A celebration of eccentricity in all its slippery, latex‑dusted glory, the Manipulate Festival once again proves why one of Edinburgh’s ‘other’ festivals has become a lodestone for bold artistic endeavour. Now approaching two decades of quietly reshaping Scotland’s creative landscape, the festival gathers artists from more than 25 countries while placing Scottish makers firmly at its centre, asserting that innovation here is not imported but homegrown, nurtured and resilient.

This year’s programme is characteristically ambitious: ten major live works, four world premieres, and a significantly expanded film strand now hosted by the Filmhouse. The animation selection (shorts and features including the acclaimed Australian stop-motion Memoir Of A Snail) cements Manipulate’s growing reputation as a hub for contemporary animated storytelling. But animation bleeds into everything: the fluidity of form, the porousness between mediums, the sense that nothing onstage is ever quite fixed. 

That porousness is writ large in Dik Downey’s Don Quixote (Is A Very Big Book), where puppetry, mask work and clowning fold into a surreal, affectionate riff on Cervantes’ ageing knight. Downey’s own misadventures entwine with Quixote’s, creating a gently absurd meditation on time, delusion and the refusal to go quietly. A remarkably physical (and sweaty) performance, it fends off the preconceptions of growing old and champions the resilience of the artistic body. Transformation (of bodies, histories and materials) threads through the festival with some international works carrying a sharp edge, interrogating colonial legacies and the systems that allow them to persist. KMZ Kollektiv’s Coffee With Sugar? (pictured above) is a stand-out: a gripping, multimedia excavation of western consumption. With biographical storytelling, object manipulation and culinary art, a live‑built soundscape (plus the festival’s only appearance of candyfloss), it reframes the morning cup of joe as a site of global consequence. 

Bruno Gallagher’s Europe, Meine Liebe, Mon Amour offers a quieter but no less resonant provocation. Across four wordless sketches performed in pop-up performances (with a more structured iteration at Craigmillar’s Lyra), mask work, elaborate costuming and altered movement conjure drifting memories of travel. It’s a poetic, border‑crossing dreamscape with a sting for artists still snarled in bureaucratic red tape. Mamoru Iriguchi, one of Manipulate’s most consistently inventive alumni, returns with Size Matters (created with Vanishing Point), a flagship of the festival. Joined by puppet versions of themselves, Iriguchi and Julia Darrouy weave science, humour, and visual trickery into a meditation on scale; the things that feel impossibly vast or uncomfortably small, and the meanings we attach to both. And the ever-present guest of the festival, Death, naturally lurks in the wings. In Kar, cabaret, music and object theatre collide in a riotous wake inspired by Anna Karenina. This is chaotic, witty and gloriously life-affirming: Tolstoy with a vodka chaser.

What emerges from this year’s Manipulate is a portrait of a city animated by curiosity and craft. Puppetry, film and visual theatre become tools for wonder and reflection, inviting audiences and fresh generations of creative power players into a world where the ordinary is re-imagined and the extraordinary feels tantalisingly within reach.

Manipulate runs at various venues in Edinburgh until Tuesday 10 February; main picture: Pablo Hassmann.

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