Manipulate Festival: The Law of Gravity
★★★★★ Ethereal
Manipulate @ Traverse: Thurs 13 Feb 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
A collaboration between pioneering music group Scottish Ensemble and innovative puppet company Blind Summit, The Law of Gravity is an exploration and collision of the boundaries between two diverse disciplines; where they exist, where they can be bent, where they can be broken and remade.
Under the artistic direction of Scottish Ensemble’s leader Jonathan Morton and Blind Summit’s master puppeteer Mark Down, some of these questions are answered – and even more remain to be explored.
The Law of Gravity. Pic: Viktoria Begg
Opening with two nested semi circles of music stands on a bare stage, the smaller accompanied by short stools, the only obvious indication of what may be to come lies in two wheeled platforms in the larger circle, with their music stands heavily gaff-taped in place. The musicians emerge to inhabit the larger circle (cellists taking their place on the platforms), and the puppeteers the smaller. With a sharp nod, the musicians begin to play.
What follows is not necessarily what one might expect from “puppetry,” traditionally; rather, the puppeteers enliven sheet after sheet of paper, raised in coordination from their music stands, embodying the sound rising from behind them. Music notes, rests, tempo and volume markings, are lifted and tossed aside; then other things begin to join them: planets, stars, spaceships, and words: the law of gravity states every particle attracts every other particle in the universe…
impelling them invisibly
As the first piece of music unfolds (Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3, arranged by Michael Riesman), the puppeteers leave their seats, clear their papers, clear their stools, until finally and with care, they begin to move the musicians. Until this point, it has seemed as though the music moved the puppeteers, impelling them invisibly; now the puppeteers lead the musicians about the stage by the movement of their music stands, and revolution of the wheeled platforms, and the music seems to respond.
The Law of Gravity. Pic: Viktoria Begg
The beginning of the second piece, Arnold Shoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transformed Night), begins, appropriately enough, in darkness. Joined by a scattered sparkling of glowing spike-tape on the stage itself, the musicians glow and flicker like stars in an empty cosmos as they play the brightness on the tablet screens that contain their music, a soundless prelude to the coming segment.
In this piece the puppeteers manipulate a range of objects: after having piloted the musicians into a line facing upstage, illuminated only faintly in silhouette by their tablets, the puppeteers take up large rectangles of cardboard, and begin a ballet through the night.
subsumed
Now lit from the sides and moving through swirling through haze, they flicker from light to shadow, demonstrating the puppeteers art of becoming fully subsumed in their puppet, whether it be a Skeksis or a piece of cardboard. At this point it becomes abundantly clear that although the emphasis of this piece is on the interaction between music and puppetry, Kai Fischer’s lighting design is as integral a character as either of these.
The Law of Gravity. Pic: Viktoria Begg
The puppets evolve, sketching the story of a spaceflight, until at last the music draws forth a life-sized, fully realised, many-jointed puppet; an astronaut, caught between spacewalk and ballet. Skilfully manipulated by three of the production’s four puppeteers, the astronaut dances ecstatically through space, orbited by the glowing light of a music tablet, which circles and weaves in the hands of the fourth puppeteer.
The timing of each sequence of The Law of Gravity is impeccable; assisted by the movements of the music, each section is well defined and perfectly paced, right up to the final moment when, restored to their original positions, the musicians and puppeteers alike fade into the darkness, wraiths in backlit blue, anonymously returning to stasis.
Music is invisible; puppets are silent. But together, in the hands of humans who, as Morton writes, “pick up inanimate objects and, somehow, breathe life into them,” they collide in a combustion of harmonious unity; the creation of something new.
Running time: One hour and 5 minutes (no interval), followed by 30 min Q&A
Traverse Theatre, 10 Cambridge Street, EH1 2ED.
Thurs 13 February 2025
One performance: 8pm.
Run ended: Details
Scottish Ensemble website: https://scottishensemble.co.uk
Blind Summit website: www.blindsummit.com
The Law of Gravity. Pic: Monica Gowans
ENDS
