rise @ bluebird is our Acomb evening arts venue.
The space regularly plays host to live music, spoken word, art exhibitions, theatre, comedy, family- friendly nights and much more.
Rise aims to be a vibrant and independently-run creative hub, driven by love and support from the local community - and an ardent sense of adventure.
Pop down and check us out - we’re looking forward to you helping shape this place just as much as we do.
Gallery
What's on
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Dusko!
Join us for Dusko — an early-nighter of house music through the decades in a chilled-out café setting. These nights will bring talented DJs to transport you right back to the old-skool clubbing scene - with classic uplifters, retro anthems and dirty beats. Pop down, grab a beer, catch up with mates and - when the music takes over - get yourselves on the dance floor. All with the promise of a full eight-hours of beauty sleep.* *any after-party activity is entirely at your own risk. Food available from 5pm
- 28/07/2024
15:00:00
Family Friendly Activities
Free
BYO Vinyl
Bag your 20 minutes of fame! Spin your tunes at our BYO Vinyl Sundays.
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Rise Up!
Our monthly celebration of poetry and the spoken word! Join us on Wednesday 31st July at 8.30pm (doors at 7.30pm) to welcome poets Kim Moore, Deborah Finding and Laura Strickland (and three open-micers). Kim Moore’s first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Kim will be supported by two exciting voices:
Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her debut poetry pamphlet, vigils for dead and dying girls, is published by Nine Pens and her second, amortisation, is forthcoming with Live Canon. She has been widely anthologised and is published in Propel, fourteen poems, Berlin lit, and The Alchemy Spoon. She has also written features and interviews for the Guardian, the Huffington Post and DIVA magazine. Originally from the North-East, Deborah lives in London, where she is poet in residence at the Soho Poly Theatre.
Laura Strickland is a carer, poet and MA student at Manchester Metropolitan
University. Her work has appeared in The North, Northern Gravy, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dreamcatcher, Strix, The Frogmore Papers and High Window. Laura was shortlisted in the Leeds Poetry Festival and Black Cat Poetry Press competitions. She is one of 20 poets included in Poetry Archive's Worldview 2023 and is working on her first pamphlet.
Doors at 7.30pm - event starts at 8.30pm and finishes at 10.30pm.
- 02/08/2024
18:00:00
DJ Nights
Free
Resurrection - Indie Revival
Playing the best Indie tunes from the 80's & 90's. Food available from 6pm
- 03/08/2024
18:00:00
DJ Nights
Free
Jammin' @ rise - with guests
Sweet reggae music is back with our brilliant residents Alli Lou & Tinkermuffin. Food available from 6pm
- 04/08/2024
17:00:00
Family Friendly Activities
Free
BYO Vinyl
Bag your 20 minutes of fame! Spin your tunes at our BYO Vinyl Sundays. Food available from 5pm
- 09/08/2024
18:00:00
DJ Nights
Free
On My Way
Our Northern Soul residency with Michael Toy & Dan Guest (Brighton Beach). Expect Northern soul classics along with some upbeat Motown to get you moving. Don't forget your talcum powder! Food available from 6pm
- 10/08/2024
18:00:00
DJ Nights
Free
TROPICA!
World grooves and musical flavours - a sunny atmosphere guaranteed whatever the weather outside with thanks to tropical decor and hot selectors play the freshest beats from around the globe. One NOT to miss.
- 11/08/2024
15:00:00
Family Friendly Activities
Free
BYO Vinyl
Bag your 20 minutes of fame! Spin your tunes at our BYO Vinyl Sundays. Food available from 3pm
- 17/08/2024
18:00:00
DJ Nights
Free
Uptown Funk
Uptown Funk - (Acomb’s uptown isn’t it?!) - our funky monthly residency taking place on the third Saturday of the month. Expect funk and soul classics along with some great new tunes and edits. Food available from 6pm
- 18/08/2024
15:00:00
Family Friendly Activities
Free
BYO Vinyl
Bag your 20 minutes of fame! Spin your tunes at our BYO Vinyl Sundays. Food available from 3pm
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Kassie Valazza
Kassi Valazza’s latest album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing is a spellbinding collection of songs that dangle like protective magic talismans, catching dreams and glinting light. She hypnotizes listeners with a sturdy, yet gentle, voice and painterly songwriting imbued with an independent spirit.
Though her music plays country cousin to British folk, calling to mind greats like Sandy Denny (Fairport Convention) and Karen Dalton, a Southwestern American streak carves its way through these solemn, sweetly sung melodies like a canyon.
‘Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing’ is an album of subtly brilliant songs. This is sure to be one of the best country albums of the year, drawing from country and folk tradition to shape something fresh and unique.'
Americana UK
'A little while back I featured a standalone single from Kassi Valazza that found her injecting a sense of Cosmic Americana into Country’s trad trappings. Just over a month later the Portland songwriter offers up news of an upcoming album, Knows Nothing, and the first single, “Watching Planes Go By.” This time there’s still a country countenance but the song is cut with a sense of ‘60s UK folk, nodding to works by Fairport Convention and Pentangle alongside the darker folk musing of Americans like Susan Christie or Karen Dalton. The song’s midsection blisters into a torrent of rhythm and guitar that pulls this far from the ordinary modern country single, rippling with a turbulent tension.'
Raven Sings The Blues -
Brendan Duffy Quartet
One of the most charismatic and popular entertainers on the UK jazz scene on sax and vocals.
Accompanied by the astonishing Tom Townsend on drums, local favourite Christian Topman on double bass and the hardest-working pianist in York, Karl Mullen on upright piano, hold onto your hats for an eclectic and exciting evening of jazz. Everything from singalong fun to John Coltrane and Charles Mingus! - 30/08/2024
18:00:00
DJ Nights
Free
Into The Groove
An eighties vinyl extravaganza!
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Steve Wynn
Steve Wynn's first UK solo tour in over ten years with new album and book Steve Wynn, leader and founder of the Dream Syndicate, will be touring the UK this September in support of I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True, his debut book, a memoir for Jawbone Press as well as “Make It Right,” his first solo album since 2010, to be released on Fire Records. Both the book and new record will come out on August 30, just a few weeks ahead of the tour.The book details the winding path from growing up a music fan and pre-teen bandleader in Los Angeles through the formation and ultimate dissolution of the Dream Syndicate at the end of their first era in 1988. There are stops along the way for tales of cross-country greyhound trips to track down Alex Chilton to wild, off-the-rails tours with U2 and R.E.M. and the epic heart-of-darkness making of the band’s controversial second album Medicine Show and plenty more. The album is a similarly, reflective and intimately revealing collection, written and recorded in tandem with the writing of I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True.Wynn promises a one-man show blending songs from and inspired by the book along with a narrative structure of readings from the book and storytelling, adjunctly extrapolated from those passages. Fans can expect a selection of evergreens and rarities from the Dream Syndicate’s 80’s catalogue along with illuminating covers and reflective numbers from the new album as well, all adding up to one tall tale of a past revisited. Steve says, “I don’t see this show as a stodgy reading or as a random selection of songs but rather a tiny play of sorts, a way of giving a flesh and blood companion to the book. I’m looking for that magic place where, say, Lenny Bruce and Spaulding Grey and Ray Davies and Bob Dylan and maybe Hedwig might meet in a dimly lit cabernet on the back streets of Hollywood. I’ve never done this kind of show before but if I can hit all those markers, I’ll be happy.”Steve Wynn will be selling and signing copies of I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True (book) and “Make It Right” (CD/LP) after every show.
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Rise Up!
RISE UP! - with Malika Booker, Lillian Akampurira Aujo & Rachel Bower! Malika Booker, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, and co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3 (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, A Complete Works fellow, inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). She is the first woman to win the Forward Prize for Best Single poem twice: The Little Miracles (2020) and Libation (2023).
Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a poet and fiction writer from Uganda, currently based in Leeds. She is the recipient of the Jalada Prize for Literature. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Gerald Kraak Award and the 2018 Brittle Paper Anniversary Award, and longlisted for the 2018 Nommo Award. Her writing has been published by Adda (the Commonwealth writers website), HarperVia, New Internationalist, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, Jalada Africa, Jacana Literary Foundation, among others
Rachel Bower is a poet and fiction writer based in Sheffield. Her debut novel, It Comes from the River will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2025. She is also the author of two poetry collections and an academic book on literary letters. Rachel's poems and stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including The London Magazine, The White Review, Magma and Stand. Her work is represented by Curtis Brown.
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Baps and Buns Burlesque
We are thrilled to announce that York’s Burlesque Queen, Freida Nipples, is back at Rise this September.
Freida is an internationally award-winning burlesque artiste who will seduce you with astounding aesthetics and enthral you with her captivating stage presence.
Alongside her will be a selection of sensational cabaret artists. From drag queens to acrobats, you always know you will be in for a fun night at Freida’s shows which have been sell-out successes across York for the past six years, at venues such as York Theatre Royal, The Basement, Impossible and more.
So - prepare yourselves for an evening of debauchery & glamour in Acomb. The big question is, are you ready for it?!
Tickets include a welcome drink on arrival. (Non-alcoholic option available).
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Groovetone + The Unknown Stuntman
We'll be welcoming the five piece powerhouse Groovetone + The Unknown Stuntman onto the bakery stage! They will be shaking the room with jazz, blues, latin, funk and ska tunes. So don your dancing shoes and come hit the floor.
More events coming soon!