Hazard 2016
On Saturday 9 July Hazard, Manchester’s hit and run of peformance festivals, launched its seventh spree of random eccentricity onto an unsuspecting city centre.
Hazard is a peculiar conundrum – a very public incursion into the life of the city for an unsuspecting audience - playful, mischievous, political and just a bit controversial, yet too big to fly ‘under the radar’ so falls subject to scrutiny from a panoply of statutory bodies, from Police to Health + Safety to Public Realm.
In programming it, the irony is not lost of an event that, by its very name, invites danger, yet which has to be risk assessed and justified to within an inch of its life – justified to a room full of people who might just doubt the sanity of its organiser.
Over the years, I’ve become expert on the finer points of brokering the ‘safety group’ - presenting eccentricity backed up by meticulous detail, always having on hand a ‘fall guy’ project (something they can say no to) – NEVER suggesting stickers, roller-skating or heaven forbid, CHALKING on the streets of Manchester (Dick van Dyke would never have jumped into pavement art in Mary Poppins had it been set in Manchester!)
This year, however, the value of that brokerage really did come home. There was a definite zeitgeist in the work proposed – work that confronted issues of migration head-on. In the halcyon days of late May, it seemed an exciting idea to curate work dealing with European migration for a potentially different post-referendum Europe. A bare couple of months later, it’s almost impossible to believe that none of us thought Brexit a serious prospect – and that the idea of presenting work for an unimaginable new world seemed clever...
Fast forward to July: two weeks post-Brexit and post a 500% increase in hate crime. The reality of presenting work dealing with migration in the most exposed of public settings was suddenly a long way from the smart-arsed curator vision of a month earlier...
Instant Dissidence’s beautiful and emotive Dancing with Strangers: From Calais to England and ThereThere’s playful and provocative Text HOME suddenly seemed so much more urgent and vital – yet inviting a member of the public to virtually dance with a resident of the Calais Jungle; or a Farage-faced Eastern European woman offering immigration advice, also seemed much more hazardous – which is where all that authority brokering came into its own...
Having the powers-that-be aware and on-side was empowering – it kept (my) organiser concerns at bay, knowing that, in that most exposed of situations there was help at hand. Happily, in the outcome, Manchester played its part perfectly – there was no unwanted ‘political’ attention, the currency and power of the work was unfettered and appreciated and it was simply allowed to be the statement that it needed to be...
Written by Tamsin Drury
Categories: Report
Date Posted: 18 August 2016