Hands up for art and soul in Manchester

Published on Sunday 17 July 2011 17:58

As Manchester International Festival reaches its climax, our reporter asks director Alex Poots what lessons Edinburgh can learn from the genre-busting feast

TOMORROW Alex Poots, the Edinburgh-raised director of the Manchester International Festival 2011, might be getting a much-needed lie-in, but somehow I doubt it.

Tonight sees the conclusion of the 18-day festival, whose events ranged from the kind of avant-garde performance that involves being in a small space with a naked woman, to a gig by Snoop Dogg and a new Manchester-set musical by comedienne Victoria Wood.

In the morning, Poots's team will be back at their desks crunching the numbers, the technicians will be at work and the trucks will start rolling for those projects that will tour internationally.

But if MIF will be keen to process the lessons of its third edition, so will arts programmers and festivals around the country, both for the overall lessons about the impact of austerity Britain – by the middle of last week sales of ticketed events were up 60 per cent but individual purchasers were buying fewer tickets each – but also for the particular implications of a bespoke festival with a unique emphasis on new commissions and genre-busting collaborations.

"It's a commissioning, artist-led festival," says Poots. "It's very bespoke. In some ways it's quite old-fashioned. It's quite a romantic view, but I like to think it's craftsman-made."

This week both Poots and the Edinburgh International Festival were absolutely clear that the events were not competitors. Poots told me: "I grew up in Edinburgh, I worked at the Edinburgh International Festival and I set up my own one (the experimental music festival Flux] there. Edinburgh is the festival, the biggest festival in the world, it's really good for Scotland."

For the visual arts, Sorcha Carey, director of the Edinburgh Art Festival, the umbrella for the city's galleries during festival time, tells me: "We are not a curated festival so we are very different festivals in very different contexts. What we have in common is a commitment to bringing the very best to audiences, which can only be good for the sector."

In visual arts terms MIF presents two immediate lessons: the first is that it's the level of ambition and quality of artists that have helped it become absolutely essential viewing for the notoriously fickle contemporary art audience.

When the biannual festival kicked off in 2007, global curator and co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-curated the performance project Il Tempo del Postino. This year, Obrist and New York's Klaus Biesenbach curated 11 Rooms at the Manchester Art Gallery, which saw artists from Joan Jonas to Roman Ondk each given a room to fill with a single performance work. From the historical context of Joan Jonas's 1970 Mirror Check to a playful performance by a comic actor in Simon Fujiwara's mischievous and semi-autobiographical Playing The Martyr, the 11 Rooms project delivered both breadth and impact with only the occasional false note.

The second lesson is that its genre-busting collaborations and emphasis on performance and durational work have created a vital sense of event for both local and international visitors.

The biggest international draw has been The Life And Death Of Marina Abramovic, based on the life story of the grandmother of performance art, famously introduced to wider European audiences by Richard Demarco in Edinburgh in 1973.

The collaboration between the Serbian performance artist, the actor Willem Dafoe, the singer Antony Hegarty and the American director Robert Wilson, Life And Death told of the artist's early years and her relationship with her dominant and at times violent mother. In its near three-hour duration, there were moments of electric possibility, particularly when Hegarty sang, an unquestionably brilliant performance by Dafoe, and passages of unrelenting spectacle when it was hard to tell what was true passion and what was risible pastiche.

There was a clear danger that, as the tectonic plates of performance art and musical theatre worlds came together, some of the core values might fall down the cracks. But heck, there was some interesting noise and smoke on the way. The audience loved it.

Poots is a risk taker: he is quite open to admitting that some of his commissions over the years have been "valiant attempts" rather than outright successes. But his balance of the locally rooted and the international, the avant-garde and the popular, is careful and clever.

A quick glance round the bar at Manchester's Mint Hotel this week, with Willem Dafoe and Victoria Wood at adjacent tables, summed it up perfectly.

"When I was growing up I was always surprised and then aggravated I guess about this snobbery, elitism about high art and low art," Poots says. "For me there is great pop music and terrible pop music and great classical music and terrible classical music. Applying that across the arts then, why would this festival not embrace artists of all sorts?"

There was, however, no dilution of the difficult stuff. It may be that what he learned in many years of music programming in his early career is that there is a constant appetite for the new and experimental – and that the passionate loyalties audiences feel for individual performers or creators can lead them through the door to other art forms.

But if there are lessons for Scotland's capital city, there are points to note too for Glasgow, where the consistent investment in visual arts infrastructure and the city's recognition of its artist community has sometimes wobbled when politicians have got involved in questions of content or quality. There are clearly good relationships of trust in Manchester. Poots describes the city's investment as the "absolute rock" of his plans.

And while here was joined-up marketing and near universal branding, the sheer uncompromising nature of the artwork ensured that both cart and horse knew where they stood.

The biggest lesson in Poots' programming, therefore, is its artist-led nature. "You start with the artist... One of the jobs that is most important for this festival is the choice of artist. I think that what we are about is to choose remarkable artists – we're open to all areas of culture – who are at the top of their game and support them in what they want to achieve."

• This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday on 17 July 2011