Manipulate Festival 2025
By Aaron Bowler
Manipulate Arts just held its 18th festival between the 12th-15th of February, showcasing a cumulative 28 different artistic works from a range of mediums. These included art installations, short/feature films, and public workshops. Having held their first festival in 2008, the festival has remained a bastion of promoting artistic experimentation and creativity for nearly 17 years. While located in Scotland, the festival has platformed the works of artists from over 35 countries, demonstrating Manipulate’s attentiveness to presenting a diverse range of art representative of many different cultures.
Following the global pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, Scottish artists (both working and aspiring) face many challenges in promoting their works or even sustaining themselves through their art as a career. The direction of Manipulate’s 18th Festival shows cognisance of this tough reality by platforming various artworks within the programme that promote sustainability and cooperativeness. Furthermore, Manipulate Arts have gone the extra mile in generously reallocating festival funds to financially support artists within experimental fields such as puppetry and animation. Such works will hopefully feature in the programmes of future Manipulate festivals.
We were given the opportunity to interview Manipulate Art’s artistic director and CEO Dawn Taylor, allowing her to speak further on her inspiration and motivations in arranging the 2025 festival. Dawn showed a great passion for the various artworks platformed by the festival, demonstrating thoughtfulness and intention in the arrangement of the programme. Our questions and Dawn’s answered are recorded below:
- You’ve outlined the works of the festival as articulating key themes of sustainability, degrowth and artist care – could you tell us more about why these issues are central to the festival?
As an artform-driven festival of animation, visual theatre and puppetry, it’s easy to become exclusively focused on technique and form, and the ways in which stories are told. However, at Manipulate, we’re particularly passionate about the power that these visual artforms hold to shine a light on challenging issues in a new way. 2024 was an incredibly challenging year in the Scottish arts sector, with delays to critical funding decisions and major funding programmes closing to artists. We felt that it was an important time to invest in the local creative community and to explore conversations about how the arts, and particularly festivals, can be healthier for people and for the planet.
- How do you feel Covid has impacted the arts and in what ways do you think festivals like your own can aim to remedy that?
Whilst some types of arts events are still taking a while to recover from the pandemic, audiences seem to remain excited by and engaged with festivals, as unique and memorable moments to share with others in real life. Flexibility also seems to be increasingly important, allowing people to maximise personal and leisure time alongside work and time at home. We always try to create fun moments that are totally unique as part of our festival, such as hands-on opportunities to play, post-show talks and social events, as well as providing access to events online, allowing people to engage from anywhere. Our short films across all our programmes are available online as one bundle to watch from home next weekend.
- All of the filmed works the festival is staging are animations/non-live action pieces. Was this a conscious choice or coincidental? Do you think it reflects anything thematically about the aims of the festival?
Manipulate is one of the only film festivals in Scotland which is entirely focused on animation in our film strand, and we aim to showcase as wide a range of techniques and styles as possible. As a medium, animation has an incredible capacity to tell stories which might be challenging or unsafe to tell through live action filmmaking, with an ability to depict inner worlds or fantastical narratives and an almost unlimited palette. Many independent animators work alone and create extraordinary work on very limited budgets; we feel that it’s important to keep championing this work and making it visible as part of our support of independent artistic practice.
- We’re really interested in the ‘One Bum Cinema Club’, we wondered – have the programme directors experienced this for themselves? What were their reactions?
One Bum Cinema Club is a roving cinema for one person at a time, showcasing a series of short, non-verbal and family friendly animations, which load randomly as the one audience member pushes a big red button. This cosy converted shed enjoyed its Scottish premiere as part of Manipulate Festival 2024, and we are really excited to be bringing it on an 8-week tour of Edinburgh libraries throughout February and March 2025. The films are really varied and eclectic, funny and moving, and there’s a chance to get an insight into the huge variety of possibilities in this artform. Also I discovered last year that a parent and child can fit in together, so the one bum rule is a bit flexible if needs be!
- Could you say more about the pairing of On the Edge with Queer Stories? Do you think there’s a particular intersectionality here/meaningfulness in considering these conversations/ideas side by side?
Manipulate Festival has always been committed to using our platform to highlight marginalised or lesser told stories, and these two programmes really reflect that ethos. Through On the Edge, we have worked closely with social justice film festival Take One Action, and are exploring the ways in which communities living in the circumpolar north are affected by climate change, including northernly indigenous communities. Queer Stories has been co-curated with Sanctuary Queer Arts – during that process, we had so many incredible films to choose from, which is really testament to the fact that some of the most exciting films in this genre at the moment are by Queer artists.
- And finally, why puppetry and visual theatre and animation?
Even after years spent working in these artforms, I am continually struck by their ability to surprise me and to spark new ways of thinking and seeing the world. All of the artforms we champion are concerned with breathing life into the inanimate or telling stories using primarily images rather than text. Play and manipulation are at the heart of all the work that we champion and support – whether of puppets, objects, digital imagery, or of the human body. I think that the connecting thread between these forms lies in the opportunities they create to unlock the magic in the everyday, to find common visual languages beyond the reach of words, and to enable play at all stages of our lives. And of course, their highly visual nature makes them a great tool to bring together diverse groups across communication or geographic boundaries.
As a student-run publication which aims to platform the works of young creatives and encourage thorough engagement with the arts, we at the film dispatch are delighted to have spoken to Dawn and learned more about the festival. We hope that in the coming years readers of our publication will recognise Manipulate’s future events as an opportunity to engage with committed and innovative young artists.
