I RECALL standing in the dark, shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone I’d ever met, in the car park off Charles Street, behind the Capes & Dunn auction house and the Lass O’Gowrie. We were there at twilight to watch video art. Windows of Opportunity (Woo) 2: The History of the World from Big Bang to Post Modern Paranoia. The show lasted 23 minutes, during which a dozen huge windows at the back of abandoned Asia House glowed hot with back projected images. It was a highlight of the creakingly titled Boddington’s Manchester Festival of Arts and Television, 1995.
Alex Poots has on occasions without number sent me happy to bed
A couple of years earlier, in a sparkling mirrored structure called Spiegeltent, pitched on a bowling green by the Granada studios, I listened to Istvan Szabo, the Hungarian film director, discussing his Oscar-winning films Mephisto and Colonel Redl.
A compact man called Phil Jones was festival director. He came from Leeds with a cloudy disposition and a small en suite office in Central Library. His right-hand man was Ruth Floate. Boddington’s wanted to sell more beer. Granada played the regional arts card in their bid for licence renewal. William Burdett-Coutts, the Zimbabwean who had already set up Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival, headed their arts operation at the time. Manchester has been in the Festivals business since the Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857.
The cultural programme for the Commonwealth Games went down well. Post-2002 there was a need for Manchester to keep up momentum. Factory graphics man Peter Saville undertook a branding exercise for the city that never quite stuck. He gave us our rainbow M, and a post-modern anti-slogan, ‘Original Modern’. And he gave us his friend Alex Poots.
Edinburgh, Avignon, Basel; the European cultural merry-go-round was, at first glance, a curious ride for Manchester to choose. Mr Poots was, perhaps, the only man who picked up Saville’s dictum and knew exactly what to do with it. Original commissioned work forged in Manchester and traded round the globe. Poots proposed spending a lot of public money and discouraged any council input in his programme. The cheek of the man, except that autocracy is just what Manchester Town Hall understands.
In many ways it all took off at the Velodrome one hot July night, the opening night of the second Poots Festival in 2009. Kraftwork, Team GB cyclists and, astonishingly (and a little inaudibly), an original Steve Reich premiere. And then - and this is the kicker - a big fuck off Manchester Party.
Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna, Jeremy Deller’s Parade, Punchdrunk and Adam Curtis, Zaha Hadid’s swoosh of a pavilion for Bach’s solo works in Manchester Art Gallery, Joe Duddell. Joe Duddell, who’s he? The Halle orchestra and choir, and Elbow were under Joe’s baton to perform his orchestral arrangements of the Elbow songbook, for two nights in Bridgewater Hall, one of which was shared by video link with an audience in Castlefield Arena. Guy, being the heroic bear that he is, even hoped in a cab to put in an appearance with Jesca Hoop at the interval. Best Elbow gig ever, some would say. Hold on to that upturned roof. It might well have come off.
Nobody should doubt the power of hospitality. Done well, it pays dividends. This, above all, is what Alex Poots has done for us. That and Christine Cort. She’s a Clitheroe girl with something of the Catherine Earnshaw about her. And Kate Bush, come to that. Poots brought her in to be his bag lady, day one. Moneybags, that is. Christine lured the sponsors, whom she’s kept extremely loyal ever since. She’s now the Festival’s Managing Director. If you think Marina Abramovic is a formidable performance artist, you should see Christine Cort.
Paul Heathcote does the catering in Festival Square these days, and Thwaite’s provide their Wainwrights ale. All at a premium price, of course. The Square is the MIF fringe. With a good run of weather, the show never stops. The aftershow talk is what’s so good. The hum and buzz of hot audience. The swing of opinion, like Chinese lanterns in hot night air.
Tree of Codes might well be essence of Poots. It’s a big idea from a twice clever book. Wayne McGregor choreographs dancers from Paris Opera Ballet and his own company. Olafur Eliasson is the visual creator of the space that for 75 light-licked minutes flamed and burst like a planet trapped in a box. There was not a single wasted visual moment whilst the dancers made the most of the Jamie xx score. We even joined them on stage, audience reflected in backdrop. We were dazzled to momentary blindness when the light burst out on us.
On Thursday 9 July at 1pm, a royal progress, a wedding march perhaps. Two old gentlemen, craftmasters, stars in the artifice dome, make their slow stiff way down the garden corridor towards the Landscape Gallery at the Whitworth. The German painter Gerhard Richter, born in 1932, clutching a small attaché case. Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, born in 1935 clutches his long slim hands. I’m amongst a group who follow, like wedding guests.
We look at Richter’s work; large glass panel diptychs in shades of grey. Four quadripytch, closely hung, around cruciform of white wall. These are matt-surfaced photographs of bigger paintings that are based on photographs taken by a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Whilst we ponder these (are they just low-rent cheapskate non-paintings?) a small man steps on to a well-worn wooden box and lifts his arms.
“Alleluja, alleluja….” sing fourteen members of Vox Clamantis, for less than a minute. The choristers are sprinkled through the room, like cinnamon on pastry. They are dressed in their Estonian day wear, inscrutable, unperturbed. We, the audience, on the other hand, have no grasp of the etiquette of the situation and barely know where to look. The short piece of fine crystal music ends, we murmur and relax. Three minutes later, they sing again, and will do so, repeatedly for the next three days.
Later the gentle composer moves across the wide floor of a different gallery to fetch himself some water. He is tall and thin and wire grey. On a trajectory straight towards him is Marie-Agnes Gillot, Paris Opera Ballet Etoile, over six feet tall, etched in black. Two metres short of her object, she drops into the deepest of curtseys. Arvo smiles broadly in startled surprise.
Tony Wilson was very ill in 2007, and died in August, following the first MIF. In 2009 Durutti Column performed Vini Reilly’s Peon to Wilson in the Festival Theatre in the square. “Is this art, or are you a technician?” is the loop of Wilson’s ironic question to producer Martin Hannett that opens the piece. Two more things I will say. The twin theatres, Palace and Opera House were stars of MIF 15. Jack Thompson is MIF’s Technical Director. Clearly, technicians are artists too.
On Sunday 12 July 2015, just before 7.30 the three-minute bell has gone in Bridgewater Hall. I’m heading to my seat, and Alex Poots overtakes me. “He’s in the house”, he says, excitement beaming from his Panda eyes, “Arvo’s in the house”. “Where did you put him up?” I ask. “A suite in the Lowry,” says Alex, “We don’t fuck about”. I think a little bit of Alex Poots has turned Mancunian.
An hour and fifty five minutes later, Manchester Camerata, Vox Clamantis and soprano Polina Pasztircsak have been joined on stage by the tall thin smiling composer of the exquisite music they have just performed to perfection. The audience has been on its feet for nearly fifteen minutes. Our hands are tired. Arvo Pärt joins his long thin hands together, as if in prayer, tilts them through forty-five degrees, and rests his head upon them, to say he’s ready for sleep.
It is, in my view, a primary duty of every civic authority, to make life interesting. What has Alex Poots ever done for me? On occasions now without number, he’s sent me happy to bed.