Talk #168

Natalie Reckert

Tuesday 29 September 2026, 5.30pm

The Salutation Pub (upstairs)
Higher Chatham Street
Manchester
M15 6ED

Songs for an Unwritten Sky

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.

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.