Manipulate theatre festival turns to homegrown talent for 2025

Members of Blind Summit and Scottish Ensemble rehearse for The Law of GravityMembers of Blind Summit and Scottish Ensemble rehearse for The Law of Gravity
Members of Blind Summit and Scottish Ensemble rehearse for The Law of Gravity | Charlie Lyne
Festival director Dawn Taylor is full of hope for the future despite losing international acts from the programme this year, writes Joyce McMillan

Internationalism is the lifeblood of Manipulate. So says Dawn Taylor, director of Edinburgh’s annual festival of visual theatre and animated film; and so it has been, ever since the festival was was first staged back in 2008 by its founding director, Simon Hart.

2024, though, was anything but a normal year for the arts in Scotland, swept by funding uncertainties which still remain unresolved, although an increase in arts funding has now been promised. Long term planning has been all but impossible; and freelance artists received a disturbing shock, last August, when Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for artist projects was completely closed down for a time.

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“The feedback we were getting from the Scottish-based artists we’ve been working with,” says Taylor, “was that they increasingly felt they just had nowhere to go, in terms of support for new development. We originally had some international work programmed for 2025; but then we looked at our budget - which was under heavy pressure anyway - and at what we were preparing to spend on air travel and freight and all the other costs that go with international touring, and we decided that, for this year only, we just couldn’t and shouldn’t do it.

“So we took most of that money, and put it into what we called our Creative Fund; and that meant that we could make small grants to some Scottish-based artists who wanted to develop work for this year’s festival. Whilst Manipulate Arts has had an artist development strand through which we have funded projects since 2008, this is the first time that we have directly funded artists to develop work linked to the festival programme. We hope this won’t be necessary next year, and we’re very much planning a return to a full-on international festival programme, in 2026.”

The 2025 Manipulate Festival will therefore be a slimmed-down affair, spread over four days rather than eight or nine, and with a live performance programme focused entirely on Scottish made work. The programme at The Studio includes When Prophecy Fails, a new show by the Scotsman Fringe First winning Groupwork team of Finn den Hertog, Lewis den Hertog and Vicki Manderson; and it explores the hugely topical theme of cognitive dissonance and irrational belief, through a 1954 case involving apparent sightings of flying saucers.

The Traverse Theatre, meanwhile, hosts The Law Of Gravity, a cross-art-form exploration of the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Philip Glass co-created by leading UK puppet company Blind Summit and the Scottish Ensemble; Elke/Ratkin, a double bill created by Glasgow-based circus and street theatre artists Sarah Farrell and Ruben San Roman Gamez; and a workshop event called Chaos: Play, exploring with the audience the role of play in making art and performance.

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The Studio is the venue for Manipulate’s regular Snapshots evening of short works in development, while at the Fruitmarket Gallery, a group of artists led by Al Seed take over the warehouse space with Cartography, a series of experiments in the kind of intimate one-to-one performance pioneered by the much missed Adrian Howells. There are workshops and Open Studios on subjects ranging from the role of puppetry in storytelling, to the sheer difficulty of maintaining a creative life in an age of planetary meltdown and chronic personal stress; and all this comes in addition to an impressive programme of animated film - mostly showing at the French Institute on George IV Bridge - that remains as international as ever.

And despite this year’s all-home-made festival, Taylor feels that many of Manipulate’s international links are now growing stronger and deeper than ever. “We’re building relationships with visual theatre-makers in the Nordic countries, for instance - particularly Norway and Finland - that are absolutely full of potential for future collaboration, and we can’t wait to get on with that.

“But our priority for now has been to keep working with our great network of artists here in Scotland, and to stay in touch with our wonderful Edinburgh audience. And we hope our 2025 programme will achieve that; an unusual edition of Manipulate, but also an exciting one, full of hope for the future.”

Manipulate 2025 is at various venues, Edinburgh, 12-15 February, see www.manipulatearts.co.uk/festival/whats-on/

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