The festival’s playful slogan is: “The original 3D experience”. But it also describes the kind of theatre on show here, based upon a high quality of acting, innovative staging and relevant subjects. This year, ten full performances and five in-development rehearsal readings are telling us stories in a different and imaginative way.

It’s the place to go for theatre in Manchester, not least because first-time writers often début here before getting longer bookings at bigger venues later on in the year. There’s likely to be plenty of future stars to look out for. Here’s my choice of the most interesting plays:

Make Believe is an imaginative piece of work, talking about the difficulties of growing up and saying good bye to an exciting childhood world. The actors will make you laugh and dream all the way through, allowing the audience to share the imaginary world they create.

Reeling is a meeting between the past and the present, presenting an interesting point of view about how the present can change when we rediscover the past. The acting is convincing and the writer does well to take us into the past through their words.

The inconsistent whisper of insanity is a story related in different times. It’s an original way of telling a familiar story, of love in war times. The plot and the staging are, however, brilliant.

Fading Hum is a story about family reconciliation which, if not particularly complex, features stand out performances from talented young actors.

Bluest Blue covers a meeting between different worlds and is about first and second impressions; the gap between appearances and reality. Definitely worth at least one watch.

See here for more information about the plays.

See here for reviews, comments and actor diaries.

Photo credit: Neale Myers

Contacting the World was born in a coffee shop in New Delhi. Founder Noel Greig dreamt of a global theatre project, able to bring young people around the world together to share ideas and produce new work. In 2002, his dream became reality.

This year, the biennial festival runs 19-26 July and is already demonstrating powerful creativity, with thirteen international companies offering innovative ideas. Performances, workshops, forums and debates are transforming Manchester into an exiting, international theatre meeting point.

Virginia Fernandez: Do you ‘Contacting the World’ to be about more than a theatre festival?

Babba Isreal: It’s much more. It’s about culture exchange and creating a kind of global dialogue through young people in a very significant way. It is also about building relationships. From January, different theatre companies around the world have been twinned together. For example, this year Manchester company 10p Mix Up was paired with another company from Mumbai, India, called Working title 2.0. Companies have an interaction over many months, online. They share diaries, blogging, videos, photos… things about their lives and their performances.

VF: What can we expect at the festival?

BI: It’s a real mix. The main goal is creating original pieces. For instance, the company from Manchester has created a play called The Lost Lizard, which is a kind of fairy tale. It’s extraordinary as issues they discovered learning about India [have become] questions and ideas about society explored through fairy tale. Then we have the company Cuciotak, from Indonesia, bringing traditional aspects to their work. They are very involved with the traditional Japanese and Indonesian theatre, based in masks and music. Then there’s a group coming from USA, First wave hip hop ensemble, who are combining hip-hop and spoken words with theatre. It’s a real diversity. It’s a kind of traditional and contemporary theatre; we have some many different interpretations about theatre.

VF: Do you think that theatre is able to speak a universal language?

BI: Definitely. Theatre is a reflection of human experiences. We find the things that make us human: emotions, stories, conflicts, love, struggles, imagination, explorations; everything from the real and the surreal. Theatre gives us a place where we can interpret our experiences as people. It’s one of the ways that communities come together and understand each other. Theatre has been used to set or change social values. It’s very universal because you have a lot of share languages in music, movement…

VF: Can Manchester transform into a ‘theatre city’?

BI: I think there’s always been a strong tradition of theatre in Manchester, with great diversity. From the Royal Exchange to the Green Room, to Contact, to the Library Theatre, to the Festival 24:7… people are starting to learn about these and other festivals, which have been happening for a long time. The main thing is how to improve awareness in Manchester. The real challenge is how to spread to the world about the energy delivered in the festival’s project.

VF: From the work already performed, it seems that exploring the work shown at Contacting the World is a good place to start.

For more information, visit: http://www.contactingtheworld.org/

David Slack created 24:7 in 2002. After working on a play in the Edinburgh Fringe and coming back to Manchester to work on a TV show, he realised that Manchester needed its own theatre festival. MULE spoke to David about this festival at a meeting of writers actors and directors ealier this month. Here is what he had to say.

MULE: What can you say about the writer’s talent this year, do you think the competition is very high?

DS: We had a one hundred and fourteen scripts submitted and they all pay something as well, it’s not an open thing, everyone has to pay a submission fee, this is the first level of adjudication because they have to believe in their scripts. We had forty different readers working in three stages to reduce the number until we found ten to produce this year. The standard, I think, is very high. Of course, our risk is how does it work on the stage? We think it’s good because the kind of the festival we are is based on the model of the Edinburgh fringe, which means you have to quickly get into the space, do your show and get out again. So, we always say don’t rely on the technical support, rely on the text and on the actors to do the work. It doesn’t matter where the play is, it’s important how they work and how people use their imagination.

MULE: What kind of people and what kind of theatre is the festival is looking for?

DS: We’re looking for writers who are willing to take a chance, take a risk. We want interesting dialogue. In this festival we have some writers who are quite experienced, but also we have some who for them its the first thing that they ever wrote, and so we help everyone to get their play on.

MULE: After seven years do you think the festival is consolidated or not?

DS: For some people it is. The main problem is that we are competing with all kind of things, in theatre and in performance in general and television. We are competing with sofas, to get people off the sofa to come and see a piece of live theatre. So this is a big challenge. And why should people come to see the work? Because they don’t know who is in it. We don’t have any big celebrity run in it. It’s interesting, is about human relationships, but it’s not simply entertainment. It’s entertaining, but it’s not just about that. We have to convince people that it’s not amateur work, most of the actors are professionals, or they want to be professionals, and this is an opportunity. We are looking for people who want to work along side us, and help new writers to be discovered.

MULE: What does theatre mean to you?

DS: I love theatre because I like to be transported, I like to be faked into an other place. I want to believe what’s happening in front of me, with theatre, and also with television or film, I want to be part of it, I want to enjoy it.

24:7 Theatre Festival, 26 July – 1 August. New Century House, Mayes St, Manchester

Various times throughout week; average ticket price £8.
For further information and tickets see 247theatrefestival.co.uk

Virginia Fernandez

I was excited and apprehensive about the pretentious ensemble which most likely awaited me at an exhibition which promised to, “explore relationships between the gallery and theatre, staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord”.

Descending the steps of the Castlefield gallery, I enter the grey concrete space, dimly lit by theatrical red spotlights. It only needs hooks hanging from the ceiling to resemble a horror movie slaughter house. But this macabre setting works to the exhibitions advantage.

The images on display are not in themselves aesthetically pleasing. The pieces of photojournalism Osbaldeston has collected are tenebrous reprints haphazardly collaged with historical dates and philosophical musings, giving the impression of a work in progress. This is the point: that the media we are witness to is constructed and only “a stolen language of reality”. It is posed to the visitor: “doesn’t all media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary value?”

This exhibition is meant to unease rather than inspire. As the audience approaches each image their shadows are cast upon it in the red light, suggesting that the individual in collective society is a part of “the illusion of disturbance” which assists hegemonic power.

The link between the theatre and media, illusion and reality are all valid and important political points but the exhibition loses impact due to its nebulousness. It does not make explicit that the photographs show the 1992LA Riots, the Waco Siege and the first Gulf War’s, ‘highway of death’ and therefore partly excludes the viewer. It is a striking exhibition but somewhat inarticulate and occasionally confused. But why believe everything you read in the media? You’ll have to go and see it for yourself.

Kirsten Ferrari

Out of Time (The Light of Day/ The Action of the Play) is showing at Castlefield Gallery until June 6th.

Photo © Alex Wilkinson-Hughes

There are five more days of the festival left and those feeling that it is too ‘niche’ would be rewarded by challenging that view. The description is a disservice. Road Movie is a one-man, HIV themed play first performed in 1995. Re-imagined for 2010, it offered Library Theatre audiences a poignant exploration of the universality of grief. Peggy Shaw, performing at the same venue tonight, is likely to present a similarly polished, personal show.

Less traditional in form, Three at Contact Theatre was a storytelling triptych that split audiences with its seemingly hetero – but nonetheless sexual – content. There was confusion from some: where was the gay theme? Yet the performers had questioned “queer” and found diverse, unusual responses. The festival is not afraid to challenge its own purpose – a rare and important approach. “Unexpected” has served as a suitable description throughout.

Internal and Exam, two free, participatory theatre pieces, further push the envelope, addressing identity, politics, science and art. They run alongside club nights Brenda and Bollox vs Pussy Faggot, cabarets and traditional theatre. Audiences for one event may have no idea another is running. There are events to appeal and impress everyone – queer or otherwise.

One issue this year is the lack of visual arts. The only exhibition, Seven Acts of Reciprocity, is being held at the only non-central location, in Oldham Gallery. Is this simply evidence of lip service being paid to locality? Venues as diverse as Sachas Hotel and the Carlton Club suggest not. The exhibition itself is not too impressive, however, which may be expected of an attempt to show a retrospective of performance art, with no live performances.

The festival draws to a close over the Bank Holiday weekend, moving its primary venue into the heart of the Gay Village. The emphasis will shift to perhaps more readily identifiable “queer” events: alt.cabaret; burlesque; experimental performance art. Is this what and where it means to be Queer Up North? The festival is not that limited. The specially erected Speigletent, a dance hall of mirrors, will continue the thread of political, challenging and highly impressive performances seen throughout the festival. Apparently, this year the festival has had to cut back for financial reasons. Yet there is little evidence that quality or thought have been compromised as a result. Instead, we have been reminded how progressive, enjoyable and important the arts can be.

The Queer Up North website is here and the festival runs until 31 May.

Siobhan McGuirk

From video documenting the last horse-drawn ‘chariot’ driver in Sulaimaniyah, to photographic portraits mocking orientalist paintings of nineteenth-century European artists, many of the works are explorations of the politics of identity, rather than explicit responses to the bloodiness of Iraq’s present and recent past.

The exhibition showcases the work of nineteen artists currently living and working in Iraq – explicitly excluding work from Iraqi artists in diaspora. This decision has its drawbacks, notably the narrow geographical range of the artists represented. Because the majority-Kurdish areas of northern Iraq are less dangerous than the rest of the country, and perhaps because the organisers’ strongest links were in Kurdish areas, fifteen of the artists are from Kirkuk, Sulaimaniyah and Erbil. The remaining four are from Baghdad.

“The majority of the artists do come from Iraqi Kurdistan, and that’s reflective of certain issues across Iraq,” concedes the exhibition’s co-curator, Sarah Perks. “We’re not saying that this is a full representation of all Iraqi art, just that here are nineteen artists living and working in Iraq, this is the art they’re creating at the moment. We’d like people to think a bit more widely and hopefully challenge some of their preconceptions.”

Adalet Garmiany, Perks’ co-curator, is a Kurdish refugee whose organisation, ArtRole, organised the first post-war art festival in Iraq, in Sulaimaniyah in 2009. According to Garmiany, some artists refused to participate in the show because of the mainly British and Kurdish organisers.

Amongst others who have not had their preconceptions challenged are, apparently, the visa applications staff at the British embassies in Amman and Beirut. A number of the featured artists, as well as several Iraqi academics, were invited to attend the recent exhibition opening. All were denied entry to the UK – part of a growing trend attributable to tightened visa regulations which, Perks suggests, could have serious implications for artistic freedom and interaction. “I don’t know why they didn’t give me a visa,” laments Julie Adnan, a photographic artist from Kirkuk.

According to Adnan and colleague Jamal Penjweny, from Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi artists are trying to use the internet to communicate – both abroad and with other artists within the country. But “unfortunately we do not have a good community of artists now in Iraq because most of the good Iraqi artists left Iraq during Saddam’s period and some after Iraq war because of the violence left the country,” says Penjweny.

Contemporary Art Iraq is at Conerhouse until 20 June.

Sarah Irving is a freelance writer based in Manchester.

It’s an ambitious line-up filled with programming coups such as the Oscar Nominated Shorts screening (Sunday 2 May), a series of locally produced films and a strand of eight debut features from directors who have crossed over from the shorts genre. Each day of the festival runs 10am – late night.

Anyone taking advantage of the ridiculously good value festival pass might as well book the week off work. For film fans especially, Kinofilm looks worth taking advantage of any holidays due. For students, the country-specific selections should stand out, for educational purposes of course.

The full schedule disguises any reported funding difficulties faced by a once-popular event given short shrift from the City Council since the last festival, in 2006. Like many other small and niche festivals, Kinofilm appears to have suffered around the same time as the funding guzzling Manchester International Festival arrived on the scene. No matter, it seems. Kinofilm has garnered enough sponsorship and support from European cultural funding partners and Vision+Media, the northwest’s main film funding body to pump for a fully fledged event.

Organisers are even adding an art exhibition into the mix. The Polish Film Poster show is on now and until 16th May in the unusual premises of The Triangle Shopping Centre. The location harks back to the Kinofilm festival tradition of presenting films in unexpected surroundings, and ties in well with the Polish Shorts screenings.

Between the astonishing 30 short film programmes, a range of seminars and workshops covering acting, screenwriting and editing are all open to the public – advanced booking is strongly advised. For festival director John Wojowski, Kinofilm 2010 is a product of hard work and passion. “For the last four years Manchester has been without an International Film Festival and it was my ambition to make sure that Kinofilm would return. We have seen over 1100 short films submitted from all over Europe, and a fantastic team have worked hard to ensure that we are able to present the best to North West audiences”. The end product, it seems, is there for all to enjoy.

Daisy Priestly

The Kinofilm Manchester European Short Film Festival runs Tuesday 27 April – Sunday 2 May at the AMC Cinema, unless otherwise stated in the programme.
Passes are available for £35, allowing entry to all screenings.
See here for the full line-up of the Kinofilm Festival.

Set in a Salford tower block, the story follows Ronnie and Bridgette who, for the sake of their now terminally ill daughter, have moved back into the flat she grew up in. Shortly after moving in, they find their neighbours Paula and Otis are not entirely as they first seem.

Overall, the small cast give accomplished performances. John Henshaw (Looking for Eric) offers a particularly convincing father and husband dealing with the impending loss of his daughter. Janice Connolly, a mainstay of the Manchester comedy circuit, plays Bridgette. Her characterisation is robust but at points veers towards the farcical.

Sally Carmen (Shameless) gets the most laughs and her energy often carries the action, although she never quite manages to shake off her Channel 4 alter-ego. Otis, played by James Foster, is a likeable character but certain motifs begin to grate with repetition and seem slightly patronising of the working class male he attempts to typify. Perhaps here the casting is slightly off, as a younger actor would have been more believable.

The script is sharp, however; well paced with some genuine laughs intercut with touchingly true scenes in which the central characters attempt to relate through their incompatible ways of dealing with grief. The various layers and themes add gravity to the off-stage death of the daughter.

Yet a major problem with the play is that it is simply too hard to see how the idea of the Egyptian “beautiful house” – where embalmed organs are kept for use in the afterlife – connects with the struggles of a family trying to get onto the housing ladder.

The mood swings wildly from comedy to grief in the second half  and the audience is left wondering when they should be laughing. While this may be a comment on our reaction to loss, from the perspective of the audience it is jarring.

The play is still worth watching and for theatre-goers especially it is interesting to see the talents emerging from the fringe scene.

Samantha Bradley

Beautiful House is at The Library Theatre until 8 May.
Tickets cost £11-13, concessions available.

The Spokes, an all-female troupe of bike performers, have several events planned, including a performance (24 April) and Acrobalance classes (every Monday), where a circus instructor will be at hand to advise on the art of human pyramids. Along with Spokes events there is a women-only ‘bike play’ event in Chorlton’s Longford park to practise balancing tricks (18 April) and a scheduled visit to the Pankhurst centre , where a women’s bike maintenance workshop and history talk will be held (13 April).

Other events including a mountain bike ride through the Delaware forest on (11 April) and a Bike Polo tournament (17-18) promise energetic weekends, whilst those who like a dance may enjoy the Reggae rides (8 and 15 April), meeting at Sandbar for a musical two hour bike ride finishing at Saki bar. But remember to drink and ride responsibly!

Emily Crompton, a member of the collective told the Mule “The I Bike MCR festival has been going from strength to strength. There are loads of events happening this year, film screenings, workshops, long rides, short rides, rides to take you somewhere beautiful, races and challenges, rides with hundreds of people and rides with just a few.”

In fact, I Bike MCR has been advocating the use of bikes and bicycle fun in Manchester for years. The grassroots autonomous collective is best known for Critical Mass, which draws cyclists to the central library at 6.30pm on the last Friday of every month. From here, the gathering throng of cyclists, whether fresh off their stabilisers or veteran two wheelers, reclaim the city; often occupying entire lanes of city centre roads or cutting through alleys you never knew existed. It is all legal – which doesn’t make Critical Mass any less liberating.

The festival will draw to a close with a celebratory Critical Mass (30 April) and, depending on the April weather and those inspired by the months events, it should be a good turnout, embodying the autonomy and sense of community which I Bike MCR hopes to develop, a sentiment echoed by Crompton:

“I Bike MCR is all about getting on your bike, riding and enjoying it- if you ride, come find us! Be your bike a fixie with deep v’s or a sit up and beg, whether you bike in high heels or in lycra…Come and bike with us”

Kirstin Ferrari

Visit the I Bike MCR website for more information

The show is based upon Sissay’s own experiences growing up as the only black person in a totally white Lancashire town. Adopted at a young age and then given up to the care system again at the age of eleven by his God-fearing foster family, the poet went on to stay at five care homes in seven years. Isolated and searching for an identity without any family as reference points, Sissay’s self-exploration centred upon his race.

The show reflects these years of searching and is jam-packed with witty and cringe-worthy observations and impersonations of British life. Sissay’s characters are spot-on, from the macho lager-lout who props up the bar proclaiming, “If there’s one thing I don’t want to talk about it’s racism” to the nosey old-lady on the bus pointedly asking, “…and where are you from?”

Sissay’s poetic use of language is engaging and the subject matter often whirls off on unexpected but pleasing tangents. The performance style is dramatic yet his energetic bounds across the stage, though appropriate to the dialogue, occasionally reminded me of an over-keen teacher at a school drama workshop. At times, it was clear Sissay was struggling, stumbling over words and seeming slightly distracted. Though the language is disjointed by nature, his mistakes were noticeable, though not disastrous. He has a truly creative mind and is so at home on the stage that he managed to just get away with any fumbles. The question and answer session after the show was a much-needed round-up to the performance and gave some interesting background to his story. And fair play to Sissay, who wholeheartedly admitted and apologised for the mistakes he made, he even offered to pay for twenty tickets to the next evening’s show.

After, a friend asked me, “Does Lemn say anything new about race?” Well, no. But then again he never said he was going to. Sissay, as the title of the piece suggests, simply offers up a personal account of a life spent tackling race and the self. Ultimately, the show is light-hearted and peppered with humorous moments but seems to lack a certain, expected depth.

Rachel Jackson

Why I Don’t Hate White People played at Contact Theatre, 18 – 20 March 2010.