Alex Poots is excited. He is about to see the fruits of years of his labour. He is director of the first Manchester International Festival and every item on its jam packed programme is his baby. “I picked all of it, so I’m getting personal with all of it. I’m most pleased about the breadth of it. It’s not just one thing – we’ve got everything from pop to opera.”
“The main aim was to create a ‘home’ where all different kinds of artists could create new work and present it as part of the festival. We’re giving it a home – a context,” says Alex.
Alex’s enthusiasm is infectious, and there’s not a corner of the arts world that he’s left untouched. From a club night called Industrial Resolution that features DJs like Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox and Sasha mixing it up in a visual installation with Video Jockeys, to food as art with Heston Blumenthal from the famed Fat Duck restaurant serving £7 summer deserts. It’s all there.
“We thought we’d better call it by its full name, as in its first year MIF didn’t have a good ring to it”, he says as he gives me the mouthful of a web address manchesterinternationalfestival.com. But the name doesn’t really matter when you see the programme.
As Alex himself says “we’ve got a range of exceptional talents to present”. He gives the example of two of his pre festival commissions: A Gorillaz concert, and a McQueen painting co-commission called Queen and Country which commemorates the British soldiers who have been killed in the ongoing war in Iraq: “The two events couldn’t be more different, and that was what I was trying to get across. It’s not about putting people in boxes.”
Smokey Robinson has been confirmed, as have Bert Jansch and Beth Orton. The launch event is Monkey: Journey to the West. It is a circus opera for the 21st century, based on an ancient Chinese legend but reworked as a dazzling spectacle involving more than 40 Chinese circus acrobats, vocalists and performing martial artists. Salman Rushdie’s epic novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet has been transformed into a full-length concert piece for orchestra, film, singers and narrator. The festival runs to cutting edge visual arts too: Assembly is a new film installation by artist Rachel Davies, based on her teenage memories of being in the Manchester Girls Choir in the early 1980s, and Manchester: Peripheral remixes and replays the sounds of Manchester in an audio-visual installation in Piccadilly Gardens.
There’s something very personal, intimate, almost secret about some events: The Pianist (best known as an Oscar-winning film by Roman Polanski) is based upon the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation and uses Szpilman’s original text and the ravishing music of Chopin in a warehouse attic in one of Manchester’s most historic buildings.
One look at the programme’s music bias and its obvious Poots is trying to appeal to young people – a point he acknowledges, saying that Manchester has a large young community. However, he says the bias towards pop and rock has more to do with what Manchester is famous for, than any attempt to capture the youth market. Innovation and music are key themes, for a festival that is trying to draw on Manchester’s reputation and history as the industrial city.
“The city wanted an international festival, but one danger we could have not heeded was to ignore Manchester,” explains Alex, so they lined up local acts with the international. Kapital – a film about hidden people in Manchester sits next to a “unique family concert” The Cunning Little Vixen co-produced with Opus Arte and Los Angeles Opera and Alphabicycle which has been commissioned by The Halle. Alongside this is an Orchestral Suite by one of the world’s leading record producers, Grammy award winning William Orbit. It’s important to Alex that the festival showcases Manchester, as well as bringing the world to Manchester.
There has been a lot of news about festival rivalry in the lead up to the inaugural festival, so is Manchester taking on Edinburgh? “If you read the press we are,” he laughs. “The positive part of any comparison between the two festivals is that Edinburgh is now starting to lobby the council so we might have been of benefit to them.” Manchester has been a funding success that many others are no doubt hoping to emulate. The £2 million put up by Manchester Council have led to £3.5 in private donations – the most that any arts festival has ever raised – and most of it is from local sponsors.
When I suggest that he might just have the best job in the arts world, he agrees. So how did Alex end up with his dream job?
He had been working as head of contemporary arts for English National Opera (ENO) for only 18 months at the time the job came up in Manchester. Usually a job like the one he had at ENO would have a term of 3-4 years, so when he was asked to apply for the job in Manchester he chose to stay at ENO, and not to apply.
“I didn’t apply for the job in Manchester. But I was asked to talk to the panel in Manchester about what they could do. So I went up to Manchester and told them what I would do if it was me.”
Alex laid out three things: they should not copy anyone else’s festival, they should invest heavily, and the artistic director they appoint should have complete and total artistic freedom. He told them that he thought the festival should be different, because if it wasn’t what was the point in doing yet another festival? And he also said it should not go head-to-head with any other festival in terms of content or timing.
By the time he got off the train back at London Euston they had called him and offered him the job he hadn’t applied for. He asked them to put it in writing, and everything he asked for arrived the next morning in an email. Alex was impressed at the lack of bureaucracy “here was a council that could make a decision in less than 3 hours and put together a proposal in a day”. So after ENO “very sweetly” agreed to let him go, he moved into his dream job – one he’d inadvertently been able to create and shape.
He hasn’t looked back. Alex says the council did exactly what he’d suggested and put its money on the table and backed it. “They let me do what I wanted to do which is really quite bizarre. I had this idea of world permieres, a simple idea, and they backed it. They gave me complete artistic control.” Alex took his blank canvas, and shaped his own dream job, as well as a festival of new work that’s made headlines the world over.
“We’ve had a good run,” says Alex in his casual, humble way, “we’re waiting for something to go wrong! I hope it will be a success, but we’ll have to wait and see.”
Manchester International Festival runs from 28 June until 15 July.
