Pianist Dave Maric and poet Mike Garry, external joined the Manchester Camerata orchestra to perform Joe Duddell, external's new composition.

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Ian Youngs
Entertainment and Arts Reporter, BBC News

How do you mark the 10th anniversary of the death of someone who thought nostalgia was "a disease"?

That was the challenge for a Manchester International Festival event on Monday, held in memory of Tony Wilson, the man who signed Joy Division, and the Happy Mondays and ran the Hacienda nightclub.

They managed it by avoiding the obvious Factory Records names and instead choosing performances that celebrated the influential label's little-remembered classical offshoot.

There was also the premiere of Blindness & Light, a new composition by New Order and Elbow collaborator Joe Duddell, using only the notes contained in the Joy Division song Atmosphere. All the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

And there was a panel discussion that soon became an entertaining joust between veteran music journo Paul Morley and Lois from Pins and Joe from Cabbage about the merits of social media as a platform for art and whether having too much music is killing music, which Wilson would surely have enjoyed.

Morley, who's writing a book about Wilson, described him as a "weird abstract surreal professor" whose imagination and "intellectual energy" helped give Manchester a stronger sense of identity. In the '70s and '80s, Wilson was "designing a city in our imagination, and one that has kind of come true", Morley said.

Take a look at Jane Horrocks in the stunning Campfield Upper Market Hall - in the world premiere of her industrial musical - Cotton Panic!, external

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Inspired by our show Fatherland, Jack Hardiker has created Fatherline, external: an interactive telephone line about fatherhood - a living library of the experiences of fathers, and children.

It collates personal stories about fatherhood via the medium of an interactive telephone line. In offering anonymity and a common technology, the project hopes to capture an intimacy and frankness that might be denied in traditional interview forms.

The wonderful accompanying website , externalis a parody of an early 2000's charity website, with a heavily stylised voiceover and soundtrack.

Listen to a couple of personal stories below, learn more about many more stories shared anonymously and maybe even share a story yourself, external?

Created by @jackhardiker, external

Developers: Craig de Gozdawa and Harry. (Apparently, Harry does not like to use his last name when credited)

Voiceover: Christian Payne.

Music: Philip Kay.

Communist Manifesto writer Friedrich Engels is the focus for our closing event - but did you know he had a common-law wife in Mancunian woman Mary Burns?

There'll be a one-day pop up exhibition tomorrow, external exploring the life, works and influence of this amazing woman - largely forgotten in history, but absolutely central to Engles' works.

You can expect music, sculpture, art installations and film (all created by artists from our #creative50 team) - drawing together the stories of a hugely influential woman.

Get along tomorrow, and celebrate the legacy of a forgotten hero.

We're into the final week of MIF, and your last few chances to take a look at True Faith, external - an exhibition looking at the long term artistic legacy of New Order and Joy Division.

Learn a bit more below, and nostalgia fans, look away now...

Sarah Eastaff
MIF17 Creative 50

Image source, MIF

Sarah Eastaff, one of our brilliant #creative50 artists, was inspired by the welcoming traditions of Susan Hefuna's ToGather , externalexhibition, and created a blog gathering welcoming recipes, external - stuffed to the brim with the food that makes her participants feel welcome, calm and at home.

Our particular favourites include 'Katy's Pizza Shop Parmo', 'Jude's Mum's Lasagne' and 'Dave's strawberry beans on toast' - one we absolutely have to try.

Read all the recipes, external, stick on the accompanying playlist, external, and learn more about Sarah, external. Now, where's the strawberry jam...

Jane Horrocks is currently wowing audiences in Lancashire Industrial Musical Cotton Panic! and she is simply one of our favourite people to sit and listen to. Both when she sings, and when she talks:

Andrew Magee
MIF17 Creative 50

Gloriously talented screen printer and visual artist Andrew Magee, external has created a beautiful short film inspired by 10,000 Gestures, What Is The City But The People? and the city's response to the MEN arena attack.

We'll let him explain it properly:

Animation - https://www.instagram.com/andrewandoscar/, external

Sound - @V_Glovackyte, external

Learn the secret music stories of Manchester city centre - what stars have walked these streets, and the amazing things they got up to along the way...

Liverpool's electro-pop trio Stealing Sheep played live on Radcliffe & Maconie last week - take a listen to their utterly unique, very cool and toe-tapping sound right here:

An immersive blend of puppetry, dance, interactive theatre and solid adventure, The Welcoming Party , externalhas been dazzling kids and big kids alike with it's big-hearted message and important issues.

Can't make it to an underground tunnel by the Science And Industry Museum? Well, at least we can show you the next best thing...

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

Image source, MIF

We've got two days before Boris Charmatz opens his brand new work 10,000 Gestures - a piece that contains an utterly unique premise: 25 dancers, never doing the same movement twice.

So, why do it? He spoke to the New York Times, external about why indeed...

So, issues of 'good' choreography aside, what exactly should we should be getting from 10,000 Gestures?

Learn more about 10,000 Gestures, external

Learn more about Ride at the Ritz, external

A lot of rock fans rejoiced when Ride announced its reconciliation two years ago - and we're lucky enough to have them at MIF when they've just released their first new album in 21 years.

They'll be taking over the Ritz tonight, external, but in the meantime, you can listen to what they have to offer...

Industrial musical Cotton Panic! , externalstarring and created by the magical Jane Horrocks opened last night. Combining found sounds, a gig atmosphere and the tale of how the people of Manchester stood in solidarity with the slaves of the American South, it's a jaw-dropping story of community, bravery and strength.

Take a look for yourself:

Image source, MIF

In advance of Phil Collins’ Ceremony, external, MIF has asked several leading British writers for a personal take on Friedrich Engels and his legacy. Today, Sheila Rowbotham traces Engels’ influence from the Manchester of the 1840s to the Russian Revolution and the First World War – which each changed the world exactly a century ago.

Friedrich Engels, the man who was to become Karl Marx’s closest collaborator and loyal friend, arrived in Manchester for the first time in 1842, aged 22.

The son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer could well have been oblivious to the brutal consequences of rapid industrialism. Instead, he set about documenting the careless brutality of the newly concentrated form of capitalism that surrounded him. He based his case on a thorough study of working and living conditions. Drawing on doctors’ statements, he revealed not just accidents in the cotton factories but the slow maiming of child labourers.

Noting the broader consequences of mechanisation in the factories, he traced their impact on unregulated outworking. Dry reports on health and sanitation revealed two families living in two rooms, while statistics on common lodging houses showed that damp cellars were the homes of many thousands. Using his own eyes, he noted the cotton goods drying on Manchester washing lines and the men’s shoddy Sunday best overcoats, neither of which kept out the damp cold.

Helped by Mary Burns, a working-class Mancunian who became his guide and his lover, he learned by interviewing the workers themselves. He heard how some starved slowly, some killed themselves swiftly, while others stole. But he was also told how, amid devastated lives and the most ruthless forms of exploitation, some resisted, through trade unions, through envisioning an alternative in socialism or drawing up a Charter of political and social demands for immediate changes. The resulting book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, external (1845) pioneered a new kind of documentary polemic about class and sex inequalities. Admired by Marx, it helped to forge the long personal and political comradeship between the two men.

Both men were primarily preoccupied with how the changes in production brought a new class into being. However, both were also aware how men and women were affected by society in differing ways, and in 1884, Engels explored the causes of women’s inequality in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, external. Engels’ 19th-century anthropological theories about evolutionary stages in human societies have dated, but his insights into the significance of the social consequences of reproduction, both economically and biologically have stood the test of time, becoming a central tenet in socialist feminist thinking.

Personally, Engels, the sensuous man of action, was a somewhat contradictory exponent of women’s liberation. Capable of offering support to thoughtful rebellious women like Marx’s daughter Eleanor, his correspondence is splattered with crude caricatures of women he did not favour. Nicknamed ‘the General’ because of his enthusiasm for military strategy, after Marx’s death he proceeded to order his friend’s thought into schemas and denounce deviancy. Unwittingly, Engels became the first ‘Marxist’.

However, by an irony of history, it was to be Engels’ writing on women that provided a much-needed ballast for socialist women such as Clara Zetkin in Germany, who sought recognition for working-class women’s specific subordination. During the early 20th century, as a mass socialist movement began to emerge as a political force, women on the left began meeting internationally. This new left optimistically envisaged changes for women and for men at work and in the home, in the public political sphere and in personal relations. Campaigns were mounted for basic human rights, for labour laws and for welfare reforms.

But workers divided tragically when war broke out in Europe in 1914. National identity trumped international solidarity. The majority acquiesced. To oppose the First World War took considerable courage because it meant being branded as a traitor.

Neither Marx or Engels lived to see workers from the belligerent countries murdering one another in their thousands on those muddy battlefields of wasted human blood. Technology enabled this slaughter to reach an unprecedented scale of efficiency.

Before the war, Clara Zetkin, along with other socialist women, had supported a peace initiative from the British Independent Labour Party. By 1915, there was talk of a ‘Women’s War Against War’ in Britain. Early that year, 28 delegates from eight countries made the difficult journey to Berne in Switzerland. This was followed by the broader women’s peace conference at The Hague in Holland. Despite the war, women contrived to meet internationally, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation which still exists today, was to be formed. A strong branch was set up in Manchester by supporters of women’s suffrage.

The war and the Russian Revolution in 1917 meant that the authorities in Britain were as worried about feminist and socialist supporters of peace as they were of potential German spies. During the 1970s, when I interviewed two members of the Independent Labour Party, Florence and Maurice Hann, they remarked wryly that during the war they kept the membership list of their local London No Conscription Fellowship branch buried in the garden. Assuming it was safe when peace was declared in 1918, they dug up the tin, only to be raided by the police, who seized it.

The triumph of the Bolsheviks did not occur in conditions that either Marx or Engels had envisaged. Nonetheless, the formation of the Soviet Union resulted in the two founders of Communism reaching people in many lands. Unfortunately, it exported their thinking as doctrinal certainties embodied in great leaders. Soviet iconography transposed Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin into bewhiskered granite blocks.

Chipped and smashed since the 1980s, Engels has survived in a street name in his home town Wuppertal and city bearing his name in modern Russia.

Even though the man described by the former Chartist George Julian Harney as ‘the Prince of Optimists’ got it wrong and Manchester did not erupt in revolution, the inequalities he outlined are still with us today. Friedrich Engels, the great critic of capitalism, deserves to be honoured in a city with a proud tradition of radical defiance.

Sheila Rowbotham is a socialist feminist historian. Her latest book is Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States, external (Verso, 2016). This piece is part of a short series of personal blog entries commissioned by MIF to mark Phil Collins’ Ceremony, external, which closes MIF17 on Sunday 16 July 2017.

From 10am-6pm every day, Karl Hyde is live right here, external painting the walls of a shop front with the stories of those who'd experienced sleeping rough - and by all accounts, it's an affecting installation:

Local artist Tara Collette continues her storming collection of festival GIFS , externalwith this one for our industrial musical Cotton Panic!, external, starring and created by Jane Horrocks.

A sneak peek of Karl Hyde creating an immersive exploration of homelessness, bringing attention to the real-life stories of those who have experienced rough sleeping.

Watch below for more, and remember, you can see him create the piece live , externalevery day.