Field Notes: Manchester

Ron Berry’s Fusebox Field Notes

Summer 2026 Part 2: Manchester

Note: I spend a fair amount of time traveling between festivals. It’s a part of my work with Fusebox that I love, but one that most people don’t get to see. So throughout the year, I’d like to invite you along. What follows are a few notes from the road. Things I saw and questions I’m still carrying home.

In early July I headed north for the opening of Ai Weiwei: Button Up!, a major new exhibition at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International in Manchester.

The trip was partly personal. One of my dear friends, Kee Hong, has spent the last four years helping bring this ambitious project into the world, and I wanted to celebrate that with him. It also gave me the chance to meet up with my sister Cindy and her husband Alex. I rarely get to share this aspect of my work with family, so this felt really special. We spent a few fun days together roaming the streets of Manchester, taking in the exhibition, drinking some pints, and Alex scored a really rad new jacket. Priorities.

Austin is many things, but it has never been a real industrial city like Manchester. So walking through a city where red-brick mills, warehouses, and factories still shape the landscape always captures my imagination. You can really feel that this was one of the great manufacturing cities of the Industrial Revolution, even though the city is changing and evolving in many ways (like so many cities). The past and the present are both kind of hanging out together in a pronounced way.

Manchester also has an incredible musical legacy. Joy Division. New Order. The Hollies. Buzzcocks. Simply Red. Oasis. In fact the name Factory International pays homage to Manchester’s legendary Factory Records.

Manchester is also really into football.

Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Holy shit.

For starters, the exhibition is epic. Awesome in the truest sense of the word. Monumental sculptures. Things that just stop you in your tracks. I found myself making slow loops around the exhibition, zooming in and then zooming out. Like I think I made four loops?

One entire wall is covered with History of Bombs, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It reads as an epic mural depicting an inventory of bombs, each labeled with its country of origin and year of invention. It’s a sort of history of human ingenuity told through the machinery of war.

(Fun fact: the bombs are constructed using little LEGO-like toy bricks. Ai Weiwei shared in his talk that he originally wanted to use LEGO bricks, but the company declined. So he sourced nearly identical compatible bricks manufactured in China instead. He had a hilarious glint in his eye when he told that story.)

Nearby, suspended overhead is La Commedia Umana, a massive black Murano glass chandelier composed of more than two thousand hand-blown pieces. Instead of cherubs and flowers, it’s filled with skeletons, skulls, bones, and organs. It feels equal parts Venetian palace, science fiction, and horror film. It’s stunning and the stuff of nightmares.

Then there is Ai Weiwei’s new work called Eight-Nation Alliance Flags. It consists of eight enormous flags that, from across the room, look almost painterly. Move in closer and you realize they’re sewn together using lots and lots of buttons. Like four million. These flags represent the multinational military coalition that invaded Qing-dynasty China in 1900 to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and force open trade ports.

One work in particular really kept pulling me back.

Law of the Journey is an enormous black inflatable raft crowded with refugee figures. It’s constructed from the same reinforced PVC rubber used in the rafts that carry people across the Aegean Sea. Standing at one end, there’s this feeling that the boat simply never ends. It’s a sort of dream language. Your eye keeps traveling down its length, and it’s just more and more bodies. Haunting.

Then, toward the back of the exhibition, quietly tucked along one wall, was the story of Ai Weiwei’s life.

I probably spent thirty to forty minutes there. The text patiently traced Ai Weiwei’s life. I learned about his father’s persecution during China’s Cultural Revolution, his own imprisonment, his decades of artistic activism, and his unwavering commitment to documenting human rights and the lives of refugees.

Taken together, the exhibition became something much larger than a survey of an artist’s career.

It felt like encountering a remarkable life. The life of someone who has devoted so much of their time on this earth to bearing witness, and using the power of their imagination to draw our attention to things we might otherwise look away from. It just kind of leveled me.

24 Hours

Accompanying the exhibition was a new twenty-four-hour performance recreating Ai Weiwei’s eighty-one-day imprisonment by the Chinese government.

Audience members were free to come and go. Some stayed for hours. Others wandered in for twenty minutes before quietly slipping back out. I found myself somewhere in between.

The performance took on an impossible task. How do you recreate an experience defined by isolation, surveillance, and the slow passage of time inside a theater where audience members are free to come and go?

The answer, of course, is that you can’t really.

And there were moments when you could feel that impossibility. But that didn’t really bother me. In fact I found myself appreciating those moments. They made it all a little more human.

It made me think about:

What does it mean to recreate something?
What becomes possible? And what remains impossible?

Maybe the beauty was in the attempt, in the act of strangers coming together to spend time with this memory?

Collapsing Time

The performance also sort of collapses time. In a way, we’re invited to spend time with two versions of Ai Weiwei in the same room. The younger man who endured imprisonment, and the older man who chose to return to its memory. And there’s all the life that has happened in between.

I found myself thinking about another project that has stayed with me for years. In Your Brother. Remember, Zachary Oberzan and his older brother Gator return to their childhood home to faithfully recreate, shot for shot, the homemade parody films they made together twenty years earlier when they were teenagers. Like they would recreate Jean-Claude Van Damme films, just the two of them.

We watch the original films alongside the new versions made twenty years later. It’s so funny. It’s also incredibly moving. For a little while, the past and present occupy the same room. And all the life that unfolded in that twenty-year gap becomes part of the experience.

And somehow, the act of recreating these ridiculous childhood movies becomes a way for the brothers to encounter each other again across time.

It’s absurd and heartbreaking and tender. Here’s a link to a trailer.

This also made me think of Gob Squad’s incredible Before Your Very Eyes performance. Years earlier, they filmed a group of children asking questions of their future selves. In the performance, those younger versions appear on video and interview their older selves, who are now standing there with us onstage. Once again, two versions of the same person occupy the room together. The past is literally asking questions of the future.

A Question of Scale

I don’t inherently think bigger is better. Which is a strange thing for someone born and raised in Texas to say.

But scale is a real question for us (Fusebox) right now, and I want to think through it honestly.

Like, how do you scale in a way that feels human?
How do you invite more people to experience Fusebox (which requires growth), and not lose what’s special about Fusebox in the first place?

I think in truth I’ve always been interested in the idea of scale. I have lots of questions about it. Artistically. Organizationally. Architecturally. In how we measure impact and “success.” Even in terms of time. The idea of scale is just really complicated and interesting to me.

These two trips this summer both featured really large-scale works in large art centers (these were highlights for me!) and it got me thinking about scale again.

Artistic Scale

I began my career working in and falling in love with small, intimate theaters and funky, DIY artist spaces. Those spaces will always have a place in my heart.

Relatedly, for my work with Fusebox, I would say that intimacy is, in many ways, our special sauce. We really want to create personal, tangible relationships between the artistic experience and our audiences. Let’s be in the room together.

We’ve shared projects at Fusebox for one person at a time. For two people. We’ve presented dance shows for sixteen (Beth Gill’s amazing Electric Midwife). These aren’t compromises. They’re specific choices.

One of the most remarkable works we’ve ever presented was Tania El Khoury’s As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a one-on-one encounter for a single audience member at a time. You sit in a chair, slip on a pair of headphones, and stick your arm through a hole in a gallery wall. On the other side is Basel Zaraa, a Palestinian refugee and musician born in Syria, and though your arms touch, you never see each other. While you listen, he draws on your arm, telling the story of his journey from Damascus to Sweden.

And then long after the experience ends, there’s still the physical fact of it. Someone drew on your arm. Their story is literally on your skin. You walk out into the world and have to decide when you want to wash it off. When you’re ready to let it go. It’s incredibly powerful. Incredibly intimate.

And then on the other hand…

Some of my favorite Fusebox experiences of all time have happened on a large scale. I instantly think of Guadalupe Maravilla‘s ritual performance in a five-story State of Texas parking garage near the Capitol. This performance has become a part of Fusebox lore. A fifty-foot inflatable alligator dominated the courtyard. Young Latina women in brightly colored quinceañera dresses streamed out of its mouth and began performing traditional dances in circles below. An all-female motorcycle club that had driven up from San Antonio rode into the courtyard and became a roaring choir, conducted by Guadalupe himself. The audience lined every level of the parking garage, five stories of people looking down into the courtyard, participating in this fever dream of a ritual.

It was something I will never forget.

I also think of T is For, led by Austin’s own Allison Orr of Forklift Danceworks, which brought more than 200 two-steppers to the steps of the Capitol. Or Mozart Requiem Undead, with some 200 performers and vocalists taking over the grounds of the French Legation. Both large, wildly different, and unforgettable.

I love all of these experiences. I think for me the take away is that neither the large nor the small feels more important. They’re just doing different things. I don’t think that’s a binary that we need to choose. I want both of those kinds of experiences in my life.

Institutional Scale

Institutional scale feels a little more complicated to me.

Fusebox is interested in growing right now. Not because we think bigger is inherently better, but because there are still so many people, even here in Austin, who don’t know about Fusebox. We genuinely believe many of them would connect with these artists and experiences, and we’d like to invite more people in.

But how do you grow without losing the thing that made you worth growing in the first place?

And what exactly are we trying to grow?

Maybe reaching more people doesn’t always mean turning an experience for 100 people into one for 1,000. Maybe it sometimes means creating ten intimate experiences for 100 people.

It also makes me wonder how we measure impact in the first place.

In the arts, like in so many things, we tend to reach pretty quickly for numbers. Attendance. Budget size. Number of artists. Number of performances. Those things matter. Numbers do tell stories. But they don’t tell the whole story.

So how do we measure impact when some of the things we care about most are relationships, belonging, and curiosity? And what about experiences that unfold over time?

Can you measure those things? Should you even try?

Maybe institutional growth doesn’t mean pushing every dial in the same direction. Maybe some things get bigger while others stay intentionally small.

Is it helpful to think about scale as a multidirectional tool?

Questions I’m Bringing Home:

What turns a place where people see performances into a place where people genuinely gather?
What becomes possible when a festival also has a physical home?
How do you grow something without losing the thing that made it worth growing in the first place?
What does it mean to recreate something? What are the possibilities of that and the impossibilities?
Can we think about scale as a tool that lets us move in multiple directions?
What would it mean to measure the health of an arts organization by the relationships it creates?
How can we build places and create experiences that invite the past, present, and future into the space with us?

Thanks for coming along.

I’ll be back with another edition of Field Notes soon. Until then, I hope you find something unexpected that sparks your own curiosity.

— Ron