What Is the City But the People? // Clare McNulty

Manchester

Madchester

Womanchester

It has a good few names. Quite succinctly it is goosebumps. A frisson of fashion and fascination. Shudders of connectors and receptors. Born from changes and hormones.

Piccadilly Gardens grew a limb for MIF's opening ceremony. It was strong, white yellow and black, a suspended scaffolded catwalk bookended with gargantuan screens. Forcing us to face elevated people of hairs and muscles we wouldn't necessarily notice but need. 

Outcasts can find homes here and be heard. Happiness happens. Ageing graffiti is persistent proof on decayed tooth buildings. In love longing and loss, the people present made the same marks of defiance and delighted in difference. 

The community of Manchester is multicultural, multidimensional and multi-layered. Overhead city birds flew through bringing beats of Graham Massey, familiar yet distant and path-promising. The music drove the spirit. Instrumental expressions inspired individuality in absolute purity. Each person offered a preserved presence and prominent pride. Some were meditative and mindful. Moving with the same precision, simplicity, honesty and dignity of a Japanese Tea Ceremony. 

This misplaced MIF limb shone an examination light on the pulse of Manchester, linking lives and the humbling cure of courage people can bring. That's how the city sings its sounds. They echo against minimalist movement in a microcosm magnified. 

We are all blood cells moving through concrete capillaries, veins and arteries. The buildings house pains and electric brains. Without our power our city's complexion would wither to the wan of winter.  There would be no ideas. A computer not operated, not invented even.

We consider a baby's first breath. Nature and inherent beauty. A mother's love and another mother's duty.

Beautifully beaming brothers burst out. One romancing with adrenaline fuelled break-dancing. We all feel it. It happens again. We smile. We are related in bird skin. We rub our arms but we are not cold. In that collective moment we're reminding each other of our fragile mortality through silent screened stories and broken open emotion. Undoubtedly, those of us who were not elevated, were raised in other ways.  

A counterbalance of contemplation and cognition came curling round cogs of memory, giving mind to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. A medical tool based in subjectivity and judgement, stuck in me from my nursing history. The individuals we saw seemed to present in Maslow’s self-actualisation. It gave a great faith for fruitful futures in friendship. We surely shouldn't take our time or significant others for granted. That is a given. Each moment is a gift into learning about ourselves and others. Promoting our purpose. But entrenched medical models are archaic and here in Manchester we face forward. Or at least we try to. 

Ahead on my own path I look to a person lying on the floor. Amongst bags and cans and covers. Somewhere else on the scale of self-actualisation. I judge. I do not want to but I do. I've already assigned him a gender. I wonder about this life story. How he see's the city. How he saw the runway? I imagine his goosebumps are from other places. I hand him some money from a guilt-lined purse. 

- Clare McNulty

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Womanchester Poem - Ella Otomewo

Why Do We Get Goosebumps?

808 State – Pacific State

Baby Delivered Inside Amniotic Sac Takes First Breath

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - Simply Psychology

What Is the City but the People? // Ciaran Grace

What is the city but the people? This was the question posed by the opening performance of the 2017 Manchester International Festival. Inspired by an idea from contemporary artist Jeremy Deller, it reflects his desire for artworks that are ephemeral whilst also living on as a kind of “folk memory”. This juxtaposition of the humble and the mythic is at the heart of What is the City but the People?

The show consists of a catwalk of people from the city, a fashion show that is more about the models than their clothes. While the participants strut their stuff, enormous screens tell their life stories through twitter-esque sentences. The result is a deeply moving presentation of the tribe of Manchester; a city that is egalitarian, diverse and defiant. In the words of one participant interviewed on Radio 4’s Front Row, “even though we are different, we are all the same”. In the wake of the attack at the Manchester Arena in May, this attempt to define the city cannot help but feel intentional, or at least, tragically appropriate.

Jeremy Deller says the term “ordinary people” “sticks in his throat” because “everyone is extraordinary and a bit mad”. Participants were chosen for having done “normal but amazing things.” They are “normal” people – bakers, florists, ministers for transport -  but most have overcome amazing circumstances. Participants included those who had been homeless, a Syrian refugee and a grieving mother and daughter. The second participant to appear is also a mother – pregnant in the photos on the tv screens, but entering with the baby in her arms. Then there were lovers - Shakar and Shabnam Hussain, whose romance spans decades. Two brothers, Shaneer and Shaquille, often mistaken for twins, who were the breakdancing Romulus and Remus of the evening.

The show passes no judgment on the participants, but its emphasis on survivors can’t help but cast its characters in a heroic mould. The participants become exemplars or archetypes of human experience. Manchester in turn becomes a city of heroes. Whilst deeply moving, this is not without its problems. The participants who had been homeless, now have rooves over their heads, the criminals are now repentant. They are “reformed” somehow, presented as different from those who are currently homeless, many of whom joined the crowd to watch the show. When we tell the folk-tale of Manchester, which Manchester will we sing about? What happens to sufferers of homelessness and grief when we idolise those who overcome these things? (CG)

- Ciaran Grace

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller on Front Row

The bee as the symbol of the ideal society - Virgil, Georgics, 4.453-527

Social Facilitation

Cultural Survival

What Is the City but the People? // Hannah Ross

How to take a city, slice 100 people from the prism and get a cross-section suitable to be walked down a suspended catwalk whilst having their image displayed on towering screens in its centre? How to defend against those who are keen to whip out accusations of tokenism (as if representation is distasteful), without creating pastiched narratives about citizens as though they’re part of a saccharine version of Propp’s character theory? Post-election - mayoral and general - it feels apt to put a lens on at least a handful of local folk who make up the electorate, not only upon the renowned figures who feature in the festival.

Deller’s design is like a live art remodelling of Lowry’s 1954 ‘Piccadilly Gardens’, which hangs only a stone’s throw away on Manchester Art Gallery’s ground floor and similarly depicts a procession of people with an adjacent fountain in the very same location. Deller’s motifs of ordinariness and public space were, too, to be found in his 2009 MIF piece ‘Procession’. He must have maintained the same interest that he previously had in showcasing ‘The Big Issue sellers’ for, in the 2017 work, one such seller opens the work before us. It is static but for the flow of chosen ones along the elevated catwalk, oscillating between two screens that show pre-prepared shots of each person, plus snippets of candid biographies to boot. As the screens face each other, there's a sense of mise en abyme, mirrored further as people watch not only the procession but also the reactions and anticipations of one another in the Very Ordinary crowd. A foot before me stands Mancunian screen legend Julie Hesmondhalgh, later to be hugged by Boltonian wonder Maxine Peake in a Corbynista lock (a micro-spectacle of its own). The stage provides the expected unexpected - there's Bez, gently gyrating! There's that lovely woman who whizzed me around Bury North as we canvassed, and look, she’s got a baby with her!

There is one man in a wheelchair, a lady nearly a centenarian who has a walking aid. Walking, lingering, parading, protesting - as you ambulate through the vocabulary, words like these can become politically charged. What is it to march, or to stand up, and who can do this? What is ‘a movement’ in essence? The Manchester Activist Group take the spotlight and call protest ‘an expression of desire’. But when we think of a city full of people, celebrating a glorious exposure of variegated humans - can we talk about how this could remain inaccessible to some, with certain people’s experiences inexpressible (though, granted, the piece makes efforts to speak of homelessness, and MIF’s Festival in My House has gone some way to bringing events to a greater variety of areas)? About a recent public endorsement of forced institutionalisation, and the people whose city is often barred to them? Even with the inevitable and forgivable partiality that comes when trying to represent a large metropolis through a comparatively small set of individuals, we ought to keep stoking this discussion. The square flickers with pop-colour electronic posters asking the rhetorical title question of the show. May it be a city of people in their full variety, where resistance and optimism equitably uphold all. (HR)

- Hannah Ross

LINKS RELEVANT TO THIS DIAGNOSIS:

MIF - What Is the City but the People?

Propp’s Character Theory

LS Lowry - Picadilly Gardens 

Jeremy Deller - Procession

Mise en Abyme - A Gallery curated by Fedebrique

MIF - Festival in my House

Election 2017 - Tory disability minister endorses forced institutionalisation

What Is the City but the People? // Reina Yaidoo

A catwalk was set up right in the middle of Piccadilly Gardens and out strut Manchester’s finest. Ranging from a new born baby to a centenarian, taxi drivers, former Lord Mayors, artists and revellers all strode out to a driving beat. If the city aimed to proclaim itself through its people then there we stood. No rain, much applause.

Each dweller was framed with a story, individual to them giving meaning to the person behind the face.

• ‘Kate chose her own name. She was christened Andrew.’

• ‘Chris stood on the rooftop of the empty Ducie Bridge Pub. He wanted to say people could live here. Instead he got two months bread and breakfast in Strangeways.’

• ‘The big tower that howls. Ian designed that and much more of Manchester after the IRA bomb.’

Midway during the event a question is asked - Are the stories of the people of Manchester one of resistance or resilience? It would seem both words reference attitudes at the soul of what it means to be Mancunian but which would the people of Manchester most value: their resistance to the challenges they face or, their resilience, their ability to recover from these same obstacles?

Manchester is a city of two halves. It has nearly half a dozen universities, yet is also ranked the 5th most deprived local authority area in England. Two hundred languages are spoken in Manchester yet statistics from the National Literacy Trust show low levels of reading affecting literacy. Manchester boasts one of the most expansive digital and creative sectors covering computer programming, film and broadcasting yet the population continually shows higher rates of mental ill health than the national average. 

Maybe a more resonant question is how can these two halves work together in a dual display of resistance and resilience?

The parade continues and we see old and new lovers greet each other, the common electrifying day to day harmony of neighbours looking after one another and the ease of everyday stories. It becomes easier and easier to forget this notion of separation and instead consider solutions.

The World Health Organisation and Mental Health Foundation state that communities with high levels of social capital, indicated by norms of trust, reciprocity, and participation are more resilient and better able to resist the effect of material deprivation. Perhaps, then, every year we should leave a space in Manchester’s calendar for a catwalk of the cities’ residents, with background stories set up to remind us to trust in the primacy of goodwill and cooperation, to resist inequality of opportunity and build up some good old fashioned social capital. (RY)

- Reina Yaidoo

Links Relevant to this diagnosis:

Multilingual Manchester - A Fact Sheet

The National Literary Trust Manchester 

Greater Manchester Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy

World Health Organisation - Mental Health, Resilience and Inequalities

Mental Health Foundation - Commentary 

Social capital and the power of relationships - Al Condeluci at TEDxGrandviewAve

Building social capital | Joseph Cabrera | TEDxScranton

What is the City but the People? // Dom Rogers

Piccadilly Gardens was the backdrop for the launch event of Manchester International Festival (MIF), What Is the City, but the People? - a busy crossroads between various areas in Manchester City Centre. ‘Ordinary’ people walked down the catwalk. Messages displayed on two big screens showed the roads that the people had taken in their lives and for the most part, a resolution to their circumstances. The show was an exploration of connection in a city where unknown people are faces in a crowd. It highlighted the vulnerability of these people, the vulnerability of humans, and the bravery of sharing their message.

A message appeared on the big screen “John never intended to be a drag queen. It was an accident”. This quote reminded me of the process of randomisation of atoms; how an atom randomly colliding can be compared to a human and their life- bouncing constantly - forming different experiences. Manchester University is after all where the atom was first split, which led to the development of nuclear power. It was at this same university where that Alan Turing was a robotics professor, who is famous for breaking the Enigma code, and in his lifetime was condemned for being homosexual.

Manchester is now a safe space for the LGBT community. Drag performers from club night ‘Cha Cha Boudoir’ walked the catwalk and morphed as they went: into a peacock fluttering its feathers, lady death, or a Greek God like creature. It was the visual embodiment of change that the show represented in its entirety. The ability for humans to change and adapt to their surroundings. “As a geeky queer kid, Michael loved gods, monsters & dragons”.  Childhood experiences form part of who we are as adults.  Some Gods are a hyperbolic interpretation of a personality trait, as drag can be. “Donna is an extension of who I am – Kieran”. Drag and identity, like human physical selves, evolve and change with time. 

The show made me look at the person next to me and wonder who they were, and ask what they were thinking. So much of the time we walk past a person paying little or no attention. Everyone has a story; having open dialogue in this story is important. What Is the City? certainly opened up topics in my mind, snapshot moments and its fast pace sending the neurons swirling. In the final runway walk, a young child was staring at the shiny Greek God. The child and God danced. What is the city but these extraordinary people? Could it be any other city? (DR)

- Dom Rogers

Links Relevant to this diagnosis:

MIF - What Is the City but the People?

The Power of Vulnerability - TED

Manchester University - Splitting the Atom 

Alan Turing in Manchester

Crash Course on Identity - PBS

Cha Cha Boudoir 

People's History Museum - Never Going Underground

What Is the City but the People? // Tom Patterson

The Manchester International Festival opened on Thursday 29th June with What Is the City but the People? 160 participants walked, biked, danced, jogged and ambled along a raised runway in Piccadilly Gardens. People who might not usually be together were given the same platform, each having the same experience and sharing the same applause, from a Big Issue seller to a dance group, a taxi driver to a university chancellor. Being outdoors by a transport hub meant that it was not only highly visible but easily accessible. And breaking a Manchester tradition it didn’t even rain.

Each participant was accompanied by a streamlined narrative, conveyed through photographs and text projected onto large screens, creating an effect like flash-fiction. The text summarised a choice moment from their lives, a struggle, event or experience that they had lived through. Many were survivors, and such personal and sometimes traumatic experiences gave an intensity to these micro-narratives. This in turn gave the impression that we were seeing the participants’ souls laid bare, that we could know them deeply in that short moment. There was choreography to the event, orchestrated to retain attention and fit into its narrative framework. Several participants had stories that converged, like the man who was joined by his blind date on the runway. These vignettes give an impression of a bigger story beyond the event, a choice that led here and a relationship continuing into the future.

But we were only observers. It was impossible to see everything, because it was all done in such quick succession. As one person walked along the runway, the next participant’s pictures and backstory flashed up, and too much time looking at the screens meant missing the person in front of you. Did they wave? Were they happy? Normally, we get to know people by talking and sharing experiences; it’s a two-way street. As the event drew to a close, audience members seemed to be turning to one another and asking themselves; “Who is this standing next to me, this stranger, and what is their story?”

We will never know everyone’s history and sometimes even our closest friends and family surprise us with a story we’ve never heard before or a viewpoint that we didn’t know they held. But every one of the thousands of people that stream past us every day has something meaningful that they could tell us, that would make us laugh or think. We live insular lives, always watching screens with our earphones plugged in and sometimes we need to unplug, to speak to the person at the bus stop or ask the shopkeeper how their day was. Even if we only pass through each other’s lives briefly we can still have a meaningful conversation. To break down the walls between people we need to ask each other questions and really listen to the answers. (TP)

-Tom Patterson

LINKS RELEVANT TO THIS DIAGNOSIS:

MIF - What Is the City but the People?

Always Talk to Strangers - The Atlantic

Adults and Digital Devices - Scientific American

Flash Fiction

Why You Should Talk to Strangers - TED

What Is the City but the People? // Asif Majid

What is a city? The opening event of the 2017 Manchester International Festival (MIF) put forth an answer: its people. That the city is not the space those people inhabit, as much as it is the people who inhabit it. Paying tribute to Manchester, MIF’s What Is the City but the People? compelled audiences to see the city as more than a static collection of buildings and concrete. This is not a new idea, but rather one that draws heavily on social geographer Doreen Massey’s decades-old notion that spaces have multiple identities, are embedded in power dynamics, and rely on networks of social relations. What Is the City made its claim by parading dozens of Mancunians down a 100-meter catwalk in the heart of Manchester, Piccadilly Gardens. Dogwalkers, children, cyclists, refugees, taxi drivers, and lovers all appeared. It was a beautiful collection of people.

But Manchester is many things, both what was seen on the catwalk on June 29th, its opposite, and a range of lives in between. The event presented experiences of hope, strength, and community, but the city is also more than that, for better and for worse. Alongside the positive, the event might have also acknowledged the spice epidemic plaguing those experiencing homelessness in Piccadilly, an area inundated by the drug. Or it might have gestured to the major cuts to university staff at two Manchester universities (The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University), disproportionately effecting social and artistic fields, that are being fought by students and faculty alike. It might also have considered the spike in hate crime against those who are visibly Muslim that occurred in the month after the attack on Manchester Arena, reinforcing continued tensions and fears. Perhaps, then, the evening was more about highlighting what Manchester sees as the best parts of itself rather than reflecting all its complexities.

With Manchester still healing after the violence of May 22nd, What Is the City became an unintended commentary on the city’s resilience: anything other than celebration would have been inappropriate. At the same time, however, it is important to bear in mind another of Massey’s ideas, that space is no more than “a cut through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any one moment.” This runway-inspired slice of Manchester is only one drop of honey taken from a much larger pot, one boll of cotton drawn from a much wider field. It is a particular selection of people, reflecting a particular artist’s intention, at a particular moment in the life of the city. It should not be taken as universally or even totally Manchester, but rather as an invitation to deepen our relationship with the urban. For if a city is its people, to celebrate it is to take its good with its bad together. (AM)

- Asif Majid

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

MIF - What Is the City but the People?

Doreen Massey and Theories of Space

The Spice Epidemic

Cuts to Manchester Universities - Guardian and Manchester Evening News

Spike in Hate Crime after Manchester Attack