Manchester International Festival has officially launched its 2013 programme and tickets for several events have already sold out.
Billed as the world’s only festival of original new work and special events, presented biennially, it will this year run from July 4 to 21.
Featured artists include Massive Attack, Adam Curtis, Maxine Peake, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe, Abida Parveen, Kenneth Branagh, Matthew Barney, Goldfrapp, The xx, Richard Wentworth, Mogwai, Tino Sehgal, Jamal Edwards, Robert Wilson, John Tavener, Peter Sellars, James Murphy, Martha Argerich, Teodor Currentzis, Romeo Castellucci, Neneh Cherry—and more.
The programme ranges widely to include premières of new commissions and re-envisioned classic works, as well as a series of unique concerts and one-off events.
Kenneth Branagh will return to Shakespeare after more than 10 years, in the title role of Macbeth, staged in a deconsecrated church; while Salford-born Josie Rourke, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, will direct The Machine, a play written by award-winning playwright Matt Charman, exploring chess player Garry Kasparov’s battle with the supercomputer Deep Blue.
The Festival will present work in some of Manchester’s historic industrial spaces, many being transformed specially for the programme.
Manchester’s Mayfield Depot was originally built as a train station but has been empty for many years.
It will now be the setting for Tino Sehgal who will follow his Tate Modern success with a series of works programmed with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza and Manchester International Festival director Alex Poots. Mayfield will provide the location for Romeo Castellucci, Teodor Currentzis and the Perm Opera’s radical new interpretation of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, taking the original dance piece and remaking it as a theatre and dance installation... complete with bone powder and a 100-piece orchestra.
The depot also forms the backdrop for Massive Attack v Adam Curtis, a meeting of music, film and illusion in ‘a collective hallucination’.
Local actress Maxine Peake will perform in Sarah Frankcom’s new interpretation of Shelley’s epic poem The Masque of Anarchy, Britain’s greatest political poem. It will be set in the atmospheric Albert Hall chapel which will open to the public for the first time in 40 years. The same venue will also play host to director Peter Sellars’s production of Michelangelo Sonnets performed by Eric Owens and Cameron Carpenter.
Many of the world’s leading artists, including Tracey Emin, John Baldessari and Sarah Lucas, are taking part in work curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Housed in a space designed specially by artist Richard Wentworth, do it 20 13 takes as its starting point a series of written instructions by artists and is spread over four rooms, one of which will feature 20 instructions by deceased do it artists, realised especially for Manchester by 20 living artists.
The Festival also presents a series of collaborations which bring together some of the world’s leading artists—screen actor Willem Dafoe, who appeared at MIF 2011 in The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic—shares a stage with legendary dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov in Robert Wilson’s new production The Old Woman.
Details: www.mif.co.uk