As the place where the spinning jenny and the computer were invented, Manchester is often touted as the world’s first modern city, and with the advent of the Manchester International Festival (MIF), it seems to be drawing on that spirit of innovation once more.
The Festival is being billed as ‘the world’s first festival of original, new work’, and it is pulling out all the stops to live up to that name: introducing the concept of ‘trailblazer events’, mixing genres and producing the Manchester Firsts, premieres of new work created and performed by Manchester cultural organisations.
By all indications, festival director Alex Poots has done a pretty good job so far. Choosing Gorillaz for the first of the three trailblazer events was an ingenious move – the band’s five-night concert series at the Opera House sold out and attracted great attention, thanks to the band’s popularity and the impressive list of guest artists, which included Neneh Cherry, De La Soul and Ike Turner. The other two trailblazers have not yet been announced – they are to take place in the autumn and winter of this year – but if they enjoy the same kind of reception that the Gorillaz concerts have done, the festival may well be called a success before it has even begun.
All the same, journalist Lynsey Hanley must have expressed the sentiments of many a Brit when she asked, ‘Do we really need another festival of art and culture, when we have gigantic Edinburgh, an increasingly diverse Glastonbury and Liverpool’s year as capital of culture in 2008?’
It’s a fair question, and one that those behind the festival naturally answer in the affirmative. Perhaps it is indeed what Hanley described as the ‘bristling self-confidence and goodwill’ of the city that creates the need for such a festival. Despite already having a comedy festival, a jazz festival and a food and drink festival, Manchester is hungry for more and the experience of hosting the Commonwealth Games and the associated arts event Culture Shock in 2002 has only whetted its appetite.
As the level of publicity for the festival indicates, the organisers’ aims for it are high. ‘In terms of international impact we would position it alongside the top festivals in the world – and that would include Edinburgh,’ stated Fran Toms, Manchester City Council’s head of cultural strategy. ‘We didn’t want it to be like any other English city festival, so we are focusing entirely on new work.’
To that end, the festival’s collaboration with Gorillaz has been particularly serendipitous. Not only has the band’s support helped to create a buzz, but Gorillaz founder and Blur frontman Damon Albarn has now agreed to compose the score for one of MIF’s headline events, a musical circus based on the Chinese legend of The Monkey King.
Poots says that the show, Monkey: Journey to the West, will feature 40 Chinese acrobats and martial arts experts, as well as Shaolin monks and singers from the Peking Opera. Both alternative and eclectic – it will be directed by Chinese theatre director Chen Shi-Zheng – it is also reflective of Poots’ artistic sensibilities. The 38-year-old, formerly the head of contemporary arts at the English National Opera (ENO), has consistently displayed a predilection for cross-cultural and hybrid works, as is evident not only from the festival programme he has assembled but also in his commissioning of an opera about Colonel Gaddafi while at ENO.
The site-specific theme that runs throughout much of the festival programme finds its precursor in Rusholme Ruffians and Suffer Little Children, two songs by local band The Smiths, as well as in the paintings of Mancunian L. S. Lowry and Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People. In that sense, the festival programme might even be called traditional, in an irrepressible Mancunian way. Dubbed the Manchester Firsts, it consists of a series of projects that will premiere at the festival. Among these are the exhibition To the Left of the Rising Sun, which will take place at Castlefield Gallery and explore the concept of the North through the work of contemporary artists from the UK and Scandinavia. In line with the ambitious nature of the festival, the event is to incorporate a live performance that will be held at a separate venue in Manchester.
Elsewhere, Community Arts North West (CAN) is to launch the Exodus Live International Orchestra, which will bring musicians from Manchester’s diverse refugee communities together with local musicians and bands to create a new orchestral piece to be performed at the festival. This initiative follows in the footsteps of the Exodus Onstage 2006 Refugee Theatre Season, which takes place from 14 November to 4 December 2006.
Meanwhile, Alastair Dant, Tom Davis and David Gunn team up with the Museum of Science and Industry to resume The Folk Songs Project, which they first started in response to the Tenement Museum’s call for works that explored contemporary immigrant experiences in New York City. Like its predecessor Folk Songs for the Five Points, Manchester Peripheral is a soundmap that charts the sonic contours of the city. Unlike it, its purpose is not primarily to record landmarks but to turn its audience into urban sound jockeys in their own right, playing and mixing sounds varying from diverse musical pieces and resident interviews to the shouts of a kickboxing instructor and the clip-clop of police horses.
Also among the Manchester Firsts are a slew of dance and theatre productions from five new performing arts companies being supported by the Performing Arts and Network Development Agency (PANDA). Hercules Productions’ first show, Different Perspectives, tells the story of a second-generation Brit Jamaican and will debut in Manchester and London this autumn; we can likely expect more work about the cultural consequences of immigration. Running to Paradise’s three upcoming projects promise to be shockingly avant-garde, while Ikebana Productions’ Skittish, a dysfunctional romantic comedy about falling in love with strangers, has already earned itself a nomination for best new play at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards. Pigeon Theatre makes a point of performing in unusual spaces; to date its plays have been set in a railway arch, a kitchen and a large box. Upasana promotes Indian arts and culture in the UK and will present a South Indian classical dance (Bharatanatyam).
On behalf of the festival, the Cornerhouse Gallery welcomes The Assembly by Rachel Davies, a film and music installation about the teenage experiences of past and present members of the Mancunian Girls’ Choir. Davies is a dance filmmaker with an interest in experimental film, animation and video.
Continuing the site-specific theme is The Rusholme Project, led by artists Rashid Rana from Pakistan and Subodh Gupta from India, who together with local students and community groups will produce a series of works about Rusholme.
And finally, suspense still hovers around the last of the Manchester Firsts – two as yet unnamed plays that will be selected from the winners of the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition, a major new award for British playwrights that is to be handed out on 18 September. The winners will have their plays staged at The Royal Exchange Theatre during the festival.
The Manchester International Festival will not be launched until 28 June 2007, and it seems as if organisers are doing everything they can to whet the public’s appetite into a frenzy. Will their careful planning really bring them into the milieu of such events as the Edinburgh Festival? It’s impossible to say. But as far as plans go, this one is looking good.
