No single phrase can encapsulate Manipulate. The competition’s mixture of animation, bodily theatre and puppetry defies straightforward categorisation. The organisation itself opts for “visually led work”. On the energy of this 12 months’s opening weekend, you would additionally name it a celebration of constructing one thing out of nothing.
No extra so is that this the case than in Acqua Alta by the French duo Adrien M & Claire B. Round a boardroom desk, they've organized a set of enormous books, opened to disclose pen-and-ink scribbles and easy pop-up constructions. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t give them a re-evaluation.
Solely while you open the app in your cellphone do you make sense of them. Because of augmented-reality expertise, the pages change into miniature stage units. Skipping round a flat-roofed home is a squabbling couple, inky black figures shifting with balletic grace. Their argument ends because the rain begins. To see what occurs subsequent, you progress to the following open e book.
Taking its identify from the periodic flooding of Venice, Acqua Alta follows the couple as they're torn aside by rising waters, the person switching from a tiny swimmer misplaced at sea to an unlimited determine, reaching for his accomplice’s hair because it morphs right into a sea anemone. All of the whereas, the room stays unchanged. It's as if we had imagined it.
That is additionally true of Fauna, by the identical group, a sequence of posters of dramatic landscapes – craters, cliffs, waterfalls – from which scores of amorphous black creatures emerge. Escaping into Summerhall’s corridors, they're comedian and cute – and visual solely to these within the know.
Alongside the highway within the Competition theatre’s Studio, two one-off performances additionally play on the creativeness. The Chosen Haram elevates a routine boy-meets-boy love story into one thing dream-like because of the circus abilities of a weightless Sadiq Ali and Hauk Pattison. Ali’s first full-length present has visible aptitude to match its technical prowess, even when his intriguing themes about Islam and sexuality are underexplored.
In After Metamorphosis, Lewis Sherlock embodies Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, his twitches and convulsions matched by the repeating phrases of Ali Maloney’s narration. With its pummelling techno soundtrack, the physical-theatre present makes up in depth what it lacks in subtlety.
Manipulate competition is at Summerhall and the Studio, Competition theatre, Edinburgh, till 5 February. The Chosen Haram is at Jacksons Lane, London, 4-6 February.
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