MANIPULATE
From left: Intronauts, Macbeth, Wunderkammer
Tidy Carnage, Mele Broomes – whose Void has already shaken audiences both at Tramway and in its site-specific version – Fiona Oliver- Larkin, Hopeful Monster and Al Seed, as well as performers in the Surge: Pitch event and the final evening’s Clown Cabaret Special Edition. Ranging across choreography, puppetry and clowning – in the case of Al Seed, a distinctive blending of storytelling, physical theatre and bouffon – Clown Cabaret captures the dynamic landscape of Caledonian experimental performance.
The show draws on the highlights of Clown Scratch Cabaret which has been supporting Scotland’s clowns over the past three years with regular visits to Edinburgh’s Roxy and Glasgow’s Tron, as well as other venues. Hart recognises ‘the consistently growing enthusiasm for and knowledge about clowning techniques adds greatly to the development of physical and visual theatre in Scotland. As more and more Scottish practitioners acquire and hone these techniques, they often then utilise them in more “serious” theatre-making.’ that
With Al Seed’s Bridges of Madness reminding audiences of one of Scotland’s most established clown-influenced performers – now with the backing of ‘the world’s first 18th-century jazz- blues band’ – manipulate’s platform covers the rising stars and the veterans.
Across the years, however, the uncompromising experimentation of the festival’s companies has been tempered by their use of familiar narratives: Sleeping Beauty and Macbeth both receive visual theatre remakes in 2019, while Void draws on the dystopia of JG Ballard’s novels and science provides the material for Green Ginger’s Intronauts and Wunderkammer from Germany’s Figurentheater Tuebingen. ‘I wonder if one reason for engaging with more familiar stories is that then both artist and audience have a common framework, knowledge and set of expectations,’ Hart says. ‘Against these, the physical and visual elements employed can either provide further articulation or usefully digress from the essential elements of the narrative. Using stories we have even the most general knowledge of helps take the narrative weight off these means of expression.’ And it is exactly this combination of the familiar and the uncanny, the known and the unexpected that seems to lie at the heart of manipulate’s continued appeal. The visual and physical elements of the shows are, as Hart concludes, ‘employed to do what they do best: to explore and bring to light unseen fears, preoccupations and motivations’
manipulate, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Sat 2–Tue 12 Feb.
1 Feb–31 Mar 2019 THE LIST 39