Manipulate

Gobo.Digital Glossary

FIVE STARS

Bird

FOUR STARS

Torn

FOUR STARS

Threads

THREE STARS

Traverse, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

THE final performance in this year’s Manipulate programme ended the festival in a blaze of inspired mayhem: larky tomfoolery and quirky adventures with everyday objects that – like the projected animations and the live video footage – cunningly skewed normality to alter conventional perspectives before your very eyes. And yes, it’s those rogue elements, AKHE from St Petersburg, at work. Gobo.Digital Glossary sees Maxim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko plunge through seventeen short scenes that signify “the Hero”. He’s a fleeting outline on the upstage screen whose solitude, pain, aspirations and very breath they represent in flights of vividly visual fancy and a degree of physical caprice made delightfully odder by their own appearance – both are stocky, bald-headed, copiously bearded, discernibly middle-aged and unexpectedly nimble! As little robots crash and beer spurts from a bullet-hole, as a book is savagely sawn in shreds and a broken heart mends, only to burst into flames, this headlong collage of absurd events builds into a profound – and defiant – reflection on how we live now, and what we lack. All with a subversive political undertow that brings alive the power of visual theatre as a means of speaking out.

Earlier in the week Theatre Incliné, from Montreal, had created a disturbing mythic tale in Threads, albeit with a voiced-over narrative that tended to fill in the gaps that our own imagination could have dealt with. This graphic puppet-play – performed by Jose Babin and Nadine Walsh with Guido Del Fabbro on occasional violin – dwelt on the brutal effect of war on the women who are raped by soldiers. Here, in fact, it’s not just men but their horses who assault the Mountain-Woman... She gives birth to Hoof-Girl, a whinnying child-cum-colt, who is then tasked with breaking the cycle of war, rape and pillage by urging other women to terminate the ogres they carry. It’s grim, provocative stuff, even if it is wrapped up in a poetic fiction where the motif of threads sews together relationships, history and instances of female resilience and resourcefulness.

Sita Pieraccini’s solo show, Bird, has had various fledgling stages but now – partly because of her own evolution as a poised and accomplished performer – it flies, as a powerful exploration of physical and emotional hunger. A ragged survivor, prowling through wastelands – her nuanced movements make the earth on-stage into rubble, mire, a rubbish tip – she tames a little bird. Friend? or food? Like Francisca Morton’s bitter-sweet Torn, in which a woman tries to recover from a relationship break-up, Bird grips us with a sense of inner states made affectingly visible. While the paper-strewn clutter on-stage is a tremendous echo of the shredded emotions at the heart of Torn, it’s Morton’s own expressiveness and the witty, inventive soundscore provided by Foley artist Barney Strachan, that colour in the dark shadows in a piece that has really come into its own since Manipulate programmed it as a work-in-progress two years ago.