To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
The Manchester festival runs between 2nd July and 19th July. For more information and tickets visit the website.
“A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve.” Norman Mailer’s words, written in 1957, haunt the extraordinary new creation of theatre company Punchdrunk and filmmaker Adam Curtis: “It Felt Like A Kiss.” It’s a spectacular, disorienting and sometimes terrifying journey from 1950s America to the present day.
Borrowing its title from the 1962 Carole King song “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)” and set to a soundtrack chosen by Damon Albarn, the production is on for the duration of the Manchester International Festival, which runs until 19th July and incorporates a wide range of art forms—from music, sculpture, architecture and theatre to visual art. There are events happening all over the city, sometimes in the most unlikely of places. “It Felt Like A Kiss” takes place in an abandoned office complex in Manchester’s newly redeveloped Spinningfields.
For the show, Punchdrunk have converted the vast building into a labyrinthine suburban dystopia. In the first third of your journey, you pass through gardens with neatly clipped lawns, living rooms, bedrooms and offices which look, feel and smell just like the homes of my own American grandparents. The set is littered with old letters, postcards, movie posters and newspapers and magazines carrying news of Portugual’s repression of the Angolan insurgency, the rise of Nixon and profiles of long-forgotten TV pin-ups. As you move further along, the atmosphere gradually becomes more disturbing. All the signs of life are here, apart from the people themselves: in their place are costumed mannequins, rooted to their positions as if frozen after a nuclear holocaust.
At the centre of the maze, you enter a low-lit film club to watch a 35-minute film made by Curtis (although segments of it have already been spliced into your pathway beforehand). Felix Barrett, director of Punchdrunk, has likened the film to an atom bomb from which fragments explode outwards in all directions throughout the production. The film’s subject is how America, 50 years ago, set out to remake the world—and the unforeseen consequences of this. In addition to standard fare about the CIA’s clumsy attempts to kill Castro and conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK, comes some of the less well-traveled areas of history, like America’s involvement in the Congo, and come some fascinating nuggets: did you know that James Bond director Terence Young also made a 7-hour propaganda film for Saddam Hussein? In between ingeniously edited clips of Doris Day, Rock Hudson and countless classic movie moments, there’s footage of an architect warning that the World Trade Centre twin towers were “satanic” even as they were being built, and of Osama bin Laden’s father’s company building Saudi Arabia’s first modern highway to Mecca.
“I’m fed up of films about that 1960s that try and tell you it was all wonderful and full of hippies,” Curtis told me later. The period was revolutionary, but he believes it gave birth to many of the fears and uncertainties we face today—not only in relation to the outside world, but within ourselves. Yet the film (and indeed the whole experience itself) does offer far more than a singular, well-worn narrative of American imperialism. “It’s an adoring love-letter to American popular culture,” Curtis explained. The cultural influence of the US has been so great over the last half century that we are all Americans, he says. Which is why for all the portents, his work exudes warmth and nostalgia; drawing on the emotional connections to America that we all, inevitably, have inside of us.
After watching the film as many times as you like (as it is played on a continuous loop) you move on into a darker realm; at one point you sit in a hospital ward filling out psychological questionnaires and eventually you get chased down strobe-lit hallways by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Michael Billington has described these as “fairground shock-tactics” that “insult our intelligence.” It does indeed feel like you’re trapped in a cheesy horror film (as Curtis himself put it)—but this is precisely what is intended. Horror films have been an integral part of American culture over the last 50 years, and the feelings of fear and disorientation that the journey creates are not only powerful, but central to the narrative: it is about uncertainty and an eventual (ambiguous) liberation. What’s more, in trying to distinguish Punchdrunk’s staging and Curtis’s film, Billington entirely misses the point. The two mutually coexist; they cannot be separated. As Curtis himself says, Punchdrunk have taken his film and made it three-dimensional.
To sum up the full experience as “promenade theatre,” I felt, would be inadequate, and Curtis agreed. The best description he’s been able to come up with, he says, is that it’s a “psycho-political theme experience in which you become one of the central characters.”
***
However you define it, the presence of “It Felt Like A Kiss” at Manchester’s festival could not be more appropriate. Nearly everything on offer this year has managed to be in some way unique, innovative and genre-bending. Featuring a wide range of originally commissioned work, it’s a line-up bursting with difference. There is something for everyone, from the legendary hip-hop outfit De La Soul to a Rufus Wainwright opera.
“I hope we’re beyond the whole high culture low culture divide by now—it’s redundant,” festival director Alex Poots told me as we sat the Manchester Opera House watching Mercury prizewinner Anthony and the Johnsons’ final rehearsal before that evening’s performance on 3rd July. The set for the show was itself was a sight to behold, lit by designer Paul Normandale. Anthony was wearing white sheet so that he would absorb the lights projected onto him, the aim being that he becomes “part of the work.” It was an effect was not dissimilar to the one I experienced that morning, when I had a sneak preview of world-reknowned architect Zaha Hadid’s chamber music hall, built inside Manchester art gallery to host nine performances of Bach’s solo instrumental works. (The connection, Poots assured be, was purely coincidental; yet time and again I sensed themes connecting different works.) Sitting inside Zaha’s creation (pictured on the right), one feels cocooned, wrapped in a continuous white ribbon that loops around the chairs and the stage from the floor to the ceiling. Made of lycra, the structure feels solid but appears to acquire a different texture, and sometimes a translucence, when different shades of light are shone onto it. Fitted with acoustic padding to deliver a sound as natural and seamless as the work itself, the intention, one of Zaha’s assistants explained to me, was that the ribbon itself becomes a “silent performer in the space”—something that sounds ridiculous until you experience this effect firsthand.
I had similar initial scepticism about the play I went to see that evening: “Everyone Loves a Winner,” written and directed by Neil Bartlett, a veteran of the National and the RSC. Bartlett has transformed city’s Royal Exchange theatre—situated right inside the old building that used to be the biggest trading room in the world—into the Rex Bingo club. Featuring a cast of mainly old, female bingo addicts, a burnt out compere (Ian Puleston-Davies), a brisk house manager (Sally Lindsay) and three jaded teenage employees, the play covers the gruelling 13 hour day that bingo hopefuls and jaded employees spend in the glaring, neon world of the Rex. Each of the punters lives in continuous cycle of hope and disappointment, each with their own special dream of what they’d spend their money on should they ever have that elusive big win. There’s singing, dancing and a Greek chorus—but what crystallises the experience is the fact that the audience gets a genuine taste of what the characters are going through. Because everyone watching also has a chance to play bingo and win up to £200. It’s an easy gimmick, but one that draws you in compulsively. Bartlett is not just lecturing middle class audiences on what it’s like to be desperate, he forces them to glimpse the feeling, however fleetingly, for themselves.
***
Alex Poots told me that the idea for Manchester’s festival of culture came in the wake of the Commonwealth games, as a way of building on the momentum sparked by that event. Key to his vision for such an arts festival, he said, was a large body of original work (he was formerly responsible for commissioning new work at the ENO and the Tate), encouraging collaborations between different artist and art forms and, crucially, building on what Manchester already has to offer.
In this spirit, on 5th July central Manchester was given over to a riotous procession choreographed by Turner prizewinner Jeremy Deller (see Ben Lewis’s account of Deller’s art on parade, Prospect July). With help from friends like David Hockney, Deller brought together, among many others, a Scouts marching band, groups of goths, emos, a whole dynasty of white-clad rose queens from Stretford and group going by the name of the Unrepentant Smokers. As Deller has said, “As humans, it’s almost part of our DNA to be instinctively attracted to big public events that bring us together. A good procession is in itself a public artwork: part self-portrait and part alternative reality.” And in this case, the self-portrait element of this was genuine; Deller drew deeply from Manchester itself. Not only were many of the participants picked off the streets, but it was a homage to the city’s culture and history—there was a musical tribute to Oldham’s fish and chip shop (the world’s first), the legendary Valerie’s market café in Bury was recreated in all its glory, and from all over the city there came the largest ever gathering of local sporting mascots.
An accompanying exhibition of Deller’s parade will run until the end of the festival; other works, meanwhile, will stay in Manchester long after it is over. At the unveiling of Gustav Metzger’s “Flailing Trees” (right) in the Peace Garden next to the town hall, it was announced that Metzger had donated the work to Manchester university. As the ageing artist explained, in the same way that the surrealists of the 1920s inspired people with a “chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine,” so he hoped that students and other observers would draw inspiration from his 21 willow trees, stripped, upended and stuck in concrete. The work, he said, was a homage to the Dadaist tradition of play, challenge and subversion. Zaha Hadid’s concert hall will also host a programme of free concerts for the public until August. And Adam Curtis intends to put his film onto his website after the festival is over, so that everyone can enjoy his work. “TV,” he told me, “is weak.”
***
On my way back to London, I asked myself what had made the whole festival work so well; how had it managed to be so distinctive? Perhaps part of the answer lies in a particularly fortuitous selection of works this year. And it seems that decision to hold it biannually (as Poots assured me they would continue to do) was a crucial one, because it has helped the organisers to be more selective than their annual counterparts. But Manchester itself, with its long history of independent thought, activity and enterprise, also serves the festival exceptionally well. If such a thing were to take place in London, it would be swallowed by the enormity of the city; in Edinburgh, it would be consumed as the Scottish capital is by the Fringe every August. Instead, Manchester is big and important enough to carry on about its normal business, while hosting a series of enthralling and genuinely original experiences of art. Not all of the enterprises worked (see Tom Jackson’s review of Marina Abramovic). But in this inimitable event, the city’s spirit of innovation could not have found a better showcase.
The Manchester festival runs between 2nd July and 19th July. For more information and tickets visit the website.
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Share
Comments
Print
