The world’s a stage

“The great challenge – but also the great fun – of running this festival is that you create a very substantial body of entirely new work that all happens at the same time,” says John McGrath, the artistic director and chief executive of Manchester International Festival (MIF). 

The month-long festival has injected artwork, theatre and music into venues across Manchester since 2007. It’s an extremely ambitious programme that has attracted world-famous names over the years, including musicians such as Björk, New Order and Damon Albarn; visual artists Steve McQueen, Marina Abramovic´ and Jeremy Deller; and dance and drama from Wayne McGregor and Punchdrunk. One of the highlights this year is likely to be the Mexican-Canadian contemporary artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s artwork. 

“We’re building a whole new temporary venue just for Rafael’s work, Atmospheric Memory,” says McGrath. “We’ve ended up with this amazing collaboration with the Museum of Science and Industry and built an enormous space out of shipping containers to put the work in.”

The work is based on Victorian polymath Charles Babbage’s idea that all the words ever uttered in the world can still be heard in the airwaves if we just had machines sensitive enough to listen to them. “Rafael’s work is made up of machines that visualise and track visitors’ voices and words,” he says. “It’s a beautiful, crazy, Victorian idea.” 

McGrath, coming from a background in theatre, pours himself into the production of MIF – this will be the second festival he’s overseen, having started there in 2015. “I genuinely get excited because I get so creatively involved with all the projects,” he says. “They’re the artists’ projects really but I’ve been in the conversation with every one of them since each idea was born.” 

He’s thrown himself into the production of another immersive event that’s taking place this year, by the Mercury Award-winning grime artist Skepta. 

“He’s imagined what raves could be like in the future and how they would become the model of an alternative society,” says McGrath. “He wanted all sorts of virtual and hologram-based visuals in the space.

“Skepta’s ideas are actually ahead of technology, so we’ve mixed some tech with a little bit of cheating in the background,” he says. “Fortunately, those of us from a theatre background know how to do it. We create illusions. A lot of artists push the boundaries of what’s possible – and our job is to make the impossible possible.”

McGrath has tried to push boundaries from the start of his career, shown by his founding of disability arts organisation Arts Integrated Merseyside in 1984 (which lives on in the form of DaDaFest, a biennial festival for disability and deaf cultures). 

“I’ve always been interested in the combination of daring art connecting with a wide range of people, and I think sometimes, those two things are seen as separate,” he says. 

“But when the two come together, it can be really exciting. Arts Integration Merseyside commissioned and worked with artists from different backgrounds, and particularly with disabled artists. It was still quite tough in Liverpool then, but it was also exciting. We were all in our 20s and just doing a lot of mad stuff.”

McGrath left Liverpool to take a master’s in theatre direction at the Columbia University School of the Arts in New York. 

“I was very much involved in the downtown scene, where there was a lot of crossover between the different artforms – lots of theatre and performance artists who were connected to the gallery scene and moved between the different art forms in a dynamic way. I’ve often found those worlds become too segmented in the UK.”

He moved to become the artistic director of Manchester’s Contact Theatre in 1999. “I was given the job to reopen the theatre in Manchester with a vision for it to be a place that embraced the involvement of young people in everything it did,” he says.

“It became quite a radical organisation at that time, getting young people from all the different communities in Manchester packing out the theatre and becoming involved in running their own projects there. The organisation continues with that work to this day.”

McGrath left Contact in 2008 to become the founding director of National Theatre Wales, where he established a radical, community-engaged programme.

“It was almost entirely site specific, so we created work in different locations across the country, ranging from a show halfway up Snowdon through to a takeover of Port Talbot with a production of The Passion with the actor Michael Sheen and 1,000 local people,” says McGrath. 

His latest project is to set up The Factory in Manchester, which will provide a platform for “art of the future”, alongside arts training. The building, designed by OMA, a firm founded by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is to open in 2021 and will provide a permanant home for MIF.

“We will become an organisation that produces, shows and develops work year-round,” says McGrath. “We’ll still have the festival every two years, but we’ll also have this extraordinary and enormous space where work is being developed and shown.”

The Factory will also be a Manchester-wide consortium offering young people access to training in the arts. “Not just training in dancing, singing and performing, but in all of the backstage areas of organisation and management where most arts employment actually is,” he says. “We’re trying to revolutionise access to training.”

McGrath is passionate about inclusivity, whether that’s programming theatres to include under-represented local communities or bringing more jobs to a city through a training programme. “One of the things we’re really focused on now is making sure we reach as many people in the city as possible. We talk a lot about cultural democracy.”

This year’s festival will start with Yoko Ono’s Bells for Peace, a work that the artist has created for the city. “Her work is an open call out to thousands of people across Manchester to come together in Cathedral Gardens in this moment of joint bell ringing,” McGrath says. 

“The key thing is that it’s in a public space and free to everyone. You can just turn up and be part of an artwork. That sense that these legendary artists are making work that’s completely accessible to everybody is a really important part of the message.”

Other free events include live music and DJs at Festival Square. And Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera’s free intervention, the School of Integration, will happen in Manchester Art Gallery. 

“Her work relates very much to the times we’re in,” says McGrath. “The School of Integration has a very specific starting point: from her travels across the world, she’s often seen refugee or new immigrant communities going to lessons to learn the language and the culture of the host country. 

“That’s what people need to do,” McGrath continues. “You need those tools when you come to a new place. But, Tania’s proposition is simple: isn’t the host country missing out when its people don’t take the opportunity to learn about the new cultures coming in? Wouldn’t that enrich all of us? Shouldn’t we see that as a great opportunity? 

"The School of Integration turns the tables and asks people who’ve arrived in Manchester, either recently or over the last generation, to teach lessons in their own culture and provide an opportunity for us to integrate with them.”

McGrath’s ethics are apparent in so much of Manchester International Festival, and exactly what all cultural institutions should be aiming for and embracing.

John McGrath has been the artistic director and chief executive of Manchester International Festival since 2015.

After completing a degree in English, he founded disability arts organisation Arts Integrated Merseyside in 1984, now known as DaDaFest. 

McGrath did an MA in theatre direction at Columbia University in New York, after which he was appointed the associate director of Mabou Mines, an experimental theatre collective that started out performing in art galleries. In 1999, McGrath was appointed the artistic director of Contact Theatre in Manchester. He left in 2008 to found National Theatre Wales, where he stayed until 2015, having developed a radical, community-led programme that often featured site-specific events.

Manchester International Festival (MIF) was established in 2005, with the first event held two years later. It is an artist-led festival that presents new work from across the spectrum of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture. MIF commissions and presents about 30 new works for each event. 

The festival takes place in venues across the city, from theatres, galleries and concert halls to railway depots, churches and car parks. Previous artists that have been involved include Björk, Steve McQueen, Robert Wilson, Jeremy Deller, Wayne McGregor, New Order, Zaha Hadid Architects, Damon Albarn and Punchdrunk.

Principally funded by Manchester City Council and Arts Council England, MIF employs about 40 full- time staff. That number increases to 100 during the event, which runs 4-21 July this year. 

Around 500 volunteers help run the festival. More than 300,000 people attended MIF in 2017. The festival will be given a permanent home in 2021 with the opening of the new arts venue, The Factory. The £110m development, next to the Science and Industry Museum, will provide flexible space for large-scale artistic work, as well as training in the arts.