November 20, 2025
Manipulate Arts announces programme for the 19th Manipulate Festival with its most ambitious programme to date.
Manipulate Festival’s animation programme is the biggest yet – introducing a brand new ‘in competition’ strand, to award the very best in Scottish animation – and takes place for the very first time at Edinburgh’s home of cinema, Filmhouse.
Five brand-new works from Scottish and Scotland-based visual theatre makers will premiere.
Over 25 different countries are represented across the festival programme, including leading international performance work from five global visual theatre and puppetry companies.
Increased community work will see Manipulate Festival reach across more of the city than ever before.
Manipulate Arts – Scotland’s home for cutting-edge animation, puppetry and visual theatre – today announces the programme for the 19th edition of Manipulate Festival. Its most ambitious programme to date will feature: 4 World Premieres and 6 Scottish premieres on stage, artists from over 25 countries represented between film and live performance, and an increased presence across the city of Edinburgh, popping up in eight city venues, including the festival’s first appearances at Filmhouse and Lyra, with further shows and events across Traverse Theatre, Studio Theatre at Capital Theatres, Dance Base, Summerhall, WHALE Arts and Out of the Blue Drill Hall.
In 2026, Manipulate Festival will explore themes of change and transformation from the personal to the global; how finding empathy and seeing the world through another’s eyes can open up new possibilities and create seismic social change, unearthing moments of surprise and unpredictability in the hidden magic and playfulness of the everyday.
The live performance programme will see five leading Scottish theatre companies premiere new works, joined by five world class international puppetry and visual theatre works from across the globe. In film, Manipulate Arts will screen two features and four shorts programmes at Edinburgh’s iconic Filmhouse, and will host the first Manipulate Festival official ‘In Competition’ to award the best in Scottish animation.
An enhanced community programme will see the return of the One Bum Cinema Club, touring libraries across Edinburgh; workshops in inflatable puppet-making for young people and families in collaboration with WHALE Arts; and a series of small community parades which will see young people and their homegrown puppets join forces with Tim Davies’ Ocho – a larger than life inflatable Octopus puppet, with a single puppeteer manoeuvring eight independently articulated legs.
With this ambitious programme Manipulate Arts continues its commitment to nurture and raise up homegrown Scottish talent as a key factor in sustainability in the Scottish arts, particularly in the fields of animation, puppetry and visual theatre. Over 20 lead artists from across Scotland will participate in the Festival in 2026, while Manipulate Arts also returns to form as a leader in international animation, puppetry and visual theatre, fostering global connection across the artforms.
Dawn Taylor, Artistic Director & CEO of Manipulate Arts said: “We are thrilled to bring back Manipulate Festival in 2026, bigger and better, working in partnership with more organisations across Edinburgh than ever before.
Bringing the work of such a fearless, inventive, diverse and talented group of artists to stage and screen is both a privilege and a joy, and whether you’re looking for gripping stories, stunning visuals, rollicking entertainment or political provocation, there’s truly something for everyone in this year’s programme.
From the deeply personal to the deeply philosophical, this year’s programme spans a wide range of themes including explorations of our relationship with time, to the awesome power and beauty of nature, and the enduring legacies of colonialism.
Manipulate Festival is a true celebration of excellence in visual artforms, with the calibre and range of work on offer demonstrating huge potential in these forms to communicate human stories and big ideas to audiences of all ages.”
Jaine Lumsden, Theatre Officer at Creative Scotland said: “Manipulate Arts Festival is supercharging its puppetry and animation programme with a dynamic showcase of visual theatre, supporting Scottish and international creatives to present bold and transformative new work.
“Across Edinburgh’s venues, stories will be brought vividly to life through cutting-edge innovation in visual theatre and animation; sure to inspire, entertain and captivate audiences.”
Live Performance
Manipulate Festival 2026 presents 10 groundbreaking works of puppetry and visual performance on stage. Five brand-new works from Scottish and Scotland-based creatives make their premiere, all of whom have received support and development from Manipulate Arts throughout their careers, ranging from seed funding to work in progress presentations as part of the festival’s long running Snapshots series. Manipulate Art’s commitment to nurturing homegrown visual theatre talent sees the Festival present Four World and one Scottish premiere from top class Scottish makers. A further five Scottish premieres come from leading International companies, whose work brings a global outlook to the festival, asking universal questions of our world.
Acclaimed performance artist Mamoru Iriguchi and Vanishing Point return to the festival with the World Premiere of Size Matters, a wildly inventive blend of puppetry, science and surrealism. Joined on stage by puppet versions of themselves, Mamoru and Julia take a mind-bending journey through time, size and perception to explore how we convey the importance of the things in life that feel big or small. Manipulate Arts has supported the development of Size Matters from the very seedlings of an idea to full fruition.
Returning to Manipulate Festival after 2023’s incredibly successful The Chosen Haram, the Sadiq Ali Company (led by Edinburgh-native Sadiq Ali) presents the Scottish Premiere of Tell Me – a cutting edge three-hander narrative circus offering a fresh perspective on HIV. Combining Chinese Pole and aerial artistry, Tell Me showcases an innovative, multi-dimensional cube structure, exploring connection to the self, to friends, to community in the face of stigma and silence.
Disaster Plan, led by Julia Taudevin and Kieran Hurley, will kick off a Spring tour of Auntie Empire as part of Manipulate Festival – an outrageous, dark satire on Britannia and the grotesque absurdity of imperial self-regard. Taudevin is Auntie, blending bouffon, comedy, and audience interaction into a bloody lampoon on the myths of nationhood.
The Raft of the Crab, presented by circus artist Ninon Noiret, is a captivating exploration of life first being diagnosed with, and then recovering from, cancer. Working in collaboration with celebrated Scottish puppeteer Gavin Glover, the show seamlessly blends puppetry, contemporary dance, spoken text and Chinese Pole to navigate the deeply personal experience of illness, told with perseverance and play.
Bruno Gallagher’s Europe, Meine Liebe, Mon Amour: A performance in Five Absurdities fuses together five absurdist vignettes of physical performance through the mediums of object manipulation, mask play, costume, altered movement and dance. Inspired by memories and dreams of travels across Europe, the work is a journey of imagination accompanied by abstract soundscapes and elements of live and recorded music. As well as free performances at Lyra, vignettes will pop-up for free in city locations to be announced.
Opening the Festival’s live performance strand, Germany’s KMZ Kollektiv, an international collective based in Berlin with ties to Latin America, presents Coffee with Sugar?, a visually striking exploration of Western consumption and the legacies of colonialism, told through two now-staples of Western trade, coffee and sugar. Candyfloss, coffee beans, historical sources, video and music combine to confront the mechanics of colonial power and global injustice, bringing in biographical experience of the struggle between two worlds and the power imbalance of global consumerism.
Further international and UK performance will see familiar stories reimagined, including The Rite of Spring by Italian dance and performing arts collective Dewey Dell. After a sellout run at the Southbank Centre, this raw and powerful reimagining of Stravinsky’s revolutionary score makes its Scottish Premiere as part of Manipulate Festival. The piece draws inspiration from art history and the animal kingdom to explore the eternal cycle of life and death through an eclectic combination of breaking and contemporary dance.
Inspired by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Studio Daumza’s Kar invites audiences to a funeral dinner, steeped in Russian theatrical flair, where the guest of honour has come back to life. Imaginative cabaret, storytelling waiters, reanimated objects, puppetry, music and mischief all unite to bring the evening from solemn ritual into joyful chaos.
A collaboration between England’s Opposable Thumb Theatre and Norway’s Nordland Visual Theatre, Don Quixote (is a very big book) weaves together the crazed delusions of Don Quixote with the performer’s own struggle against reality. In a solo performance, Dik Downey delves into clowning and puppetry to create a surreal and joyous retelling of the famous novel to a contemporary audience, refusing to yield to the passage of time.
The Wood Paths from Latvia’s Theatre on Gertrude Street sees two performers, two logs, and two axes interweave on stage to bring a joyful and poetic journey to life. Exploring the human urge to create, to bring order to chaos, and to turn raw material into meaning, each performance becomes a distinctive world of creativity and playfulness that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Film Programme
In 2026, the Manipulate Festival film programme will be bigger than ever, based for the first time at Edinburgh’s iconic home of independent cinema – Filmhouse, showcasing the best and the bold from the imaginative world of animated storytelling.
In another historic first, the Festival will introduce its very first ‘in competition’ programme with a Scottish Showcase of animation from the last three years – Animated Scottish Shorts. The selection will seek to find the very best in Scottish animation, chosen by a jury of industry experts.
Further collections of shorts across the festival will include Animated Horror Shorts, showing the unique power of animation to bring to life the darker side of the human experience; Animated African Shorts, curated in partnership with the Edinburgh-based Jail Collective, will bring together some of the most exciting contemporary voices in African animation; and Animated Documentary Shorts will entertain, challenge, and educate with a deeply human selection of stories about the Ukraine War, Portuguese barnacles and an irreverent love letter.
A double bill feature film screening will showcase animation’s ability to explore deep human issues through a veil of playfulness, stunning imagery, and absurd humour, reflecting back our world in new ways.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day / ME offers two strikingly different yet deeply connected explorations of what it means to be a human in an increasingly fragmented world. Celebrated as one of the greatest animated films of all time, Don Hetzfelt’s masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day is a darkly humorous, poignant meditation on life, death and the fragile threads of consciousness. ME is an epic, wordless musical and political odyssey, exploring the tangled relationship between technology, narcissism and humanity’s retreat into itself, unfolding a mesmerising, sensory, emotional journey.
Finally, the much-loved One Bum Cinema Club will return to Manipulate Festival for another edition, showcasing a range of Scottish and international short animations in a personal cinema for one. Suitable for all ages, the One Bum Cinema will be situated at the Filmhouse for the duration of the Festival, as well as visiting community libraries around Edinburgh from January – March.
Festival Events
The Manipulate Festival Party taking over Summerhall’s Dissection Room on February 6 will feature pop up puppetry performances alongside headliners Fekete Seretlek – a Czech theatrical-folk music group who blend Balkan, Russian, Klezmer and other global music. Free but ticketed, everyone is invited to celebrate the magic of puppetry and performance and have a bit of a boogie.
Innovative sculptor Tim Davies Design’s iconic illuminated octopus puppet Ocho will make its way around Edinburgh in a series of pop-up performances. Ocho will be joined on parade by Scottish puppeteers Ronan McMahon and Gretchen Maynard-Hahn, working with young people from Wester Hailes in collaboration with WHALE Arts to design and create their own puppets to join Ocho the Octopus across the city. Ocho, a striking sight with eight fully articulated limbs that can be manipulated by a single puppeteer, will be followed through the streets by the Young People’s creations.
Works in progress and Professional Development
A Manipulate Festival staple, Snapshots returns to showcase works-in-progress from Scottish artists, spanning the visual theatre spectrum. Alys Williams & Duncan Geoffrey MacLeod; Jenna Watt; Ruxy Cantir & Sarah Rose Graber; and Andrea Cabrera Luna will tell bold new stories through puppetry, object theatre, physical theatre, circus and dance. Snapshots is an essential part of the Manipulate Festival ethos, feeding the creative process for Scottish theatre makers and inviting audiences a glimpse into the mechanics of how live art comes together, ensuring a vibrant, inspiring, and innovative future for puppetry and visual theatre in Scotland and beyond.
Professional workshops throughout the festival will explore the Theatre of Materials with KMZ Collective; Directing Visual Theatre with Opposable Thumb Theatre; Stop Motion Animation with Eleanor Stewart of Clubhouse Animation; a Breaking Workshop with trailblazing Italian dance collective Dewey Dell; and finally Airborne Artistry with Gretchen Maynard-Hahn, following on from her community work to explore the dynamic art of creating inflatable puppets for performance for professional artists.
www.manipulatearts.co.uk
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