Bloom at Hallé St Peter’s
Johnny James, Managing EditorVisit now
Bloom
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
This September, Manchester plays host to the 50th anniversary of Japan Week – the first time the festival’s landed on UK soil. Why Manchester? You’ll find the answer in Bloom.
The thread goes back to 1865, when three young men from Satsuma, Japan, slipped into Oldham under the radar. Welcomed into the mills, they learned from the minds and machines powering ‘Cottonopolis’, accelerating Japan’s textile revolution and helping Osaka become the ‘Manchester of the East’.
Bloom takes that history and pushes it forward. Creative producers From The Other connected an eclectic local line-up of creators: composer/DJ AFRODEUTSCHE, the kinetic force of Company Chameleon and queer-led fashion label Belladonis, with support from a Hallé trio. Together they wove music, movement and couture into a single performance – first dreamed up for the World Expo 2025 in Osaka, now reimagined for its UK debut.
It opens with the journey: dancers tracing the Satsuma students’ voyage, bodies folding into the warp and weft of the looms, synths and strings entwining like spun thread. Belladonis’ costumes – dyed with Manchester-grown Japanese indigo – reveal Bloom’s totem: the peppered moth. Once pale, the species turned coal-black in Manchester’s smog-heavy industrial age, then returned to white with cleaner skies. A living emblem of change, survival, and rebirth.
That transformation runs through everything here, making Bloom a perfect headline for Japan Week’s milestone year – a piece that distils Manchester and Japan’s shared story, then pushes it forward, fuelled by creativity, inspired by nature, alive with ideas for what comes next.
Two free chances to see it. On 7 September, Hallé St Peter’s hosts it as the centrepiece of Japan Day, alongside archive talks, instrument demos and live music. On 9 September, it surfaces in Oldham, preceded by an introduction from Gallery Oldham’s Rebecca Hill, and a set from Jennifer Reid – firing off Industrial Revolution street songs and dialect numbers about the Oldham spinners and their factory bosses, the Platt Brothers.
Ancoats or Oldham – wherever you see it, Bloom isn’t just history retold. It’s a story still unfolding.
