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Final Piece: Blues and Greens and Pinks
04/07/07
For us, the beach hut is the festival; a multi-coloured beacon of summer plonked incongruously in the city in the middle of the greyest of Julys.
It is a symbol, a hub of creativity, an escape and yet at the same time it's uncanny, bizarre, almost inappropriate. Really quite dark.
What struck us about the Manchester International Festival was how different it was from general conceptions of festivals. Think festival, think everything going on in one place at one time with a real centralised focus and atmosphere to it. This definitely wasn't the case with the Manchester International Festival. Spending a week in Manchester for the festival is, most of the time, exactly like being in Manchester in any other week. You take the tram, you shop, you walk around, put up an umbrella, go to Costa for a latté, kick a puddle, eat at Pizza Express, scare a pigeon... Actually pretty much like any week in any big city. It is only for those couple of hours each evening when you go to a performance, an exhibition or a gig that the festival really comes alive. The festival, for us, was all about being in the city, any old city and then suddenly escaping, temporary transported by the events.
The main focus for our film is the beach hut – part of Heston Blumenthal's 'Chilled Summer Treats' stand. We chose to feature the hut for two reasons. Firstly, it was simply somewhere we liked to go. Three-rooms got pretty confining and the beach-hut was somewhere we could bash about ideas as a group or a place to escape alone and think, inspired by the multi-coloured outside panels, the utter white of the interior walls and eerie bird sounds forever looping in the background. As well as simply being a place we liked to go, we soon realised the hut was an interesting symbol of how we felt about the festival. It's a temporary escape in a very urban context; a beach-hut surrounded by concrete pavement, rain, tramlines, the G-Mex.
Amidst a sea of grey it's an inspiring but inappropriate shock of blues and greens and pinks.
