Some cities provide decorative backdrops for festivals. Manchester seems to vibrate with the work itself. The opening of Aviva Studios, MIF’s new permanent home, adds to the architectural jostle of new and renovated buildings in the centre. The programming jostles too: thank goodness, there is no dominant theme or style; it just pushes vibrantly on through different events.
First, the roar of carnival. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, based on extracts from Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s 1977 book of the same title, is a wonderful tumble of talent. Ted Huffman (direction and text) and Philip Venables (music) have created a call to arms for the dispossessed, the hunted and excluded. It attacks othering rigidity – in the shape of an all-male, bureaucratically paper-obsessed place called Ramrod. It celebrates openness and fluidity in its generosity and pliability: operatic, punkish, dance-driven, teasingly spoken, an affair not of stars but of a company pulling together, presided over by Kit Green, slinking in red satin.
The attack is the least effective aspect: at its most explicit an overworked and faded account of the patriarchy that slows the scudding pace, narrows the focus and risks its own rigidity. The celebration is glorious. On harp, piano and accordion, flute and fiddle, countertenor and mezzo. With a chorus of clapping and stamping. A viola da gamba and a lute conjure the past. A breakdancer whips across the stage like something blown by the wind of change. Even a call for the audience to join in a song comes off: this is a show about breaking down all frontiers.
In a further leaping over categories, choreography and costumes come under the direction of one person: Theo Clinkard. The stage is never still, with characters, however defiantly individual, constantly gathering together. The lack of uniformity in dress, and the consequent difference in the way people move, cause more ripples: the swish of a big frock, the slither of black trousers, the indomitable no pasarán look of a bondage-style outfit. Perhaps, after all, the patriarchy was just a blip: a dead dad dance.
The most wonderful conjuring of the festival also depends on a thrilling toppling of boundaries. Kagami – the word means “mirror” in Japanese, though this meaning is not much help – celebrates the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.
In 2019 Sakamoto began to collaborate with director Todd Eckert, founder of Tin Drum, which specialises in “mixed reality” performance. A 3D recording – “captured” is too haunting a word – was made of the musician playing a series of his most famous works; it is this that the audience see. But then “see” is too small a word for this all-surrounding experience.
In a dark, circular room the audience are given goggles through which at first only a red cube is visible. Then, Sakamoto appears in front of your eyes at the piano, his white hair gleaming like a cap in the darkness. As he plays, illuminated images appear beneath, above and around him. A tree with squiggling bare branches grows into the space under the piano and becomes flushed with different colours. Snow or blossom drifts in the air. At one point he appears suspended in a globe, with the Milky Way stretching over his head and beneath his feet. Tokyo skyscapes spin round in concentric circles between audience and pianist.
Spectators are encouraged to walk around during the performance, and most are compelled to go close to the composer’s image, and look down at the stars beneath their feet. Fellow audience members become almost invisible to goggle-wearers: you are warned it is easy to bump into each other. For this hour, conjured images are more real than the tangible world. Lift the goggles and everything disappears. Kagami is both graceful elegy and transportation.
Every festival gains from having a show that argues with established stuff. Kimber Lee’s untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play, ripping into the portrayal of Asian characters, is an overdue corrective: so evidently overdue that at times it seems obvious. It is accurate and needed. New Earth Theatre, a company of British East and South East Asian artists, recently cancelled performances at the Sheffield Crucible because the theatre was staging Miss Saigon.
The broadbrush but spot-on scenes of Roy Alexander Weise’s production evoke the stupid, nasty, monocular depiction of all but white characters in Madama Butterfly, M*A*S*H, South Pacific, The King and I. A group of people crash across the boards, “gesticulating like peasants do”. In the background is the “orgasmic” roar of war. A nubile young woman appears, “dirt poor but very clean”, living in a bamboo hut with a wily relative. Up comes a jutting-jawed white wooer – in the case of South Pacific he comes close to being a paedophile – whose polite condescension is effectively parodied by his offering brand names as a large part of his conversation: “Haribo!” The heroine conveniently removes herself from further action by killing herself: she slumps gracefully with little curling fingers.
Mei Mac is very good at the sardonic scampering required for the isn’t-she-dinky heroine. Rochelle Rose carries off the hard-to-handle role of narrator, magisterially underlining that these characters do not usually voice their own stories. A swerve in the second half shows Mac raging at white condescension during a 21st-century dinner. Protracted, the effect is heavy-handed. Yet the purpose – to show that attitudes have not much improved, and that people should be able to say so without recourse to irony – is admirable. This show begins to alter what we see on stage.
I had hoped that We Cut Through Dust might give me a new view of Manchester; I expected it to be the most urgent of shows. A collaboration between Blast Theory, a group that explores social questions, and Manchester Street Poem, who set out to reflect the experiences of those living on the city’s streets, it draws directly on the city’s lives and landscapes. It comes adrift.
Moving in small groups (though the impact would be greater in solitude), the audience listen on their phones to messages sent from a post-apocalyptic world, in which a love affair between two men is recalled against a background of menacing, neglectful authority. The accounts are potentially strong, the stopping places weighty with promise: a bridge next to red brick arches under which the canal flows like the River Styx; a tunnel with trains thundering near; a small park with a Roman history. Yet memories and places are never welded. The story becomes muddied by the distraction of moving and looking around; the locations seem arbitrary, not enlightening. One of the few occasions when MIF’s purpose was not made manifest.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions ★★★★
Kagami ★★★★
untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play ★★★
We Cut Through Dust ★★
• Kagami is at Versa Manchester Studios until 9 July
• untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 16 July
• We Cut Through Dust is at various locations in Manchester until 16 July
