“Only through risk taking do we arrive at certain moments of creative spark” Artistic Director & CEO of Puppet Animation Scotland, Dawn Taylor, on Edinburgh’s first festival of the year, MANIPULATE 2023
Dawn, could you begin by telling me a little about the origins of MANIPULATE, and Puppet Animation Scotland?
When Simon Hart, my predecessor, first came into the Puppet Animation Festival – now Puppet Animation Scotland – he noticed that a lot of the puppetry work in Scotland was solely for children. He was invited to a few festivals on the continent, and found that work happening there, perhaps naturally due to having to transcend borders, with a much greater sense of being made for international, adult audiences. Wordless, visual, physical theatre, object theatre, and adult puppetry were, and still are, all far bigger in European countries, and Simon felt this was quite missing from the Scottish landscape.
So when originally setting MANIPULATE up, he saw it as a way to galvanise and inject some momentum into Scotland in those areas. In the first festival, I think it was 75-80% international work. It’s really testament to the work that he did subsequently, and has been done by all the staff over the years, along with other organizations like SURGE in growing this sector such now MANIPULATE is 75% Scottish work.
The festival has certainly grown, but the spirit of puppetry for adults and visual theatre for adults – and internationalism – are very much still at the core of what, of why we do.
How does the MANIPULATE Festival actually get put together every year?
Well, actually I haven’t curated this year, that’s what’s so interesting about it. I was on maternity leave from March until late August, but we got some funding from Creative Scotland through the Radical Care fund, because I am a leader with children.
Usually the way that one would curate would be attending loads of work across Europe, Scotland and the UK. When I came in, my question for the board was: how is this going to work? We were really interested in modelling different ways of making leadership positions are available to those with caring responsibilities or who face other obstacles.
Thanks to the funding, we’ve been able to work with two freelance program consultants, Ross and Electra who go and see work for us. Then we had my maternity cover Róisín O’Brien who was shaping some of the program in my absence, and Aidan who was our interim director. So it really feels like a collaborative effort. People have been seeing different things in different countries and places; really feeling not only the temperature of what shows feel good – and what we think our audiences will like – but also what artists are really saying at this moment in time. Out of this, a program has emerged which absolutely feels like a team effort, but also speaks to this moment particularly.
Would you say the themes which run through this year’s Festival have been found, rather than devised?
Definitely. I don’t think we ever go out looking for work and say, ‘this is the theme, this is what we’re trying to say this year.’ We are led by the work. That said, we will make choices to create a balanced program, but in all cases we are led by the work.
This year, MANIPULATE is going to have a far greater presence in the street, is that a conscious choice?
Yeah, it’s a really conscious choice. There are a couple of reasons. One is a happy accident in that during the pandemic, we had to adapt, like everyone, and think about how we make work without bringing people face-to-face. So, we’d started this installation strand, firstly through kinetic sculpture, and then last year we had an augmented reality installation.
Those works felt like they not only allowed us to really stretch that definition of what we mean by visual performance, puppetry , and animation – pushing to the edges of that – but also suddently it becomes accessible to a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise be reached. These works tend to be on all day, so people maybe who have childcare issues who, for whatever reason, can’t be in Edinburgh at particular times; people who are fitting things around work. It opens it up, and bringing it to the streets is just the next step of that.
We started out thinking, okay, we have this great, loyal audience – we really love then, they love us – how can we really grow to reach people who wouldn’t normally even think of accessing the work? That’s why we wanted to explode out onto the streets. It wasn’t easy at first, because you know it’ll be February, dark and cold, and people tend to avoid going outdoors aside longer than they maybe have to.
So we’ve chosen material which is mobile or short form. This way people can be kind of be moving with it. They can dip in and out of it rather than standing for two hours watching a performance in the rain.
Now this will be difficult, but is there anything in this year’s program which has particularly caught your attentions?
Lots! It’s hard to choose anything in particular, but I think that there’s some really exciting stuff this year. There’s plenty of great new work, as well as some things which we’ve been trying to make happen for several years and are finally, fingers crossed, happening.
An example of a really new piece that’s emerged, which I’m really excited for is, Arthropoda from Paper Doll Militia who’ve been at the Festival several times. They’re a multi-award winning, aerial, Scottish theatre company doing this new work about toxic dynamics in relationships, and how we can get stuck without knowing how to get unstuck through the metaphor of lobster fishing! The artist comes from a lobster fishing family in the United States, who’s observed that though Lobsters could technically walk out of a creel, they don’t!
Looking internationally, I’d maybe highlight Poor Thing, by a relatively new company called VOX Muziektheater from the Netherlands founded by performer Linde Schinkel. She wanted to bring together her two passions: Opera and Object Theatre. She performs at both puppetry, and opera festivals. I’ve heard a lot of interesting stories from her about how the work is received in those two different contexts. The piece is about death, which sounds very depressing, but it’s actually a joyous, joyful piece about our lives. It’s a zooming out from our lives, to look at them in their beauty, and absurdity, and the objects we leave behind. Those meaning we can put together about a person from these objects, which are individually meaningless. It’s lovely.
Do you enjoy being the first arts Festival in Edinburgh’s cultural year?
I suppose you could describe this point in the annual calendar as the graveyard shift – but we seem to have thrived! I’m actually not sure why a lot of people haven’t chosen this time of year to put work on, but we love it. It’s a time of year when people are pretty disposed to gathering together and huddling in rooms and, and need a bit of a spark of joy.
Let’s be honest, January and February can be quite dismal months sometimes, and I think there’s something joyous in coming together and finding shared moments of inspiration. Our audiences go for it with gusto! They are always really excited, I think to get their cultural calendar kicked off for the year!
This year, MANIPULATE is scheduling events at more venues that ever, how are the logistics working out?
Well, yes, in terms of the spread of venues, this is new for us. Before this, the maximum number of venues we’ve ever had is two! We’re doubling that this year, and it’s giving us the opportunity to think about where the most suitable location for work, rather than how do we jam this in here?
This year, MANIPULATE events will appear at The Traverse Theatre, Fruitmarket, The Studio, Festival Theatre and Summerhall.
Now we get to be more practice, and pay far more attention to the tech specs. Maybe a show won’t fit anywhere but Traverse 1…but in other case we will have more space to think about audiences who already frequent a venue, and what an artist is trying to say with their work. I’m really excited by the potential this opens up.
Dawn added that for every production she was able to greenlight this year, there were 8 she had to turn down. The scope for expansion of MANIPULATE is certainly there, funding and audiences willing.
Who would you say make up the audiences for MANIPULATE?
I think it is a really mixed demographic. That said, apart from a few live performances last year, I haven’t had a full year as Director yet! I did attend a lot before that, but not with the same eyes obviously. From my team’s persepctive though, the demographic seems very mixed – we have got a loyal base, but every year people seems to have it through different routes, and come their own way.
That’s really out mission now: to help more people discover it, because there really is something there, I think, for the wide majority of people.
Shows at MANIPULATE have definitely lasted in my own mind, in particular Ljubljana Puppet Theatre‘s ‘Enter the Owl’ back in 2020…
And Ljubljana Puppet Theatre are coming back this year with Moč (The Power). Simon actually saw it in person, but I’ve only seen it on film. I’m really excited about that piece and it’s so different from Enter the Owl, focussing on a very few relationships, these social para-dynamics. It takes you right into the micro and then right out to the macro, which is of course one of the things we love about puppetry.
What would you say are the strengths of visual theatre and animated film when creating engaging work?
I would always start by pointing out that we straddle both the film and cinema industries. What we notice is that the palette in theater making when you’re looking at live action is often limited to what you can recreate on a stage or through a lens. Puppetry can sort of explode that framing. You can have the same character appear 7, 8, 9 times at different scales to kind of observe them in different ways, observe their emotions, whilst also observing them in a vast landscape.
It allows this cinematic approach that is harder to achieve in other areas of theatre. Another thing I think is really interesting about it in puppetry, though quite controversial, is in performing ‘the other’. There’s certainly a lot of discussion surrounding issues of poverty, inequality and parts of the world with a colonial history.
Puppetry has been used as a way, for example, to depict the colonizer, and to perform these narratives in order to take ownership of them. The palette of puppetry is limitless, as are the stories you can tell, and how you tell them. That said, there is a live conversation about who needs to be involved in telling particular stories.
Are there any shows this year you think will ‘break out’ or be an unlooked for hit?
Okay, let me have a little think about that!
I think that Into the Long Green Jaws is a really interesting piece of work. It’s by Fergus Hall and Sarah McWhinney who come from music and design backgrounds, respectively. So, they are new to puppetry and visual theatre and have created this palette which feels quite new – I don’t feel like I’ve seen something quite like it before. It’s something like live-improvised gig-theatre: sometimes it’s like you’re watching a gig, with a few images beside it, and then all of a sudden it flips into feeling innately more theatrical. I think it feels new and will interest music and theatre audiences.
Looking into the far horizon, how do you feel about the direction the arts industry is travelling in?
II think it’s important to retain a balance of positivity and realism in my sort of privileged position as an organizational leader. It’s my job to get angry and fight when things aren’t good enough on behalf of people who don’t have as much of a voice. Frankly, the funding situation as it continues is scary, but we are not the people who will suffer. The artists are, the freelancers are, and ultimately the audiences. All of us are going to be poorer for lack of investment in culture. I think there are lots of forces in society which don’t quite understand the ways in which we’ll be poorer.
I think my job is to find creative solutions and to be positive in the face of this, but also to shout loud about just how difficult it is. We move forward with positivity, but a real sense of how valuable these things are and how sad it is if we lose more cultural institutions.
That’s never been more true, look at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, and The Film Festival, both abruptly just gone.
I think there is a better intrinsic understanding of the value of art and culture in some, not all, but some of the countries that we partner with across Europe. There’s an understanding of investment in or order to reap benefits far in the future; that things which might appear to be poorly attended or not perfect within one year can pay huge dividends in 15 years.
Of course, having a commercially savvy approach to mixing business interests with the arts is needed, but it cannot replace public investment in culture, because that’s where risk taking happens. Only through risk taking do we arrive at certain moments of creative spark, which go on to fuel the next generaiton of television and film industries.
MANIPULATE 2023 will run between the 2nd and 12th of February.
(Featured Image: Un-retained by Sandman – Scottish Premiere at MANIPULATE 2023 ©Un-retained)
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