Photograph: PR
You can rely on Edinburgh’s Manipulate festival to give you something you have never seen before. This year, it comes in the form of Simple Machines (★★★★☆), an opening weekend treat by Belgian choreographer Ugo Dehaes. His shtick is that it has become too expensive to employ dancers in his company Kwaad Bloed so he has followed the lead of big business and done away with them.
Just as Amazon embraces automation and supermarkets use self-service tills to make us do their work, so Dehaes has created a robot corps de ballet and got his audiences to develop their moves. We sit around a table to watch these dancing robots, some like snakes, others crabs, with rubbery flesh or mounds of black hair.
In a wry commentary on our brave new world, they are clunky and malfunctioning. And yet, in a culminating Swan Lake sequence, in which synchronised metal arms swing down over skittering insect dancers, they also have a mesmerising mechanical beauty.
It is a quirky delight, as is Envahisseurs (Invaders) (★★★☆☆), a 25-minute miniature by Olivier Rannou for Compagnie Bakélite. With his heavy eyes and pouting lip, the French performer looks like an alien squeezed uncomfortably into a human body as he plays out a table-top re-enactment of a 1950s UFO invasion. It is all briefcases, flying saucers and paranoia; very funny in its pyrotechnic invention and the landing of a jelly-like extraterrestrial.
Also playing with genre, albeit with less wit, is The House (★★☆☆☆), a teen-friendly puppet show by Denmark’s Sofie Krog theatre. Set in a rickety mansion – all flapping curtains and interior shadows – it is a gothic romp involving a forged will, a resourceful dog and a series of axe attacks. So far so daft, but there are too few visual surprises to offset the story’s silliness.
Al Seed’s Plinth (★★☆☆☆) has the opposite weakness and takes itself far too seriously. Operating in a narrow emotional range, it tries to say something important about the heroic male figure. Seed’s neck flexes, his arms twitch and his ribs ripple in a wordless piece that suggests the fallen of the first world war and the warriors of antiquity. But unless you regard the precision of his performance as an end in itself, it goes to a lot of effort to say very little.
By contrast, Ramesh Meyyappan makes his high-precision performance look effortless – even weightless. Last Rites (★★★★☆) is a sumptuous collaboration between the Glasgow performer and George Mann, director of Bristol’s Ad Infinitum. It describes a man’s final parting with his late father, a personal ritual before the traditional Hindu funeral. That could have been sentimental, not least because of the delicacy of Meyyappan’s performance, making you believe in every last fingertip of the dead man’s body. But although the story is fiction, it is invested with a rage that can only be real.
Washing the corpse is an act of tenderness but also a trigger for violent memories, of a son unable to communicate with a father who refused to learn sign language, of an education system that discriminated against him, of a 10-year estrangement, of a grandson cut off from the family line.
With a tremendous score by Akintayo Akinbode and sympathetic lighting by Ali Hunter on Katie Sykes’s elemental set, it is a knotty mix of love and recrimination in which the personal and the political collide.
• Manipulate festival is at various venues in Edinburgh until 11 February
