Manipulate Festival explores the absurdity of empire

Thousands of coffee beans flying in the air, a tartan-clad dying relative, candyfloss puppets – these are not the usual images conjured when we think of European empires and their extraction of resources. This year at Manipulate Festival, though, two shows – Auntie Empire and Coffee with Sugar? – bring the dregs of empire back to our contemporary consciousness using humour and absurdity. 

KMZ KOLLEKTIV, a Berlin-based performance group founded by Laia RiCa, Antonio Cerezo, Yahima Piedra Cordova and Daniela del Pomar, presents a multi-sensory, emotional and yet funny exploration of colonial coffee plantations by Western Europe in Central America through Coffee with Sugar? Auntie Empire, Julia Taudevin’s bouffon theatre performance directed by Tim Licata, brings grotesque anarchic hilarity to the stage. Through the persona of ‘Auntie’, as Britannia herself, she gathers her family on her deathbed to witness her last will and testament – and make sure her legacy continues. 

Manipulate Festival’s focus on innovation in form is on display here as these shows revel in using a plethora of mediums to inform their visual theatre, especially to draw attention to the links between contemporary capital and coloniality. 

KMZ KOLLEKTIV uses material theatre as an avenue to interrogate pantry essentials we might not give a second thought to. “Coffee with Sugar? started with just coffee as the starting point, developing it as a character alongside [RiCa] on stage,” Cerezo, co-director tells us. 

“The work with the materials helped a lot in order to address this violence,” RiCa says. “What happens when we perform one of these German [plantation owners], but wearing a mask made of candy floss?” The combination of humour with sensorial elements like documentary visuals (produced by del Pomar) and live music (performed by Cordova), becomes a powerful tool to guide the performance away from condescension, and allows its complexities to be treated with gentleness. 

KMZ Kollektiv's Coffee With Sugar? Photo: Pablo Hassmann

Auntie Empire, by contrast, draws from its many previous iterations of itself to achieve the balance of mockery and provocation that it does. The show has existed purely as live-gore, a short film, a stand-up comedy show and a three-act play, and has evolved into bouffon theatre to hold up a mirror to society through subversive and intelligent satire.

Julia Taudevin shares that the experience of being at a screening of the short film and seeing the live reaction from the audience made her want to pursue an interactive version of Auntie Empire in theatre. Now, through puppeteering and bouffonery, Taudevin is able to manipulate bodies and ideas in a way that couldn’t necessarily be done with live actors. Taudevin explains, “I liked the idea of [puppets] being a construct, because the empire was also a construct… [both are] constructed by people.”  

While these ideas on contemporary culture signal a sophisticated aesthetic and form, the emotional notes are equally nuanced.

For RiCa and Cerezo, who have been working on this piece for over five years, the process has entailed constant confrontation of the parallels between the colonial interactions witnessed in the piece and their experience as Latinx performers in Berlin – a place where their particular history has been largely erased. Including vulnerable biographical fragments in the show makes this connection even more poignant. 

Through this explicit vulnerability, RiCa extends an invitation to the audience to engage with the piece on an emotional level, rather than just a rational one. The structural violence of colonial continualities cannot be solved by preaching the right kind of coffee to buy, but by addressing the deeper wounds – for example, the emotional ramifications of a racist commercial from a German coffee brand in the 90s. Coffee with Sugar? responds with absurdity to these queries, but urges us to feel their weight.

Auntie Empire sees a similarly complex emotional tenor. “'Auntie' is portrayed by a charismatic performer,” Licata, the director of Auntie Empire states, “[and] she's also a person that people were starting to both be disgusted by and feel pity for.”

After almost six years of being 'Auntie', Taudevin adds emphatically: “She is exhausting. I like saying goodbye to her... I like the last time I put the teeth back in the bag and seal it up.” To the team, while what 'Auntie' represents can be disgusting, being able to laugh at her also illuminates the discomfort of being implicated in any way with the history of Britain. 

Costumed in what Taudevin calls a ‘tartan-safari’ of Balmoral Scotland smattered with paisley prints signifying the spoils of empire, Auntie Empire does not shy away from calling out the nuances of Scotland being a subject of Britain, but also being complicit in the wealth accrued from colonial exploitation even today. 

“I don't think that Scotland has a huge relationship with parodying the British Empire, because we have this flawed notion that we're somehow pure,” says Taudevin, but adds that this show is certainly not an essay either. “It's a visceral experience that is presenting a question to the audience about who we are and how we live in the world, but not really attempting to answer it.” 

RiCa, when asked about what she wants to convey to a Scottish audience, said she wants to offer them a moment to reflect with their morning coffee; to create some discomfort in their lives, so that they continue to ask these questions of other things in their everyday life. 

With these two shows sharing space in Manipulate’s programme, audiences should be in for an interesting exercise balancing complex emotions. Being confronted with the absurdity of empire through theatre – its impact immediate – should stir people, should make them uncomfortable. But one might argue that an absence of feeling this in our everyday, while living in a modern empire, might be the most absurd thing of all. 

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Coffee With Sugar?, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 4-5 Feb, 6pm
Auntie Empire, Summerhall, Edinburgh, 8-9 Feb, 8pm

Manipulate Festival, various venues, 4-10 Feb

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