Manipulate Festival 2024
The 17th edition of Manipulate Festival will take place between 1-11 February 2024.
You can view our programme and book your tickets here.
View and download the schedule here.
“One of the most exciting short festivals in the Scottish cultural calendar” THE SCOTSMAN
Manipulate Festival is an annual celebration of excellence in the fields of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre, bringing the very best of international and Scottish work to audiences across Edinburgh and beyond, in February each year. Creating a platform for creative exchange, debate and discussion alongside staging boundary-pushing new work for adult audiences, the Festival has gained recognition nationally and internationally for its innovative curation and unique blend of artforms.
Manipulate Festival is a home for performance, installation and film works which are either driven forward primarily by image rather than text, or which breathe life into the inanimate. This can include physical theatre, animated film, object theatre, mime, circus theatre, puppetry, dance theatre and installation work. We are particularly excited by work which sits at the margins between artforms, plays with form or challenges perceptions.
By bringing together leading puppetry, visual theatre and animated film from across the globe with work which has been developed here in Scotland, we aim to spark opportunities for artistic exchange and to offer our audiences a diverse palette of rich visually led work.
The festival also serves as a showcase for the diverse and thriving Scottish visual theatre sector, which has grown steadily since the festival’s inception in 2008.
We have welcomed work from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the USA and are always looking to build new presenting and collaborative relationships around the world.
The festival programme is announced every year in November, after which you can browse what’s on offer, book tickets and plan your visit. The festival currently takes place in the City of Edinburgh, however we also present our film programme online, and occasionally tour work to other cities in the weeks following the festival, or curate guest programmes of work in other countries around the world. To be the first to find out about the festival programme, you can sign up to our newsletter.
Read more about the press coverage of our festival in some selected articles from the Scotsman, the Guardian and the Stage.
CLIMATE
As an international festival, we are highly conscious of the impact of our activities and searching for new ways to reduce our footprint. We firmly believe that international cultural exchange is an important part of building human empathy and understanding across the globe, but it is also our view that we cannot use this belief as a reason not to take action on climate. We are working to find new ways of programming internationally whilst reducing the volume of carbon-intensive travel that we rely on. Each year, we rely on fewer flights to bring companies to the UK. We also work with all companies visiting the festival to ensure their awareness of the Theatre Green Book and support practices which help to invest in a circular economy.
