Bunker Talk #168: Natalie Reckert

This event is part of Bunker Talks. Bunker Talks invite artists and researchers to talk about who they are and what they do.
About this Event

About the performance

Songs for an Unwritten Sky is a performance exploring the past, present, and imagined futures of Pier 8 at Salford Quays.

Blending music, poetry, and acrobatics, acclaimed theatre-maker, Natalie Reckert, creates a performance inspired by the memories, experiences, and hopes of the people who live and work in Salford. Accompanied by musician Xenia Garden the piece weaves together stories of community, resilience, and aspiration, imagining more communal, ecological, and collaboratively created futures for our cities.

The idea behind this performance

is to open the creative process to community voices, breaking down barriers between institutional art and audiences.

Throughout my career as an artist, I have searched for ways to create shared experiences through performance. The strength of live performance lies in its ability to bring people together in one space — listening to one another, and opening ourselves to ideas and perspectives that may feel new, unfamiliar, or even uncomfortable.

Both the making of a performance and its presentation hold a unique potential to bring us closer together. They invite us, as thoughtful citizens, to reflect, make choices, and take a position in relation to the world around us.

This feels especially important at a time when many of us feel increasingly separated from one another, while also feeling uncertain about what we believe in or hope for.

Songs for an Unwritten Sky ultimately invites audiences to imagine what they want their city to become. Cities are places of dreams, aspirations, fears, and shared lives. They are spaces where our collective future takes shape.

The performance asks audiences, and contributors, to take ownership of that future — to imagine how we might live better together, and to participate in the co-creation of more caring, communal, and hopeful cities.

About the artist:

Natalie Reckert is a London-based artist and performance maker creating performance works since 2010. A graduate of the National Centre for Circus Arts, she also studied dance at Sozo Visions in Motion (Kassel) and Social Sciences at Humboldt University Berlin, where her research focused on the subjective physical experience of an acrobat. Using the body as a vehicle for self-actualization and protest, her work dismantles the spectacle of the circus body, transforming acrobatics into a relatable, communal experience.

Bunker Talks

This event is part of Bunker Talks. Bunker Talks invite artists and researchers to talk about who they are and what they do. Curated by the Performance Research Group at Manchester School of Art and the School of English, Bunker Talks explore geopolitical, ecological or economic concerns. The talks create space for critical encounters, presentations, provocation and dialogue as part of a civic conversation.

Originally conceived in the pandemic to explore how artists, writers, curators and researchers continued to make and share their work, live Bunker Talks now take place at The Salutation every month. Since 2020, over 165 talks have been hosted by Performance Researchers and colleagues from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. All talks are recorded, edited, captioned and then archived to create an online catalogue, capturing how artists, makers and curators think about the world today. Find previous talks here: https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/bunkertalks/