Manchester International Festival today announces the dates for the 2009 Festival: Thursday 2 to Sunday 19 July 2009.

Today also sees the publication of an independent evaluation report of the ‘07 Festival, The Ascent of Manchester, measuring the success of the Festival against its aims and targets. The evaluation project was jointly researched by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre and Arts About Manchester.

Among the headline findings, the report noted that the Festival had:

·created 25 world premieres, against a target of 10, with a total of 105 different activities in 25 venues

-attracted an audience of more than 200,000 people against a first year target of 160,000

-secured the greatest amount of sponsorship ever raised by a UK arts festival and broke even on a £9 million turnover

-collaborated with 80+ Manchester and Salford arts and community organisations

-generated an economic impact to the value of £28.8 million, against a target of £19.1m

-attracted audiences not generally well represented amongst conventional arts attendees in Manchester, and encouraged people to take risks with their choices

-recruited a task force of almost 300 volunteers who between them donated more than £200,000 worth of work hours to the Festival

-produced three events with international co-commissioning partners and five events with local and national co-commissioning partners

The line-up for the 2009 Manchester International Festival will be announced in March 2009.