Made to Connect: Theatrical Exchange between Town and City

This chapter explores city-town partnerships, focusing on Royal Exchange Theatre's Local Exchange programme – a series of residencies which aims to develop cultural relationships between the city of Manchester and the Greater Manchester city-region (UK). Drawing on ethnographic and archival research undertaken during Local Exchange's residency in the post-industrial town of Leigh in August 2021, the discussion centres on the Den in Leigh: a fortnight of performance events that took place at Spinners Mill, a grade II double cotton mill in the town. ‘Exchange’ is used here as a keyword to describe the processes of co-production between the city-based theatre company and the cultural producers in Leigh, but also to articulate the material histories of exchange that shaped the town's connection to Manchester through its former silk, cotton, and coal industries. Through detailed engagement with one performance at the Den, KIT Theatre's Digital Ghost Hunt – a site-specific, immersive children's show which mined the industrial legacies of Spinners Mill – this chapter works with Avery Gordon's concept of ‘social haunting’ to track how the production works to raise the town's industrial ghosts, and in doing so, reveal the historic connections between Leigh and the city of Manchester.