Two years after the Manchester International Festival burst on to the global arts scene with the groundbreaking idea to present a lineup entirely composed of new work, surprising collaborations and one-off commissions, the second programme has been revealed.

Bringing together everyone from the artist Olafur Eliasson and the hip-hop superstar Kanye West to the St Helen’s comic Jonny Vegas, the inaugral festival forced rival festival cities like Edinburgh to raise their game, offsetting a few inevitable duds with some spectacular successes, notably Damon Albarn’s Chinese pop opera Monkey: Journey to the West, which went on to play at the Royal Opera House and all over the world.

Yesterday, in Manchester, Alex Poots, the festival director, unveiled the productions that he hopes will consolidate the biennial event’s place in the increasingly crowded cultural calendar.

Albarn is again involved in the most intriguing offering. He is writing some of the music for It Felt Like a Kiss, a co-production between the BBC and the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, which promises to create “a political documentary film that you can walk through” in an abandoned Sixties office block.

Adam Curtis, who directed the Bafta-winning film The Power of Nightmares, said that BBC bosses had asked him to investigate “new, more emotionally involving forms of factual reporting” as well as finding fresh outlets for the corporation’s vast archive of television footage.

The result is a 75-minute walking tour through the United States of America in the years 1959-1969, the period when “American music and culture got into our hearts and took us into a wonderful dream,” but also the years when the maturing superpower began to flex its influence in “awesome and frightening ways,” at home and in places like the Middle East and the Congo.

“You could make a wonderful straight-forward film about that period or you could go a step further and actually take people into that film.”

Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk, said that the show would be a “total sensory bombardment” and a homage to American fairground entertainments of the period: “part Fun House, part Tunnel of Love, part Haunted House and genuinely terrifying.”

Punters will be shepherded through the labyrinthine six-story building in groups of eight at ten-minute intervals, stumbling on fragments of vintage film, dancing to pop songs of the era and absorbing the sights, sounds and smells of the time.

Elsewhere in the programme there are beguiling musical match-ups galore. The Mercury Music Prize-winning band Elbow are performing their best songs with the Halle orchestra or “the original Manchester band”, as singer Guy Garvey described them yesterday. Two pioneers of electronic music from either side of the classical and pop divide will meet when Steve Reich collaborates with the seminal German band Kraftwerk at a venue that brings to mind their classic 1983 song Tour de France: the Manchester Velodrome.

The architect Zaha Hadid is building a unique temporary chamber music hall for performances of solo works by Bach and the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright is presenting his debut opera Prima Donna, after it was rejected by the New York Met, its original sponsors, for being in French.

Other highlights of the festival (which runs from July 2-19) include a parade through the city organised by the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, a rare appearance by the hip-hop legends De La Soul to mark the 20th anniversary of their album 3 Feet High and Rising, a theatrical recreation of a bingo hall and a provocative artwork by Gustave Metzger that attempts to depict the dangers of global warming by killing 21 willow trees in public.

To close the festival, Lou Reed premieres a new show with his wife, the performance artist Laurie Anderson.

Poots has come a long way since he first arrived in Manchester with “a suitcase and a promise of £2million from the city but no bank account to cash the cheque.”

The 2007 festival pulled in more than 200,000 people, generated an economic impact of £28.8 million and raised the most sponsorship ever raised by a British arts festival.

This year generous public and private funding have helped the festival to confound the economic climate and the budget has risen to £10million.

Over to Edinburgh, whose own international festival unveils its programme next week.

Full listings and booking details on the festival website at http://www.mif.co.uk/ .

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