Having a strong interest in arts events in Manchester, I wondered how I might be able to get involved in next year’s inaugural Manchester International Festival.

So I asked MIF about a possible fringe to rival Edinburgh’s successful format. Here is Producing Director Simon Mellor’s reply:

We’re not really interested in emulating Edinburgh - we’re a very different sort of Festival, focusing on commissioning and producing a limited number of world premieres across a range of art forms.

Nor do we have any plans to set up a ‘fringe’. Where festivals have a fringe, these fringes have almost always been set up by a group of like-minded, independent producer/promoters who feel either that the main festival doesn’t cater for them or that there are marketing opportunities for running events at the same time as the main festival.

In Edinburgh for instance, the brochure for the international festival doesn’t contain information about the fringe (and vice versa) and the two organisations are very separate.

It may be that over time a fringe will be set up around the Manchester International Festival but it is unlikely that this will be done by the Festival itself - but rather by a group of people who want to offer something different from the international festival and believe there are some marketing advantages to grouping those events together into a fringe.

I wonder then: are people in Manchester going to set up fringe-style events to complement the festival, or will the official events be the only events in 2007?