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MANIPULATE Festival 2020: Young Critics Programme

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MANIPULATE Festival is piloting a young critics programme this year, offering free tickets to a full day of shows, lunch and travel expenses on SAT 1 FEB. 

For more information on what’s on that day, visit the website and we will work with you to design a programme for your day!

The aim of this pilot programme is to invite five younger and emerging writers to engage creatively and critically with the wide range of visual theatre performances on offer at the festival.

Puppet Animation Scotland work incredibly hard to support visual theatre makers, puppeteers and animators in Scotland, and their work has paid off – the 2020 programme is 90% Scottish. This Young Critics Programme is a move towards fostering critics and critical language around visual theatre, supporting the rich culture there now is in Scotland.

The Summerhall cafe turned cabaret space will provide a space to reflect and we are hoping to invite some Scottish critics to come and talk about writing on visual theatre, puppetry and animated film.

We have outlets available to host content, and StorytellingPR can also support with pitching elsewhere.

Like Animals

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A parrot says ‘I love you’. A dolphin tries to speak. A woman spends a lifetime trying to understand.

Newly announced National Theatre of Scotland Company in Residence SUPERFAN set off on tour from 4 April – 1 May 2020 with Like Animals: a funny and poignant look at love and communication in human (and not so human) relationships.

Directed by Herald Angel Award winner Ellie Dubois (No Show) and inspired by true accounts of research scientists working to communicate with animals, Like Animals weaves stories of human-animal communication around an exploration into the real-life relationship of performers Kim Donohoe and Pete Lannon. 

Every night, Alex the parrot and Irene the scientist bid one another farewell with ‘be good, see you tomorrow, I love you.’ As time marches on and their relationship deepens, Alex begins to use the language he has learned from Irene to manipulate her. Peter the dolphin lives in a flooded house with Margaret, who is teaching him English. Working together in a bizarre NASA-funded experiment, their relationship garners unwelcome attention in the press with headlines such as ‘The Woman who lived in sin with a dolphin’ (The Telegraph, June 2014). Delving into the research, Kim and Pete tell these stories with only a paddling pool and a couple of wetsuits.

MJ McCarthy’s delicate score and Rachel O’Neill’s surreal, contemporary design draws audiences into the joy and heartbreak of trying, and sometimes failing, to understand another being. 

Like Animals has been developed in association with Tron CREATIVE through their Scratch and Tron Lab opportunities, and with support from Creative Scotland’s Open Project Fund. 

SUPERFAN is a new Scottish performance company who create performances for adult and young audiences that blend theatre, live art, circus and dance. SUPERFAN won the 2019 Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award.

SHORTLIST – BEST THEATRE PRODUCTION, BROADWAY WORLD EDINBURGH FESTIVAL AWARDS 2019 

“A quirky, thought-provoking two-hander” ★★★★ – The Telegraph

“Cleverly and deliberately entertaining …a production that asks chewy questions” ★★★★ – Herald Scotland

“Communication between animals may be important on a scientific level, but good communication with the ones you love is essential” ★★★★ – The Wee Review

“At a moment when we urgently need to reassess our relationship with the natural world, an exploration of human-animal connections feels timely” – Recommended Show 2019,  The Guardian 

“…Original and beautifully staged” – Fest Magazine

Like Animals by Superfan – Scottish tour: 4 April – 1 May 2020

Saturday 4 April – Mull Theatre, Mull

Tuesday 7 April – The Pagoda, Grantown-on-Spey

Thursday 9 April – Lyth Arts, Wick

Friday 10 April – Gable End, Orkney

Wednesday 15 April – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Thursday 16 April – East Kilbride Arts Centre, East Kilbride

Friday 17 April – Paisley Arts Centre, Paisley

Sunday 19 April – Dunoon Burgh Hall, Dunoon  

Tuesday 21 April – Tayvallich Village Hall, Tayvallich, Argyll

Thursday 23 April – The Barn, Banchory 

Friday 24 April – MacRobert, Stirling 

Saturday 25 April – The Byre, St Andrews

Monday 27 April – Platform Theatre, Glasgow

Thursday 30 April – MacArts, Galashiels 

Friday 1 May – The Maltings, Berwick-upon-Tweed

Marlon Wobst and Will Knight lead Autumn/Winter Season of Visual Art at Summerhall

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Will Knight, Summerhall, front door elevation drawing, 2019. Scale 1:20 giclee print on art paper, 380 x 510mm © Will Knight

Quirky felt tapestries by Marlon Wobst and charming architectural drawings by Glasgow’s Will Knight plus Out of Sight Out of Mind presents work by hundreds of artists as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival

October 2019: the nights are closing in and the days are getting nippy, so we’re cosying up with an outstanding programme of visual art throughout Autumn and Winter here at Summerhall.

On 15 November we open a UK first exhibition of Berlin-based artist Marlon Wobst’s (b.1980) mischievous, colourful felt tapestries. In FRIENDS, Marlon walks the fine line between fine art and craft with wool-felt tapestries that recall Joseph Beuys’ subversive felt sculptures of the 1960s and 70s. Known as a colourist working predominantly in oils and on paper, these new felt tapestries will bring the Meadows and Corner Galleries to life with cheeky bathing scenes, football games and wild, naked horse rides direct from Marlon’s gallery in Berlin, SCHWARZ CONTEMPORARY. With humour and intelligence, Marlon presents us with human figures locked into complex and often sensual shapes, drawing us into a colour drenched, almost hyper-real world.

On 30 November, Glasgow artist Will Knight (b.1988) will invite us to look at Summerhall in a new way with his quirky, beautifully wrought architectural drawings. Will studied at the Glasgow School of Art, where he began investigating domestic, commercial and civic buildings through recording, measurement and drawing by hand. But Will’s drawings resist the sterile, static nature of architectural drawings. Instead they record the building just as it is, with all the furniture, objects and ephemera that we live and work with every day. With this exhibition, Summerhall will join the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, Dumfries House in Ayrshire and Renfield St. Stephens Church in having our ‘portrait’ drawn by Will.

On World Mental Health Day (Thursday 10 October) we welcomed Out of Sight Out of Mind to Summerhall as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF). Now in its seventh year, Out of Sight Out of Mind presents a feast of film, sculpture, installation, photography, painting and drawing, it continues to be supported by SMHAF and the Mental Health Foundation as part of their year-round arts programme. This year the exhibition will consist of almost 400 works by artists from across Scotland and the UK and will fill more than an entire floor of the extensive gallery spaces at Summerhall in Edinburgh.

Closing on 27 October, there isn’t much time left to catch Alan Smith’s (1941-2019) The New World: Retrospective exhibition. After a life threatening illness, Smith completed this new body of work prompted by Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo – a fresco depicting everyday life in Venice in the 1790s – when The Venetian Republic of a thousand years found itself in its death throes. In The New World, Alan used digital images to draw parallels between this fading Venice and our own Brexit Britain. A selection of the earlier works is presented along The New World.

All exhibitions are free, and we can’t wait to welcome you to Summerhall this winter.

Find out more about the Summerhall visual arts programme.