The Welcome at Manchester’s Factory International

The Welcome is the opening of the Factory international/ Aviva Studios venue in Manchester’s newest cultural venue. It is where the original Factory International moniker returns, the point at which two years and more of effort and voluntary energy is released. Across the venue, a rage of events and activities are running for nine days in November and allow the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester a representation here, in this cultural hub. There is so much to support and love about this, The Assembly, made up of people across the boroughs, creatives and not, activist and enthusiast, all voluntary and all filled with energy yesterday.  This is a major event and one they have created between them to celebrate a part of the behemoth that is otherwise easily missed, that network of community that was always expected to infuse the venue and its offerings.  It was notable the prevalence of Factory International logo and conversation with the Assembly members, they were here before the money issues, before the Aviva finance package.  They bring that with them, the original ethos of community and diversity. There is a legacy amongst them of the Manchester International Festival and a clear belief in the power of arts and creativity to build a space, to do so with people and now with a building.  A gigantic and impressive building, at that. The podcast continually returns to this as ‘a building like no other’.  In what they hope to bring, site specificity is crucial.  That means nothing without people, as much of new Manchester shows, the building is often despite the people. This is different here, there has been an attempt from inception to include arts and creativity, and people.

So much of what happens here is superb, we were wandering about and so aware of the ways in which the massive and the corporate and the arts world globalisation tentacles can be made real in actual lived communities.  The Phillipine artist, Leeroy New dominates the spaces between bar and stage with Balete Spacecraft that presents a non-Western version of globalised waste, of science fiction, of Balete trees as hosts for the other world in this as they play out in Philippine folklore. The plastics and actual waste bound in this mammoth and quite beautiful structure of hazel, bamboo, willow all come from here, Greater Manchester.  But it is not just the waste the area brings, amongst the plastic bottles and Mancunian tip harvest is a writhing poetry of bodies adorned in chaotic costumes of waste, a dance movement that brings the whole space ship of junk to life.  Each of the dancers that brought this to another dimension of movement, of entrancing brilliance, was from here. The international, the local.  Breathing life into art and making it of here, not just placed here.

This whole site is familiar enough to the nation at large as the original site of Coronation Street, the Granada studios set was here. That huge engine of northern parody that was so entrenched it became the enduring image of Northernness for the nation in a televisual age, maybe it still is in the digital one.  That mixture of musical hall and high drama in small spaces, a nation sat and watched as broadcasters built a modern version of the ancient Beoetia before our eyes, us now the new Beoetian horde synonymous with thick headed nostalgia, treacly sentimentality and interlaced with dry wit and camp humour. Listening to The Assembly, their vision is of diversity and genius, of arts and creativity and a modern world Manchester built on art and thought, it is entrancing.

At times the other world still reminds of the suffocating division, of people who belong in art spaces, people who do not. Whether true or not, and it was readily dismissed in every conversation and panel, these places and spaces have a natural magnetism for some just as much as they repel others. A comfy world of Gilet gangs exists, always does, of pens filled with circus skills workshop and those families from Sunday magazines that don’t really appear round here, but do love these spaces.  And they are wonderful, cute and perfect. They would for certain be included in certain newspapers’ ten things to do at the weekend for the Saturday Weekend edition.  Retired lecturers and culture vultures and alternative clothing and cool crowds of interested engagement with all of it, just All of It! The gilet and the spotless walking boots, the poshness, one came over to say to Alex, ‘your coat, let me say, simply wonderful, makes such a statement’ and we both felt sadder after she had gone.  What kind of statement? It may have been a compliment, but then Alex wondered if she was overdressed and we looked and the coat was not the so expensive, it was not expensive at all, but we knew the gilets were, and the walking boots.  ‘You get away with being a scruff’, she said to me (Alex, not the complimenter, thank the stars!), and I thought I was not scruffy but suddenly aware that I probably was.  The thing is, I was not really scruffy but I was not in any way curated or meaningfully dressed, no statement.  A mistake perhaps, it is these micro moments I get screwed by every time. We felt a bit shufflier, looked silently at our feet, and made our way to the circus.  ‘Where are your seats exactly?’ the ticket checker asked, just me, nobody else before or after. My barcode beep had worked on his machine but the further inquiry was just that thing I see as why I still feel fear in these places often. It happens in literary festivals, academic conferences, places I have been tense about and now I forget.  Which came first, the tension or the micro challenges?  Here, I thought it was my own fault for taking the MagNorth press tickets, in the posh seats, down the front.  I also know this is immediately called paranoia – you cannot win, you own the shame and the blame. It is one of those things that when we are in the venues and despite the ethos of inclusion and the genuine love of that in the organisers, there is a whole ecology at play in cultural events that remains rooted in other conceptions of the world. ‘Maybe he didn’t recognise me from the Waitrose in Congleton’ I whined, a withering defensive witticism to Alex.

Just so you know, if you feel that too, we are right, it does happen. You are also wrong, or at least, I am.  We have to take these steps and let this light in for ourselves, and by doing so we help make the world turn a little more smoothly. If we populate venues and have our say things will change – us included.

The circus is a great example of the Welcome and the overlap with the venue and its other purposes.  It is well worth the £16 if you have it, but there are reduced ticket prices when you cannot.  When no tickets are possible, the events here are almost all free, including dance workshops with the carnival performers, the most incredible athletes you can hope to see.

Driving home, we went down Deansgate, it was rammed.  Everywhere, the roads choked, people everywhere and all of them recognisably not in the Studios, the factory, the new place.  Maybe not this time, but that is the challenge. Can the welcome reach beyond the usual suspects?  Despite our lack of sartorial consciousness we are that too, me playing journalist sometimes, or both of us just desperate for something more. We go, we have felt the ostracising, learned to repel it.  There is a depth to newness that is not what is expected, nor what is done elsewhere. In the Welcome panel discussion, an assembly member described it as ‘a miniature festival, two years in the making’.  A ‘uniquely Mancunian event’ was the goal, and the Assembly people are brilliant, they are the heart of all of this. Their enthusiasm was infecting, the energy that flowed across the hall and the events themselves came mainly from them.  The atmosphere was quite beautiful and this is what you get from building-in the community as designers and influencers, focal points for all that is going on.  That in itself is unusual, if not unique, the people on the stage were positive and examples of making a difference, and the voices not the standard English that generally dominates these stages and openings.  It has that going on, an eclectic mix, music, performance, activity, a representation of other voices. Up on stage, The Assembly told us their definition, ‘ a wonderful smorgasbord of cultural production…bringing people together from different boroughs, different lives, different backgrounds’.  It is certainly that, it opened up another Manchester, the real one I think, placing the heartbeat into architecture. Around the hall, Ming De Nasty displays life sized photographs of those that built this whole thing, images shot across the duration of the renovation and rebuild and build. Even this, recognising the builders beyond the architects, the ‘names’ is in accordance with this effort to make the site belong to the city as people, not city as celebrity or wealth or power.  It works.

In part the performances were part club land gig, part classical offering, part beautiful interludes.  A Caribbean band, Mento-B then a violin and keyboard, upstairs somewhere a rapper and a tarot card reader, Queen Lil, set up amongst the tables and chairs of the foyer, a contemporary dance moved across the floor and mesmerised old goats like me and cross legged children and all in-between in a beautiful moment of rapture.   The Welcome has genuine moments of brilliance to it –most notably for me Afrique en Cirque which is the show stopper, the brilliant end to the day for us.  But that is the biggest thing, the intended BOOM! Moment. Everything about this rattles along with perfect beauty, sometimes a clumsy symmetry. Awkward moments, long intervals, a vast expanse so never sure where things are, these are feet finding moments and ones that make it special, the community take over it aims to be.  This is how it should be, a genuine desire to make things work and to work with passion, with heart.

In those intervals, haunting on the wind, A Guy Called Gerald, Blue Monday, other anthems of a Manchester I am used to hearing replayed over and over.  It is getting airtime here too, but it is haunting, it is on the wind of this huge open space, not in the minds of the people here so much. As historic and of the past as Fred Eliot and Curly Watts, I still loved to hear it but thought of how things have moved, how much more is happening in this new frontier. It felt a beacon in a world that really needs that now, a beacon of welcoming and belonging.  The Assembly talked of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, they mingled, they energised.   You will bring your own Manchester, how it links with all of this is for you to decide. The whole purpose ‘is to bring in new people, Shada from Harpurhey told me, a volunteer and Assembly member with a desire to ‘make this work for Manchester’. I believed her, it felt that way, no side to this and no grandiosity.  I wanted to share in it and to get you to consider coming along too, if you were not already.

‘Net curtains round the dustbin, that the Barlows’, Jack Duckworth once beautifully observed of his neighbours.  There is a sense of the awareness being around what we see as comfortable, and where we think we fit. That is often the frustration, that sense of wanting to be involved but never ever being invited in, the opportunities always seemingly two steps away.  Class divides, even in the same street.  But it has to be overcome because how can we change a world if we cannot make links across a single city?  We all come through different gates and down diverse paths, but The Welcome does want you here, it is saying it in as many ways as it can and it needs support.  It needs you, especially the shoe shufflers like me.  We have to go here, we have to help make it work.  I do not know how you get to be a part of these things, I never have.  But I know they are important and they need us to support them. When people make the efforts these people have, they need us there and to make it work.  This is free, other events here are not.  Get down, have a great time, book for the events coming up, they include Afrique en Cirque, but so much else.  It is for all ages, it needs courageous pioneers that say “I can do that” and then do it.  On this site of Bobbinwood, where too often dense but lovable caricatures of Northernness were created, a new alternative is possible. Only if we let it by taking part.