The weather continues to be as unpredictable as ever! But you can rely on Kirkgate Arts & Heritage to keep bringing you the best in cinema, live music, workshops and more this Autumn.

We’re delighted to be launching a new season of Kirkgate Arts Out West shows, so we thought it was time to invite one of our rural venue promoters to share a bit about himself, scroll down to hear from Mick – our man in Ireby, who works tirelessly keeping live performances an integral part of village life at The Globe Hall.

Have you been in our bar recently? With our new, flexible, LED spotlights now installed it’s transformed. We’re amazed the effect that the right lighting can have in a room. When we look back to photographs of that space a few years ago it reminds us of just what a difference a bit of vision and a lick of paint can make (and of course comfy chairs plus bespoke iroko topped mobile bar and tables). The new energy efficient lighting finishes the space off perfectly!

@HOME@KIRKGATE

This month we have lots of creatives using our space to develop their work. One of these creatives is Stefan Escreet from Ragged Edge Productions. He is working on a brand new show, which will be coming to a village hall near you very soon with Kirkgate Arts Out West.

“This is a theatre company working on the Ragged Edge…
…of ideas
Making entertaining and engaging shows which take a fresh look at current issues and ideas.
…of the economy
Celebrating the power and creativity of theatre with quality shows at a time when funding for the arts is scarce.
…of geography
Taking theatre to places on the edge of arts provision, in our countryside, towns and cities.”

Find out more about their work here.

The Mystery of The Blue Moon Saloon, which has toured many rural venues since it’s early days in development at The Kirkgate, was riotously fun! We can’t wait to see what’s in store for the audiences of the next brand new show…

Imogen Barnfather is another familiar face at Kirkgate, we fondly remember her performances in the local amateur dramatics society annual pantomime (more years ago than we’re going to admit to!), and those acting skills have grown and flourished exponentially. Wayfarers Theatre Company (find them on facebook here) host a summer production just outside Cockermouth every year. If you haven’t been to one of these outdoor performances yet we recommend you keep an eye out for the next one.

We’ll do our best to take some sneaky pictures while they’re working, and will let you know all about the show in next month’s edition of the Chronicle.

All we can say for now is it involves paper, imagination, and a lot of fun!

UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS

We’ve got all the usual regular events this month, with another Monthly Market, Poets Out Loud and we had the first of our new Sunday Sessions last weekend. There’s more from Comedy@Kirkgate, Jazz@Kirkgate and Crafts@Kirkgate too! Not to forget the ever popular Cooking@Kirkgate.

Our pic of the month for September is a day long craft workshop, led by award winning artist Celia Burbush.
Crafts@Kirkgate: The Craft of Drawing- back to basics is from 9.30am on Saturday 21st September. Join Celia for a relaxing and playful workshop designed to remind you of how wonderfully rewarding the daily craft of drawing can be. For more information, and to book your place, click here.

Once you’ve spent the day nurturing your creative side, why not stay for the evening? We’re delighted to welcome back The Paul McKenna Band at 8pm on Saturday 21st September. Formed in Glasgow in 2006, The Paul McKenna Band sees Paul McKenna (vocals, guitar) come together with Ewan Baird (percussion), Conor Markey (banjo, bouzouki, guitars), Conal McDonagh (pipes, whistles) and Robbie Greig (fiddle). The members are bound by a shared love of Scottish and Irish traditional music and contemporary, dynamic compositions, all underpinned by expert playing and Paul’s stunning vocals.
Book your tickets here.

New for Kirkgate Arts & Heritage this September is our first ever Kirk-Kit sale! You’ll have seen the information in our last mail out, but if you want to know more, or register as a seller, click here.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

This month we are heading over to Ireby to meet one of our Kirkgate Arts Out West volunteer promoters, Mick Moore. Here he is to tell us a bit about himself and his work over at The Globe Hall.

“The Globe Hall in Ireby was built in 1908 by the Boyes family as a gift to the village and it is a gift that continues to give. As well as being host to local clubs and societies there are regular films in association with Cine North, a variety of shows from Arts Out West and privately sponsored performances by world class artists. Also the hall is regularly booked for a wide variety of social gatherings. The Hall is managed by a group of volunteer trustees who oversee the running and staffing of events as well as ensuring its original purpose as a centre of village life is maintained.

In my spare time, yes I do have the occasional moment, my energy is mostly directed towards musicaI activities. I am a member of the Ireby Village Singers, led by Janice Havelock, meeting every Wednesday morning to sing for pleasure and casually rehearsing for performances. I organise and teach Ukuleirby, a group of improving ukulele players on one of the most popular, or least liked, instruments. We meet in Emily’s Black Lion, the village pub, every Tuesday evening and hope to continue as the pub moves from private to community ownership via the ongoing sale of shares. I am also one fifth, including our caller, of The Bald Mountain String Band, playing for Ceilidhs in Cumbria and surrounding counties.

A very busy venue, well done Mick and the team, hats off to you!

If you’d like to keep up with what’s on at The Globe Hall, you can find them on facebook here.

KIRKGATE HISTORY AND HERITAGE

“Cockermothians have always shown a keen interest in amateur theatre and musicals over the years.  Many people in town will have parents or grandparents who were enthusiastic members of groups such as the Cockermouth Amateur Operatics Society, which had its home in the Grand Theatre and first started performing for townspeople in 1920.  Arthur Wilson was the Manager of the Grand Theatre, and his sister (Lizzie Wilson) kept a very full record of performances, with many wonderful photographs and programmes.  They were ambitious in their programmes, performing productions such as The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, The Gondoliers and Tonight’s the Night, to name but a few.

AN UNOFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE KIRKGATE

This month Bob Pritchard shares his experiences of cinema at the Kirkgate…

“There may well be people better qualified than I to write the history of cinema at the Kirkgate, so I look forward to their corrections and improvements to this narrative.

The Grand Theatre building on Station Street was Cockermouth’s cinema until 1966.  It was owned by the Graves family along with most cinemas and bingo halls in West Cumbria, as well as hotels, such as Armathwaite Hall. The Grand Theatre was sold with a covenant stating that the building could not be used as a cinema (thus ensuring that Cockermouth residents had to patronize another of the Graves’ establishments). So being able to show films in the Kirkgate Centre was one of the priorities driving the whole development.

A family of cinema enthusiasts locally (get in touch if you remember the name! We’re drawing a blank in the office) had a number of 35mm projectors salvaged out of closed cinemas. One of the least ancient of these was loaned to, initially (later bought by) the Kirkgate Centre.  It was a sturdy beast. The lamp housing, I was told, came from a Sherman tank.

The cinema screen with its electric motor to raise and lower (it’s still the same one even now) was a heavy, unwieldy object and when it arrived passers-by had to be recruited to help manhandle it up the stairs.

In 1995 film came in spools of celluloid, about one foot diameter. They had to be sliced together and wound onto very large spools (see examples as décor in the Egremont Room – image below), then threaded through the various sprockets and gates in what always seemed a very complex operation.

As films got longer a “Cakestand” arrangement was required with film being loaded onto a large horizontal top spool then threaded over a series of loops and pulleys to enter the projector, exiting onto the bottom spool on the cakestand. At the end of the night the projectionists had to break the film back down into the small spools. So, if you’d been showing Branagh’s Hamlet or Lord of the Rings you’d be lucky to get home by midnight.

A film (i.e. a box of small spools) would arrive in the middle of the night, courtesy of Gordon and his dog. Gordon distributed films all over the Borders and West Cumbria, collecting them from Glasgow and driving through the night. He had keys to all the cinemas in the area.

Way back in 1996 it was not usual practice for cinemas to enable advance booking. You simply had to queue up, the bigger the queue, the better the publicity. In pre-Kirkgate days I remember queuing round the block in Workington for “Shirley Valentine” and then not getting in.  The volunteers of the Kirkgate film group adopted the same policy initially, and queues through the car park were not uncommon – OK on a fine summer evening but on a damp November night far from it.

When the system was changed it took a long time to filter through to the audience that booking was available, and indeed advisable, particularly if the film starred Dame Judi Dench !  I also remember a French film about a rural primary school, which had received rave reviews in the Guardian, being sold out, to the ire of regular audience members who protested “But it’s got subtitles, subtitled films never sell out!”

We’ve come long way from then. The old 35mm projector was eventually retired and we moved to DVD’s and Blu Rays via a digital projector before the splendid and very precious all-singing all-dancing machine we have now.”

It is indeed a fine beast of a projector! Films are now delivered straight to a ‘server’ by the distributors and then ‘ingested’ onto our digital projector, and of course our National Theatre Live streamed events, from stage to satellite to screen. It is quite compact, compared to the previous set up of cake stands and 35mm, but we wouldn’t want to have to move it again! Getting it up the stairs was quite a challenge for the cinema engineer and our operations manager! (pictured below – checking the glass is nice and clean where the image is cast through to the auditorium).

GENERAL MANAGER’S LETTER

It’s lovely to hear from our Kirkgate Arts Out West promoter, Mick, and get a glimpse of the hard work that he puts in to keeping the arts scene thriving in Ireby, too. As mentioned above we are now into a brand new season of Kirkgate Arts Out West performances, across the region. We’ll be emailing a full list of those events very soon, but in the meantime head over to our website and choose ‘Arts Out West’ from the drop down menu for details . I’m intrigued to know more about the new show from Ragged Edge… all will be revealed in the next Chronicle.

We love the new lighting at the centre, so much brighter all round and the spotlights in the Egremont Room really do create a cosy welcoming atmosphere. There are plenty of them too! If you came along over the last few days of our summer exhibition you will have noticed how much better the information and objects were lit. There is one drawback of the improved brightness around the centre… our operations manager keeps spotting marks and scratches in the paintwork! It seems the previous lighting was hiding a few ‘missed bits’ in our redecorating, but our dedicated team of maintenance volunteers will be working away touching up the paintwork over the next few months. The porch lights are now on a motion sensor, so if you want to see what’s on offer at the Kirkgate you can have a look at our noticeboard anytime, day or night.

The work on our improvements is continuing, we’ll update you with more on that next month. For now I think it’s time we all went through our closets and sheds and had a good old clear out! I’m not sure we really need half a dozen camping stoves at our house, so if you’re looking for one come along to Kirk Kit! I’ll see you there.

Emma Heys
General Manager