Manipulate
by Mary Brennan © The Herald
There aren’t many areas where the word manipulate enjoys a positive spin – or draws in queues of people willing to have their perceptions of reality tickled and tweaked.
Simon Hart, artistic director of Manipulate, the Visual Theatre Festival that returns to Edinburgh’s Traverse next week, says the growing popularity of the work that Manipulate champions is a sign of our times.
“We’re so ready now to distrust the spoken word – that’s very noticeable in the way we respond to our politicians,” says Hart.
This shift in trust and engagement has, according to Hart, given us a chance to catch up on our European counterparts – this third Manipulate season features live performances from Portugal, Germany and Spain, but also includes Snapshots, short experimental forays into various forms of visual theatre by six Scottish-based artists who are new to making work for older and adult audiences.
“I’ve lost count of how often puppetry has been re-discovered, hailed as a great new thing ... and a year later, it’s off the radar again,” says Hart. “We’ve seen Robert Lepage use it in his work. Lately there’s been War Horse in London’s West End. Animation? It’s everywhere. Not just the Wallace and Gromit films but in a number of advertisements on television and in cinemas.
”The strange thing is, these are all too often seen as exceptions, whereas they are just the tip of what’s already out there. We could fill our festival over and over with quality work that has been made for adult audiences. Work that looks at dark, intense issues that you couldn’t do on stage in any physical, pictorial way.”
Last year at Manipulate, full houses bought into the notion that wee strips of foam rubber could spring into life as a cunningly athletic alphabet or that an old-fashioned brass tap could become the gnarly old skinflint in a brilliant staging of Moliere’s The Miser. This year we are invited to explore the rooms that Circolando (Portugal) conjure up on stage, but which they suggest are also living inside our heads: memories.
Traverse 2 will house 1945, a sound sculpture that melds images and echoes of the past to question our ideas of history and time. There’s a whiff of the medieval Dance of Death in Salto. Lamento, a kaleidoscope of nightmares put together using puppetry and movement, by German company Figurentheater Tubingen.
It’s a rich feast and going by last year’s turn out it’s a welcome addition to an adventurous Traverse programme envisaged by artistic director Dominic Hill. Hill’s own enthusiasm for the kind of work fielded by Manipulate saw the festival move with him from Dundee Rep, where it was first staged in 2008. Hart still hankers for the programme to have offshoots all across Scotland. “A survey showed 65% of our audience were first time attenders at the Traverse. I’d like to think that was a kind of thank you to Dominic for his support,” says Hart.