John McGrath on MIF17: “A festival for everyone”

The world's first festival of exclusively new commissions, Manchester International Festival returns for 2017 under the leadership of new artistic director John McGrath. He tells us about a programme of enormous ambition, with firm local roots

Feature by Lauren Strain | 09 Mar 2017

The first artist credited in the programme for Manchester International Festival 2017 is you.

'Created by the people of Manchester' and directed from an idea by Jeremy Deller, What Is the City but the People? will see Piccadilly Gardens turned into a catwalk unlike any you may have encountered before. In a celebration of diversity and character, individuals from across Manchester will take to a 100-metre runway, creating a living, spontaneous self-portrait of the city.

It sets the scene for a festival that artistic director John McGrath rightfully claims is “for everyone,” bookmarked by three big, participatory public performances: What Is the City...?; German-Egyptian artist Susan Hefuna's ToGather, in which residents new to Manchester from as far afield as Iran and Sierra Leone will trace paths across Whitworth Park echoed by dancers from Company Wayne McGregor; and Turner Prize-nominated artist Phil Collins' Ceremony, a multi-media welcoming party for a statue of Friedrich Engels, retrieved from the former Soviet Union and driven across Europe to be installed in Manchester city centre.

“The piece will be nothing like anybody would expect a welcoming ceremony for Engels to be!” laughs McGrath, describing Collins as “a very political but also a very playful artist.” Having relocated to Manchester from Berlin for the year-long project, Collins has been collaborating with the city's workers to make “extraordinary films” telling their stories, which will be combined with music by artists including Oscar-nominated composer Mica Levi in a public celebration marking the return of one of Manchester's most radical thinkers.

Such inclusive projects are McGrath's speciality. The founder and director of National Theatre Wales until he assumed the reins of MIF from Alex Poots in 2015, McGrath led the building-less NTW to international recognition for its large-scale, site-specific work: staging a 96-hour performance of Michael Sheen's The Passion in Port Talbot involving more than 1000 people from the town; gaining special access from the Ministry of Defence to take Aeschylus' tragedy The Persians into a military training ground deep within the Brecon Beacons; and bringing Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children to a Labour Club in the South Wales valleys.

“For me the important thing [about participatory work] is that it should always be driven by the same and even greater artistic curiosity, and artistic ambition, as a work that you would see standing by itself in a gallery or on a stage,” McGrath says.

Reflecting on the effect that a production like The Passion had on the community, he adds: “What made that work was the artistic commitment of Michael – and Owen Sheers the writer, and Bill Mitchell the co-director – to that space, and the generosity and honesty with which they then came to the people in the town and said, 'We're interested in telling this story, can you help us?'

“There's got to be the ambition and artistic drive but that's got to be paired with a real capacity to listen to the place that you're in and treat people as peers. It's an interesting combination: that push, always, to the most extraordinary artistic thing, with that sensitivity to the place and the people.”

MIF17: “Taking the temperature of the world”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this year's MIF programme is its timeliness. Migration is a prominent concern, from Hefuna's ToGather through to HOME1947, an immersive installation by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy looking at the experiences of people who left their homes during the Partition of British India in 1947.

Also recurrent is the idea of a community trying to be heard, as in Fatherland, a multi-voiced exploration of identity, nationality and masculinity in 21st-century England, and German theatre titan Thomas Ostermeier's Returning to Reims, in which a man visits his hometown to find it radically changed, his family having switched allegiance from Communism to the far-right Front National.

Elsewhere, there are visions of apocalypse and utopia – interactive show Party Skills for the End of the World will 'teach you how to get by when the end finally comes', while Tilda Swinton narrates Last and First Men, a film by Arrival composer Jóhann Jóhannsson based on the sci-fi novel by Olaf Stapledon, offering a 'requiem for the final human species in civilisation'.

McGrath emphasises that the Festival makes no demands in terms of theme. Entirely artist-led, the programme is a result of what its participants want to say, and how they want to say it.

“We just ask artists, 'What are you interested in doing?' Of course what then happens is, you end up taking the temperature of the world that we're in,” he observes. “And some people, including Thomas Ostermeier actually, have completely changed their project over the last six months because of the way that the world has changed.”

Meanwhile, a piece like Yael Bartana's What If Women Ruled the World – a reversal of the ending to Kubrick's Dr Strangelove that tasks a different group of women each night with solving a global emergency – had already been in development for almost two years but quickly assumed new relevance: “We weren't originally going to announce it [in November],” explains McGrath, “but it had just been the American election and it felt that the question was so ripe that we had to let people know we were doing it.”

While there are weighty issues at play in this year's programme, they are met with a variety of approaches – fun and creative, often wild and full of movement. “A festival is a time of wonder and joy and coming together in unexpected combinations and excitement,” McGrath says. So although Party Skills has a dystopian theme, it will be “very, very enjoyable and surprising,” and something like So It Goes.. – a collaboration between New Order and visual artist Liam Gillick that will see them deconstruct, rethink and reassemble material from throughout the band's career – is “just deeply full of the joy of a new collaboration.”

Manchester's musical legacy

The New Order project and its accompanying exhibition, where artists including Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Leckey will show work influenced by New Order and Joy Division, also marks a deep engagement with Manchester's musical heritage, which has always been something of a backdrop to MIF but perhaps not so thoroughly assessed.

“I just felt this was the time to really put it at the heart, because it's of massive international interest, that story, that body of work,” McGrath says.

The fact that it is to be interrogated and reimagined is key, offering the opportunity to say, “Here's Manchester at this moment that feels full of transformation, and here's this creative force that still exists – how should we look at it in new ways?” It is very deliberate that, on the opening night of the festival, the baton is passed: following the world premiere of New Order + Liam Gillick: So it Goes.., Manchester grime crew Levelz will be the first artists to play Dark Matter, a series of live events curated by Mary Anne Hobbs.

That legacy, of course, finds its future in the name of MIF's new purpose-built venue, The Factory, which will open in 2020 and enable the Festival to present “work of scale and substance” all year round. Two 'Factory Trailblazers' in this year's programme offer a sense of the vision for this new £110m space: Ostermeier's Returning to Reims, and Available Light, a new production of a 1983 collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, architect Frank Gehry and composer John Adams, “these great giants, really, of the second half of the 20th century.”

“Those would be the kinds of figures that we'd want to invite to show work, even if it was existing work,” enthuses McGrath. “I felt that those two pieces would be a good example of what a weekend in the Factory might look like.”

We would say roll on 2020 – but there's that small matter of MIF17 in the diary first. Have you been learning your lines...?


Manchester International Festival 2017, 29 June - 16 July

mif.co.uk