-11pm
FFFManchester's newest 'turbo-charged food event' running for the next twelve consecutive weeks. Grub, booze, music. If only they provided beds we'd never have to leave.
Against one wall, throw ten to twelve top cooks from established restaurants like Nutters, Ning, Solita, Yang Sing, pitch them against smaller-scale back-of-the-van and out-of-a-cart vendors like Bobbys Bangers, Diamond Dogs, Piggy Smalls and the Hip-Hop-Chip-Shop (fantastic name) and let them battle it out for your trade. Along the other wall sling up a bar serving up craft beer, craft cider and a host of speciality cocktails, set up a DJ in the corner, put benches down the middle and let it all go off.
Upper Campfield
Music: The Australian Pink Floyd, Phones4u Arena, Fri 7 March, Doors 6pm
This Oz tribute band have carved out their own cult making them the premier Pink Floyd tribute act in the world, beating off stiff competition from Stink Lloyd, Drink Floyd and Sigmund Freud. The group have sold over three million concert tickets in their own right and are celebrated for their near note perfect performances and spectacular stage shows.
We're all invited to the after-party too, where, being Australian, they'll mainly be barbequing meat in their pants, drinking heavily and shouting while blistering beneath a million watt UV bulb and trying to dodge seventeen thousand different native species that are trying to eat them. Oh the Oz lifestyle.
Tickets from £31.35 here.
Stargate had got weird
Film: Viva! 20th Spanish and Latin American Film Festival, Cornerhouse, Fri 7 – Sun 23 March
Cornerhouse are bringing together the cream of new filmmaking from across the Spanish-speaking world to celebrate two decades of this annual film festival.
Festival highlights include Gabriel Nesci’s charming debut comedy Días de vinilo; El Fantástico mundo de Juan Orol, the life story of the king of the B-movie; the history of women in Spanish film in documentary Con la pata quebrada; Catalan comedy of errors Menú degustació from ¡Viva! veteran director Roger Gual and post-apocalyptic disaster movie Los Últimos días.
For a full listings brochure including films, walking tours, intros, studies, Q&As and everything else, then look here. Tickets from £3-£54 (for a full festival pass).
Dias de Vinilo
Theatre: Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, Oldham Coliseum, Opens Fri 7 March – Sat 22 March
Written in 1970 by Nobel Prize winner, Dario Fo, this famous play is inspired by the suspicious fall of a known political activist from the fourth floor window of a Milan police station. ADOAA has become a canvas on which playwrights can paint their own contemporary issues, be it miner’s strikes, banking crises or whether or not Miley Cyrus should be put down. Each performance of this show will be unique as the cast will add topical inserts from the day’s news into the show to keep the audience on their toes (annoying for the person sat behind).
This Oldham Coliseum production has been adapted by playwright and Corrie actress Deborah McAndrew. A raucous rollercoaster of a comedy, the action takes place in an unnamed police station where an absurd re-enactment of events takes place to determine if the anarchist’s plummet to the street was accident or foul-play.
Oldham Coliseum
Shows: North West Wedding Fair & The Baby And Toddler Show, EventCity, Fri 7 – Sun 9 March
The world’s best boffins have been working away at this one for decades. NASA stopped building rockets, CERN stopped trying to kill us all, even China’s biggest nerds stopped hacking everyone to tackle this question. And still nobody has the foggiest: Why DO people keep getting married and having children?
It remains one of life’s great unanswered questions, like ‘What is in an Iceland samosa?’ AND ‘Why is God a particle?’
Still, if you’re into all of that, love and the continuation of the species (which is fair enough, we need that), you can do worse than heading down to EventCity by the Trafford Centre this weekend. There’ll be absolutely everything you could ever imagine you’ll need (and plenty you don't) for either a wedding or a baby, or both (god forbid), right there under one roof. Take your wallet, the deep one. According to the Telegraph your average wedding now costs £18,000 and having a child £222,000. Congratulations.
Still fancy it? Discounted tickets here.
Gary was determined to get pumped for the Baby & Toddler Show
Music: Haim, Manchester Academy, Sat 8 March, Doors 7pm
Ever since topping the BBC Sound of 2013, this LA sisterly trio have gone from strength to strength, culminating in their delayed but hotly anticipated debut album Days Are Gone, delayed mainly because the girls would not stop touring. Originally part of a band with their parents (err) the girls have dumped the fogies and become one of the hottest tipped bands this side of Hypeington.
Tickets are £17.25 here.
Tour: FREE Entry To Manchester United Museum, Old Trafford, Throughout March
Wary that fans were becoming a little grouchy with the team’s on-the-pitch slump, the club have decided to give something back to the fans off-the-pitch. You know, keep ‘em sweet. And with Malcolm Glazer reportedly unwilling to sacrifice his head, or even a toe, the marketing team have come up with this instead.
Entry to the United Museum and Tour, the city’s ‘Best Large Visitor Attraction 2013’ (City’s museum and tour won ‘Best Small Attraction’. Ouch) is free to everyone for the whole of March. Except if you’re a blue or a Scouser, in which case it’s a pound… of flesh.
Attendances took a dive
Art: Joana Vasconcelos: Time Machine, Manchester Art Gallery, Until June 2014
It seems Marie Antoinette can't park. Or at least she can't land. You see, she's misplaced her big fluffy pink helicopter in the Manchester Art Gallery - Stick with us.
Joana Vasconcelos is a Lisbonian artist (no, not that), bringing her huge, textured and flamboyant pieces to the Manchester Art Gallery that pad out the hindermost atrium like a towering, bulbous, patchwork comfort blanket spilling out over the levels. It's quite extraordinary. Fair bit of sewing involved too we imagine. There's also an old Morris car covered in a bunch of plastic rifles, a giant crocheted insect and what must be over 100 steam irons opening, closing, then letting out little puffs of steam? Why you ask? Well, why not?
Christopher Biggins had gone a pinch too far
Music: MØ, Deaf Institute, Sun 9 March, 7.30-11pm
Karen Marie Ørsted, better known as MØ, is a 24-year-old Danish singer and songwriter. In Copenhagen, Denmark 2013, she was recognized on the P3 Unavoidable, a list of ones to watch similar to our BBC Sound Of... just a taller, blonder and more stylish list.
MØ, whose name means 'virgin' in Old Norse (boasting), has been compared to electro-pop vocalists such as Grimes, Purity Ring, and Twin Shadow - None of which we've heard of.
MO money, MO problems
Festival: Flying Solo Festival, Contact Theatre, Oxford Road, Opens Wed 12 – Sat 22 March
This festival celebrates the solo performers and one-to-one performance from a range of forms including theatre, dance, spoken word, live art and a Basset Hound called Major Tom. All taking to the stage on their todd or in a one-to-one performance right at you. Yeah you. Right in your looking balls and down your ears.
One of the most intriguing performances of the festival is Kaleider: You with Me, an experience for only one audience member at a time, taking you on a journey through Manchester. It is a personal story, which you become the centre of. The performance uses the backdrop of Manchester and is played out through a 45 minute telephone call. Just be in a certain place at a certain time, own a mobile phone and have some bottle, you ninny.
Exhibition: Wellcome Image Awards: Winners, MOSI, From Weds 12 March until August
Wellcome Images is one of the Wellcome Library's major visual collections. It provides unlimited access to a vast catalogue of medical images, manuscripts and illustrations exploring the meaning of medicine, its history and current practice.
For the first time since the launch of the Wellcome Image Awards in 1997, the public are invited to experience a selection of winning images that celebrate the best in science imaging talent and techniques. From an x-ray of a bat to a kidney stone, a head louse egg to a cross section of a flower bud. There’ll be 18 images created by medical professionals, scientists and other image makers on display for the very first time at the Museum of Science and Industry.
FREE. More here.
'That's your best side?'
Theatre: Orlando, Royal Exchange Theatre, Until Sun 22 March
TV and stage actress Suranne Jones (Coronation Street, Scott and Bailey) stars in this stage adaption of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: a Biography, a story that refuses all restraints, transcending time, gender and reality.
Jones has received rave reviews as Orlando, a young sixteen-year-old nobleman who wins the heart of Queen Elizabeth I, Russian royalty and a Spanish dancer, before waking up one morning as a woman in her 30s, living that way for four centuries. Still, could be worse, I once woke up in Wigan.
Orlando
