Help shape Manchester's culture forum before it opens.

There's no live discussion board here yet, and we'd rather say that plainly than dress up an empty page. A community forum for Manchester's culture scene - theatre, comedy, dance, visual art, and the venues and people behind them - is planned, built around the kind of conversations people already have about what's worth seeing and what's opening or closing in the city.

Until it launches, Manchester's culture community is easy enough to find elsewhere - through venues directly, through the casting and crewing routes covered on our other pages, and through the audiences and creators who already gather around venues like the Frog and Bucket, Bridgewater Hall and The Lowry.

We want the forum shaped by what people actually want from it, not what we assume they want. If there's something specific you'd use - a venue review thread, a "who's casting right now" board, an area-by-area discussion split - tell us before we build it via the contact page.

We're building it this way deliberately rather than launching an empty comments section and hoping it fills up. A forum only actually works once there's a real base of people using it, and getting there means having moderation and structure sorted before the first post rather than scrambling to add them after spam or arguments show up. That's the whole reason this is a "coming soon" page instead of a live but empty one.

In the meantime, Manchester's culture scene already talks to itself plenty - through the venues themselves, through casting calls and open auditions, and through the kind of word-of-mouth network covered on our cast and crew guide. What a proper forum adds on top of that is a permanent, searchable record of the practical knowledge that currently just lives in people's heads and gets re-asked constantly: which rehearsal room actually has decent acoustics, which venues are good to work with, what a particular festival or open call was really like to go through. That's worth building properly.

The same approach applies across MCR.CITY's creative sections - the film forum and the art forum are in exactly the same pre-launch state, for the same reason.

Manchester's culture scene has a genuinely long history of this kind of informal knowledge-sharing - from actors and stage managers who've worked the same rooms for years, to audiences who follow specific companies from venue to venue. A forum doesn't need to invent that community; it needs to give it somewhere permanent to live that isn't scattered across group chats and social feeds that make older conversations impossible to find again. That's the actual gap we're building toward, rather than a generic "add a comments section" feature.

If you run a venue, company or festival in Manchester and would specifically value a way to post open calls, casting notices or venue availability once this launches, that's also worth telling us directly - it'll shape whether the forum has a dedicated section for that kind of listing from day one rather than it being an afterthought.

In the meantime, our cast and crew guide and rehearsal space guide cover the real organisations and routes where a lot of Manchester's culture community already connects - worth reading if you need an answer today rather than once the forum exists.

Front of house and audience volunteering at venues you already like is also worth mentioning here - it's one of the quickest ways to actually meet people working in Manchester theatre and performance, forum or no forum, and several working relationships in this city started exactly that way.

We know "coming soon" is a phrase a lot of sites use and never follow through on. What we can commit to is that this page gets replaced with the real thing rather than quietly forgotten, and that it gets built around what the people who actually ask for it say they want, rather than a generic forum template dropped in unchanged.

FAQ

Is the culture forum live? Not yet. This page will be replaced once it launches.

How will I know when it opens? It'll be linked from the Culture hub the day it goes live.

Can I suggest what it should cover? Yes, genuinely - get in touch via the contact page.

Will venues and companies be able to post, or just individuals? Still being decided, and it's exactly the kind of question we want feedback on before launch.

Is there a cost to use the forum once it launches? The plan is for it to be free to use, in line with the rest of MCR.CITY's community tools.

Will there be a section for open casting calls and open auditions? Likely, and it's one of the specific features we'd like feedback on before building - tell us if that's something you'd actually use.

Can I follow up on a suggestion I've already sent? Yes, use the same contact route and reference your earlier message.