What’s On

Tucked away in the window of a city café, something curious is stirring. All across the city, in a moment of wider social and cultural upheaval, curious hidden worlds are shifting and revealing their secrets. A bespoke new kinetic sculpture artwalk with dates in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow.

Experience boundary-pushing visually led performance, broadcast direct to your home. For the first time in 2021, MANIPULATE presents a digital performance programme spanning visual and physical theatre, animation, puppetry, aerial and contortion, alongside workshops, social events and discussions.

In this playful and sensitive exploration of everyday objects as symbolic communication, metaphors such as a cup half full or treading on eggshells are brought from the page to the stage.

A funny, sensitive and scary fantasy about a lonely man trying to get in touch with himself and the world. The digital premiere of this piece is based on the celebrated live work Boxed by Israeli puppeteer Ariel Doron, in which he goes another step into minimalism, creating a fascinating short story using only a shoebox.

The Yellow Canary is both an epic true story and a leap into the imagination of a young child desperate to escape the horrors of war, exploring love, loss and what it means to flee your home.

tank is a one-woman show combining live performance, UV light, and digital animation, about choosing loneliness, becoming trapped by your own mind, and how trying to stay in control means you can soon spiral out of it.

Come together with MANIPULATE artists, audiences and staff for a virtual kick-off event to celebrate the opening of MANIPULATE Festival #14.

Anchored on stories of dissolving, shifting and stillness: far out to sea, where land-based networks begin to crackle and skip on the boundaries of their limited existence, our lonesome sailor sits, moderate at first, then rising slowly. A unique digital collaboration for the Covid-19 between leading South African animators, puppeteers and theatre-makers.

A physical theatre performative lecture about connections, inheritance and loss. A cooking show that is an attempt to understand what holds us apart and what brings us together. An intimate psycho-magical documentary.

“Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” – Edgar Allan Poe. A powerful aerial and physical theatre performance using the Japanese art of shibari (rope bondage) exploring mental health, cycles of repetition and the struggle to break out.

The pandemic has had a devastating effect on the livelihoods of artists across Scotland and the world, not only in its immediate effects but in the deeper structural issues and inequalities that it has exposed within our sector. This event is a chance to dream big together about how we might build back a sector which better serves everyone within it and the communities around us.

Visual theatre makers MHz and circus act Hannah Finn unite to create a performance inspired by neuroscience, memory and surrealism. [dream]ENGINE unmasks the neural networks and brain processes that create the spontaneous, non-sensical and other worldly manifestations within dreams. 

Edinburgh Short Film Festival returns to MANIPULATE to curate another dynamic and vibrant programme of award-winning international short animated films, which this year explore moment of connection and of isolation.

In the workshop we will explore our immediate environment and what we have in it – our home (or wherever our computer/phone is located) ourselves, the objects we have with and around us – and the virtual space we are in all together. 

Sick beats, mellifluous harmonies and vampiric terror come together as Dracula finds a band of his own to battle the winter blues. Or was it the band that found Dracula? Either way, the contagion is as real as the hairs rising on your hand right now. 

Brought to life at a time of newly heard birdsong. David and Sita present Crunch, an intimate journey of a nimble figure in a barren world with a taste for the… crunchy?

A woman prepares her kitchen, a tightly controlled environment….but is life ever that simple and for what or whom is she preparing? Today I Bake is a visually compelling exploration of themes sourced from Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin. Intense, intriguing, brave and uncomfortable, with flickers of dark humour. 

A fun evening with chats and games to reflect and explore how we can take responsibility when designing characters and actively make decisions about how we portray people to challenge stereotypes and promote positive messages of empowerment, diversity and inclusion. Bring your favourite drink and drawing gear!

A womxn-led showcase of extraordinary and award-winning stop-frame and VFX from the animated film industry. This dynamic and vibrant programme pushes the boundaries of animated film, showcasing a wide range of tones, textures and styles from puppet animation to curated showcases and music videos.

Set in a post-industrial Rust Belt city in the 1990s and told through a collection of original 70’s R&B-inspired art pop songs, THE END OF TV explores the quest to find meaning amongst the increasingly constant barrage of commercial images and advertising white-noise.