Mr Poots reinvents Manchester

By Isabel Lloyd

A man is walking fast through the streets of central Manchester, and he is lost. "Where is Peter Street?" he demands. One of his team, a dark-haired woman in her 30s, is talking with some agitation into her mobile, trying to keep up as her boss scoots along the pavement, head turning this way and that. "I think…" she begins. "Is it here?" the man says. "No it’s here. This way."

It is May 2012; in nine months’ time, Alex Poots—a small, snap-crackle-pop Scot with salt-and-pepper hair, a mind like a Rolodex, and something of Gordon Brown in the dark bags under his eyes—will have to announce the full programme for the 2013 Manchester International Festival (MIF), an £11m event, taking place every other July, which he has directed since its inception in 2005. Everything in the 18-day festival—operas, plays, gigs, art installations, public events—will be new work, commissioned by Poots. Often, he pulls together stars from different firmaments. At MIF07 "Monkey: Journey to the West", a modern opera with a cartoon aesthetic, teamed two Britpoppers (Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett) with a Chinese-American arthouse film director (Chen Shi-Zheng). For MIF09 "It Felt Like a Kiss" matched an immersive theatre director of grand guignol bent (Felix Barrett) with a fiercely cerebral documentary-maker (Adam Curtis) to make a series of choreographed "experiences" exploring late-20th-century American power and guilt.