Coffee-Table Notes

The robots are coming in this year’s Manipulate festival of animation, puppetry and visual theatre. As AI technology increasingly takes over the world in a way that goes beyond sci-fi paranoia, Manipulate’s constituency of international performance makers are already playing with the possibilities of hi-tech.   Puppetry, animation and object-based theatre are arguably halfway there already in terms of incorporating non-human players into the mix. Out of this comes an ongoing series of pas de deux between man (and woman) and machine. So it goes with several shows in the 2024 Manipulate programme.    Ruins sees the Megahertz company in association with Feral fuse choreography and digital technology inside a video cube to explore the potential for news ways of being beyond ecological disaster.    On film, Junk Head is a stop-motion sci-fi action thriller set in a distant futurescape in which mankind has forgotten how to procreate, while a human created species has ...

It was twenty years ago more or less today when Usurper announced themselves to the world. That was after the duo of Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson joined forces to move beyond their tenure with the rumbling behemoth that was Giant Tank to do something a whole lot quieter. Working with dismantled instruments and what looked like a table full of car boot sale detritus, Usurper mixed an array of off-kilter sound effects with goofy verbal exchanges that made for a kind of Zen art cabaret.   After two decades, Usurper’s Dadaist double act is pulling the plug on proceedings. To say cheerio, they have gathered the clans for That’s That Then, in which friends, conspirators and fellow travellers join forces for one last blowout.   “I guess Usurper died of COVID,” says Robertson of the duo’s parting. “We came out the other end of the pandemic and it didnae feel like something we wanted to continue doing.”   Duff concurs.   “ I've decided to concentrate fully on my cartooning,” ...

Kayus Bankole was never taught about Edinburgh’s role in the slave trade when he went to Boroughmuir High School, where he met Alloysious Massaquoi. The pair would go on to form Young Fathers with Graham ‘G’ Hastings, with the band going on to win both the Scottish Album of the Year and the Mercury Music Prize with a multi-cultural mash-up of righteous bombast on their albums, Tape Two and Dead, respectively. The trio followed up with White Men Are Black Men, Too and Cocoa Sugar, and featured extensively on the soundtrack for Danny Boyle’s Irvine Welsh adaptation, T2 Trainspotting. Now, Bankole is seeing in the new year with his contribution to this year’s edition of Message from the Skies. Edinburgh’s Hogmanay’s city-wide series of site-specific installations combines newly commissioned texts by five writers with brand new visual projections and sound scores. The event is run in partnership by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay producers, Underbelly in association with Edinburgh UNESCO City of...

Angus Farquhar has had quite a decade. This is something the former driving force behind environmental auteurs NVA and post-industrial agit-provocateurs Test Dept. might wish to mull over in the unlikely event he can find a quiet moment on Hogmanay next week. Farquhar will be seeing out the year playing as one half of Second Citizen, his new marimba-based duo formed with classically trained percussionist Cameron Sinclair, who make their live club debut as part of Optimo’s End of the Decade Party in Glasgow. Second Citizen was launched at Dear Europe, an internationalist performance cabaret presented by the National Theatre of Scotland on the day Brexit was originally earmarked to take place. Farquhar introduced the performance with a spoken-word prologue that expounded on what Europe meant to him on both a personal and professional level, following it up with a mesmerising duet of rhythmic physicality. “It was my response as a European to what’s happening in Britain, and the b...