An experimental new film by a Manchester Met senior lecturer that explores being part of an audience and uses amateur production footage spanning 80 years will feature at the Lowry’s exhibition, Curtain Up.
Give Yourself a Round of Applause includes more than 50 pieces of footage from Manchester Met’s North West Film Archive (NWFA) dating from the late 1920s to present day and ranging from school plays on home video to footage of amateur theatre productions.
The film was commissioned for Curtain Up, a group exhibition held by the Lowry in Salford, which explores how visual artists have sought to capture the shared anticipation, heightened emotions, and communal energy of being in an audience.
Created by Chris Paul Daniels, Senior Lecturer of Filmmaking at Manchester Met’s School of Digital Arts (SODA), it features a new storyline narrated over the vintage footage by Henrietta Smith-Rolla, a Manchester based composer, producer and DJ known by her alias Afrodeutsche. Original music was composed by Raz Ullah, musician, sound artist and Manchester Met Technical Officer.
Daniels said: “Give Yourself a Round of Applause is about the power of being in an audience. I used a montage of existing material to create something new. It has its own story, but it uses a variety of films as a springboard to tell a different narrative that reflects on the present day.
“To start with, we looked for curtains opening and closing on a stage, then gradually revealed the different characters and cast and the backstage interactions and people getting dressed up. It explores different kinds of masking and unmasking, taking the viewer on an unexpected journey to look at performance with fresh eyes.”
Daniels will also be taking part in Double Agents: Play and Performance in Digital Worlds, a series of monthly evening seminars held in a collaboration by SODA and Liverpool arts centre FACT exploring the social, political and cultural impacts of working with advanced digital technologies. His joint seminar on April 30 will discuss the making and influences of his work, including this latest project.
The material for Daniels’ new film came from Manchester Met’s North West Film Archive (NWFA), a specialist resource based within Manchester Central Library Archives+ partnership and dedicated to saving and growing the region’s rich filmed history.
Will McTaggart, Access and Engagement Officer at the NWFA, said: “Chris’s film really brings out the range of physical media that we hold here, as well as the fascinating images that filmmakers have captured over many decades in the region.
“I’ve been working at the NWFA for almost 20 years and even I wasn’t aware we had so much old footage connected to performance and theatrical productions. It’s wonderful that through the artist’s own research we have been able to discover more about our own collection here.”
Many clips used in Daniels’s film came from the Horse and Bamboo Theatre Company, a Rossendale-based theatre group whose work in the 1980s was captured on 16 millimetre black and white films to recreate the style of the early silent cinema era. Daniels also draws on striking imagery from a huge range of performance material, including school and student productions, amateur dramatic societies, dances, concerts, theatre shows and local pageants, with all footage hailing from the North West.
McTaggart added: “It’s unique. This material isn’t stored elsewhere and, without the ability to preserve it at the film archive and make it accessible, coupled with the generous co-operation of our donors and rights holders, it wouldn’t be available to reshare and to create wonderful artistic work like Give Yourself a Round of Applause.”
Curtain Up takes place at the Lowry from April 18 – June 21 2026. Find out more here.
