Manipulate Festival reviews: The Law of Gravity | Cartography

Cartography, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (work in progress – no star rating)

There’s no doubt that art forms can merge and interact to powerful effect; opera and ballet, after all, would barely exist without a synthesis between drama and other forms.

It’s a bold move, though, to seek to merge live classical music at the height of its powers with the kind of “object theatre” – using physical objects to create drama – celebrated in Edinburgh’s annual Manipulate Festival; and the The Law Of Gravity – a one-hour show co-created for the festival by the Scottish Ensemble and leading UK puppet theatre company Blind Summit – offers something of a roller-coaster ride through the potentials and pitfalls of that possible relationship.

We begin with the six members of the Ensemble standing or sitting in a conventional semi-circle, and delivering the first part of what becomes a truly brilliant performance of Philip Glass’s 3rd Symphony, followed by an equally powerful rendering of Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht.

In front of them sit four performers on chairs, each with a pile of sheets of A4 paper which they lift, move and show with infinite care; on the paper are child-like drawings that hint at the the theme of gravity – a falling apple, a series of fragments assembled briefly into an image of Isaac Newton, and then images of space flight (rockets, spacemen, planets with rings) that both defy gravity, and use it to bring us home from vast distances.

The main dissonance in the show therefore lies in the deliberate contrast between the exceptional high artistry of the musical performance, and the consciously naive and improvised quality of some of the images and objects that accompany it; a blown-up version of a child’s space-rocket drawing, panels and props made of roughly cut-up cardboard.

What’s not in doubt, though, is the beautiful and perfectly co-ordinated quality of movement achieved by the four performers, even when they are given the difficult task of moving the musicians around as they play, for example leading them to new positions by lifting and moving the screens on music stands that display the score.

There’s a theme, here, to do with the magnetic power of the bright screens that now dictate so much of our lives; and it eventually reaches a climax with the appearance of a very beautiful two-thirds life sized astronaut puppet, floating and dancing in space, led only by the light of a screen.

And always, there is the hugely eloquent driving power of the music, delivered by a Scottish Ensemble in tremendous form, superbly led by its director Jonathan Morton; who, together with Blind Summit’s Mark Down, has produced a show worth pondering, about a human race now poised between Earth and infinity.

Also on view during the early days of Manipulate 2025 was a fine collective event at the Fruitmarket Gallery, called Cartography, and beautifully co-ordinated by theatre-maker Al Seed as a work-in-progress exploration, involving six female artists, of the kind of intimate or one-to-one performance pioneered in Glasgow by the late and much-missed Adrian Howells.

In groups of four, over 50 minutes or so, the Cartography audience toured around six different experiences, three of them involving forms of live storytelling, and two where the audience group follow instructions on how to interact with a small but powerful installation.

For myself, I particularly enjoyed Edith Hicks’s meditation on the Vermeer painting Woman With A Jug, Fibi Cowley’s startlingly powerful brief group interaction inspired by the life cycle of a painted lady butterfly, and Kirsty May Hamilton’s vivid response in thread and fabric to the Red Riding Hood story. All six works, though, suggest a fascinating future for this emerging form of performance; one that seeks to offer profound moments of intimacy and connection, in a world where those seem ever harder to find.

The Manipulate Festival’s run in Edinburgh ends tomorrow. The Law of Gravity is at Glasgow Concert Hall New Auditorium tomorrow