Below-zero temperatures are forecast at City Park on Friday evening but the warmth radiating from Bradford’s mighty UK city of culture opening will undoubtedly put everyone in the mood to celebrate.
The city was right in the centre of a badly timed amber weather warning this week and suffered a deluge of snow that the council has “been proper grafting” to clear, said the show’s dramaturg, Kirsty Taylor.
“It’s wild isn’t it?” she said. “I feel like that’s what we get for putting on a show in January, but it hasn’t been like this for years, has it?”
On Friday and Saturday, thousands of Bradfordians are expected to gather to watch RISE, the outdoor theatre event launching the year-long programme, described as “Bradford’s equivalent of an Olympic opening ceremony” by the magician Steven Frayne, formerly known as Dynamo, who grew up in the city.
Though there are likely to be a few icicles, the festival atmosphere in the centre of the city will include DJs, food trucks and entertainers, ahead of the show, which will involve 200 people and featuring aerial performances, acrobatics and magic, created by Frayne, and directed by Kirsty Housley, the lauded theatre director.
“Seeing the scale of the production is just blowing my mind,” said Taylor, herself a critically acclaimed playwright, director and poet, whose poignant and hilarious sold-out 2022 show, Cashy C’s: The Musical, received five-star reviews and was one of Guardian readers’ favourite stage shows of 2022.
Attendance might be a bit more challenging for those living further afield – the Bradford district stretches out past Ilkley Moor in the north and the rural Pennine town of Haworth in the west, home of the Brontë sisters – where there are many people snowed in. Almost 200 schools are closed across the Bradford area.
“People [potentially struggling to] access it from outside the city, I think that’s going to be a shame,” she said.
But there are many more notable events coming up in the calendar for the year, including an exhibition of work by the Bradfordian David Hockney, bassline mixed with Opera North, traditional brass bands with Afrobeat rhythms, the Turner prize showcase, poetry, cinema, food and a seemingly endless array of local events.
Saturday begins one of the most hotly anticipated weekends in Bradford, which also became the world’s first Unesco city of film in 2009: the reopening of the beloved Science and Media Museum, which has been treated to a much-needed revamp thanks to a £6m investment.
A pair of “techno trousers” replete with the infamous penguin villain Feathers McGraw from the 1993 Wallace & Gromit film The Wrong Trousers has been installed high up on the wall of the museum foyer by Aardman, ahead of a festival this weekend celebrating the animated duo.
But delays in construction meant the museum’s reopening was pushed back – and it is not the only project that has not gone to plan.
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Bradford Live, a £50.5m, 3,800-seat venue that was funded mostly by Bradford council had remained closed since NEC Group, which runs a number of large venues in and around Birmingham, pulled out of the deal last summer.
Drone footage released this week of the newly refurbished building, a former longstanding Odeon cinema, shows sensitively restored original features including a grand regency-revival-inspired ballroom with a vaulted ceiling.
Residents have also complained about a £45m “monumental infrastructure project” of roadworks in the city centre, most of which was completed in December but there still some work not yet finished, causing diversions.
Bradford, which was selected as a city of culture in 2022 after a record 20 bids, has some of the poorest wards in the UK and wards where only about 10% of residents are white, areas that are referred to as “no-go zones” by rightwing agitators. “This old bullshit narrative of Bradford, we know it’s fuelled by racism,” said Taylor, adding a “fuck you” to those who force that story on the city.
“We know what the narrative is of the city, nationally, worldwide. And it’s time to move on from that.”
It simply does not match the truth of a city where people are united across cultures, backgrounds and generations, she said. “I’ve got a poem about how you can take us out of Bradford, but you can’t take the Bradford out of us. Even if we do go anywhere else, it has shaped us in that way. And it sounds so cheesy, but it’s bloody true.”