The annual arts event in the north of England suggests that focusing on community and inclusiveness could be a natural, post-pandemic outcome for artists.
MANCHESTER, England — “Your City, Your Festival.” The slogan is emblazoned on the 2,000-odd posters strung up around the city center here, above pictures of ethnically diverse faces of various genders and ages. That would be the Manchester International Festival, which, against considerable odds, in a region of England particularly affected by the pandemic, opened on schedule on July 1. (It runs through July 18.)
Since its inception in 2007, this festival has had a distinctive identity: It presents only new work, across multiple disciplines, usually through high-octane creative collaborations. But this year, despite the (mostly virtual) presence of artists from 22 countries, the festival feels more local than international, with a strong focus on community, inclusiveness and political engagement, mostly expressed through film and the visual arts.
The pandemic’s influence on this is clear. Most of the international participants have not been able to travel to Manchester to research, rehearse or perform. Live performance in theaters is still a risky gamble for producers, and the shared productions that have made ambitious projects financially possible in the past have been off the table.
About two-thirds of the 2021 program comprises planned projects that had to be reconfigured “because artists couldn’t be here, or we couldn’t rely on having live audiences,” said John McGrath, the artistic director of the festival. The remainder, he added, were new commissions that “weren’t even previously on our radar.” (The $4.15 million budget is about two-thirds of the previous festival amount, he said.)
One of the reconfigured events was Boris Charmatz’s “Sea Change,” which opened the festival on Thursday. Originally planned as an outdoor dance performance before 4,000 people, it instead ran for three hours along Deansgate, a wide central shopping thoroughfare. Timed slots controlled the number of onlookers strolling past the 149 performers, mostly local and nonprofessional, who were arranged in a long, continuous line down the center of the street. As sound reverberated from speakers along the trajectory, the performers gesticulated, shouted, whispered and contorted, before running to touch and displace another in the next group, in an ongoing game of tag.
Themes emerged and mutated. One group counted down repetitively from 100; another ran in place in different ways; a third shouted out angry slogans (“My body, my choice!” “Boris, out, out, out!” “Free, free Palestine!”). Others reached out hungrily, lay shrieking on the ground or whooped with exultation. “That’s just how I felt after lockdown ended,” a passer-by said with a laugh to her companion.
“All the gestures were linked to current circumstances,” Charmatz wrote in an email after the performance. “The anger about not being able to dance, not being able to touch one another, to be between life and death. Every participant interpreted these ideas in his or her own way.”
“Sea Change” was touching and ambitious in scale but not especially memorable as an artistic enterprise. Neither was the children’s show, “Global Playground,” directed by Sue Buckmaster, which incorporated dance, theater, music, puppetry and ventriloquism. Presented in the round, its central conceit involved a director (Sean Garratt) trying rather haplessly to make a dance movie as first his camera, then a brash puppet, talked back to him, while four charming onstage dancers (Jahmarley Bachelor, Annie Edwards, Kennedy Junior Muntanga and Charmene Pang) eluded his control.
Gregory Maqoma’s highly varied choreography for these dancers (as well as Thulani Chauke on two large screens at the sides of the stage — a nod to travel problems during Covid-19) and Garratt’s ventriloquist skills were the best parts of the unevenly paced show, which meandered from one set piece to another.
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The strongest performance piece was, surprisingly, a film installation. In the vast Manchester Center (a former train station), flashing lights and a humming, breathy electronic surround sound (by Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Jon Hopkins) pierced the cavernous space before the start of “All of This Unreal Time,” a collaboration between the actor Cillian Murphy (“Peaky Blinders”) and the writer Max Porter, directed by Aoife McArdle.
Murphy and Porter have worked together previously, on the stage adaptation of “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” and as with that work, the text here is a strange and wonderful assemblage of narrative, reflection, soliloquy, myth and poetry. “I came out here to apologise” is emblazoned on the screen before we see Murphy trudging through a dark, dripping tunnel.
As he walks through the night, down dilapidated streets and past fluorescent-lit all-night cafes, Murphy’s character speaks of his shame, anger and fears as he confesses his failings as a man (“Sisterhood, now that’s a thing to envy”). “I’m sorry I took, and took, and took, and took, and took, and enriched myself without pause and left deep scars on the skin of the earth,” he says near the end, by which time he is walking through a field outside the city, the sky lightening, trains passing, birds flocking.
McArdle keeps the pace tight, the focus on Murphy, her cutaway shots fleeting and pointed. Seen on a huge screen, the sound swelling and waning like the echoes of nature itself alongside the musical rhythms of the text, “All of This Unreal Time” (available to watch online) is a riveting, genuinely immersive journey that — like all good art — keeps the possibilities for meaning entirely open.
The same openness to interpretation characterizes the lovely exhibition “Poet Slash Artist,” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the director of the Serpentine Galleries, and the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay. Mixing poets and artists who deploy both visual imagery and text in their works, the exhibition shows 25 practitioners working across continents, languages and scripts.
There are several other compelling works, including “I Love You Too,” by the South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere, in the beautiful round reading room of Manchester’s Central Library. Striking sculptural compositions made from tires, wood, porcelain dogs, suitcases and shoelaces are laid out precisely along the room’s long tables where scholars might study.
At the newly restored jewel-box Manchester Jewish Museum, Laure Prouvost’s “The long waited, weighted gathering,” a film and textile installation, pays homage to the female figures who underpinned the city’s Jewish community. And Cephas Williams’s powerful “Portrait of Black Britain” has 116 large-scale portraits of diverse Black figures from a wide range of backgrounds and ages hanging throughout a local shopping center.
“Big Ben Lying Down With Political Books,” from the Argentine artist Marta Minujín, manages to combine political worthiness with a flamboyant spirit of artistic panache. Inside the 42-meter-long “temporary landmark” created out of 20,000 books, all connected to British political history and attached to scaffolding, a film by Minujín shows Big Ben as a rocket ejecting from London and landing in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. The piece is rich in interpretive possibility: Is it about the north-south divide in Britain? Does it symbolize a tamed phallus? Is it about censorship? Brexit?
Perhaps the focus on community, inclusiveness and diversity at this festival is a natural, post-pandemic outcome for artists, as much as a practical response to the logistics of creating a festival program.
“We only ever ask, what can we help you to make?” McGrath, the artistic director, said. “But of course, when multiple artists are creating in the same time-frame, themes of our time emerge.”
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
