Festival Partners:  
 For two days and one evening in August, Piccadilly Gardens - Manchester's ever changing urban space hosted selection of some of the best outdoor performance and installations from across the UK. The programme, developed in partnership with the Trafalgar Square festival, presented several performances originally commissioned by the Festival plus two brand new commissions. In the two weeks leading up to the festival an explosion of colour and flowers bloomed in the windows around Piccadilly Gardens. xtrax and Piccadilly Partnership wish to thank Arts and Business for their investment in this project and Space Cadets for their creativity.
2007 was the first year of a dynamic new partnership between Platform 4 Piccadilly and the Trafalgar Square Festival, which aims to promote cultural partnerships through outdoor festivals in major UK cities.
With the support of Manchester City Council and the Greater London Authority, the two festivals will develop joint creative programmes and wider strategic partnerships with the public and private sectors. Platform 4 Piccadilly and the Trafalgar Square Festival will showcase the creativity and cultural diversity of the UK's artists and communities in the most iconic urban spaces in the heart of each city.
Manchester City Council is delighted to be working in partnership with the Greater London Authority on this exciting new initiative.
Walk the Plank and Dhol Academy presented In the Dholdrums playing traditional music with a twist, on a giant Dhol drum which acts as a stage as well as a musical instrument.
Fans of Fellini can re-live that Dolce Vita moment when Italian virtuouso juggling company Gandini presened 'The Sweet Life': a cheeky celebration of summer life that ended with an irreverant romp in the gardens' famous fountains.
For the first time the hugely successful Contact theatre took to the street, to bring us Freeflow, an explosive mix of words, music and water. Combining aerial physicality with subversive spectacle in an unusual setting, Freeflow turned the gardens into a weightless world, where walls became floors and paving stones streams.
Music came courtesy of Tongues of Fire who created a musical riot of reeds, brass and percussion and the One Voice Accord Community Choir who lifted the spirits with a sensational book of gospel classics.
The Spiralling and spinning finale to the evening came courtesy of Dream engine who brought closed the show with the spectacular, aerial Heliosphere.
Company Fierce Dance Theatre teamed up with Walk the Plank in an x.trax commissioned piece to bring you an exciting new outdoor show. Gulliver's Boom Box, a new outdoor show commissioned by xtrax. The show featured a larger than life ghetto blaster (a time tardis for dance movements and music) which doubled as a music system and performance stage. Dancers burst out of the hi-fi set and danced to the music which took us from the soul and funk filled 70s, through 80s electronica and rap to the music of today and beyond. Gullivers Boom Box is a Without Walls supported project.
 Akademi - Dreaming Now
Hot foot from London's Trafalgar Square Festival, Dreaming Now came a South Asian dance-led contemporary spectacle, with a talented cast of dancers. Two forms of Indian dance came together and encompassed the lyricism of kathak and ballet and the spirited dynamics of Bharata natyam, modern dance and circus. Punctuated with special effects, this vivid show brought the very best of cutting edge choreography to Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens.
Throughout the afternoon there was another chance to catch Gandini's The Sweet Life and Contact's brand new show and then Bollywood, Brass and Bhangra collided with a performance from The Bollywood Brass Band. A host of drummers and a 6 piece horn section played massive hits from Indian films, driven by the huge beat of a dhol drum.
Ziya Azazi - Dervish in Progress
East met West, and physical feats met mysticism in this original take on traditional Sufi dancing. With the help of costume, music and daring physicality, this amazing solo illuminated the magic of the spinning body and through dynamic play on colours, forms and energies a whirling Dervish appeared before our very eyes.
Nina Rajarani - Quick!
Straight from Trafalgar Square, we presented fast paced dance and live music from the award winning choreograpger Nina Rajarani, and her acclaimed evocation of the hurly burly of the corporate business world, her “Quick!”.
Plus
Installations from the fabulous Space Cadets. Willet and Patterson's Amazing Camera Obscura will give a different perspective on the citY.
Plunge Boom bring the Vegetable Nannies to Piccadilly;
Wheeling an ancient Victorian Pram laden with a prized collection of vegetables, the Vegetable Nannies were out for the day, showing off their allotment cherubs & telling many a tale like any proud parent would. Lookers on befriended, cherished, fed, changed and comforted all manner of earthen toddler such as Magnus, the ambitious down hill racing watermelon & Angelica the award winning Sweet Potato Beauty Queen.
 Festival Partners:
Piccadilly Manchester supports high quality events and activities for Piccadilly Gardens and their surroundings.
Encouraging shops, bars and restaurants to get involved with future events, Piccadilly Manchester promotes a sense of unity between the businesses and people who live, work and play in the area.
Piccadilly Manchester is delighted to be associated with Platform4Piccadilly and look forward to this inaugural festival of arts and animation within the Gardens.
Trafalgar Square Festival
The Trafalgar Square Festival is the capital's foremost outdoor arts festival. It features brand new commissions from the UK and overseas, with three weeks of colourful and unusual outdoor performance designed to make the fullest possible use of the square and to showcase the vast array of cultural activity to be found in London, the UK and around the world.
If you would like us to post you a brochure about this event please email info@xtrax.org.uk
What the press said:
THEY were singing - and dancing - in the rain at Manchester's newest free festival over the weekend. Indeed, one adventurous group, the intrepid six-strong Gandini company, danced in the fountains while doing their virtuoso juggling.
The success of this new venture, linked to London's month-long Trafalgar Square Festival, was made by the show-must-go-on spirit of the performers - dancers, musicians, actors, jugglers and the rest.
Produced for xtrax by Maggie Clarke, Manchester's enterprising outdoor events organiser, this first city-centre Festival featured non-stop performance by a wide range of novel entertainers.
In a specially-commissioned piece, Fierce Dance Theatre teamed up with Walk The Plank to present the UK premiere of Gulliver's Boom Box. Dancers emerged from an outsize model of a ghetto blaster to perform a range of dances, from soul, funk and hip-hop, as the machine was “tuned” to different stations.
They even danced to Verdi and Strauss, changing pace and style as classical music became upbeat disco.
The Bollywood Brass Band, an 8-strong combo of drums and brass, treated us to traditional wedding music, tracks from Indian film hits and the mesmerising work of the modern Indian composer AR Rahman.
Colourfully-costumed South Asian contemporary dance, punctuated with special effects, featured in the Akademi Company's Dreaming Now spectacle. And Contact Theatre's Young Actors Company chipped in with a lively, almost acrobatic, new production, Freeflow.
Supported by Piccadilly Partnership, representing the city's business community, this promises to become a welcome annual event, building up to match the Trafalgar Square Festival.
Manchester Evening News - Philip Radcliffe - 19/ 8/2007
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