Manipulate (Live Blog on the Bus): Buzzcut

The opening night of manipulate was an appropriately post-modern take on the cabaret format: the audience found themselves in four different spaces, moving from the intimate one-to-one of Five Minutes To Move Me through the longer performances of Sarah Hopfinger, Murray Wason and Harry Wilson, to the finale with Carles Casallachs’ Por Sal Y Samba. The emphasis on physical theatre reflects the influence of curators Buzzcut, who have spent the past year garnering a reputation for taking performance into unfamiliar places, although Por Sal Y Samba has enough funky choreography to count as dance.

Five Minutes To Move Me has become Buzzcut’s signature strand: a series of one-on-one pieces, lasting five minutes, it has turned up at youth days and international visual art festivals alike. Bringing together artists both new (Corrie McKendrick is still studying at the RCS) and familiar (Ian Nulty has graced both Glasgay! and Arches Live!), it challenges the artist to condense an idea into a short, intimate routine.

The longer pieces, meanwhile, mark Buzzcut’s ongoing relationship with emerging artists. Both Hopfinger and Wason are graduates of the Contemporary Performance Practice degree at the RCS, and their work is personal and bears the traces of Live Art’s enthusiasm for community and performance theory. Running towards the hour, they have space to explore their ideas and display their wide range of performance techniques.

Por Sal Y Samba, coming in at around twenty minutes and finishing off the evening comes from a very different tradition. Deconstructing the sensuality of samba, and exposing the violence lurking behind the sway of the hips, it shifts rapidly from entertaining display to a no-holds barred battle of the sexes.

Establishing physical theatre’s place within the visual theatre festival, Buzzcut @Manipulate takes advantage of Summerhall’s multiple venues and, by using old lecture theatres, brings out something of physical theatre’s academic bent. Wason’s Automaton includes a brief history of robotics and Hopfinger’s performance with even year old Carragh McLiven is framed by two white boards that highlight the mutual learning processes that are happening within Age Old.

The loose format of the evening is appropriate to the content: there are plenty of “works in progress” and both Wason and Hopfinger are hinting at ideas, both theatrical and intellectual, rather than pursuing a specific argument.

It is a gentle introduction to the festival, questioning rather than demonstrative, encouraging an intimacy between performers and audience, and refusing to make any grand declarations about performance. Situated within a festival that has its roots in puppetry, Buzzcut@Manipulate recasts physical theatre - in itself a relatively recent genre within a broader tradition.