Manipulate Festival: The Wood Paths

Two logs. Two axes. Two people.

A pause. Silence. Then the splinters fly. A tree cracks under pressure. But the people don’t stop.

What begins as labour becomes something magical, a joyful, ever-spiralling process of making and remaking. A playful, poetic journey through the human urge to create, to bring order to chaos and to turn raw matter into meaning. Wood Paths is a celebration of humanity’s endless creativity and our desire to understand, to shape, and to find beauty in the mess. With humour, rhythm, and wonder, the performance transforms raw wood into a living story, full of sound, silence, symmetry and surprise.

Directed by Andrejs Jarovojs, a master of poetic stage language and deep connection with his audience, each performance becomes a distinctive world with its own rules. Theatre becomes joy, craft becomes poetry, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

The Wood Paths is part of the Traverse's £1 Ticket Project.

Photo credit: Elmārs Sedols

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