Manchester International Festival: Everyone Welcome

This year's Manchester International Festival,

it couldn't be happening at a more poignant time

for this city and its people.

The response here to the recent terrorist attack

has been one of deep sadness.

But also one of great determination.

This shows the courage and the strength

of the people of Manchester.

It is a city defined by its music and art.

And at a time like this,

we have never needed creativity and inspiration more

to raise our spirits,

to lift our hopes.

The Manchester International Festival runs every two years,

and invites artists and performers from all over the world

to premiere new work.

Tonight, we're going behind the scenes

of the festival, to see the rehearsals for five key shows...

When we do lights up,

you come in with your threat line...

..all getting ready for their opening nights.

Take a break, we're just waiting for lunch to arrive...

As ever, this year's festival is a showcase for new works

and many of these productions

involve the people of Manchester.

None more so than

What Is The City But Its People?

Today we're in the old Granada Television studios

in Manchester,

and we are rehearsing for What Is The City But The People?,

the opening event of Manchester International Festival.

The inspiration for the event comes from the artist Jeremy Deller.

The main visual thing that people will see

in Piccadilly Gardens right in the heart of Manchester

is a catwalk that's almost 100 metres long,

and then they will see the people of Manchester staged on that catwalk.

It's a kaleidoscope of the city of Manchester,

a portrait of the city in multiple fragments.

Literally seeing all manner of people, all ages, all backgrounds.

This performance, still at an early stage of rehearsal,

features ordinarily Mancunians with some extraordinary stories to tell.

Mr Hussain used to chase me around in school.

And I used to run away from him because I didn't like him at all.

-And then we went our separate ways when he left school a year earlier, before me.

-Yeah.

I decided at one point, "I'm going to leave home." So I left home.

Obviously when I left home, I didn't plan anything.

So where am I going to sleep?

So I started sleeping in Piccadilly Gardens.

So Piccadilly Gardens has a very, very significant point

for me in my life.

I went to the council,

they suggested a flat that they had -

I thought, "I'm going to risk getting on the bus

"without a fare or anything like that."

I got on the bus - I saw Shabnam.

-Oh...

-He told me a bit about his story.

At that time I didn't realise he was sleeping rough.

So then one day he asked, "Would you just marry me?" and I went...

-So it was about three months in.

-.."Ooh, yeah."

And for us to end up doing a catwalk

21 years after when I was homeless, in Piccadilly Gardens,

-we never could have dreamt this.

-No.

What we do now is we run a food bank ourselves.

So we look after people so they don't get to that...

-Get to that point.

-Oh, wow!

-Yes.

We create this great choreographic

mess of chaos of the city,

I think that's what we're attempting to do,

to lift the pavements up

and put them on this yellow catwalk through the centre of the gardens.

I come from a small town in Kosovo.

And I used to live in a big house with my uncle, my cousins,

my grandmother.

And then my mum, my dad, my sisters, my brothers

so we were a very happy family,

I have great memories of

my house and my childhood.

And what happened?

In March 1999,

the Serbian soldiers came to the house,

and I was shot, my two brothers were shot,

my sister was shot in the throat.

My cousin was shot 16 times.

And I lost about 19 members of my family

including my mum, my sister, my grandmother.

But I managed... Me, my sister, my two brothers, my cousin,

managed to survive.

So that's why we came to England, to get medical treatment,

and we came straight to Manchester.

And what does this show mean to you?

It was a good opportunity to tell the people of Manchester

about MY personal story,

and also to, erm...to thank the community of Manchester

for the support that they've given us.

And they helped us with our recovery, with education,

with everything, really, so in a way,

I just want to thank Manchester

for what they've done for me and my family.

Everyone's really, really nice and really friendly

cos they're there for, like, a purpose.

And especially after the Manchester attacks,

it's become much more an important event

in the city of Manchester.

And it's not like it's a tribute for it,

it was going to happen anyway,

but it kind of adds a weight behind it.

And so, even more so, I want to get involved

and, like, be part of a showcase of the city.

How are you going to feel

when you walk down that catwalk in Piccadilly Gardens?

Powerful.

I think we represent the creative kind of youth, and

I'm standing for them as much as I'm standing for myself

and standing for Manchester as well.

And when I walk down, I'm just going to give it 100%

because that's nothing less than they deserve,

do you know what I mean?

And how are YOU going to feel?

I don't like to kind of...flag that, "We're Muslim",

kind of thing, because we don't look typically Muslim, do we?

So it's always, like, people will know me for five years

and then they'll only find out -

not even through me saying it, just the way I kind of carry myself -

they'll be like...

-"Oh, you're Muslim."

-..shocked that we're Muslim.

Then there's this cognitive dissonance that we've removed...

Especially these ignorant people

who think they know what a Muslim looks like.

They'll have so many, kind of, perceptions of me. And then...

But not one of them will be Muslim. I can guarantee that

not one of those people who don't know me will think I'm Muslim,

and I think that's very important

because what does a Muslim even look like?

I think Manchester's one of the most diverse places in the UK.

Like, you see everybody from all walks of life

just walking through Piccadilly Gardens,

which kind of brings back to What Is The City But The People?, that's the idea of it.

If you just stand and just watch Piccadilly Gardens,

you can see so many different people

-and they, like...

-Yeah.

-..all coexist, it's beautiful.

It's as if you can just pick one of these people out of the gardens and then open them up like a book.

-Yeah, like a little fact file.

-That's what I found really interesting about this project.

Stanley Kubrick's

dark parody Dr Strangelove

predicts a post-apocalyptic society

dominated by alpha males,

with ten women assigned to every man.

Blast off!

BOOM

What If Women Ruled The World? as the name suggests,

takes a very different view of that dystopian idea.

The show is being written

by British playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan,

and is directed by Vicky Featherstone,

the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Let's go Woman 1, "It's an honour to have you here."

And let's just see how that goes.

The idea for What If Women Ruled The World?

came from the internationally acclaimed artist Yael Bartana.

So Dr Strangelove has always been in my mind

ever since I've seen the film, actually.

Fascination about the way Stanley Kubrick is dealing with

a very terrifying issue...

Hey, what about Major Kong?

Trying to basically create a sort of a comedy science fiction,

to put us in the condition of,

if we can go that far with one leader who decides to...

that he goes crazy and decides to drop a bomb,

what is the consequences?

The aircraft will begin penetrating Russian radar cover

within 25 minutes.

General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand.

I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority

to order the use of nuclear weapons.

'It is a film that is in a way also'

showing the system of male domination in society

that is driven by war

and creating fear.

There would be much time, and little to do.

HE CHUCKLES

But, er, with the proper breeding techniques and a...ratio of, say,

ten females to each male,

I would guess that they could then work their way back

to the present Gross National Product within, say, 20 years.

The performance, still in rehearsal, has a hybrid form.

Five actors interrogate five different real-world experts

each night -

from scientists to politicians, refugees to economists,

environmentalists to nuclear experts -

to see what would REALLY happen if women ruled the world.

One of the things that we got really excited about

when we first talked about the possibility of this space

was the idea that at the end of Dr Strangelove,

you know, there's been a nuclear bomb,

and the women have gone underground

and they will start again.

So the kind of concept of this, if you like,

is not that there has been some kind of nuclear fallout -

we're actually in the world that we're in at the moment -

but what happens if ten women go underground

to try and come up with the new structures

and the thing to beat the patriarchy,

to overcome the major threats that we have at the moment to humanity?

So, for me, the thing that's really exciting about it

is this idea of having five actresses in it,

who start off in a way as the, kind of, characters of Dr Strangelove.

Where do we start?

How do we begin?

Yes. Please tell us. Yes.

Blackout.

'And then we bring the experts into that.'

So there'll be five different experts

every night over the four nights,

and they will come, according to their area of expertise -

whether it's, kind of, nuclear disarmament,

climate change, people trafficking, human rights lawyer -

they'll bring their, kind of, main points,

and what we're trying to do over the course of the evening

is create some kind of debate, discussion,

which will come up with new ways of thinking about how we solve things.

Lights up.

I believe the biggest threat

is the desire to keep conflict alive in the Middle East.

Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North America Programme

at Chatham House.

'The sense of urgency that we would like to bring to the table,'

it is very real and very concrete.

Erm...and that's very important for the audience to experience,

that it's not something that is...is so far away,

it's just happening now, here.

I mean, you experienced also in Manchester,

two weeks, three weeks ago.

I mean, we are 2017,

it makes no sense that there isn't a different world.

It is women...

..to whom we now turn, to build the new protocol.

# I feel so extraordinary

# Something's got a hold on me

# I get this feeling I'm in motion

# A sudden sense of liberty... #

New Order have epitomised the sound of Manchester for decades.

But their new show is a very different musical journey.

We were approached to come up

with a concept and an idea,

and Bernard came up with the idea of using a synthesiser orchestra.

So we have a 12-piece synthesiser orchestra.

These performances see the band

revisit their back catalogue,

selecting a set of songs to reinterpret

with a more orchestral approach.

The problem, which makes life interesting,

is that if you include the 12 synthesiser players

and the five band members, we're a 17-piece.

So then you've got to re-orchestrate the songs

for a 17-piece, which means...

It's like smashing a mirror,

picking all the pieces up, and then

everyone comes together on the night and puts it back,

and there you've got a perfect mirror,

maybe with a few...parts missing, you know.

That's the idea of it.

The design of the show is a collaboration between the band

and the internationally renowned conceptual artist Liam Gillick.

The pressure of working with a band like New Order,

I have to enter that relationship that they have with an audience

and still bring my own mentality, right?

Not lose my own mentality. It's not easy.

The thing is you've really got three elements.

You've got the band, you've got me

and you've got a group of keyboard players

who are deconstructing the music

along with the arranger, Joe Duddell.

It really appeals to my sensibility.

It's not the easiest way to do things, I have to say.

It's much easier if there's one authoritarian figure,

but we kind of work like little collectives and now we're trying

to bring everything together to make it make sense to an audience.

# It's never enough until your heart stops beating... #

There's a lot of technical musical challenges in doing this

because, as far as I know, it's quite original

and no-one's done it before...

Probably cos it won't work.

Migration is a word with many meanings.

It's a loaded word now,

central to our politics and cultures.

And it's at the heart of Susan Hefuna's major new work,

ToGather.

Here are palmwood structures which came from Egypt

and we built them together here in Manchester.

They are these structures here in the museum and they will be soon

also structures in the park, which will connect

the inside to the outside.

I'm inspired by the city life in Egypt,

where such palmwood structures are used to define space on the street.

The whole piece has many layers, so in this exhibition,

inside the museum, you can see a lot of drawings,

which are my typical drawings

made of several layers of tracing paper,

abstract drawings.

This work has been developed for over a year with 30 migrants

now living in Manchester,

all being found through support organisations

for refugees in the city.

My name is Mariam Ibrahim Yusuf. I'm from Somalia.

My name is Jila Mozohn. I came from Iran.

My name is Mariatu Sesay. I'm from Sierra Leone.

I've done so much that I wouldn't have done back home,

cos back home, women don't do that.

Women don't have their place,

they don't have to be in public,

so this exposure, to me, has been very good.

In this country, we are very alone and when we are coming

and find a lot of friends and we have enjoy time,

it's very useful.

I like everything about the project

because the project is something that people come

and, you know, participate,

dance, do art, talk to people,

but the most thing I like is bringing people together

in Manchester, all of us.

That's the best thing that I like about this.

We worked also with these people on different layers.

For example, they brought objects which are

very important for them, like, very touching,

moving personal objects which are related to their life

and not to the group they belong.

This is from my grandma,

give to Mum and Mum give to me.

Beautiful, thank you.

In the same... People also will take part in the dance performance.

Until now, we rehearsed in studios,

so now we start to rehearse actually in the park.

Developed step-by-step

with the Wayne McGregor Dance Company from London

and which is related to the structures of my drawings.

My own background heritage is that my father is Egyptian,

my mother is German, so from my childhood,

I was confronted with different cultures and different views.

So this was part of my artwork from the beginning.

It's very related to my own story.

And that's why there's also my interest to interact with

people from different cultures.

Manchester is famous for its 24-hour party people

and as uncertainty and insecurity sweep the globe,

there's one show at this year's festival

that takes that to its ultimate conclusion.

Just what party skills do we need to know for the end of the world?

This is an immersive theatre piece

meaning that the audience of 300 people

are actually part of the show.

As they walk through the building,

they can choose from 30 different rooms,

and in each room they'll learn a new skill,

to help them party at the end of the world.

Good people of the world, what is it that we fear?

That no-one will love us? That we will have no-one to love?

That we will be alone?

-Hey, Lemn.

-Hey, Nigel.

-Yeah, I'm Nigel.

-Good to see you.

-Come on in.

-Hello, I'm Louise.

-Good to see you.

-Come in.

-This way.

-Fantastic.

The show is Party Skills For The End Of The World, so this show,

the conceit is that we all come together and we'll teach you skills

you'd need to have a party at the end of the world

which would be skills for a party and skills for survival.

And does the audience know what's going to happen

before they come in?

-No.

-No.

-We work a lot with, sort of, surprises and unexpected situations.

Follow us.

OK, so we've just got lots of different people

working on lots of different stuff.

Would you like to learn how to play the saw?

-Yes, apparently, I would.

-Brilliant.

Actually, this is something I've always wanted to know.

MUSIC PLAYS

SAW PLAYS

You are so good!

And you get a vibrato by shaking your leg, basically, like that.

OK, let me get a note first, OK, please, if you don't mind.

Go for it.

MUSIC PLAYS

SAW WHINES QUIETLY

LAUGHTER

-Hey, Lemn.

-Hey, Lemn.

-I never SAW that coming.

Do you see what I did there?

-I've never been able to get a note out of it.

-Oh!

-That's really impressive.

-I feel like I've learned something.

-Nice view.

-It's a beautiful view, actually.

This is going to be full of people going in and out

of the various experiences here.

And it's going to be lit, as well, probably differently.

This space where the performance takes place, what was it?

Well, it was the old Salford University

and now it's ours, and we can do what we want with it.

We have to give it back.

We make work using the building and the architecture

and the history of the building

as part of the dramaturgy of the show.

There's this really beautiful glass building

but it's a cross between a ship and a prison, so it's like

having a party and learning skills on a prison ship made of glass.

-That sounds like a great show.

-Sounds like an incredible show.

KNOCK AT THE DOOR

Hello?

-Hello.

-Hey, man.

-How are you doing?

-I'm good, I'm good, man.

Good, thank you. Yeah.

I'm spinning stuff in my room. That's what I'm doing, so.

Record spinning and spinning cushions

which you might want to learn how to do.

Do know what? In for a penny, in for a pound.

That's...that's a good starter cushion.

Give it a good pat

and then just spin it like a kind of spinning top.

That's it. And then give your finger a wiggle.

-Wiggle the finger?

-Wiggle the finger.

-That just keeps it going.

-Sounds so wrong.

-I see!

-Very good.

Immersive theatre is a term that's banded about a lot.

What is immersive theatre?

I don't think it's a very helpful term.

I'm not sure where it's come from and I know people are always

trying to categorise work that they can't put into boxes.

What we make is a kind of hybrid

and I think probably it's safe to say

there's never been a show like this before.

It is quite formally challenging and yet accessible.

So, that's fine with your green balloon, there.

-That's fine.

-How much do we need to make these...?

Two inches, Two inches.

-SNAPPING

-Oh!

LAUGHTER

Detention after class.

Oh, no, How To Dance.

I've got to say, this is one of my fears.

-Hello.

-Hi. Have you come to learn to dance today?

-Apparently so.

-Come on in.

-Thank you.

Bye!

-How To Dance.

-How To Dance.

-Oh, no.

-You do that with such...

-You've just got to...

I'm just a guy stepping backwards.

As long as you've got hip action, you've got it. OK?

-We're going to try some of these moves with some music.

-OK, right.

-Are you ready?

-I'm going for this.

-You can do this.

-I'm going for it.

It's a tip for the end of the world and I want to dance.

-I can't believe I'm doing this on film.

-Easy as pie.

OK, ready? One, two, three.

Cha-cha-cha, forward, here.

Cha-cha-cha, back, together.

Cha-cha-cha, forward, together.

Cha-cha-cha, back, together.

All you need to do is keep practising

and then you've got it down.

-Thank you, thank you so much.

-No problem. Thank you for coming.

I will... I will see you on the dance floor.

-Bye-bye. Ciao, bye-bye.

-Bye.

-Bye.

Oh!

-Shame!

-You did it.

That was a new experience for me

and, you know, I like a series of things.

One, she's a really good teacher and makes you feel at ease

and the other is, yes, you can

see everything from the outside of each room, here.

It's all glass.

That's a thing in itself.

Very interesting. Interesting not just being in there,

but actually the act of being outside as you're going to

another room and seeing this tip

for the party at the end of the world

actually happening between the people within that room.

-That means you get a show...

-The whole building's a show.

You get many shows that are one show in one building of many parts.

It's really...

So the designers have had to design 30 different shows.

So it's 30 different theatres

as one piece of experimental theatre.

I'm so happy to be here.

THEY LAUGH

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-Nice to meet you.

-Thank you.

-Bye.

-See ya.

-Bye-bye.

-Bye. We're here all festival.

LAUGHTER

With the catwalk now built across Piccadilly Gardens,

it's time for the people of Manchester to take to the stage

and kick off the 2017 Manchester International Festival.

MUSIC PLAYS

I even get my own 100m of fame

as Chancellor of the University of Manchester.

CHEERING

MUSIC PLAYS

The festival is on until July 16th

and everyone's welcome.