Sissay, Lemn

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.”From left, Sean Garratt, Charmene Pang, Jahmarley Bachelor, Kennedy Junior Muntanga and Annie Edwards in “The Global Playground.” Tristram Kenton“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. More