John McGrath, the Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales. 2016 The festival announced a co-production of Giselle between themselves English National Ballet and Sadler's Wells Theatre to be directed by Akram Khan and performed at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in September. The production will then go on tour to Bristol Hippodrome, the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton and Sadler's Wells Theatre, London later in the year. MIF 17 The 2017 Manchester International Festival took place from 29 June to 16 July. The first four commissions were announced in autumn 2016, together with a creative community programme called "My Festival". The festival opened with a parade of disparate individuals from Manchester on a runway in Piccadilly Gardens, "What Is the City but the People?", and closed with a celebration of the installation of a statue of Friedrich Engels in Tony Wilson Place, outside HOME. Major productions included Fatherland, created by Frantic Assembly's Scott Graham, musician Karl Hyde and playwright Simon Stephens; Jane Horrocks' Cotton Panic!, telling the story of the Cotton Famine; and New Order performing with a 12-piece synthesiser ensemble from the Royal Northern College of Music, a show entitled Σ(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) produced in collaboration with artist Liam Gillick. In all, 380 performances of 32 commissions and events took place over 18 days, with a record 300,000 visitor count. MIF 19 The 2019 Manchester International Festival took place from 4 to 21 July. The opening event was a collaborative bell-ringing event created by Yoko Ono. Other productions announced in late 2018 include Tree, a musical work about South Africa, by Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah, and DYSTOPIA987, Skepta's vision of the future. David Lynch will have a major presence at the festival, exhibiting his painting and sculpture, showing a series of his films and presenting three nights of shows by 'Lynch-inspired musicians', all at HOME. Maxine Peake, a regular at MIF, stars in a show about Nico, The Nico Project. A custom-built structure at the Science and Industry Museum will house Atmospheric Memory, a performance piece portraying speech in the air. Other artists appearing at or creating works for the festival include Chim-Pom, Abida Parveen, Ivo van Hove, Philip Glass, Tania Bruguera and Laurie Anderson. Controversy surrounding authorship of Tree On 2 July 2019, The Guardian published a story describing how Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley had been removed from their work on Tree under what they said were questionable circumstances. The two