Origins

There’s something defining about cities and their rivers.

Bristol and the Avon, Dublin and the Liffey, Glasgow and the Clyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, London and the Thames, Newcastle and the Tyne .... familiar pairings, cities and their waterways.

Manchester’s trinity of rivers do not trip so easily off the tongue even for its residents.

Some are aware of the Irwell, swollen by the time it feeds the Ship Canal, but the Medlock and the Irk run largely unnoticed through the centre of the city. 

Once known for its fine eels as it sped through the meadows outside Manchester, by 1844, the Irk was transformed into the “coal-black, foul-smelling stream” that Engels viewed from Ducie Bridge.

This noxious reputation lingers still, a murky-mirky starting point for us …

Beneath Victoria Station, the Irk disappears from view before mingling with the larger Irwell. It’s an inconsequential end, one well-suited for this unremarkable river, too short to develop much in size or character.

Rising less than 15 miles north (in between Middleton and Royton), it’s less a river, more of a big stream. Weaving its way into Manchester - channelled under the orbital M60 motorway; passing close by, but hidden from, the splendour of Heaton Park; descending to Crumpsall where its waters were unceremoniously taken for the dye and chemical works.

Flowing still stream-like beneath the splendid brick arches of the Queens Road viaduct - its last few miles into the city centre lie in the valley bottom between the districts of Red Bank and Angel Meadow.

Straddling either side of the lower reaches of the Irk, these slums were the c19th home to Jewish and Irish immigrants respectively. Both communities came to Manchester, escaping poverty and oppression back home.

They had the ‘wrong’ religions, languages, values, diets, and customs ... and they attracted the negative press and discrimination that so often accompanies immigrant communities the world over.

And the Irk, flowing between these communities of newly-arrived labour for manufacturing growth, attracted all the filth and ugliness of the industrialisation that made Manchester.

Even now, when the industry has largely fallen silent, when the massed hordes have long since departed, and when nature is reclaiming the river banks and neighbouring brown field sites, the Irk is only occasionally pretty.

Mostly old industrial units back directly onto it, and the detritus of the modern era clogs its path, but occasionally it delights with its ducklings skimming over the blossom-sprinkled ponds of the old dye works.

Khosidls and hornpipes, doinas and slow airs, freylekhs and polkas, bulgars and reels, shers and set dances - there are many intriguing similarities in these dance traditions.

And some common themes in their songs of home and immigrant aspiration.

Whilst klezmer foregrounds clarinet and brass amongst other instruments, Irish trad. music uses uillean pipes, button accordions, and banjos perhaps, but both traditions feature fiddles, flutes, mandolins, and percussion.

Again, interesting possibilities arise through the juxtaposition of klezmer and Irish fidls/fiddles, through the exploration of the plaintive evocation of the human voice by clarinet and pipes, and through the melding of elements (such as the rhythm from one tradition) with elements (such as melodies) of the other.

The show builds upon such possibilities ....