Festivals
Manchester International Festival
The biennial Manchester International Festival featured a mixture of online and in-person events in July, but not much that resembled a sit-down theatre performance.
Theatre-Rites performed The Global Playground at Great Northern Warehouse but it was also available to watch online in a version of this amalgamation of puppetry, dance and technology that worked as well for adults as for children filmed clearly with an online audience in mind rather than the camera being an intrusion into a live event.
Visitors to the city centre were given a glimpse of the new Factory building, which will be MIF’s permanent base when it opens, whenever that might be (it was originally scheduled for completion in 2019), for Deborah Warner’s sound and light installation Arcadia.
According to MIF, almost three million people experienced this year’s festival, with a further 1.2 million joining it online.
For this year’s festival, however, BTG had a man on the inside, as David Cunningham joined the opening ceremony, Sea Change, as a volunteer dancer and reported entertainingly on both the selection and rehearsal process and the performance itself. He obviously enjoyed the experience as he was back in November for The Walk, when giant puppet Little Amal arrived in Manchester, making and operating bird puppets.
Liverpool Theatre Fest
After last September’s outdoor event at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church, created by Liverpool producer Bill Elms, Liverpool Theatre Festival returned a year later with the addition of Little LTF in July to showcase new work in front of an audience.
Little LTF featured 14 performances, whereas the full festival contained 23 performances of 16 shows over 12 days, including four shows for children and a music show about George Harrison.
Fringe festivals
Last year, the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival was postponed from summer to autumn, but even that smaller, later event was cut short by a further lockdown. Undeterred, this year’s festival, again put back to September, went on sale with more than 60 shows at venues around Greater Manchester.
Before that, The Goat Mcr created a new mini outdoor event The Summer Shakespeare Festival at Great Northern Warehouse, moving indoors to the new 53two when the weather turned nasty, which appears to have been successful.