Manipulate Festival is Puppet Animation Scotland’s annual celebration of innovative puppetry, visual theatre and animated film. This year, it has commissioned eight Scottish artists to produce Restless Worlds, a series of kinetic artworks which can be viewed in person behind windows in public spaces.
In 2021 Manipulate Festival presented a digital programme for the first time ever, featuring 12 digital theatre productions, 22 short animated films and 3 workshops. However, Restless Worlds was postponed earlier this year in the hope of presenting the kinetic artworks in real space rather than online. So, now it’s possible.
Restless Worlds premiered on 22 April in Edinburgh and ran until 2 May. It’s touring to Aberdeen 6-16 May (see map) and then Glasgow 19-24 May. The artworks will be on view behind various windows around both city centres, in a self-directed artwalk.
The kinetic artworks include automata, miniature figures and on-screen animation. Each is accompanied by a narrative or soundscape which you can listen to on your personal device. The audio tracks are essential to getting the full-immersion experience and block out traffic and street noise. The audio is also available as a BSL translation. Don’t forget your headphones. You can go at your own pace.
The artworks are loosely inspired by the pandemic and from Boccaccio’s 1353 novel The Decameron, where ten strangers isolate together from the Plague. They occupy their quarantine time by telling stories to each other. Each artwork offers a unique experience. Some are inspired by our shared experience in prolonged lockdown. Some look for an escape from it. Others offer a nod to similar experiences in medieval culture.
“Whilst the project was designed for the COVID-19 era, it has proved a really exciting and rich area of artistic growth for the organisation, expanding the ways that we collaborate with artists and allowing us to reach audiences in different ways, which we hope will continue beyond the pandemic.”
Puppet Animation Scotland
Here are the artworks and their creators:
STILL LIFE WITH WILLOW PATTERN
Shona Reppe and Tamlin Wiltshire
Afternoon tea meets kintsugi, the broken love story behind the famous blue and white willow pattern, and a broken-down T’Pau song. Shona Reppe is a multi-award-winning Scottish theatre-maker designer and puppeteer who has performed extensively and internationally. Soundtrack by Ben Seal, text by Eva Reppe-Rove.
CREATURIUM: THE LOST ONES
Lucas Chih-Peng Kao and Katanari
Creaturium is a surreal double-cabinet of curiosities (cabinets designed and made by Emily Martinelli). On display are models of timeless imaginary specimens, or are they semi-mythological creatures that may be extinct. Imagined scientific illustrations of the creatures line the cabinets and the soundtrack imagines them captured in their natural habitat. Filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Lucas Chih-Peng Kao is based in Edinburgh. Katanari is a visual artist, puppeteer and theatre-maker who experiments with nature and memory.
TRIALS OF BLISS
Florentine Renaissance architecture is the theatrical backdrop for tales of deceit and disinformation. All the while, it seems the sands of time run through the set. Edinburgh College of Art graduate Chell Young designs miniature spaces, surrealist architecture and sets.
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
An assembled cabinet of curious journeys and impossible tales as we follow the journey around the cabinet. With years of experience as a theatre practitioner, Gavin Glover specialises in puppetry and live feed micro cinema. He has developed his own distinctive style of work in both visual and text-based theatre. Soundtrack composition is by John Kielty.
THE DIKTAT SYNTHESIZER
Watch as an automated home-made machine randomly issues instructions, media snippets and data about Covid19. An anonymous human figure repeatedly seems to bash its head against the machine. It highlights the language used and the confusion of coronavirus updates and metaphors. There is a window slot that reveals randomly generated regulations governing social behaviour in lockdown. Guy Bishop is a sculptor, prop and puppet-maker and designer specialising in mechanical movement.
APPLE EATERS
Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre and Heather Parry
This show-stopper of a kinetic sculpture event is unmistakeably Sharmanka. In collaboration with Heather Parry’s writing, music by Brian Irvine and vocal performance by Kirsty Logan. A pandemic-inspired theme asking whether it’s better to be alone in ignorance, or together in despair? Misery loves company, as they say. Isolation, love and the loss of innocence. Based in Glasgow since 1996, the theatre tours as well as having its own theatre space. Sculptor-mechanic Eduard Bersudsky and theatre director Tatyana Jakovskaya started out in St Petersburg. Sharmanka is Russian for barrel organ which hints at the imaginative use of scrap metal to create kinemat and vintage -style automata with medieval roots.
MR HOLDCROFT
An unexpected gift connects an isolated elderly man to the world outside his front door. This screen-based animation uses string and shadow puppets within an installation recreating the man’s living room. It reflects the isolation that many have felt recently. Jessica Innes is an early-career puppeteer, performer and multidisciplinary artist, with an emphasis on work that is socially and visually engaging. Soundtrack/camera by Calum Barbour.
HERE. WE’RE NOT.
This installation will have you interacting without hesitation, even from the street on a chilly spring day in windy Edinburgh. It challenges self-perception presence, and connection by pulling you into the interactive visuals. The soundtrack of found audio from radio frequencies around the world adds a disoriented tone to the merging and mutating visuals. Photographer and visual artist Samuel Watterworth focuses on digital generative design and real-time systems, with a particular interest in how people interact with space, and with each other.
Restless Worlds is showing in partnership with the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh and Aberdeen Performing Arts. The Manipulate Festival is produced and delivered by Puppet Animation Scotland. Founded in 1984, it champions puppetry, visual theatre and animated film in Scotland and internationally.
All photos ©Artravelist
