Alex Poots on ten years of Manchester International Festival
This year's Manchester International Festival is to be its founding director's last. Alex Poots reflects on ten years of ambitious programming and dream collaborations
There exists, nudging the top of the social zeitgeist at the time of writing, a mobile dating app called Happn, which matches users as they pass on their local streets. They often ‘cross paths’ more than once, although there's no official line on exactly how many of these ships-in-the-night moments surely constitute fate as logged by GPS.
As director of Manchester International Festival, you have to assume Alex Poots does not use Happn. He's happily married, for starters, and – after a decade overseeing the growth of MIF – about to move permanently to New York with his wife and two children to begin an equally prestigious role programming the city's highly anticipated new arts venture, the Culture Shed. But if he did, you would probably cross paths with Poots so often that fate might be the only reasonable conclusion. From meetings, to site visits, to artist liaisons, to dinners, Poots constantly zips across Manchester with little time to waste. The biennial festival ultimately spans just over a fortnight for its audience but, for Poots, its development is a constant concern, an eternally spinning wheel – even if, at least for him, it's finally about to stop.
“I'd say two thirds of [this year's festival] had already been put in place by last October, when I realised it was going to be my last,” he explains, wide-eyed, excitable and, yes, a little late back from a meeting at the other side of town. “I think I worked even harder on this one. I didn't want it to look like it didn't matter because I had a new job. I wanted this one to be at least as good, and maybe even surpass what we've done before.
“Who knows,” he shrugs, cautiously.
You can't help but get the impression that, by now, Poots does know. In the ten years since MIF and its flagship commission – Monkey: Journey to the West, a bonkers Mandarin opera written by one of the kings of Britpop – arrived in Manchester with no little fanfare, the festival has been littered with creative risks, of which the vast majority have paid off. Documentary maker Adam Curtis created a startling haunted house for 2009's It Felt Like a Kiss. The same year, artist Jeremy Deller was given free rein to produce a city wide Procession, and in 2011, Björk premiered her new album, Biophilia, as an encompassing theatre piece at the Museum of Science and Industry.
It's a well worn tale at this point, but Poots ended up captaining MIF by mistake. Then based at English National Opera (ENO), also commissioning new work, in 2004 he was simply consulting for Manchester City Council, which was rich with the afterglow of the world's attention during the 2002 Commonwealth Games and suddenly possessed with the confidence to envision an international arts festival that would rival Avignon, Edinburgh and Melbourne. By the time he was comfortably on the train homebound for London, his boat-rocking ideas had won him a role he didn't even know he was up for. At the time, Poots had only held office at ENO for just under a year. As the MIF programme will attest, he is a loyal sort, and handing in his resignation so soon seemed unfortunate; but he was generously told, “if I wanted to take it, I could take it. Which was really cool. If he hadn't said that, I'd have had to say no, and this has been the best job I've ever had.”
Among these jobs was one with Manchester's own Factory Records, to which Poots's student band were briefly signed in the early 90s. The label's eclecticism and ambition naturally appealed (“how counter-intuitive their success had been... an indie pop label with a classical division was pretty out there at that point”), and he soon put down his trumpet to manage the band full time. While he didn't know Tony Wilson personally, one of his first tasks was to obtain a fax machine, so he put in the phone call. “He was very charismatic in a subdued way,” Poots recalls. While Wilson wasn't able to witness MIF's complete evolution, he was able to catch the scent, early on, of the event's likeminded penchant to mix 'classic' art with radical new approaches. “We had June Tabor, the folk singer, performing Love Will Tear Us Apart in pitch darkness,” Poots remembers of the 2007 festival, “and Tony came for that. He didn't know that was going to be played. And he was very frail, I walked him out, but he looked at me and grabbed my arm and said, 'I love this fucking city.' I never heard from him again and from what I gather from his friend Peter Saville, that was the last performance he ever saw.”
"I'm enjoying watching Manchester becoming a great city of the future" – Alex Poots
If Poots were to have a catchphrase, it might well be 'artist-led.' (Famously, he only agreed to take the reins of MIF after stipulating five conditions: “One was they delay it a year, two was that it was biennial, three was to invest serious money into it, four was that, while they were investing serious money, they keep their hands off, and five was that it be artist-led.”) He loves his artists, and he loves the freedom MIF is able to give them. Some – Marina Abramović, Maxine Peake, The xx, theatre company Punchdrunk and, most notably, Damon Albarn – have featured more years than they haven't. This has led to a few murmurs, loud ones at that, suggesting Poots takes something of a 'jobs for the boys' approach in his construction of the event. Sure, it's a treat to see Willem Dafoe in your local curry house, but does Manchester necessarily need to get used to him, with so much other talent available?
“The devil's always in the detail,” Poots offers by way of explanation. “No other festival commissions all new work, so it's difficult to compare it. We're closer to, say, the National Theatre, or the Young Vic. They go one step further and have associate artists, [who] do something new every year. So if each festival was only new artists, the chances of all the works being successful would be greatly reduced. What you need to do is develop relationships.
“Take Damon, who I've known for 15 years, since we did Mali Music at the Barbican,” he says. “When we did Monkey in 2005, it was only because I knew him and he trusted me that he agreed to do an opera, which was maybe the riskiest thing he's done, possibly ever. He could have been ridiculed as a big pop star trying to do something for the stage. There was no way he'd be writing a musical now if we hadn't been on a journey together.
“The idea that we'd done all that work and [then] somebody else got the cream of Damon's first musical... We've put in all the hours, all the hard work, and then we don't bring him back because somebody might say [we] don't have enough imagination? Valid as that criticism is.”
The musical in question, wonder.land, is arguably the centrepiece of Poots's concluding season at MIF, a bold, colourful and ambitious au revoir that'll hopefully prove as truly psychedelic as its promotional artwork. The 2015 festival seems very colourful in general, especially when compared to 2013's rather downbeat edition, featuring a particularly bleak Macbeth from the mind of Kenneth Branagh, and the doom-spelling Massive Attack v Adam Curtis (“You're such a dour Scot, they told me,” remarks Poots). Given that, the lack of truly political content this year might disappoint. Recent electoral results considered, a rapid restaging of 2013's stirring The Masque of Anarchy, delivered in monologue by Maxine Peake, might even be welcomed by some.
“The Skriker is very political – it's about consumption, greed, destroying the planet and revenge,” rebuffs Poots, referring to the upcoming production of Caryl Churchill's experimental theatre piece, also starring Peake. “And in a way, if Masque was about not treating people with dignity, this is about the consequences of not treating our environment with dignity. There are things that are not political, but socially very relevant. Wonder.land is a big, open-hearted musical about a girl from a difficult background who seeks refuge in the internet, and goes down the rabbit hole and loses control. And I'd say Neck of the Woods is about prejudice, and how we always have to have outsiders. It's about the creation of the other.
“I always say to the artists, why do this in the glare of the lights of New York or Paris?” he reasons. “Why, when you can do it in a city where the audience are up for it, and where everyone is in the same boat? What we're interested in is developing the format of the artwork.
“Take Tree of Codes,” he notes, referring to the first full-length ballet he's ever been able to commission, premiering at Manchester Opera House and starring the Paris Ballet under the direction of Wayne McGregor, scored by current chart nudger Jamie xx and with a visual concept by artist Olafur Eliasson. “We need to make it not just cosmetically different, but the collaborators need to come from a different place too. Olafur has taken an absolute convention and turned it on its head, he's taken it inside out. And Jamie is approaching scoring the ballet from a completely different perspective. He's from a different kind of dance music.”
With Poots having been given such control, you suspect it is in the shows themselves that one can find a better map of his instincts and tastes than any interview could provide. When he departs for the Big Apple, his position is to be filled by John McGrath, who, having previously helmed the programme at Contact Theatre, has spent the past seven years building National Theatre Wales in a style not dissimilar to Poots's own work in Manchester. So with his own legacy nearly, neatly sealed, in what direction would Poots like to see MIF head?
“What I'm enjoying watching is Manchester becoming a great city of the future, that people want to live in and enjoy,” he says, after a few moments of thought. “And that's about education, a thriving business sector, a thriving cultural sector. For a city that gives birth to 120,000 students and their future careers, there has to be more attention, continually. It needs to be a city that doesn't challenge London, but is every bit as good in its own way, and makes its own decisions. The transformation between the 70s and where it's heading, if we've helped a little with that, then that's something to be proud of.”
The walls of MIF's vast offices are lined with posters from their huge back catalogue of shows, some still doing business (literally, for both Manchester City Council and the festival itself) on the international market. But, for a man who once engineered a meeting between Aphex Twin and Stockhausen, what opportunity – if any – has slipped through Poots's well-connected fingers?
“Staging Jay Z's The Black Album,'” he concludes, without pause. “Jay Z performing it, to be directed by [avant-garde stage director] Robert Wilson, who's endlessly curious – to take him completely out of his comfort zone, to take on hip-hop culture. The three of us met, three times, and as [Jay Z's] management explained, I had two of three yes responses. Yes to doing it, yes to the way we're doing it, but when are we going to do it? I haven't given up.”