Manchester Festival, 30 June – 17 July 2011
Manchester Festival defines itself as the world's first festival of original new works and special events, focusing on the kind of poetic expressive force that does not get stuck in conventional artistic thought, freely transcending the borders of specific genres, conjuring up the most creative combinations of various art forms.
The festival dates from 2007, held as a biennial every other year.
The greatest pride and treasure of this year's festival is definitely the world premiere of the Biophilia multi-medial project by the Icelandic singer Björk. In her quest for the points of intersection between music, nature and technology, Björk has a diverse array of technologies on her side; completely new musical instruments have been invented and built for the show. Still, the singer's main allies are all the wonderful musicians involved in the project, a female choir from Iceland among them.
Manchester Festival is likewise hosting the world premiere of the latest stage work by the American theatre magician Robert Wilson; this time around, he is focusing on the biographical genre. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović was created thinking of the Serbian performance artist and in close collaboration with her - conjoining the separate worlds of the visual arts, theatre and music into a new entity. The artist plays out her life and death with the help of the American actor Willem Dafoe and a group of other actors and performance artists from different corners of the world. The musical score for the piece was written by the British experimental composer Antony Hegarty who, with the help of his bandmates from Antony and the Johnsons, mixing the sonic world of his own creation with the more traditional forms of music. According to the Director of Manchester Festival Alex Poots, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is an excellent illustration to the actual purpose of the festival - which is furthering the creation of new works by the world's leading artists. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is a collaboration with Teatro Real Madrid, the Spanish royal opera company headed by Gerard Mortier, one of the world's best educated and creative opera executives. It was he who invited Robert Wilson to create a new kind of piece for the opera, being convinced that is was necessary for the operatic genre to evolve along new routes, finding its allies in young composers, strong visual artists and also performers who did not necessarily have to be professional opera singers. Mortier claims that the great Italian revolutionary composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) would have enjoyed The Life and Death of Marina Abramović by Robert Wilson, Hegarty and Marina Abramović.
Programme: www.mif.co.uk
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