Manipulate Festival Archives - North West End UK

Animated Scottish Shorts – Edinburgh Filmhouse

11Feb

By Wendy McEwanNo Comments

Scotland

Animated Scottish Shorts – Edinburgh Filmhouse

The richness and creativity of Scottish animation is showcased in this selection of ten short films, shown as part of the Manipulate Festival. Here are some of my favourites: The stop-motion world of Distance to the Moon, by Sacha Kyle and Victoria Watson, is full of texture and graceful movement, as its determined protagonist embarks on an epic journey. There’s peril, beauty and friendship, and plenty of surprises. Fairground Fever, by Linda Hughes, is colourful and nostalgic. A young woman visits a fairground with her friends. She enters a visually thrilling, swirling world of wonder and excitement. Painted in acrylics, the animation delights with movement and joy. Creche and Burn, by Frank O’Neil, is told from the perspective of a child. Zombies are on the rampage, and hero...

11Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Auntie Empire – Summerhall Edinburgh

At Summerhall, as part of the Manipulate Festival, Julia Taudevin’s Auntie Empire is a show that improves as it decays. Performed solo by Taudevin, who also conceived the work, the production opens in a register of playful provocation, leaning heavily on audience participation. Under the guidance of performance director Tim Licata, these early sections clearly aim to implicate the room, drawing the audience into complicity before pulling the rug, but the results are mixed. Some exchanges feel laboured, stretching jokes past their natural lifespan and slightly blunting the edge of the satire. At times, the structure seems more interested in keeping the audience busy than in advancing the analysis. Once the show pivots away from participation and into its more overtly theatrical langua...

9Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Rite of Spring – Traverse Theatre

At the Traverse Theatre, as part of the Manipulate Festival, Dewey Dell’s The Rite of Spring announces itself as a work that expects, and repays, sustained attention. Running a concentrated fifty minutes, this is not a production that courts easy admiration or quick interpretation. It is slow, deliberate, and insistently moody, drawing the audience into a sealed weird world that unfolds according to its own internal logic.The original scandal of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring lay in its pagan brutality, Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes presenting sacrifice as the necessary price of renewal. In Dewey Dell’s reimagining, conceived and directed by Agata Castellucci, Teodora Castellucci, and Vito Matera, that focus subtly shifts. As a monumental red flower opens to reveal a prot...

6Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Coffee With Sugar – Traverse Theatre

There are moments in Coffee with Sugar at the Traverse Theatre when the senses are so thoroughly engaged that conventional critical distance simply gives way. Smell, sound, movement and image collide in ways that feel genuinely intoxicating, even overwhelming, in a production that prioritises sensory immersion over narrative drive. The show forms part of the Manipulate Festival, one of the many festivals Edinburgh hosts throughout the year, and arguably one of the most consistently rewarding. Dedicated to visual theatre, puppetry and experimental performance, Manipulate reliably delivers work that foregrounds audio visual invention and formal risk taking, and Coffee with Sugar unquestionably lives up to that billing. The piece is led by Laia Ribera Cañénguez, who also created the wor...

International Shorts : On The Edge – The French Institute

17Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

International Shorts : On The Edge – The French Institute

As part of Manipulate Festival, and screened in the gorgeous interior of The French Institute, this is a series of short animated films mostly set in and around the Arctic and Sub-Arctic regions focusing on the Climate Emergency and the effects on the indigenous peoples and the animals that live there. Education is the key and short films like this are just perfect for delivering bite sized thought-provoking perspectives. Kicking us off is an enjoyable 14 minute documentary from the National Film Board of Canada, Three Thousand, by Asinnajaq. This mixes animation with archival footage to explore the cinematic representation of the Inuit. The format is light-touched but the implication is clear, this is a people whose days are numbered. In The Power Grid (2018) by Clara Boden, a grai...

13Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Ruins – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Part of Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2024, Ruinsis a multi-media dance performance involving three humans, locked within a video cube, who represent the last of the human race, kept alive by machines. Created by Megahertz, a visual theatre company and relying on wordless, highly expressive, beautiful movement from Philip Alexander McDonald, Rita Hu and Suzi Cunningham, the performance is set against an extraordinary soundscape by Cucina Povera and Jamie Grier. The fourth star of this show is the video cube itself, which is extraordinary. Projections from three different directions onto a gauzelike material on a thin metal frame creates the impression of semi-solid walls surrounding the figures and hologram-like images seem to float unhindered within the cube. The effect is mesmeri...

13Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Ragnarok – Traverse Theatre

Part of Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2024, Ragnarokis a hugely entertaining, massively ambitious and highly technical show, an international co-production between Edinburgh based, Tortoise In A Nutshell, and Nordland Visual Theatre of Norway. The show which has over 1100 cue lines, to give an idea of its scale, combines hundreds of mini stick-like figures living within a mini set and captured in real time with the use of the latest technology in micro cinema, combined with live music and live video projection to create an alternative universe in front of our eyes. Here the great wolf rattles its chains, and the world snake sleeps lightly, wrapping its tail covetously around the globe. If the great wolf escapes, it will eat the sun and the moon and infect the world with pestilence and di...

Shorts 3: Beyond Words – Summerhall, Edinburgh

13Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Shorts 3: Beyond Words – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Part of Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2024, Shorts 3: Beyond Words is a great opportunity to see a wide and varied collection of animated short films from around the world, and to have your mind and imagination sparked by them. The third and final part of the animated film programme for this year. In the poignant and thought-provoking Sisters, by Andrea Szelesova, a young girl sullenly pulls a heavy load across a barren wasteland to the slumped body of a red skinned giant. She climbs up and grudgingly feeds bread and water to the giant, which rumbles and grows. Around the giant new flowers begin to sprout, their heavy heads tinkling in the breeze, the sound of tiny bells. The young girl resentfully continues to feed the giant, with the same results every day. One day she wakes up and ...

10Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Tess – Traverse Theatre

Part of Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2024, Tess is an ambitious retelling of Hardy’s famous tale, Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, through a feminist lens by the acclaimed UK circus theatre company Ockham Razor. The original tale was set in Victorian England, but there are plenty of moral and ethical lessons which translate very easily into today’s Britain. The story of a naïve young girl, forced into low paid work by poverty, and then abused and violated by a rich arrogant seducer, seems all too familiar. The fact that the abuse becomes her almost unbearable cross to bear and yet means little or nothing to him also speaks volumes. In this production there are two Tesses, actor Macadie Amoroso who speaks the tale and Lila Naruse who physically enacts it. They are joined on stage by five...

10Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Pickled Republic – Traverse Theatre

Part of Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2024, Pickled Republic is advertised as an existential dip into the pickle jar of life from Glasgow-based creator/performer Rudy Cantir. Originally from Moldova, where apparently every food is pickled, this one-woman show sees Rudy morph into various pickled vegetables to highlight the universal themes of abandonment, being unfulfilled and unwanted, the fundamental need to be loved, or in the case of the pickled tomato, just eaten would be nice! It sounds zany and it is! Sound designer John Keilty creates an atmospheric, gastric gurgling soundscape and I assume also writes the witty songs which pepper this dish. But the real driving force behind this show are the consumes, which are fabulously conceived by Fergus Dunnet, and which takes t...