Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival
Now in its fourth year, Puppet Animation Scotland’s week-long showcase of hybrid forms involving puppetry, film and animation intermingling with live performers features 11 different events at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre which mine the more immersive sides of the human psyche. The two most striking wares on offer may take radically different approaches, but the worlds they inhabit remain striking enough to captivate and disturb.
At the start of the week, archaically inclined ensemble 1927 return with the long awaited follow-up to their Herald Angel-winning Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, which blended animation and silent movie piano with a parlour-room presentation of a selection of fantastically gothic short stories. The new piece is the extravagantly titled The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, a full-length yarn set in a decaying tenement in a city slum that looks part Fritz Lang, part Bertolt Brecht in its aesthetic.
Also returning to Scotland is French director/choreographer Giselle Vienne, whose ongoing dramatic collaboration with ex-pat American novelist Dennis Cooper and composer Peter Rehberg was last seen at Glasgow’s Tramway with the large-scale piece, Kindertotenlieder. Where that piece looked at the life and death fixations of the black-hooded teens who soundtrack their lives with goth music until one of them takes things too far, Jerk strips things back to a solo performance that also looks at doomed youth. Where Kindertotenlieder integrated showroom mannequins into the action, Jerk, which takes as its starting point a trio of real-life teenage serial killers made notorious in the 1970s, has solo performer Jonathan Capdevielle use deceptively cuddly glove puppets to play out the atrocities.
The Animals and Children Took To The Streets, February 1; Jerk, February 3, both Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, which runs from February 1-5. Visit www.traverse.co.uk, www.manipulatefestival.org.