Manipulate Festival Reveals Programme For 18th Edition

Manipulate Arts – Scotland's home for animation, puppetry and visual theatre - will see the 18th edition of the Manipulate Festival run across a bespoke four day programme from Wednesday 12 - Saturday 15 February 2025. 

The Festival remains a home for live performance, installation and film works which are driven forward primarily by image rather than text, or which breathe life into the inanimate. This can include physical theatre, animated film, object theatre, mime, circus theatre, puppetry, dance theatre and installation work.

Manipulate Festival 2025 will put artists at its heart, building on the Festival's commitment to nurture homegrown and international artistic talent, providing support, development and community building against the current backdrop of extraordinary times for the arts. World Premiere productions, and short and feature-length films, will sit alongside works-in-progress, in addition to the sharing of new works made possible by bursaries supported by the Festival.

Across four days, audiences will have the chance to get up close to the nuts and bolts of visual performance through a bespoke programme which explores themes of play and degrowth, asking urgent questions of the industry and its future. Doing things differently in challenging times for the cultural sector, and inspiring conversations about degrowth and sustainability, the Festival invites audiences to join their community of artists to rediscover magic on stage.

Dawn Taylor, Artistic Director & CEO of Manipulate Arts said: “Given the extraordinary moment we are currently facing in the Scottish arts sector, with stagnating funding levels, spiralling costs, and many Scottish artists struggling to make ends meet, it felt critical to take a different approach to our festival in 2025. We are proud to be investing this year in Scottish artists and in the future of our creative community, and are excited to welcome our audiences back to rediscover with us the joy and elemental magic of these visual artforms. 

We look forward to inspiring conversation throughout this festival, which takes a serious look at new and sustainable ways of working together, while still transporting audiences to new and exciting worlds through the magic of animation, puppetry and visual theatre. 

 Manipulate Festival will ask fundamental questions about the world that we inhabit together, in light of the moment we find ourselves in.”

Award-winning ensemble Groupwork will present a daring new piece of physical theatre, When Prophecy Fails at The Studio at Festival Theatre. Following 2019 Fringe First-winning The Afflicted and 2022's Imaginate commission The Hope River Girls, Groupwork brings their signature blend of explosive physical and visual storytelling to this thrilling exploration of belief and disillusionment at the intersection between UFOs, cultish devotion, and the chaotic power of faith.  

In a new collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and puppeteering company Blind Summit, the Festival will present The Law of Gravity at the Traverse Theatre. Following their successful partnership with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra where they brought the folk tale of Peter and the Wolf to life at the Hollywood Bowl, Blind Summit and Scottish Ensemble pair up to explore the boundaries of their mediums.  

Returning for 2025, the Festival's long-established showcase of work-in-progress (Snapshots) will take place at The Studio at Festival Theatre. The line-up for Snapshots includes; Disaster Plan and Jordan and Skinner's Auntie Empire, Voyager by Ruxy Cantir (Pickled Republic, Manipulate 2024) and Sarah Rose Graber, The Pathetic Planet by Romi and Dale, Nightmares by Craig McCulloch and Arlington, a developing work from dance company Shotput - last seen at the Festival in 2023.

The Festival will showcase six new works-in-progress in Cartography, a labyrinthian event taking over the Fruitmarket Warehouse. Every 13 minutes, an intimate audience will be guided on an entrancing, captivating adventure through highly interactive encounters - each distinct, yet adding to an appreciation of the whole. Cartography has been created by Eilidh Appletree, Fibi Cowley, Kirsty May Hamilton, Edith Hicks, Kialy Tihngang and Alys Williams – participants on the Waypoint-1 mentorship project, supported by Al Seed Productions.

In partnership with Surge, the Festival will bring two new works-in-progress as part of its annual Double Bill to the Traverse Theatre. The life of pioneering lichenologist and trans woman Elke Mackenzie is told through micro-cinema, drag, cabaret and music in Elke by Sarah Farrell; while in Ratkin, by Ruben San Roman, we meet a mutant species of rodent humanoids in a fast-paced cautionary tale featuring slapstick, projection and acrobatic choreography.

Written in collaboration with former gymnast turned circus artist Gabbie Cook, These Things Aren't Mine follows a circus artist whose world is turned upside down by a mundane encounter, which triggers a series of unnerving events. A fictional story based on real events, the film is a visceral, abstract and emotive exploration into the psyche of an ex-child athlete living with PTSD and hyper vigilance. The Scottish Premiere of the film at the Traverse Theatre will be followed by a Q&A hosted by Emily Nicholl.

The Festival will team up with Take One Action Film Festivals to present On the Edge, a selection of animated short films, which focus on climate in parts of the world that are considered to have Arctic boundaries by water, land or region. It also joins up with Sanctuary Queer Arts to present a programme of Queer Stories, animated short films which speak to queer identities and queer bodies. These programmes will take place at The French Institute of Scotland.

On Valentine's Day (14 February), the Festival presents a stimulating double bill at The French Institute of Scotland. From La Fantasmagorie to the Future allows audiences to travel from the first animated cartoon in 1908 through to some of the most innovative filmmakers working in the present day. It will play before a retrospective screening of the 2000s hit animation, A Town Called Panic (Panique Au Village). Premiering in 2009, it was the first stop-motion title to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

One Bum Cinema Club makes an exciting return to the festival with its pop-up series of animation for just one audience member at a time. Appearing across selected City of Edinburgh Council Libraries, audiences will be able to lose themselves in three programmes of animated shorts for an entirely free 3-minute break from the outside world. Extending beyond the confines of the festival, One Bum Cinema Club will tour for eight weeks. 

Strengthening their commitment to artist support and development in light of wider sector challenges for freelance artists, Manipulate Arts have re-directed some festival funds to directly support Scottish artists in the creation of new work in the fields of animation, puppetry and visual theatre. These works hope to run at future editions of Manipulate Festival, with these bursaries allowing much-needed funded space and time for research and R&D. Supported artists are at a critical juncture in their practice whereby they are asking key questions about their work and survival in the arts sector in the UK.

Manipulate Festival audiences will be invited into the creation process through the new Open Studios strand, allowing them to peek behind the curtain at what it takes to develop new, innovative work for the stage, and to play with visual performance techniques themselves.

Inspired by the camera-less photographic technique of cyanotype and playing with shadow-puppetry, Dusk till Dawn invites audiences to brush up against nocturnal creatures, fungi, plants, and natural forces. Taking place at The Studio at Festival Theatre, the team will welcome audiences into an intimate space to explore what happens when day turns to night through striking imagery and light play. Scottish/English/Hungarian puppetry company Hopeful Monsters will undertake research and development on this new work, supported by Capital Theatres through Open@TheStudio.

A connection forged between two artists in Scotland and Lebanon respectively, I Might Not Make It explores what a shared space for rest might look like. Making space at Dance Base, Scotland based theatre-practitioner Liz Strange and Lebanese dance artist Sarah Fadel are set to explore the challenges of creating rest spaces in survival contexts—spaces that, by their nature, may not be safe for rest, reflecting the intricate realities of these lived experiences. Supported in partnership with Dance Base, Edinburgh.

And finally, Manipulate Festival's industry-facing workshop strand will return, with workshops from artists including Emma Jayne Park (Gather, Grow and Ground and Mapping Degrowth Futures), Mamoru Iriguchi and Fergus Dunnet (So You Think A Puppet Could Tell Your Story Better Than Yourself? Exploring Dramaturgy in Puppetry), Gavin Glover (Micro Cinema Techniques) and Gabbie Cook (Acrodance). Anthony Scragg welcomes artists and audiences alike into public-facing workshop, ChaosPlay.

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