Live From Manchester

Back in 2009, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, described the burgeoning Manchester International Festival (MIF) as a tribute to the British architect Cedric Price, who, in the 1960s had an idea to build a flexible, interdisciplinary arts space in East London. Price’s “Fun Palace,” as he called it, was never realized, but its spirit thrives in this biannual 18-day festival, now in its third incarnation. This year, Alex Poots, the festival’s director, has come up with another stellar lineup of music, theater and visual arts events to match the city’s reputation as both a creative incubator and provocateur.

Obrist, along with MoMA’s, Klaus Biesenbach curated an exhibition of performance works called “11 Rooms” at the Manchester Art Gallery, each featuring an encounter with a living sculpture, conceived by 11 different artists. In one room, the manga character Annlee (acquired by the artists Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe) is made human by the artist Tino Sehgal. The young girl stares wide-eyed, introducing herself and questioning the audience, her movements slow and calculated, delicate and almost human. In another room, a woman checks out every inch of her naked body with a hand mirror in a re-creation of Joan Jonas’s 1970s work “Mirror Check.” In Allora and Calzadilla’s “Revolving Door,” a troupe of Rockettes-style dancers are lined up from wall to wall, leaving viewers stuck in their hold as they move around a central axis. Marina Abramovic’s 1997 performance, “Luminosity,” is restaged in yet another room, the performer perched naked on a bicycle seat under an intense spotlight, like a human specimen pinned to the wall. Of the 11 rooms, perhaps most interesting is John Baldessari’s “Unrealised Proposal for Cadavre Piece,” first conceived in 1970 and comprised of the paper trail of documents and e-mail correspondences of failed attempts to procure a willing male cadaver who would then have been placed in a climate-controlled vitrine, made to resemble Andrea Mantegra’s recumbent dead Christ. (In a Duchampian twist, the body was to be viewed through a peephole.)

These pared-down rooms provide a stark contrast to Robert Wilson’s richly layered “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” an experience to absorb rather than a narrative to follow. The almost-three-hour vividly staged portraits of real-life events in Abramovic’s life are collaged together in an intensely original and imaginative installation. In a program note, Wilson provides some guidance as to how the work should be approached: “Go as you would to a museum, as you would look at a painting. You just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures.” The story is brought together beautifully by a shock-haired, white-faced Joker-esque narrator, played by Willem Dafoe — whose incredible monologues on Abramovic’s life (and even meticulous details on how Serbians go about catching rats) add an element of levity — and by the angelic voice of Antony Hegarty on 11 songs composed for the production.

Meanwhile, the Whitworth Art Gallery (an institution that earlier this year was given one of the greatest 0utsider-art collections in the world) hosted a tribute to London’s nonprofit public arts organization Artangel, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. In a new commission by Artangel, the Albanian artist Anri Sala and Sejla Kameric, an artist and filmmaker born in Sarajevo, recreated daily life in Sarajevo between April 5, 1992 and February 29, 1996 in two separate films together titled, “1395 Days Without Red.” The films depict a beautifully dressed woman who traces the route of “Snipers’ Alley,” interspersed with jump cuts to scenes of an orchestra rehearsing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, “the Pathétique,” elsewhere in town. Other Artangel film commissions are also on view, including works made over the last decade by Francis Alÿs, Atom Egoyan, Tony Oursler and Catherine Yass.

And lest we forget Manchester’s history as the birthplace of bands like the Buzzcocks, Joy Division and the Smiths, the MIF opening weekend included the Gorillaz (and formerly Blur) frontman Damon Albarn’s opera “Dr. Dee,” Bjork’s nature-loving concert-meets-artist in residence “Biophilia,” and musical performances by the Mancunian wonder band WU LYF and the violinist Alina Ibragimova. How’s that for a fun palace?

The Manchester International Festival runs through July 17. Go to mif.co.uk.