“I feel like thinking big. I feel like being dramatic. I feel like making a real splash. I feel like declaring I am here.”
Linda Brogan is a multi-award winning playwright. She has been resident in the National Theatre, Contact Theatre, Peterborough Maximum Security Prison, Askham Grange Open Prison, and the Whitworth Art Gallery.
Been around the world: Moss Side, Jamaica and back
Being seen from Moss Side to the Manchester International Festival.
Linda Brogan in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
On Linda’s project to excavate the Reno nightclub, an archaeological exploration and affirmation of the presence and voice of Moss Side’s ‘mixed race’ community in Manchester.
Biography
Linda is a multi-award winning playwright. She has been writer-in-residence at the National Theatre, Contact Theatre, Askham Grange Prison, and the Whitworth Art Gallery. Her recent work has concentrated on the Reno, a legendary 1970s funk and soul club in Moss Side, Manchester, predominantly populated by ‘half-caste’ people born into the 1950s, the era of No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs, and stigmatized by the 1930s Fletcher Report which cast the offspring of interracial relationships as ‘born with mental and physical defects’.
As a recipient of three consecutive Arts Council England grants, in 2016 Linda collected ‘Reno Memoirs’; in 2017 she excavated the Reno; and in 2018 ‘Excavating the Reno’ was a finalist in eight national awards. In 2019/2020, as The Reno @The Whitworth, Linda exhibited the ‘Reno Memoirs’, artefacts, and teen photo montages in the Whitworth Art Gallery, and received Manchester City Council’s Outstanding Contribution to Manchester Culture Award. Currently, she is working on The Reno @Manchester International Festival for 2022.
