Performance, Place, and Politics

Push 2012 Review #11: Almighty Voice and His Wife at The Waterfront

2012-02-02T07:21:00.001-08:00

As PuSh Festival Senior Curator Sherrie Johnson and I were discussing last night after the premiere of Daniel David Moses' Almighty Voice and His Wife at the Waterfront Theatre, it's hard to believe the piece was written and first premiered way back in 1991. That's how theatrically audacious and representationally daring the piece is, made even more so in this compelling production from Canada's premiere Aboriginal theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts, which is here vividly directed by Michael Greyeyes in a co-presentation with Touchstone and Pi Theatres as part of this year's Aboriginal Performance Series at the Festival.

The play is a two-hander told over two acts and based on historical incidents. Almighty Voice is a Cree man from the One Arrow Reserve in Saskatchewan who is arrested after poaching a cow. He escapes from prison and a manhunt is initiated by the Northwest Mounted Police. Hiding out at his mother's home with his wife, White Girl, who has already had a terrifying vision of his demise, Almighty Voice prepares for the inevitable shootout. When it comes, it is brutal and bloody. All of this is told in a fairly straightforward manner over 10 compact scenes, the titles of which are announced in a Brechtian manner by White Girl. However, this metatheatrical conceit--together with the almost deliberately anthropological/dioramic way (most of the scenes are played in a single large centre spot on an otherwise bare stage) this "true story of the dying Plains Indian" is staged by Greyeyes--is a clue to what's coming next.

Indeed, returning from intermission the audience discovers the stage now cluttered with props, the flies open to expose the wings, and a cue card dangling from the rafters announcing Act 2: Ghost Dance. The actors themselves, we soon discover, return in white face, with White Girl now additionally dressed like a Mountie and, true to the interlocutor/impresario role she now takes on, charged with getting the person she addresses as Almighty Ghost to perform his Indianness for us. Combining aspects of the vaudeville routine and the minstrel and medicine shows, the second act is a series of increasingly outrageous and high-stakes riffs on "redskin" stereotypes, addressed directly to the audience. Indeed, in Act 2 Moses doesn't just break the fourth wall, he explodes it, with both Mr. Interlocutor and Almighty Ghost coming out into the audience at various points, and each strategically playing to and upon our ideological sympathies in order to gain the upper hand.

And it is this last point that makes Moses' play at once so groundbreaking and compellingly contemporary, for it accomplishes via its canny structure the double task of exposing both real and representational violence to us, theatricalizing Aboriginal stereotypes and then catching us in the act of succumbing to them. It is risky material, to be sure (think of some of the backlash and misinterpretation that accompanied Spike Lee's film Bamboozled), and it takes very accomplished performers to bring it off successfully, capturing both the ironic comedy and the tragic drama underlying the jokes. Happily, the incredibly talented Derek Garza and PJ Prudat are more than up to the task, and kudos must go to all the artists involved in bringing this masterpiece of Canadian drama back to the stage.

Almighty Voice and His Wife continues at the Waterfront through this Saturday.

Push 2012 Review #10: No. 2 at The Cultch

2012-02-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

No. 2, which the PuSh Festival is co-presenting with the Cultch through this Saturday, is a virtuosic performance in search of a more tonally coherent and satisfyingly constructed play. In this solo work by Toa Fraser (who subsequently directed a multi-character film adaptation), the amazing Madeleine Sami plays all nine roles, starting with Nanna Maria, the matriarch of a large Fijian family living in New Zealand who decides one morning that she will name her successor, and calls upon her grandchildren to help prepare a feast (the second generation being "worthless"). Enlisting a range of sharply delineated voices, physical gestures, and postures, Sami then introduces us in turn to: the dependable Erasmus, charged with finding a pig to roast; granddaughters Charlene and Hibiscus, enlisted to prepare the accompanying curries; the feckless Soul, who only seems to be good for stirring up trouble; rugby-playing Tyson, who seems to be Nanna Maria's favourite, and who brings with him his English girlfriend, also named Maria; and the young Moses, whom Sami brings to hilarious life in all his childish excitability. The ninth character is Father Francis, the local priest whom Nanna Maria invites to make the event more authentically Sicilian, in honour of her dead husband, who fought in Italy during the war, and with whom she is still in the habit of communicating.

Alone on stage, save for the chair from which Nanna Maria issues her directives, Sami is able to switch back and forth between characters with expert precision, telegraphing each grandchild's relationship with the battleaxe--and with each other--via a tone of weary resignation (Erasmus) or aggrieved martyrdom (Hibiscus and Charlene) or uncertain worry (Tyson) or innocent obliviousness (Moses and, in his way, Soul). Dramaturgically, however, I feel that Nanna Maria's own motives in naming her successor, and her somewhat fickle and random manipulations of her grandchildren, are left unexplained, or else are not provided enough internal context (or conflict).

SPOILER ALERT! Early on, it appears that Tyson will be the anointed one, even though, as per Fijian matriarchal custom, it would make more sense to name either Charlene or Hibiscus. This would seem to be confirmed especially after Nanna Maria starts warming to Tyson's girlfriend, with whom she gets drunk on grog and gin while the others do all the work, and whom she starts calling her adopted daughter. But by the time the feast is prepared, she seems to be taking direction from little Moses and when, in a surprise move, she ends up picking the person who appears the least responsible, Soul, we do have to wonder if she hasn't been having everybody on. Perhaps she sees in Soul, whose dance music mix and consequent flirtation with Tyson's Maria gets the party going in a way (i.e., with fighting) that appeals to Nanna Maria, a fun-loving kindred spirit, someone who reminds her of her departed husband. A final tableau of Nanna Maria dancing with what we assume to be the ghost of said husband partly supports such a reading. But the play ends so abruptly after the announcement of Soul's elevation, and Charlene's purse-lipped command for everyone to eat, that the invitation to find more depth in Nanna Maria's thinking is denied.

All of which is not to say that the evening did not contain an abundance of other pleasures--nine of them, to be precise. Indeed, for the skill and sheer exuberance (even still, after 10 years playing the roles!) with which Sami sketches each of the characters in this work, No. 2 is not to be missed.

PuSh 2012 Review #9: Turning Point's Colourful World at SFU Woodward's

2012-01-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

These are some of the colours I heard last night at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's, where the magnificent Turning Point Ensemble performed a full evening of music as part of the PuSh Festival.

Morton Feldman's "Short Trumpet Piece," a solo overture played by Marcus Goddard from the back of the auditorium, heralded bright sunbursts in advance of "Rain Coming," a short orchestral work by Toru Takemitsu that was as changeable in its tonality as Vancouver weather, and that put me in mind of the way the German painter Gerhard Richter is able to capture the complexity and startling vibrancy of so many shades of grey.

Next up was a 1915 cello sonata by Claude Debussy. In this intimate and playful work in three movements, the call and response between Ariel Barnes on cello and Jane Hayes on piano, particularly in the middle movement when both set about plucking their instruments in striking ways, conjured a dance of light and shadow, as when late afternoon sun filters through a leafy tree on a windy day and dapples the sidewalk in constantly shifting patterns.

Then came the centrepiece of the evening, the world premiere of Rodney Sharman's Chamber Symphony. Written in two movements, the first was a weird and wonderful jangle of dissonant sounds, like silvery icicles crackling in a wintry landscape that can't decide if it's warming up or getting colder. Things definitely get hotter in the second movement, a rousing take on the scherzo form, the strings now alighting a red flame beneath the other instruments.

After intermission there were two more works by Takemitsu and Debussy. Takemitsu's "Archipelago S." positioned the ensemble in five separate instrumental groups--including clarinetists François Houle and Caroline Gauthier in the upper balconies stage left and right--lonely islands connected by a deep blue sea of sound. And finally we heard Debussy's "Jeux," newly arranged by Michael Bushnell. Listening to its bright tempo changes (and influenced no doubt by the original Ballet Russes commission), I couldn't help seeing tennis whites, albeit requisitely dotted with strategic grass stains.

A most enjoyable evening of music, and a fitting tribute to Milton Wong, to whom the concert was dedicated.

PuSh 2012 Review #8: Hot Pepper... at SFU Woodward's

2012-01-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

Three years ago, at the 2009 PuSh Festival, Richard and I sat in Performance Works (next to soon-to-be Associate Curator Dani Fecko, in fact) and watched a group of young Japanese actors interact in a succession of oblique scenes in front of a white backdrop. The surtitles projected onto that backdrop suggested that most of the exchanges concerned whether or not these curiously affectless characters should leave off talking about the mostly banal goings on in their lives and join a protest wending its way through the streets of Tokyo, and gradually it became apparent that the historical backdrop to the piece was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mostly, however, I paid scant attention to the surtitles, so mesmerized was I by the curious gestural patterns and bouncy-jerky movements repeated by the actors as they spoke their dialogue.

Five Days in March was my first introduction to the work of Tokyo's chelfitsch Theatre Company and its quirky artistic director, Toshiki Okada. So taken was I with his unique juxtaposition of speech and movement that when I learned the company was coming back to this year's Festival with a new work, I immediately put it on my list of must-see shows. Last night I caught the final performance of Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech at SFU Woodward's Studio T, and it did not disappoint.

As per its title, the piece is divided into three related vignettes, all set within an unnamed office in Tokyo. In the first, three temporary workers discuss the farewell party they have been charged with organizing for Erika, a fellow part-time employee who is being let go. Their worries about where to hold the party, and what sort of cuisine Erika might like, gradually give way to speculation on which of them might be next to be axed, and what they'd like to eat at their own farewell dinner. Next up, two permanent workers--one male, one female--have a bizarrely circuitous and increasingly aggressive conversation about the temperature in the office. Finally, Erika herself is given the floor, her brief farewell remarks eventually turning into an epic story about how the shoes she has worn nearly every day to work for almost two years remind her of mating penguins, and the cicada she stepped on with them outside her apartment that morning.

All of this is told against a similarly stark white backdrop, onto which surtitles are again projected. But so, at various points, are kaleidoscopic washes of colour that, together with a soundtrack of cool jazz and pulsating electronica, enhance the surreal quality of the piece. However, nothing contributes more to that overall effect than the trademark movement patterns of the chelfitsch actors as they speak their lines. Waving fans, walking on their heels, rubbing arms and legs obsessively, and generally contorting their limbs and bodies into all sorts of strange positions, the staccato choreography suggests a generation of young people chafing not just against the facade of office decorum, but against their diminished expectations more generally.

Social realism is definitely not chelfitsch's aesthetic stock in trade; but compelling social commentary is nevertheless the result.

PuSh 2012 Review #7: Guided Tour at the Vancouver Art Gallery

2012-01-28T08:15:00.000-08:00

Anyone who saw City of Dreams at last year's PuSh Festival knows of UK artist Peter Reder's uncanny ability to reveal a city anew to its residents. In that piece the pleasure of rediscovery was facilitated by the creation of an evolving historical and geographical map of Vancouver on the floor of the Roundhouse using a succession of everyday objects and found artifacts. This year Reder is back with Guided Tour, a site-specific work co-presented with Boca Del Lupo and the Vancouver Art Gallery that transports an audience of 30 after hours through the hidden corridors of the latter institution.

The fact that Reder first premiered this piece at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005, and has since toured it to different galleries, museums and auditoriums in Russia, Romania, Singapore, Spain, and the United States should clue us in to the fact that, as our guide, Reder is not particularly interested in revealing the complete history and design of a building about which many of us in the audience know as much, if not more, than him. And, indeed, when at the start of last night's 9 pm tour, while we were standing in the magnificent first floor rotunda, one man asked a question about the concrete construction, Reder happily admitted that he hadn't the faintest idea what the answer might be. This is not to say that Reder hasn't done his research, delving into the building's origins as a courthouse and discussing with some authority its architectural conversion into an art gallery in the 1980s by Arthur Erickson.

But he is also up front in telling us that, as far as he has been able to determine, that's all the history there is to the place, just two layers: its present use and its past heritage. The competing dialectic between these temporal and spatial poles, and between which is real and which ersatz (the preserved courtroom that's now used as a film set or the representations of representations on the gallery walls?), obscures all of the sedimented layers in between, piling them up like rubble before the leaden feet of Walter Benjamin's recording angel. We actually meet that angel at the end of the tour: deep in the bowels of the building, among piles of crated art and empty display cases, she appears before us on a video, a sweet old granny wearing fluffy white wings, sipping tea, and reading Proust.

This is not the first juxtaposition of the two writers. Earlier in the tour, when we are shown into the gallery library, and someone in the group comments on the smell of old books, Reder launches into a discussion of Marcel biting into the tea-soaked madeleine in La Recherche, and the involuntary memories that come flooding back to him as a result. Afterwards, in the hallway outside, Reder pauses briefly to discuss Benjamin's angel of history being blown backwards into the future. And this, I would argue, is the more compelling dialectic at work in the piece: the juxtaposition of the violence of institutional history, which seeks not just to obliterate the past, but to re-purpose it, with the counter-narrative of personal memory, which always partially exceeds or escapes or resists aesthetic capture and exhibitionary display. How else to explain Reder's family slide show near the end of the tour, which far from containing his experiences within the gallery setting actually succeeds in taking us out of what we think that space should be for?

At the outset of the tour Reder informs us that in preparation he has been reading various "how to" guides on being a guide, and among other things learning various phrases to deploy on his audiences. The most important one, he tells us, is "follow me." And that, by the end of this intimate and revelatory piece, is precisely what we have done.

PuSh 2012 Review #6: Looking for a Missing Employee at the Roundhouse

2012-01-27T07:10:00.001-08:00

On September 25, 1996, a low-level bureaucrat in Lebanon's Ministry of Finance disappeared. Shortly thereafter there appeared a small item in one of Beirut's daily newspapers announcing this fact, and tying the disappearance to the loss of several billion Lebanese pounds from the coffers of the Ministry. A few days later the disappeared man's wife published an item denouncing the slander against her husband and appealing for information concerning his whereabouts. And so things continued for the next four months, with different newspapers tracking the story: quoting government sources and the disappeared man's family in equal measure; regularly reporting on the fluctuating amount of money stolen; implicating other individuals; linking the whole affair to a coincident scandal involving fraudulent stamps; and gradually revealing the depths of corruption within several other ministries.

Following every twist and turn in the story was Lebanese performance artist Rabih Mroué, who clipped related items from three different newspapers and pasted them into notebooks. Mroué has brought these notebooks with him to the PuSh Festival (in a performance co-presented with the Grunt and Contemporary Art Galleries), and out of this textual archive he weaves a Kafkaesque tale (and, yes, there is at one point a reference to a Josef K.) of deception, innuendo, and rumour that is as intriguing for how it is presented as for what it says. Indeed, because Mroué reconstructs the story of the missing employee entirely from published newspaper accounts that are two decades old, and for an international audience that would in large part be significantly removed--not just temporally and geographically, but also culturally and politically--from their import, drama and suspense must be created via their re-presentation and remediation. To that end, the notebooks of clipped and pasted newspaper articles are projected onto a screen via an overhead camera, with Mroué flipping through them and summarizing their content in largely chronological order, occasionally offering a comic aside or barbed comment on the contradictions contained within them, but for the most part literally letting them speak for themselves.

Except, of course, that it is Mroué doing the speaking, acting as our medium by translating the accounts from Arabic into English, and by helping to place the specifics of the missing employee's story in the larger political and cultural context not just of Lebanon, but of the entire Middle East region (the various reports of the employee having absconded to either Egypt or Syria or the no-man's land between Lebanon and Israel offer an occasion for Mroué to make oblique references to both present and past conflicts). Moreover, the spectral quality of Mroué's second-hand reportage is further enhanced by the fact that he does not sit, à la Spalding Gray (with whom he has justly been compared), at the empty table and chair positioned centre stage to tell us his tale, but rather among us in the audience, with his image then projected onto a small screen just behind the chair. It's an eerie and uncanny effect: Mroué is at once materially among us, re-discovering and in effect co-creating the story of the missing employee with us; at the same time, he is electronically and digitally removed from us, a virtual Big Brother governing how we receive the story. And, in this regard, the careful spectator starts to observe how Mroué at various moments chooses to edit the newspapers' own editing of the story, saying he is at loss for how to translate some of the Arabic phrasings, deciding not to convey the content of some of the articles at all, going back and forth between different newspapers at strategic moments, and censoring some of the accompanying photographs from our view.

How, in the end, can we know what is true and what is a lie? This is in fact the question put to us at the start of the show by Ghassan Halawani, the visual artist who is Mroué's performance collaborator. Like Mroué, Halawani sits among us in the audience, but with blank sheets of bristol board in front of him, and upon which he first writes a couple of epigraphs (including the one about truth and lies being only a hair's breadth apart) and then attempts to construct the timeline and order the facts of the missing employee's story. By the end of Mroué's spoken account of that story, Halawani's visual record is a mess of scratched out names, competing figures, and cancelled possibilities, its inadequacy as a final explanation for what happened underscored (or overwritten?) by the water that Halawani squirts upon the board at the end, blurring the different colour-coded jottings into a hopeless jumble.

As for Mroué, after he finishes recounting the missing employee's story, he continues to stare at us from the small centre-stage screen--even after the house lights come up, even after he receives a smattering of applause, even as the audience gets up to leave. It's a challenge that makes us uncomfortable, maybe because it implicates us in the double violence done to the employee (real and textual), maybe because it refuses us the closure promised by the last of the recited newspaper items. As Mroué's witty, complex, and ultimately chilling piece shows, there is always more than one story to be told.

Looking for a Missing Employee continues at the Roundhouse through this Saturday; a talkback with the artist moderated by Vanessa Kwan follows this evening's performance.

PuSh 2012 Review #5: Do You Want What I Have Got? at Arts Club Revue Stage

2012-01-25T06:11:00.000-08:00

I've only ever used Craigslist once: to sell a sofa. But I have friends and family members and colleagues and students who swear by it: to buy or trade all sorts of items; to find apartments or roommates; and, yes, to hook up. The concomitant (maybe consequent?) loss or proof of selfhood within our consumer culture is a major theme in Bill Richardson and Veda Hille's Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata, on at the Arts Club Revue Stage until February 11th. Or, as one of their songs puts it, "acquisition and attrition." That could also easily describe my experience last night watching this hilarious and surprisingly moving show. For every moment of laugh-out-loud mirth I greedily lapped up over the course of its intermissionless 90 minutes, I was also emotionally undone by the vulnerability and desperation that clearly underscored so many of the lyrics.

That those lyrics come almost wholly from actual want ads culled by Richardson from the online classifieds site Craigslist is the central conceit of this sung-through musical, first developed as part of Theatre Replacement's 20 Minute Musicals offering at Club PuSh in 2009. With additional lyrics and original music provided by collaborator and co-writer Veda Hille, those ads are here shaped into a rich and deeply affecting portrait of the virtual marketplace, filled with longed for exchanges and missed connections. Indeed, for every song cataloguing something to buy or sell (headless dolls, a collection of stuffed penguins, a dead moose, a bathtub full of noodles) there is another opining a fleeting encounter at a coffee shop, a wordless look exchanged on a street corner, a stolen glance on a bus. The wistful "Did you see me?" becomes the counterpoint to the more assertive hawk of the title refrain.

All of this is perfectly captured by a ridiculously talented cast. J. Cameron Barnett is hilarious and heartbreaking in a number about offloading old dance trophies, which also allows him to show off a mean plié; later he also rocks out, including on the saxophone, in a unique take on male bonding. Dmitry Chepovetsky (the best thing about last year's This, at the Playhouse) brings down the house in a gypsy-inspired tune soliciting the attention of a pretty lady to whom he briefly said "Hi, hi, hi." Bree Greig is a standout from beginning to end, her powerful soprano and expressive face and body able to convey both pure innocence (in that song about the penguins, or the opening number about the guy she smelled on the bus) and down and dirty raunch (as in a Liza Minnelli-like bit about the roommate she doesn't want). And Selina Martin brings layers of hidden depth and subtle pathos to her mostly deadpan delivery in a variety of roles, including a woman mourning the death of her cat and another who edits Craigslist ads for grammar and spelling.

Joining these four on stage are Hille on piano and Barry Mirochnick on percussion (and a variety of other instruments). Hille also harmonizes throughout, and gets her own occasional solos (including a nice homage to Steve Jobs). Even Mirochnick sings an ode to a toupé. As with everything Hille composes and arranges, the score is just the right mix of catchy and quirky, and true to the cantata form is made up of a mix of recitative (as when different ads are sung through verbatim) and more lyrical songs repeated throughout at different intervals. It makes so much sense to apply this traditionally sacred musical form to a topic that is so profane, and I hope a cast album is recorded soon.

A shout out, as well, to director Amiel Gladstone for building a recognizable dramatic arc out of the material, for making great use of the Revue Stage space, and for keeping things moving at breakneck speed. Set designer Ted Roberts works magic with a bunch of strung-up lamps, the analogue technology by which we compose our digital dreams--which lighting designer John Webber in turn shines successive spots on with precise aplomb.

Everything about this show has the makings of a hit, and--despite the various local references in the lyrics (which, of course, can be easily adapted)--one that will definitely travel well. Could an extended run and then a tour follow, maybe even to New York? Although a chamber piece ideally suited to an intimate space like the one in which it is currently playing, I can also see this easily filling, whether in the same or expanded form, a much larger house. Drowsy Chaperone anyone? Get tickets now so that you can say you saw it when.

PuSh 2012 Review #4: Eve Egoyan at Heritage Hall

2012-01-24T07:34:00.000-08:00

Classical music is the one performance modality about which I have always felt reluctant to offer critical commentary. I simply lack the knowledge and technical vocabulary to describe it accurately and in depth. But I do know what I like, including the repertoire of contemporary minimalist composers like Arvo Pärt (everything) and Philip Glass (not quite everything). I admit that I am shamefully ignorant of much of the oeuvre of the late Canadian composer Ann Southam, who blazed a trail both acoustically and electronically for women composers in this country until her untimely death in 2010. Last night that was remedied somewhat as the PuSh Festival, partnering with the amazing Music on Main series curated by David Pay, presented Eve Egoyan playing "Simple Lines of Enquiry," a piece composed for her by Southam in 2007.

"Simple Lines" is a 60-minute piece structured in 12 movements, each exploring what Southam calls "the emotional possibilities ... and the sonorities" within a 12-interval row. It is a gently contemplative piece; there is no percussive banging of the piano keys, and the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves. Indeed, watching Egoyan's body as it rose and fell with each intake of breath, as her hands seemed to glide over rather than press upon the keyboard, and as she applied more or less pedal, reminded me that there is more than one way to create resonance from such a magnificent instrument (a Fazioli grand in this case). The ambient sounds of Heritage Hall and Main Street inevitably became part of the piece as well, with the clock tower's striking of 9 pm creating an especially wonderful counterpoint around the same movement in the work. However, I was less taken with some of the sounds created by my fellow patrons: I understand why drinks are served at such events, but can we not restrict them to beer and wine? Ice clinking in plastic cups is the last thing one wants to hear during a work like this.

Though beautiful to listen to, I wouldn't say that "Simple Lines" is the easiest work to sit through. In my struggle to make as little noise as possible, I found myself holding my breath and my limbs cramping at certain points. But, strangely, this disciplining of the body opens up further avenues into the music, almost like chakras traveling up one's spine, reminding one that the sound and silence are part of the same continuum.

Egoyan plays "Simple Lines" again this evening at 8 pm.

Superhuman Steps

2012-01-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

Richard and I played hooky from PuSh last night in order to attend DanceHouse's presentation of La La La Human Steps at the Centre on Homer Street. "New Work" (that is, in fact, the title of the piece), by La La La's Artistic Director and Choreographer, Édouard Lock, is set to updated scores of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Glück's Orpheus and Eurydice--by Gavin Bryars and Blake Hargreaves, respectively--and features a pianist, violinist, cellist, and saxophonist performing live on stage alongside the dancers (hence Vancouver New Music coming on board as a co-presenter of this piece).

New work, but trademark Lock steps: tight, precise, lightening quick, and with the graceful muscularity we have come to expect from La La La's women dancers, in particular, who are almost always en pointe, and whose quarter, half, and full pirouettes during partnering were dizzying. Those turns, like the rapidly fluttering arm extensions and movements of all the dancers, were given an added cinematic quality--akin to the early stop-motion experiments of an Eadweard Muybridge, for example--by the dramatic lighting for the piece, which consisted almost entirely of overhead follow-spots, and which, in addition to always keeping the dancers half in shadow, had the effect of creating momentary visual traces of their impossibly fast movements. If it is often said that dancers sculpt air, then this is one occasion where I can say that I actually saw how that happens.

One final element of the piece is the inclusion of a series of black and white filmed portraits of several of La La La's female dancers. These descend from the rafters at select moments in the work, and consist of extended close-ups of face and torso, both in the sitters' current glowing youthfulness and--via make-up and wigs--in terms of what they might look like in old age. Were these meant to be Dido and Eurydice, caught between youthful passion and bitter regret? I hesitate to make direct narrative and thematic connections in Lock's work, but whatever their meaning they were as compelling to watch as the dance itself.

PuSh 2012 Review #3: The Idiot at Freddy Wood

2012-01-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

The creative team behind Crime and Punishment, the award-winning theatrical adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel that played the 2005 PuSh Festival, is back with another large-scale interpretation of one of the Russian writer's novels. Commissioned by Neworld Theatre in conjunction with PuSh (through the Arts Partners in Creative Development program), and in partnership with Vancouver Moving Theatre, Theatre at UBC, and the Playwrights Theatre Centre, the play premiered last night at the Frederic Wood Theatre, where it runs until January 29th. Once again the incredibly talented James Fagan Tait has taken on the monumental task of condensing a 1000-page novel of immense scope and complexity for the stage, as well as directing a cast that numbers 19. It no doubt helps that several in the cast were also in Crime and Punishment, and that music composer and director Joelysa Pankanea is also back on board. Joined by Mark Haney on bass and Molly MacKinnon on violin, Pankanea plays the marimba live on stage over the course of the evening's many scenes, her jazz-infused score the perfect accompaniment to the many instances of sung recitative in the play. Yes, this is in part a musical adaptation of Dostoyevsky--and it works.

The Idiot focuses on Prince Lyov Nikolayevich Myshkin (Kevin MacDonald), who is returning to Russia after four years convalescing in Switzerland, and almost cured of his youthful epileptic "fits." On a train bound for St. Petersburg he meets two men, Lebedev (Tom Pickett) and the rake Rogozhin (Andrew McNee), who shows him a picture of the beautiful woman with whom he is obsessed: Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov (Cherise Clarke). Myshkin is himself immediately smitten: with both Rogozhin and Nastasya. But Nastasya is damaged goods, having been kept for much of her life by the older businessman Totsky (Luke Day), who now tired of her, has entered into a deal with the general Yepanchin (David Adams) to have Yepanchin's young assistant, Ganya (Craig Erickson), marry her in exchange for 700 rubles, thus ensuring that Yepanchin has easy access to Nastasya's bed. Meanwhile, Yepanchin's wife (Patti Allan) turns out to be a cousin of the Prince's, who after meeting her three daughters becomes enraptured with the youngest, Aglaya (Adrienne Wong). But Aglaya is also beloved by Ganya, whom she keeps toying with, and whose impecunity and embarrassment about his alcoholic and kleptomaniacal father, Ivolgin (Richard Newman), seriously tempts him to take the marriage deal with Nastasya instead. Got all that?

Dostoevksy is obsessed with doubles in this novel, and in his entire oeuvre more generally. At the centre is the contrast between the essential and unprepossessing goodness of Myshkin and the calculated guile of Rogozhin. But Nastasya and Aglaya are also paired, although in ways that are more complicated. Externally, Nastasya is compromised and sexually available, while Aglaya is pure innocence. But, inside Nastasya remains loyal to Myshkin (even though she dies at the hand of Rogozhin) while Aglaya is rather promiscuous in her affections. Similarly, the two patriarchs, Yepanchin and Ivolgin, are meant to be contrasted, with the former's outward moral rectitude masking his secret lechery, and with the latter's present fallen state unable to cancel out completely memories of a more glorious past, including as Napoleon's page. It is a credit to all of the actors, and to Tait's canny direction, that these novelistic nuances in character are given definite shape and substance in performance. At the centre of this constellation of types, whose motives and means keep shifting in relation to each other, is the Prince, the only person who remains pure and true of heart from beginning to end. Myshkin, despite the idiocy attributed to him as a result of his epilepsy, is neither simple nor guileless, and it is one of the great strengths of MacDonald's remarkable performance that he is able to convey both the generous depths of Myshkin's empathy for others and the extent to which he is also subject to his own divided conflicts and appetites.

That much of this conflict is conveyed through humour surprised me. Granted, Dostoevsky's novel is a mix of comedy and social commentary, especially at the beginning. But there are moments in this production that are downright slapstick, and Tait's updating of the language, especially with respect to the liberal oaths and epithets unleashed by nearly all of the characters, keeps the audience cackling. This is a good strategy in a production that runs 3 1/2 hours long. And while Tait has done a remarkable job in distilling both the novel's complicated plot and its grand themes, I do think there is room to trim another half hour, especially in the second act scenes at the summer spa town of Pavlovsk. For example, I don't think the scene where Burdovsky (Alexander Keurvorst) and Keller (Stephen Lytton) attempt to shake Myshkin down for money is needed; the Prince's goodness and social equanimity has already been indisputably established. To be sure, in a novel as rich as this one in scenes of social commentary and contrast, it can be hard to know where to cut, especially if you want to give each member of your large ensemble a brief moment in the spotlight.

That said, I was never less than gripped last night, and in ways that I haven't always been with the work of Catalyst Theatre, for example, who have also adapted classic works of literature (by Poe and Mary Shelley) for the stage--including the PuSh Festival stage--in a mix of sung/spoken narrative exposition and dramatization. I think Tait and his collaborators find a better balance between these two forms of presentation, wisely leaving most of the narration to the musical bits and letting the actual encounters between the characters on stage organically take shape in terms of those classic staples of good theatrical drama: rich dialogue and physical blocking and movement. On the latter front, one of the things I was most taken with in this staging was the canny spatial uses to which the large cast was put, creating various tableaux and massings that not only obviate the need for elaborate sets (as with the three stunning train rides that are evoked at various points) but also help materially represent the social maw Myshkin's virtue is at once separate from and will eventually be stripped by.

There is no doubt that this production of The Idiot requires a significant investment on the part of its audience: not of money, to be sure (it's cheap by half in that regard); rather it requires an investment of time and energy, of both affective and intellectual engagement. But what you put in will be rewarded many times over. This is a production, like the novel upon which it is based, that is overflowing with ideas, with richly drawn characters and social situations, with theatrical conceits and choric commentary. It is not to be missed.

PuSh 2012 Review #2: Woody Sed at Club PuSh

2012-01-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

What happens when the artist from New York whom you've invited to open Club PuSh--the cabaret-cum-festival-within-the festival at Performance Works on Granville Island--cancels at the last minute? Why, you phone up Thomas Jones, of course. Jones is a local writer and performer whose one-man show, Woody Sed, played at The Cultch's Culture Lab last October. My loss at having missed it then was my gain last night, as on four days notice Jones got back into character as the legendary American folksinger and political activist, Woody Guthrie, tuned up his guitar, and wowed us all through a combination of story and song.

Actually, Jones got into more than just Guthrie's character, for this solo biographical show (the title is a riff on a column Guthrie wrote for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker in 1939-40) calls for him to incarnate many other roles as well, including Guthrie's three wives, the radio broadcaster Ed Robbin, and the Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax, whose conversations and recordings with Guthrie in the 1940s led to his first record, Dust Bowl Ballads. Jones steps in and out of each character deftly, moving into a spot, modulating his voice slightly, and adopting a small gesture or significant pose to distinguish different speakers, as well as to mark for us where we are in the story. For the play, while mostly chronological, does weave back and forth in time, beginning with Guthrie's struggles in New York in 1940 to find the right words for his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land," which was inspired by his distaste for Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." We are then transported to the hospital where Guthrie spent the last 15 years of his life, his body and mind slowly deteriorating as a result of Huntington's disease, and with his second wife, Marjorie Mazia (a dancer with the Martha Graham Company), keeping vigil. Only then do we go back to his childhood in Oklahoma, his early troubadouring between there and California during the Depression, his politicization and radio work, and of course those famous conversations with Lomax.

And everywhere along the way we are treated to music, Jones wisely studding his tale--which, despite Guthrie's undeniable legacy today, is not at all a happy one--with both popular and lesser-known tunes from throughout his subject's career. Jones has a rich and warm singing voice and is also an accomplished guitar-player; combined with the deliberate lack of vocal or instrumental amplification and the intimate Club PuSh setting, it really felt that we were sitting around a campfire swapping stories and songs. Which is, of course, what Woody would have wanted. The self-taught musician who famously thumbed his nose at copywriting his work believed, as Jones tells us in a brief program note, that music was above all something to share. And, to that end, the show ended with all of us in chorus on a version of "This Train is Bound for Glory."

A most fitting tribute to Guthrie in the centenary of his birth, and an inspired choice to open the Club.

PuSh 2012 Review #1: Amarillo at Woodward's and Gala Opening at The Waldorf

2012-01-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

This year's PuSh International Performing Arts Festival got off to a roaring success last night with a packed house at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's for the opening of Amarillo, by Mexico's Teatro Linea de Sombra. Amarillo is a mid-size city in the Texas panhandle, a long way from the Mexican border, but it is the destination of our nameless, faceless, ageless protagonist in this piece, who departs his native Mexico for its unknown horizons, only to come up against the wall the US has erected to bar his entry, as well as the wall of silence surrounding his disappearance. And, in fact, we learn that there are many names, with many different faces, and of many different ages who have so disappeared, with performer Raúl Mendoza at one particularly mesmerizing moment donning a series of sweatshirts to signify the thousands of Mexican citizens who yearly risk their lives in flight for what they imagine will be a better life as an illegal immigrant in a country that has stated in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome, and will be repelled at all costs.

All of this is conveyed in a series of monologues (translated via English surtitles, although they aren't really needed to follow the story) that are accompanied by recorded and live video projections on the giant white wall that serves as the monumental backdrop to the set. The live feeds, in particular, result in some stunning tableaux, as when Mendoza climbs some ladder-like steps jutting out of the stage-right side of the wall, eventually hanging off of the top one while the image of a train is projected behind him. The creators have even rigged cameras up in the rafters, which results in equally arresting images of the various patterns created by the objects and material substances strewn across the stage over the course of the production (there are a lot of them and, as with White Cabin at Club PuSh from a couple of years ago, I wouldn't want to have to stage manage or tech this show!). Two of the most prominent of those substances are water and sand. When, for example, Mendoza is recounting the dangers of dying from dehydration in the desert, performers Alicia Laguna, María Luna, and Antígona González set out what had to have been at least 40-50 gallon size plastic jugs, some of them already filled, others with a smaller container emptying its contents into them--which, when illuminated with a small flashlight and captured via the overhead video, creates a projected image that's at once magical and threatening. Ditto the sand--mostly white, but occasionally coloured red--that empties out of bags attached to cables that are lowered and raised at different points, or that the performers spill from shoes and bottles and their own hands to create lines and borders and compasses on the stage. At once the impassable desert that sucks dry all that moisture in those water bottles and that literally swallows up so many Mexican bodies, the bags of sand also neatly telegraph the image of illegal drugs being conveyed across the border, whether phantasmatically in the minds of American law enforcement officers or very materially in the backpacks of desperate Mexican immigrants corralled into becoming mules for drug lords who (often also phantasmatically) promise them money and safe passage across the border. Then, too, the suspended and slowly emptying bags of sand also convey an image of the hourglass, time slowly but surely slipping away from all who find themselves in this no man's land of the border.

Two things I wasn't prepared for in this production were the prodigious use of movement and Jesús Cuevas' haunting vocalizations. On the former front, lots of extreme physical activity (running, jumping, spinning, fighting, even a bit of gymnastics involving a table and two chairs) combines with simple folk and line dance sequences played out near or against the back wall to convey the trajectory between stasis and movement. When Mendoza is still in this piece (most prominently at the beginning and end), we understand the import. As for Cuevas, he plays a sort of Trickster/seer/sheriff character, his basso profundo--which erupts at various points in the evening from the back of his throat (and from a diaphragm that must have untold depths)--as well as his echoed recitative to some of the monologues, variously a lure, a warning, a dirge.

Finally, last night's performance had added significance for those of us sitting in a venue that is officially known as the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, as at one point in the performance Mendoza reads a letter from Mexico to the "citizens of Vancouver" urging us to protest the damage wrought upon the environment and local indigenous populations by mining companies operating in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. The audience, which included the president of my university, was absolutely silent at that point.

In short, Amarillo is a thrilling work of theatre. I am so grateful to have been introduced to this amazing company (well-known in Mexico and widely toured, but new to Vancouver), and it was another inspired choice to open the Festival. The show runs tonight and tomorrow at SFU Woodward's, and I strongly urge people to see it while they can. Tonight's show is preceded by a free screening of the film Norteado (in conjunction with the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival) and followed by a post-show talkback on the issue of borders, national and otherwise.

On a personal note, I was also pleased (and relieved) that my own pre-show performance--that is, the fundraising appeal from the Board that I volunteered to pitch--seemed to be a success. We exceeded our matching gift goal last night (!) and many folks came up to me at our Gala party at the Waldorf afterwards saying how heartfelt my words seemed and, most importantly, how much they supported the work of PuSh.

The party itself was great fun: the right mix of people, entertainment, and of course fabulous venue. If only I hadn't walked into that glass door upon exiting--and I wasn't even drunk.

Tonight it's the opening of Club PuSh, where we'll also be hosting a reception for our amazing Patron's Circle members. I'll be there, sore nose and all.

Gambling, Marriage, and Great Theatre

2012-01-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

A new year and already the same old news: governments giveth, and they taketh away. To wit:

BC Premier Christy Clark announced this week that her provincial Liberals were reversing a decision of her predecessor, Gordon Campbell, and re-instituting gaming grants eligibility for arts groups, sports organizations, and the environmental sector, as well as permanently extending her previous one-time boost in available monies from $120 million to $135 million per year. But that's still well below 2009 levels, which is what an independent review of the gaming grants program called for by Clark herself recommended returning to. And such announcements notwithstanding, Clark can't outrun Campbell's long shadow, not least in the inevitable delays in reversing the HST based on last year's referendum results, and which will almost certainly follow her into the next provincial election. Perhaps that's why she's looking so grim these days.

Then came front-page headlines from the federal Conservatives that cast doubt on the legal validity of same-sex marriages of foreign nationals performed in Canada. While Prime Minister Harper quickly dismissed any notion that the stunning announcement from his Justice Minister, Rob Nicholson, was a covert way of re-opening the same-sex marriage debate in this country, there was a lot of nervous chatter on various news wires and Twitter feeds until Nicholson clarified that the government would act quickly to amend legislation to guarantee the legality of said marriages--as well as to provide easy mechanisms for their dissolution (which is what prompted the whole tempest in the first place). One such tweet came from sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who married his partner Terry Miller in Vancouver in 2005, and who quipped that he woke up to discover he had been divorced overnight.

Speaking of Dan Savage (and sustainable arts funding), he's part of a group of Seattle-based cultural figures who have come together in a recent YouTube appeal by the Intiman Theatre in support of their goal to raise $1 million towards their reinvention as a sustainable live theatre company after their financial collapse and canceling of their 2011 season. If they are successful (they've raised just shy of half so far, but have only three weeks more to raise the rest), that reinvention will be launched this summer with a four-play festival performed by a repertory of 12 actors, and featuring a new work written and directed by Savage himself (who began his career as a theatre artist). Richard and I have seen many very fine productions at the Intiman over the years, and it would be a tragic loss to Seattle, and west coast theatre more generally, to see this institution disappear. That's why we've pledged money, and that's why I urge those of you who can to do the same. They are not asking for the money up front, just commitments to give. If they reach their goal, they will be in contact to collect the money; if not, well, let's not even go there. Here's the link to give. And here's the YouTube video describing the appeal:

Finally, speaking of great theatre and performance in our own backyard: only two more sleeps to the start of the PuSh Festival! We launch at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre (and we'll be thinking of you, Milton--RIP) this Tuesday with Amarillo, from Mexico. Join us there if you can, or afterwards at our opening gala party at the Waldorf Hotel. Tickets for both events and a host of other great shows are available at pushfestival.ca. And, as I've already shamelessly solicited your dollars on behalf of a rival arts organization, I would be remiss (especially as the Board's Fundraising Chair!) if I didn't also make an appeal for donations on behalf of PuSh. You can give online when you buy your tickets, or by taking away a pledge card at any of the performances over the next two weeks.

Thanks in advance for your support and hope to see you at a show. I will, as per past practice, try to blog about all the productions I see on this site.

Still Waiting

2011-12-30T08:11:00.000-08:00

Blackbird Theatre is back at the Cultch with what has become for them something of a post-Christmas tradition: a new staging of one of the darker entries in the classic repertoire. This time it’s Waiting for Godot. Richard and I attended the second of the two preview performances this past Wednesday (the play opened last night and runs through January 21st). Despite how much I’ve enjoyed this company’s work in the past, I have to say I was disappointed.

Could it be that the production was almost too reverential? Notwithstanding the degree to which Beckett’s famously litigious estate has inspired an almost slavish devotion to the text among even the most experimental of contemporary interpreters, can we not at least move a smidgen beyond the same tired accents (Gogo’s Irish brogue setting him apart from the only slightly posher Didi) and the familiar Little Tramp costumes we’ve seen hundreds of times before (including Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s excellent version for the 2001 Beckett on Film series, starring Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy)? What about jeans and hightops and hoodies and baseball caps instead, and a bit of a hip-hop lilt to the music of Beckett’s writing? What about a post-apocalyptic, inner-city setting with condoms instead of leaves on the tree in Act Two? Granted, it’s harder—given the famous stage directions that open both acts—to think of tampering much with the limitations Beckett deliberately places upon the set, though even here I have some quibbles with Blackbird’s choices.

Thus invariably knowing what’s coming, the key for audiences familiar with the play is to find new (or renewed) subtleties in the performances. Anthony F. Ingram, as Vladimir, and Simon Webb, as Estragon, certainly have wonderful comic chemistry. I laughed out loud and at great length last night. And yet I still felt the nearly 2 ½ hour performance dragged. In this regard, I felt that some comic bits—including the opening sequence with Gogo’s boots—went on a bit too long, while others, like my beloved Laurel and Hardyesque bowler hat sequence from Act Two, were given short shrift. Likewise, where the visit by Pozzo (a wonderfully expansive—in all senses of that word—William Samples) and Lucky (Adam Henderson, who wears that rope with the best of them) flew by in Act One, their much shorter stay in Act Two seemed interminable, with too much time spent by all four actors lying prone on the stage floor. I also didn’t understand Pozzo’s falsetto in Act Two, which seems to emasculate him unduly.

However, what was most missing for me last night was an equal sense of tragic pathos to balance out the comic absurdity—a problem with many recent high-profile productions of the play on both sides of the Atlantic, with the notable exception of Paul Chan, Creative Time, and the Classical Theater of Harlem’s staging of the play in 2007 in the post-Katrina Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Watching Ingram’s Didi and Webb’s Gogo stare up at the tree and openly contemplate suicide, I couldn’t hear the aching desperation that should accompany their kibitzing about not having a rope, like the sound of ashes both characters hear in the rustle of the tree’s two leaves. And, where, in Didi’s crucial soliloquy at the end while Gogo dozes—“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”—is the cruel anguish that should underscore, like a knife blade, their impossible situation of both not being able to go on, and having to go on?

Back to that quibble with the set. I can’t for the life of me figure out why director John Wright and designer Marti Wright opted not to make use of the Cultch Historic Theatre’s own studio stage, choosing instead to construct a square raised platform above it, with ramps off it to either wing. I get that this visually reinforces the constrained and diminished circumstances in which Didi and Gogo find themselves, not to mention reminds us that surrounding their few square metres of shared space is a swampy bog, beyond which are thieves and ruffians lying in wait. However, it makes things somewhat awkward for the Boy (a charming Zander Constant), who enters from audience level at the end of both acts, and must interact with Didi for much of his brief time on stage with his back to us.

Other critics might think otherwise, but for me this was a rare miss from a local troupe that has otherwise distinguished itself as a bold interpreter of the classics. To be fair, it was a preview performance, and maybe my mood was soured somewhat by the person who threw up in the balcony hallway just as the performance was ending. Either way, I’ve at least waited to post this review till after the show has officially opened.

P.

Sleepless in Vancouver

2011-12-22T06:42:00.000-08:00

Around this time of year it is customary for many of us to gather with friends and family at each others homes to share some food, maybe exchange gifts, sing songs, and/or play some goofy party games, and almost certainly raise a glass of holiday cheer. And, just as assuredly, witness at least one spectacular scene of relationship discord or breakdown. If you're looking to steel yourself for the latter event, or simply prefer to experience such things vicariously, I recommend checking out the inspired production of Caryl Churchill's Three More Sleepless Nights that's playing in different neighbourhoods around the city through this Friday.

Churchill's play was first produced in 1980, between Cloud Nine and Top Girls. Unlike these more famous works, Three More does not range boldly across great swathes of history, and contains little of their (at least at the time) radically experimental dramaturgy. Instead, it is a quiet domestic roundelay, sharply and accessibly written, involving two couples whose relationships, in the wee hours of the morning, have reached a crisis point. The innovation of this particular production, by a group of very talented SFU Contemporary Arts students and recent grads, is that the audience gets to witness the proceedings up close and personal, with the play being staged in a different borrowed apartment every evening--one which the actors, like us, are encountering for the first time.

This results in a most intriguing, and theatrically reinforcing, dynamic: that is, the audience's initial timidity and discomfort about following the actors around an unfamiliar space and observing them at their most intimate and vulnerable (ie, semi-clothed and in bed) is played off of the actors' equally improvisatory negotiation of a space that is likewise new to them, but which they must nevertheless move through and, indeed, command as if it were their own. No doubt this places just as much stress on the director (Conor Wylie) and the stage/production manager (Chelsea MacDonald): how to ensure your actors hit, night after night, both the comic and achingly anguished grace notes of Churchill's script while also giving them individual latitude on where--and when--to hit them?; how to find seven different workable spaces in the first place, and then to ensure that the few key props that are needed are where the actors would logically expect to find them? That both these questions are answered in this production is a credit to Wylie and MacDonald, respectively.

After we are all settled in the designated space, after we have been offered wine or beer, and after--most importantly--we have been encouraged to make a donation towards the evening's entertainment, the proceedings begin when Frank (Sean Marshall Jr.) arrives. He's drunk and his wife, Margaret (Tara Gallagher Harris), has been waiting up for him. Recrimination, in this instance, is less about how much he's had to drink at the pub than whether or not he was there with his mistress. Frank doesn't confirm or deny Margaret's suspicions; instead he taunts her by suggesting it's her fault for his infidelity, that her constant nagging, her poor housekeeping, and, perhaps most tellingly, her own ongoing flirtation with a man named Pete at the same pub has essentially driven him into another woman's arms. Marshall and Gallagher Harris, trailing each other back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom, telegraph expertly in their overlapping dialogue, their tightly coiled movements, and especially in the weariness of their barely raised voices the complex mix of hurt and desire and regret of a couple who clearly still love each other, but who can no longer live together. That they find it impossible to move beyond this impasse is made clear at one point when we hear the offstage voice of a child being kept awake by their arguing (well, okay, it was Chelsea, kneeling beside me in the bedroom doorway).

The scene between Frank and Margaret ends when she goes to cool off--literally--in the shower. Two different actors--who until that point had just been fellow members of the audience--then strip to their underwear and hop into the bed just vacated by Frank. We are immediately plunged into the insomniac world of Dawn (Jamie Taylor) and Pete (Dan Borzillo). For the first few minutes it's just the two of them exchanging an occasional foggy grunt, communicating to each other and to us a clearly recurring pattern of sleeplessness. Then Pete starts to recount the plot of the movie Alien (Churchill doing pop culture--who knew?), his childlike delight in its thrills likely doing nothing to calm the panic of his wife, who repeats more than once that she is frightened--of what exactly (her husband? unnamed forces in the world? merely the dark?) we're never sure. Taylor and Borzillo have to act most of this scene lying prone on a bed, and they do a marvelous job physically conveying the void at the heart of their marriage, with Taylor scrunched all the way to the edge of her side of the bed and Borzillo gathering the covers under his armpits like the grown-up kid Pete clearly is. Borzillo gets most of the dialogue and it is a testament to his gifts as an actor that he not only managed to make a movie I have seen many times new to me again, but that he was able to convey through his well-timed pauses and heavy swallows (each of which echoed like a clarion in that tiny room) that he has retreated to the fantasy world of action thrillers in part because his own relationship has become alien to him. Taylor, by contrast, must communicate her distress mostly through gesture, and just by the way she cuts and eats a piece of watermelon we get a clear sense of someone disquieted by even the most routine tasks--including sleeping.

The final scene is between Margaret and Pete, now together following what we surmise is the eventual collapse of their previous relationships. However, Frank and Dawn still haunt their former lovers, and as much time is spent talking about them as about each other. When Pete starts to tell Margaret the plot of Apocalypse Now, we can guess where this new liaison is headed.

All the principals involved in this production are to be applauded for their very fine efforts in staging this play. That I lay awake for much of the night thinking about various aspects of the performances is testament to their excellence. Tonight the cast will be performing in Yaletown, and on Friday the final performance will take place in East Van. I think both nights are technically sold out, but there might be last-minute cancelations or a waiting list. If you're interested, contact Chelsea at threemoresleeplessnights@gmail.com.

Things I Learned in Stockholm

2011-12-13T12:43:00.000-08:00

In a comparison of J.M.W. Turner's, Claude Monet's, and Cy Twombly's late styles, Twombly emerges the definitive genius.

The Moderna Museet (at which the above exhibition was showing) has an amazing photography collection, and serves a mean bowl of mushroom soup.

It costs $7.00 to ride the subway!

King Carl Gustaf is not a Stieg Larsson fan, much to the consternation of his wife.

The Nobel Prize Committee has its own fleet of luxury cars to ferry around laureates staying at the Grand Hotel.

At a two Michelin star restaurant serving an eight course meal which costs almost as much as your entire hotel bill, it is not possible to joke with your server about the langoustines she brings live to your table.

It is possible to cross the same bridge once too often.

If your Circadian rhythms are already disrupted because of jet lag, then you'll likely never get a full night's sleep in a city where the sun begins to set at 2:30 pm.

The New Old City Hall

2011-11-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

Not the municipal election results I was hoping for, but it certainly could have been worse given the incredibly negative campaign run by Suzanne Anton and the NPA.

I held my nose and voted for Gregor, of course, despite my disappointment in both his stance on the Occupy Vancouver protestors and his hiding behind Penny Ballem in seeking the injunction to remove them. I also would have preferred a more diverse Council and am sad that neither COPE's Ellen Woodsworth nor Sandy Garossino was elected. Alongside the NPA's Elizabeth Ball, Garossino would have been a powerful independent voice for the arts. I guess if someone had to squeak by Woodsworth for the last Council seat, I'm glad it was Adrienne Carr. It will be good to have her sitting opposite former compatriot Andrea Reimer in holding Vision's development plans accountable to its "green" mandate.

We'll see what happens over the next three years.

3 Cheers for 3 Fold

2011-11-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

I do believe that 3 Fold, Ballet BC's latest offering (on at the Queen E through through this evening), is the most inspired programming of new choreography for the company since Artistic Director Emily Molnar took over in 2009. To be fair, I missed what was by all accounts last year's stand-out hit, José Navas' Bliss--but mercifully that will be reprised in the spring along with what I understand will be Navas' new take on Giselle. Nevertheless, last night I was riveted by the dancing, and judging by the rest of the audience's reaction, most everyone else was as well.

The evening began with what for me was the most compelling work, the world premiere of Polish-Canadian Robert Glumbek's Diversion. Such complex choreography danced with such compelling emotion by the Ballet BC company, who have never looked better. And so many surprising moments that had one leaning forward or jolting back in one's seat in kinesthetic empathy. So it was when Gilbert Small, exiting stage right in a long arc of rectangular light provided by designer James Proudfoot (whose contributions are perfectly in tune with Glumbek's choreography), is suddenly barraged by a succession of leaping ballerinas from the wings, whose weight and velocity he must attempt to receive as delicately as possibly. I had thought that would be the end of the piece, but there follows a gorgeous concluding pas de deux by Conor Gnam (at least I think it was Conor) and newcomer Rachel Meyer, whose arm and leg extensions in the lifts were alone worth the price of admission.

Meyer, who graces the program cover and advertising posters for 3 Fold, is one of several new faces in the company this year (another is Daniel Marshalsay, ably filling the shoes--or socks--of the departed Leon Feizo-Gas, especially in a wonderful trio with Peter Smida and Small), and she is an outstanding addition; I could not take my eyes off of her the whole evening. I was also pleased to see that Livonia Ellis has been promoted from apprentice to full company member this year. She is a wonderful dancer, at once athletic and subtly expressive, combining power and grace.

Next up was Italian choreographer Walter Matteini's Parole Sospese, his take on sixteenth-century poet Ludovico Ariosto's fabulist world. The piece is wonderfully theatrical, beginning with a dumbshow in front of the curtain, and making use of all kinds of stage effects, including books suspended from the rafters, a series of moving flies, backdrops, and scrims, and--most compellingly--rows of lightbulbs on wires that descend to the floor at on point, and through which the dancers must carefully move. I wasn't sure if Jed Duifhuis' impresario/master of ceremonies always worked as a conceit (especially in the waltz with Gnam), but I did appreciate Matteini's decision to resist a linear narrative in favour of the particular demands (technical and emotional) of successive movement sequences--a highlight in this regard was a wonderful solo near the end by Alyson Fretz. I was also pleasantly surprised by how willing Matteini was to mix up his styles and steps, throwing in the odd breakdance move amid all the turnout and extension.

Simone Orlando's Doppeling concluded the program. Since its premiere at Surfacing, Molnar's pared down reintroduction of the transformed company at The Dance Centre in 2009, the work has gotten bigger and bolder, the steps more complex, and the body suits worn by the dancers even tighter! What I especially appreciated watching Orlando's take on Coppélia-like conformity this time was her musicality, with all the dancers in precise lockstep with Bach's Concerto in d minor. Except of course when they weren't--as when, with a syncopated hip thrust and a grand removal of her bobbed wig and shaking out of her long tresses, Makaila Wallace decided to dance to her own beat.

Adding to the good feeling of the evening was Molnar's announcement, during her curtain speech, that the company had secured multi-year corporate sponsorship from Fasken Martineau. This will allow Ballet BC to continue to commission new work while also working to rebuild and grow its audiences, which, judging by the size of last night's crowd, it still needs to work on.

Here's hoping that after you all vote today, you fill the seats at the Queen E this evening.

PuSh Festival: 2012 Program

2011-11-11T15:01:00.000-08:00

Just back in town and catching up on things. Will hopefully get to Occupy Vancouver and the upcoming municipal elections (not to mention a redaction of the performance highlights of our trip) in subsequent posts.

For now, however, I wanted to make sure to let everyone know that details of the 2012 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival are now available. Click on the image above for a listing of all the main and Club PuSh shows, and be sure to secure your PuSh passes (the best and most economical way to experience the full panoply of shows) before they sell out by clicking here.

The Festival runs January 17-February 4th, 2012.

See you there.

VIFF

2011-10-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

Went to a fabulous Saturday morning screening at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival. The film was First Position, a documentary by Bess Kargman about six young ballet dancers ranging in ages from 9-17 preparing for the finals of the Youth America Grand Prix, an elite competition that awards prizes in various age categories, but also, for the older dancers, scholarships at some of the finest schools around the world, and/or contracts at professional companies.

The lead-up to the finals and, before them, each dancer's individual regional semi-final, is--in the best tradition of similar performance documentaries--edge-of-the-seat gripping. However, what sets Kargman's film apart is not just her obvious empathy for each of the young personalities at the heart of this work, but her commitment to documenting the tremendous sacrifices they and their families are prepared to make in order to achieve their goals. And, mercifully in that respect, this is a rare example where all of the storylines have a happy ending.

Not so for the residents of the famous artist studios above Carnegie Hall, who are the subject of Josef "Birdman" Astor's Lost Bohemia, and whose unsuccessful battle to stave off eviction by corporate managers of the performance space below in search of extra office space ends up being a searing indictment of New York's larger willful neglect of its cultural past: in this case, both Andrew Carnegie's original vision for the building he endowed, and the collective artistic legacy of all the famous residents who have lived and worked and studied in its spaces.

One of those residents was Bill Cunningham, the New York Times photographer who was the subject of last year's wonderful documentary Bill Cunningham's New York. Seeing Astor's film this past Monday at VIFF was a perfect bookend to the earlier film, because it fleshes out the Carnegie relocation drama in greater depth, as well as letting some of the personalities we meet in the Cunningham film (including the incomparable Duchess) take centre stage in their own right.

Together with Pina this past Wednesday, that brings the grand total of attended screenings at this 30th anniversary edition of VIFF to three--a far cry from my original ambitions to buy a matinee pass this year and see as much as possible. I do hope to get to Alan Bennett and the Habit of Art tomorrow, a behind-the-scenes look at the staging of Bennett's play about a fictional encounter between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, which I saw at the National Theatre in London in May 2010, and which I briefly blogged about here.

But I might not get to blog about the film, as we're off early next week for another trip to London (and Frankfurt and Paris and NYC). Lots of performance and culture are on the agenda (as well as a couple of research archives), and I will have my new iPad with me. However, given all the connectivity issues I've had to deal with in the past when traveling in Europe (where it's hard to find free WiFi), and the general pressure of finding time in the day to blog, I may take a bit of a hiatus from posting, saving a global summary of the performance highlights for when I return to Vancouver in mid-November.

Fair warning to the two or three people who might actually follow this blog with any regularity.

Re-Membering Pina

2011-10-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon Richard and I attended a sold-out screening of Pina, Wim Wenders' 3D homage to the dance-theatre legacy of Pina Bausch. The film was playing just up the street at the Park as part of a special presentation by this year's Vancouver International Film Festival.

Before her untimely death in 2009, Bausch--from her nowheresville outpost at the state theatre in Wuppertal, an industrial town in northwestern Germany--revolutionized contemporary dance: in part by jettisoning completely the core principles of dance composition; by forging a company that was as much a family as it was a working collective; and by making an emotional connection with her audiences (whether positive or negative) central to her aesthetic. Let me explain a little better what I mean by these three prongs by reproducing here the first three paragraphs of an essay I recently completed on Bausch and her contributions to contemporary dance-theatre:

When, soon after taking over the directorship of Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973, Pina Bausch famously commented that she was less interested in how people moved than in what moved them, she was first and foremost announcing her own choreographic break with conventional dance composition as the virtuosic arrangement and execution of steps. Yet she was also reciprocally hailing audience members whose engagements with dance are deeply felt, but who may not be able to articulate precisely what about the movement they have watched has so transported (or alienated) them. In both instances the different limits placed upon access to or deployment of a technical dance vocabulary to say all there is to say in or of a given work is offset by a shared emotional vocabulary, one that is still profoundly, viscerally, corporeal, but that refuses to abstract, divide between, or pit against the other, performers’ and audience members’ subjective experiences of the work. Thus, starting in the late 1970s, with works like Blaubart (1977) and Kontakthof (1978), Bausch developed a new rehearsal process, one roughly akin to the emotional memory exercises of a Stanislavski or a Strasberg. That is, she threw away her dancers’ safety net of having movement patterns set directly upon their bodies, and asked them instead to first respond as an ensemble to a series of questions or prompts that could cover everything from personal relationships, memories, and moods to social situations, customs, and behaviors. The dancers’ responses might involve or incorporate movement, but just as frequently they took the form of stories told, or of images seized upon, or of objects proffered. These elements, some jettisoned, others refined and expanded, would then function as the basic building blocks for the piece, its emotional architecture. Indeed, the affective force of Bausch’s dance-theatre comes as much from its reveling in theatrical expressiveness—scenography and design, costumes, music and sound, spoken text—as it does from its eschewing of some of the more repressive canons of dance.

This dialectic demands as much of an emotional investment from Bausch’s audience as it does from her performers. One cannot sit in passive anticipation of pretty steps at a Bausch premiere. Rather, in often simultaneous scenes of serial repetition one can expect to be assaulted by an equally serial (and often simultaneous) set of affects—shame, joy, anger, disgust, hate, love, fear, pity, tenderness—as they replay, in particular, a social history of the gendered body. That body, Bausch makes clear, is always at the (physical) mercy of the other; but the vulnerability, she also suggests, is shared. And so in her work Bausch is relentless in soliciting our attention and awareness not just of the bodies and bodily behavior on stage, but of our own. Again, this happens mostly on an emotive rather than a cognitive plane. Even when we cannot make sense of Bausch’s work, Norbert Servos claims, we still maintain a “’sense connection’” to it. Even when we cannot explain our response to a given piece or sequence, we are still responding. In this way, as Servos also suggests, the boundary between rehearsal and performance dissolves, and just as the performers lay bare their creative process on stage, so must we in the audience give up something of ourselves (energy, autonomy, objectivity, distance) in our reception of it. It is an intensely co-dependent relationship, to say the least. In the world of contemporary dance, one tends either to love Bausch’s work or to hate it. One rarely remains indifferent. And just as the fierce loyalty Bausch inspired in her dancers has left them understandably bereft in the wake of her sudden death in 2009, so have many of her fans been plunged into a prolonged period of mourning.

How is it that I have come to share in this grief? I, who have only ever experienced Bausch’s work via video or grainy YouTube clips or the thick description of print reviews and criticism—why have I been so affected by her death? And in ways that, at least to me, far exceed the more temporary and vicarious forms of mourning one is wont to perform upon the passing of a great artist? These questions are what initially motivated the writing of my essay on Bausch and dance-theatre as a form, and they are also ones I took with me into yesterday’s film.

I am unquestionably biased, but I do honestly think that Wenders has crafted an exemplary tribute to Bausch, one that manages simultaneously to capture and document some of her most iconic works and, as crucially, to allow the performers who danced them to express (in words and in movement) the range and intensity of their feelings for their lost mentor. Those performers span virtually the entirety of Bausch’s 35 years in Wuppertal, with veterans like Meryl Tankard, Josephine Anne Endicott, and Dominique Mercy offering up their testimonials and dancing some of their signature roles (including Mercy in his tutu from Nelken) alongside the younger, newer members of the company, a polyglot rainbow united in their love for Bausch and their total immersion in her movement vocabulary. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that Bausch’s death actually came in the middle of filming, and so the tone of the work obviously changed. Wenders’ unifying conceit between dance excerpts is to shoot a close-up head shot of each of the featured dancers, with their words about Bausch (spoken in their native language) heard in voice-over and subtitled accordingly.

But it is the dance that takes centre stage, made fleshly and impossibly intimate thanks to the 3D technology. Wenders' use of 3D never feels gimmicky or intrusive. Rather he uses it in the same way that he uses various exterior spaces in and around Wuppertal as backdrops: to make Bausch’s choreography pop, to leap off the screen and grab hold of us kinaesthetically—in other words, to move us (physically and emotionally), as the best live dance is meant to do. In this regard, the filmie in me was surprised at just how restrained some of Wenders’ shot-making was. In pieces like Vollmond, where the dancers famously frolic in ankle-deep water and leap from a giant rock stage left, there are lots of pans and quick edits, and the drops of water from when the dancers kick it or throw it seem to land in our laps. Yet in the classic chamber work Café Müller, Wenders is quite content for his camera to remain static for long periods, letting us take in that work’s famous chair-cluttered mise-en-scène. And in the opening “chorus line” from Kontakthof (which I was pleased to see featured not only in its professional Wuppertal company version, but also those that Bausch set on senior citizens and teenagers from the community), Wenders shoots in long shot, so that we actually see the seats from the intradiagetic auditorium, an uncanny visual experience in 3D, as those seats necessarily start to merge with the those in the Park theatre, to the point where I couldn’t tell at times whether movement in the rows was happening onscreen or off.

I can’t possibly do justice to all of the works from the Bausch repertoire featured in the film, but I will say that it was wonderful that Wenders begins with a big long excerpt from Bausch’s Rite of Spring. This work, from 1975, was the last one that Bausch created in a “classically balletic” style, but also announced a clear shift in her aesthetic: the peaty soil on the stage over which the dancers move; the explicitly gendered politics of the work; the emotional demands it places on performers and audience members alike. Wenders’ film traffics in those demands as well, not least in those film-within-a-film sequences when he brings both groups together to watch ghostly apparitions of Bausch dancing and creating.

I can think of no greater memorial to the woman and her work.

P.

Arena Beats

2011-10-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

I may have been on the wrong frequency last night, but I'm not sure I got the concept behind Heart as Arena, Dana Gingras' new work for her independent company, Animals of Distinction, and which is on at the Cultch's Historic Theatre until this Saturday.

The radio transmission conceit created some interesting acoustic effects, but I didn't see the connection to the choreography, and the ones suspended from the ceiling, while serving no apparent technical purpose, played havoc with the sightlines of those of us sitting in the balcony. As for the choreography, I have always been a big fan of Gingras' work with Noam Gagnon for their company The Holy Body Tattoo: the repetitive phrasing, the physical extremity, the play with scale. And, indeed, last night what worked best for me were those moments when the five dancers (Gingras, Sarah Doucet, Amber Funk Barton, Masaharu Imazu, and Shay Kuebler) came together--mostly on the floor--to create the intense energy and pulsating action I was expecting from the title of the piece. But these sequences were too often bracketed, for me, by scenes that were surprisingly listless or tonally disruptive: such as Gingras and Kuebler as dueling toreadors circling Funk Barton, stretched out like a movie star on a white blanket.

A red blanket recurs at the end, on which Gingras contorts her body like a cat in heat, now apparently trying to attract the attention of a disinterested Kuebler. But the partnering between Gingras and Kuebler, which does seem to provide the piece with a kind of central contest of power or scene of conflict, is too diffusely rendered and suffers--as does the work as a whole, in my mind--from a lack of a coherent movement vocabulary. The program notes say that Gingras developed the piece with the dancers, and you can certainly see Kuebler's and Funk Barton's trademark 605 moves throughout. However, they need to be better corralled to the theatre of this particular amphitheatre.

And maybe, in the end, that was what I was missing: some larger spark of theatricality. Symptomatic, for me, of this piece's weak pulse on the theatrical front was the moment in the middle when all of the dancers exit for a costume change and we're left staring at a bare stage for a good minute. That's when my own heart sank.

A Musical to Die For

2011-10-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Atomic Vaudeville's Ride the Cyclone, on at Granville Island's Revue Stage until next Saturday, October 15th, is a delight from start to finish, a smart, witty and deliciously macabre musical about the afterlife of the hidden lives of six students in a chamber choir from Uranium, Saskatchewan who perished on an amusement park roller coaster. Returned from the dead by Karnak, the mechanical fairground fortune teller who feels responsible for their untimely ends, each is given a chance to tell his or her story, both the outward image they presented to the world and their secret inner longings.

Thus Noel Gruber (Kholby Wardell), the fastidious gay boy who has never kissed another man, sings about longing to live a dissipated life as an unrepentant female whore in prewar Paris. Ocean O'Connell Rosenberg (Rielle Braid), the self-appointed and self-absorbed leader of the group, recounts how she lost the national debating championships as a result of being torn between the conflicting advice of her Jewish Marxist father and her Irish Catholic mother. Mischa Bachinksky (Matthew Coulson), an angry recent immigrant from the Ukraine, raps his rage at his adopted country before revealing (in a stunningly designed projection sequence) his passion for his electronic girlfriend back in Kiev. Ricky Potts (Elliott Loran), an Asbergerish loner raised on a steady diet of comic books, brings down the house when he reveals a secret alter ego as a "bachelor" superhero from a planet populated by felines. Perhaps the evening's most haunting moment comes when Jane Doe (played in white face by Sarah Jane Pelzer)--who was decapitated in the accident and whose body, having never been claimed by a family member, remains unidentified--sings achingly of the regret of having no regrets. Finally, Constance Blackwood (Kelly Hudson), the "nice" girl among the group whom everyone expects to settle down for life in Uranium, reveals her real dark thoughts, including the incredible liberty she feels at the moment the roller coaster she persuades her friends to ride with her goes off the rails and launches them into space.

All six actors are amazingly good, the book and music (Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell) knowing and heartfelt, ironic and sincere, in equal measure, and the direction (Richmond and Britt Small), choreography (Treena Stubel) and set design (Hank Pine and James Insell) polished to symbiotic perfection. My only critique would be the extensive expository voice-over from Kranak at the beginning: the information is necessary, but might it not be delivered in some other way--i.e., a real live Kranak who gets his own song, and who acts as narrator/MC throughout? Something to think about, perhaps, as the creators continue to hone this already very fine show.

Circle Mirror Confusion

2011-10-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

Peter Birnie is right. Reading his damning review of the Arts Club production of Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation (on at the Granville Island Stage until October 22) in yesterday's Vancouver Sun in advance of attending that evening's performance, I thought: how can this be?

The play, about secrets sheltered by the damaged participants of a community acting class in small-town Vermont, was the toast of the 2009-10 Off-Broadway season and, together with her play The Aliens, cemented Baker as an up-and-coming star in the American theatrical firmament (she's just been named, along with Kenneth Lonergan, Katori Hall, Will Eno, and Regina Taylor, as a resident playwright of The Signature Theatre Company). I had read adulatory reviews of the New York production by critics whom I respect. And Nicola Cavendish was at the helm here in Vancouver. What could go wrong?

Plenty, it appears, and while much of the blame can be placed squarely at the feet of Cavendish (why so many blackouts, and why so long for each in a 45 minute first act?), it would have to be a pretty crackerjack ensemble to overcome the structural weaknesses and general thinness of Baker's script. This might have been the case in New York (the great Reed Birney was in that cast, after all), but it's not here. Believe me, the only thing worse than bad acting is badly acted bad acting.

An unfortunate--and unusual--misstep for the Arts Club. And after this past January's disappointing (although form much different reasons) mounting of This at the Playhouse, I'm definitely starting to second guess the imprimatur of the New York Times' Charles Isherwood.

Foresight on Insite

2011-10-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the Supreme Court of Canada for unanimously recognizing what the Harper government (note how I'm following the PMO's preferred designation) has steadfastly denied in trying to shut down North America's only safe-injection site for IV drug users: InSite saves lives.

Read about the decision here.

NBC at 60

2011-09-24T12:23:00.001-07:00

No, not the National Broadcasting Corporation. I mean the National Ballet of Canada, which is currently on a 60th Anniversary Tour of Western Canada that sees them in residence at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from last night through this Sunday.

The NBC is touring without its in-house orchestra, and with a mostly contemporary rather than classical repertoire. The latter might not be to everyone's liking (though last night's house was quite full, I hear many of the tickets were comped), but it certainly was to mine.

First up was William Forsythe's the second detail, to a pulsating electronic score by frequent collaborator Thom Willems. Filled with turned in and bent knees rather than pointed out and extended toes, the piece (first commissioned by the NBC in 1991) is classic (which is to say classically deconstructivist) Forsythe. To this end, the piece abounds with various meta-references to the classed, gendered, and raced history not just of ballet, but of modern dance. Was that not a nod to Josephine Baker with the dancer of colour in the white dress cutting through the corps de ballet at the end?

Next was Jerome Robbins' Other Dances, a suite of mazurkas and one waltz set to the music of Chopin (with live piano accompaniment provided by Andrei Streliaev). Originally created by Robbins for the legendary Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov, as danced by NBC principal dancers Greta Hodgkinson and Zdenek Konvalina, virtuosity never overshadowed the simple romanticism and folk origins of both the music and the steps.

The most recent piece on the program was former NBC Artistic Director James Kudelka's The Man in Black, a quartet for three men and one woman set to six cover songs recorded by Johnny Cash late in his life. With the dancers shod in cowboy boots, and employing trademark country and western movement patterns, including line and square dancing, Kudelka manages both to highlight the pantomimic qualities these forms share with classical ballet and to translate the melancholy at the heart of Cash's growly, faltering tremolo into a succession of arresting poses that reveal the aching vulnerability underneath each of his dancers' swagger. Beautifully brought to life by Kevin Bowles, Stephanie Hutchison, Patrick Lavoie, and Jonathan Renna, and with a terrific lighting design by Trad Burns, this was my favourite work on the program.

A close second, however, was local legend Crystal Pite's Emergence, which closed the evening by showcasing what at times seemed like the entirety of the 70-strong NBC company in her 2009 Dora Award-winning exploration of group formations and individual expression in an insect-like colony. The images Pite builds in this piece (akimbo arms evoking spidery legs; the heaving, tattooed backs of the male dancers conjuring about-to-be-birthed larvae; the female dancers swarming across the stage en pointe) are stunning. As is the stage design by hubby Jay Gower Taylor and the humming, buzzing, droning score by Owen Belton (like Forsythe, for whom she danced, Pite has understood the importance of working with a talented musical composer). However, given the complexity of Pite's work for her own company, I was frankly surprised at how mimetic this piece feels. Not that this stopped me from thrilling to the closing tableau: the company in full vertical extension, about to explode chrysalis-like from the stage, while one among them ducks back into the lit opening of their hive.

An excellent start to what promises to be a major dance season here in Vancouver.

Let There Be Light

2011-09-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

In his curtain speech last night at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre--where Patrick Street Productions' mounting of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' The Light in the Piazza is in previews (it opens next week and runs until October 9th)--director Peter Jorgensen said they were still tweaking things. One would be hard pressed to see what more needs tweaking, so flawless is virtually every aspect of this production.

The Light in the Piazza was first developed as a co-production between Seattle's Intiman Theatre (where, before its recent troubles, Lucas was for a time an artistic associate) and Chicago's Goodman Theatre before moving on to Broadway in 2005 in a production directed by Bartlett Sher that won several Tony Awards. The musical is based on the 1962 MGM film starring Olivia de Havilland, Rossano Brazzi, and a young George Hamilton, which was in turn based on the novel by Elizabeth Spenser. The story concerns an American mother and daughter, Margaret and Clara Johnson, traveling in Florence in the 1950s. There they encounter a young Florentine, Fabrizio Naccarelli, who is immediately smitten with Clara. Clara returns Fabrizio's attentions, but Margaret is determined to put an end to the liaison as she fears that Fabrizio will discover that the 25 year old Clara's luminous innocence and pure joy with life is in part related to her mental handicap, a childhood brain injury having left her with the emotional and developmental skills of a 12 year old. However, after Margaret meets Fabrizio's family and has a chance to observe the blossoming relationship between the two young lovers, she changes her mind and starts to believe (much to the fury of her husband, Roy, who has remained at home in the States) that marriage to Fabrizio might be Clara's one true chance at happiness.

Not the typical stuff for a sunny Broadway musical, but then the piece is arguably more akin to an intimate chamber opera (and this cast's voices are up to that challenge), complete with a string heavy score and largely recitative lyrics (the only place the work falls down in my mind, with Guettel too often substituting rhyme, or words of any kind for that matter, with sung scales or even humming). Lucas' book manages the tricky feat of being at once utterly sincere and wisely knowing, with several witty asides delivered directly to the audience letting us in on the thoughts of the women in particular, especially Margaret and, in the second act's memorable opening number, "Aiutami," Signora Naccarelli. Indeed, although on some levels The Light in the Piazza operates as a fairly conventional love story, Lucas manages not only to imbue the entire proceedings with a proto-feminist tone (in addition to Margaret's and Signora Naccarelli's musings on their feckless husbands, we also have daughter-in-law Franca's despair over the wandering eye of Giuseppe, Fabrizio's older brother), but also some subtle queer cynicism about the happy-ever-after of heterosexual romance: see, again, Franca's Act 1 lament, "The Joy You Feel."

All of these complexities are brought wonderfully, impeccably to life by the PSP cast and crew. The performances are, without exception, superb. As Clara, Samantha Hill not only has a soaring soprano, but an eager expressiveness in her face and body that manages to convey her character's as yet undimmed sense of wonder and openness to new experiences, including love. By contrast, one of the marvels of Katey Wright's performance as Margaret is seeing how her steely outward protectiveness toward her daughter masks serious internal misgivings and regrets about her own happiness, and how both are slowly transformed as she awakens not just to Clara's joy but to Signor Naccarelli's charms. To this end, Wright's Act 2 reprise of "The Beauty Is," a song sung by Clara in the Uffizi in Act 1 as she is stirred by all the gorgeous art works around her, is at once shattering and soul-stirring. All of the Naccarellis nail not only their spoken Italian accents, but their sung ones as well. Kudos especially in this regard to Adrian Marchuk as the lovestruck Fabrizio; his Act 1 solo, "Il Mondo Era Vuoto," demonstrates, both vocally and gesturally, just how truly gripped by Cupid's arrow our hero is. As Signor Naccarelli, the amazing David Adams brings just the right combination of old-world charm and gravitas to the patriarch who is not above doing some romancing of his own. Heather Pawsey and Dana Luccock, as Signora and Franca Naccarelli, respectively, have smaller roles, but each makes her presence keenly felt when on stage and both get moments in the spotlight to display their operatic pipes. As the comic lothario Giuseppe, Daren Herbert doesn't get a musical solo, but he does get the evening's only dance one, and he makes the most of it.

The orchestra, under the direction of pianist Sean Bayntun, are on a raised platform upstage throughout the performance, and they were perfectly in synch with each other, and with the performers, throughout. A simple, moveable set of frames designed by Lance Cardinal successfully conveys the multiple perspectives of and on display in the work, and Alan Brodie's subtle backlighting of many of them helps bring this out even further. Finally, a standing ovation for costume designer Jessica Dmytryshyn, whose tailored dresses and suits perfectly capture the glamourous world of postwar Italy. The shoes worn by the brothers Naccarelli are alone worth the price of admission.

All of this is brought to life under the assured and even-handed direction of Jorgensen, who highlights the sentiment without overplaying it, and who keeps things moving in real theatrical time while somehow managing to transport us into the dreamtime of Clara and Fabrizio's impossibly possible romance.

Go see this show with someone you love.

Vancouver Playhouse and David Y.H. Lui

2011-09-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Two startling bits of arts-related news in the Vancouver Sun today.

First, I was stunned to read that the Vancouver Playhouse was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that it is being brought back from the financial abyss in part via emergency funding from the city. I do understand the arguments for shoring up our signature regional theatre company--including averting the ripple effects its going under would have on countless smaller theatre companies and performing arts organizations who depend on its theatrical infrastructure. However, I do wish someone would be honest and tackle the elephant in the room, which is the lackluster and uninspired programming at the Playhouse for the past several years. The argument has been made that to fill the seats, populist entertainments must be enlisted (cue the works of Norm Foster, which this theatre seems to love). But what about all of us who currently stay away because of the safe and largely recycled offerings, and who are waiting desperately to support more adventurous work? Why can't the Playhouse figure out a balance along the lines of what Bill Millerd has achieved at the Arts Club? These and other questions need to be answered if the Playhouse is to survive long term.

Also in today's paper was the shocking news that leading dance impresario and all-around patron saint of the arts David Y.H. Lui had died. Lui almost single-handedly put Vancouver and BC on the map in terms of international dance. He was largely responsible for the formation of Ballet BC (also just back from the financial brink) and the companies he brought through Vancouver through his Dance Spectacular and Dance Alive series provided an early model for Barb Clausen and Jim Smith's current DanceHouse seasons. The rooftop garden at The Dance Centre is named in Lui's honour, and as that space celebrates its 10th anniversary this weekend, we would all do well to take a moment and reflect on the rich legacy Lui has contributed to the cultural landscape of our city.

Fringe Madness (2011 Version): Oh, That Wily Snake, Giant Invisible Robot, and Jesus in Montana

2011-09-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

Martin Dockery's Oh, That Wily Snake is part modern relationship drama and part absurdist updating of the Adam and Eve story: with a 10-foot tall dish-washing Belgian as God, a brussel sprout substituting for the apple, and Aruba metaphorically standing in for all that is pleasurable and forbidden. I'm not sure if all the script's unexplained allusions and orthogonal shifts in direction and tone work, but Dockery, as Edmund, and co-star Vanessa Quesnelle, as Edith, handle them deftly, their overlapping dialogue delivered at lightning speed and with very believable sentiment. Quesnelle is especially affecting portraying the different--though no less coercive--roles thrust upon women by men.

Jayson MacDonald is a terrific physical actor and vocal chameleon who is as convincing as an excited six-year-old boy summarizing the plot of The Empire Strikes Back as he is as a seductive, cream-puff eating woman redounding on why she always gives to charity anonymously. Both characters are on display in MacDonald's beautifully written, hilarious, and deeply moving play Giant Invisible Robot, which tells the story of Russell, who forges a relationship with the robot of the title in order to deal with the trauma of childhood, and who insists, in dealing with the vicissitudes of adult relationships, in remaining loyal to the existence of his friend. With the aid of a few simple costume changes, a seemingly endless repertoire of sound effects and postures, a pair of flashing bicycle reflectors, and heaps of charisma, MacDonald succeeds in making us believe as well.

Barry Smith is familiar to Vancouver Fringe audiences from past critically lauded shows Every Job I've Ever Had, Baby Book and American Squatter. In Jesus in Montana Smith tells the story of how he rejected his Southern Baptist upbringing, only to later fall in with a Baha'i cult and place his faith in a convicted pedophile as the second coming of Jesus. Smith is a talented monologuist, who combines a storyteller's gift for narrative suspense with a stand-up's intuitive grasp of when to deliver the punch-line. But what elevates this work even further is the amazing multi-media slide show that accompanies Smith's words, and that incorporates photographs, old Super-8 movies, charts and graphs, and highlighted passages from the Bible to add visual texture to Smith's incredible story.

These three shows bring to an end my 2011 Fringe experience. I may yet get to a few Pick-of-the-Fringe holdovers, but if not I count what I've seen as one of the more rewarding festival experiences in a while (and not just because of the spectacular weather). There's still a whole week left of shows for those of you with freer schedules than my own, so do get out there and see something.

Fringe Madness (2011 Version): Little Orange Man, The De Chardin Project, and Cabaret Terrarium

2011-09-11T07:55:00.001-07:00

Ryan Gladstone recites, as one of his tales in Every Story Ever Told the unexpurgated version of Cinderella. Among other things Disney leaves out: the stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to make their feet fit into the glass slipper and end up getting their eyes poked out by a pair of birds loyal to the heroine at the end of the story. These details provide a link to the extraordinary child savant, Kit, at the centre of Ingrid Hansen's Little Orange Man, about a hyperactive girl of Danish heritage whose greatest delight comes from reenacting the grisly folk tales told to her by her grandfather to the young preschool children adjacent her primary schoolyard. When she is banned from doing so any further by concerned parents aghast at the drawings their kids are suddenly bringing home, and when her beloved grandfather suddenly descends into a coma after falling down the stairs, Kit must call on the dream energy of the audience to channel the more vivid imaginations of her preschool friends and descend to the underworld, do battle with the evil slug-men, and rescue her grandfather. The piece is wildly theatrical (tickle trunks, hand and shadow puppets, musical numbers, and multiple movement and lighting effects abound) and Kit is totally believable as played by the charismatic Hansen--one half, with director Kathleen Greenfield, of SNAFU Dance Theatre. Kit may be lonely and have no friends her own age, but as she says, she prefers hanging out with her elderly grandpa and the young preschoolers because at least they still believe. The gift of this show (which Saturday afternoon's audience gave a standing ovation) is that through their extraordinary coups-de-théâtre (the celery sticks doubling as the evil slugs is my favourite), and the absolute sincerity of their story, Hansen and Greenfield also help us believe once again in the power of our own imaginations.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a Jesuit priest who also trained as a geologist (earning a Doctorate at the Sorbonne) and worked as a paleontologist in Egypt, France, and China, where he formed part of the international team that made the discovery of the early hominid Peking Man in 1929. While always remaining loyal to his vows, in his writings de Chardin openly challenged Church doctrine, including the idea of Original Sin, and treated the Biblical creation story as a metaphor, seeking to reconcile his work in evolutionary theory with his theological beliefs. However, he was never allowed to publish his theories in his lifetime, dying in relative obscurity in New York. Only with the posthumous publication of The Phenomenon of Man did Teilhard's ideas finally reach a wider audience. In so doing, his mystical reconciliation of science and spirituality--it's to de Chardin that we owe the epigram "Everything that rises must converge"--touched a chord with many seeking to find a basis for Christianity in the material world. In The De Chardin Project the folks at Quickening Theatre have taken the outline of Teilhard's life and turned it into a tremendously compelling hour of theatre. The writing (by Adam Seybold, who also plays Teilhard) is especially rich, and as voiced by Seybold and fellow creator Kate Fenton (who plays a number of roles and who also serves, along with director Ginette Mohr, as co-creator of the show) one feels in some sense inspirited by the words. At the same time, with just a few props and simple yet effective stage techniques, the material side of Teilhard's philosophy is brought to imaginative theatrical life. Both Seybold and Fenton have tremendous stage presence and chemistry, and as told by this company (winners of the 2009 "Cultchivating the Fringe" Award for Fish Face), you will indeed find your pulse quickening as you listen to de Chardin's story.

Accidental assassins turned cabaret artists, imaginary friends who turn out to be real, archaeologists who tell jokes, and hundreds of wooden frogs audience members get to stroke with sticks to camouflage their laughter: these are just some of the delights on offer in Richard Harrington and Chris Kauffman's Cabaret Terrarium. The show resurrects (as it were) the stars of Harrington and Kauffman's previous Fringe show, Hotel California, and features a hilarious rendition of The Eagles song. Gustave is an affectless Belgian singer-musician whose voice and sense of rhythm are as rusty as his little grey cells (to be fair, he has been encased in a block of ice). Nhar is his trusty pantomime sidekick. Together they enact an identity quest that, in its epic scope, is at once arctic and equatorial, amphibious and avian, physical and metaphysical. Great good fun.

Fringe Madness (2011 Version): The Birdmann and Every Story Ever Told

2011-09-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again, and yesterday evening found me down on Granville Island for my first tastes of the annual banquet of theatre and performance that is the Vancouver International Fringe Festival. Usually the start of a new term doesn't allow me much opportunity for feasting on all the offerings. As it is this year I have had to cram all of my menu choices into this opening weekend, as the parentals arrive on Monday.

First up was The Birdmann, from the Australian writer/performer Trent Baumann. The piece is a combination of postmodern vaudeville, deadpan cabaret, conceptual stand-up, and a burlesque (quite literally) of magic, circus, and body arts--all laced with a message about anti-consumerism and environmentalism. Baumann may very well win the award for best hair of the Fringe, and if this show was a little heavy on the audience participation for my taste (always a Fringe trademark, I know--see below), Baumann's solicitations were never coercive and always accompanied by his winning and self-deprecating assurances that no one was exposing themselves to more potential embarrassment than himself.

Next, I went to see Festival superstar Ryan Gladstone's Every Story Ever Told, his 60 minute attempt at a redaction of the history of world narrative. Gladstone starts with capstone summaries of some classic works of literature and film. But after getting bogged down--hilariously--in acting out all four books of War and Peace and all six parts (who knew?) of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky film franchise, Gladstone realizes it might be better to take the common themes and structures of most stories and, with the aid of the audience, add to the pile by telling a new story. It's a risky move for a performer going from the tried and true (not to mention dutifully memorized and audio- and light-cued) to the unknown and wackily left-field suggestions of a hyper-kinetic audience. But Gladstone is a pro (all the reviewerati, including Colin Thomas, Peter Birnie, Jo Ledingham, and Jerry Wasserman were out in force), and he handled every suggestion--in our case a female trapeze artist with a prehensile tail battling her evil rivals, who are Siamese twins--with aplomb and amazing humour.

Three more shows are on tap today, so stay tuned for more reviews.

On Being Briefed

2011-09-02T07:53:00.000-07:00

Though it's been going on for more than five years and has yielded 17 different programs (and counting), last night was the first time I'd been to The Tomorrow Collective's Brief Encounters series (on at Performance Works through this evening). The concept behind the series is a time-based fusing of artistic sensibilities through cross- and multi-disciplinary collaboration. For each show, two guest programmers (in this case Laura Barron and Josh McNorton) select 12 different artists working in a range of forms and media; six pairings are then forged (the more unusual the better), and each group is given two weeks to create an original work of live art.

It's a bold experiment, not least in exposing artists--and audiences--to different creative practices. And as last night's show proved, the more each collaborator absorbs and immerses (or even risks subsuming) his or her own work within the other's discipline, the more successful the results. This was certainly the case with theatre artist Anita Rochon and singer/songwriter Dominique Fricot, who actually thematized the self-other encounter at the heart of collaboration in a funny, somewhat melancholic, and very trippy song/story cycle about time travel and connections lost and found. Ditto "fantasy stylist" Myles Laphen and flamenco dancer Rosario Ancer, who gave us a sumptuous--and literally kick-ass--version of the Coppélia story. Finally, dancer Julia Carr and puppeteer Maggie Winston combined for a winning and politically pointed slide-show/striptease about women's body image.

Less successful, for me, were the pairings in which the juxtaposition of disciplines was mostly illustrative and mimetic: e.g. percussionist Paul Bray's "sounding out" of the forms and shapes and minerals that landscape architect Pawel Gradowski works with; or the 605 Collective's Josh Martin busting moves to (rather than with) spoken word artist Prevail's rather too-dominant fairy-tale crossing of Pinocchio and Frankenstein.

I'm not usually one to advocate being overly explanatory in presenting experimental work to audiences. However, in this format I would have liked a bit more context behind each collaboration. Short video segments in advance of each piece feature the artists talking about aspects relating to the process of their collaboration, but nothing really about the motivation for the piece itself. Similarly, we are given no information from the guest programmers about why they chose these artists, if they had a particular vision for the program as a whole in selecting their pairings, nor even where they come from in terms of their own practices. Perhaps this is deliberate, but this is one instance in which I would definitely have liked to have been presented with some sort of curatorial statement--to have, in other words, been briefed.

Political Roundup

2011-09-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

If the chill in the air this September 1st is any indication, local municipal and provincial politics this fall should be anything but warm and fuzzy. At the very least recent news on both fronts merits some snide commentary.

First off comes today's report that Premier Christy Clark has paused amid her jam-packed schedule of photo-ops and put the brakes on the idea of a fall election. No doubt even she had to understand the message that was sent with the HST referendum results, and so now it looks like we won't be going to the polls until May 2013, just after the re-introduction of the PST. Time enough, one would think, for Clark to actually do some governing. Time enough, as well, for Clark, in so doing, to sink herself and her party--especially if Adrian Dix and the NDP can ride the wave of orange love in the wake of Jack Layton's funeral.

Also in the papers today was a suggestion that the soon-to-be-released report on the Stanley Cup riots (co-authored, you will remember, by ex-VANOC chief John Furlong) will cast some negative light on our shiny happy Mayor Robertson. Combined with news that the NPA has hired the same team that got Rob Ford elected in Toronto, this means we might actually have a horse-race for the mayorship of Vancouver this November. Now all we need is for Robertson to declare himself a candidate for the federal NDP leadership... Does the lad speak French, I wonder?

In Memoriam: Jack Layton

2011-08-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

Jack Layton's legacy was ennobled today by the trans-ideological outpouring--from politicians, the media, and the public alike--of praise for his gift of service to our country.

Let us return that gift by answering the call he sets out in his extraordinary final letter, building on the NDP's gains in the last election and ensuring that our government, no matter who's in power, nor for how long, remains accountable to all Canadians.

Rest in peace Jack.

We Demand

2011-08-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve curated a film series at the Pacific Cinémathèque, running August 25-28 in conjunction with a parallel academic conference called “We Demand: History/Sex/Activism.” Both the conference and the film series commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first recorded national political action undertaken by gay liberationists and lesbian feminist activists in Canada.

The cover of the Cinémathèque program guide got the subtitle wrong, but you can still click on the image above to check out what films and videos I’ve lined up. And click here for more information on the conference.

An Afternoon with John and Jane

2011-08-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

PuSh Communications Manager Kara Gibbs asked me to write a guest post for the PuSh blog on a special fundraising event for the Festival we had last Sunday.

I thought I would post the link here.

Stay tuned for more PuSh news (both here and at www.pushfestival.ca) in the coming months, including an announcement of the 2012 program.

Anything Goes at TUTS

2011-08-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Jacqueline Breakwell (center), as Erma, surrounded by flapping chorines in the TUTS production of Anything Goes

As we have for the past several summers Richard and I made our way to Stanley Park's Malkin Bowl last night to catch Theatre Under the Stars' production of Cole Porter's Anything Goes, on in repertory with Bye Bye Birdie until the end of next week. We picked a perfect night for it: clear skies and warm (I only added my last layer toward the end of Act 2), no wind, and also hardly any bugs.

As a musical, Anything Goes shouldn't work: its featherweight book (co-written by P.G. Wodehouse) is a farce that turns on a sequence of contrived coincidences and barely believable disguises (not to mention heaps of Orientalist stereotypes); the male and female leads are not a couple; and Porter blows his musical wad, as it were, in the first act, which contains the hits "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," "It's De-Lovely," and, of course, the rousing title tune and its signature tap accompaniment.

But in Reno Sweeney, the chanteuse-revivalist, who gets all the big numbers, and whose open sexuality and lusty appetites offer a trenchant commentary on social and religious repression and hypocrisy, Porter has created one of the great female musical theatre roles. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the success of any production of Anything Goes hinges on the successful casting of Reno. Ethel Merman filled the bill in the 1934 Broadway premiere, and her full-throated vocal stylings, caustic comedy, and imposing physical presence have to a certain extent established the template for all Renos to follow, including Patti LuPone in the acclaimed 1987 Broadway revival (interesting side note: Merman and LuPone would also both go on to star as Mama Rose in Gypsy). Most recently, the incomparable Sutton Foster has stepped into Reno's shoes in the current Broadway revival, and judging by the hoofing she did on the Tony Awards in June, those shoes are on fire. In Irene Karas, Vancouver now has its own memorable Reno, big-voiced, warm-hearted, light on her feet, adept at physical comedy, and always leading (or shooting) from the hip.

Granted, I'm no musicologist, but Porter's songs have always struck me as delicate, even ethereal confections, dependent on clever rhymes (most filled with abundant sexual innuendo) and lots of alliteration. With rare exceptions, one would not classify him as a someone who writes songs to be belted. Which is why I was so surprised by Reno's first big second act number, "Blow, Gabriel, Blow," as it sees Porter mining blues spirituals and swing, and allows Karas to explore the rich lower registers of her vocal range. Equally riveting in her two solo numbers is Jacqueline Breakwell as Erma, the seductive moll to gangster Moonface Martin (a terrifically funny Andrew Cownden). Breakwell (pictured above) has a background in burlesque, and it shows in terms of how she is able to put over her songs with just the right combination of sex appeal and comic swagger. Indeed, watching Karas and Breakwell last night, it struck me that through Reno and Erma, Porter was channeling some of his own sexuality; in the frank display of their sexual desires, their unapologetic promiscuity, and the worship they receive from a bevy of handsome sailors, Reno and Erma can partly be read as gay men in drag (and, here, one can also reference the legendary alternative lyrics to songs like "You're the Top," in particular).

Many of the other performances in this production are also winning, including the fleet-footed Todd Talbot as the besotted Billy Crocker, Lauren Bowler (Cathy in last year's production of Singin' in the Rain) as his inamorata Hope Harcourt, and Seth Little as Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, the buffoonish Englishman to whom Hope is disastrously betrothed, and whose rediscovery of the Gypsy within (aided, of course, by the Carmen-like Reno) eventually sets all aright, resulting in a traditional comic closure that features almost as many nuptials as As You Like It, playing across the water at Bard on the Beach.

I'm always amazed at the audiences who turn out for TUTS shows: they represent a cross-section (tourists and locals, old and young, ethnically diverse, etc.) you don't see at other shows. My only complaint last night was that we were too quiet. Everyone on stage was giving 110%, and for the most part our applause was polite and restrained. More whooping and whistles are needed for the final shows.

Connecting the Dots

2011-08-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

I'm behind on my blog posting, and while I don't have time for a proper review (the Women and Comedy conference at SFU Harbour Centre that I've been helping to organize opens tomorrow), I did want to urge folks to check out Die Roten Punkte's newest show, Kunst Rock, on at the Cultch until next Thursday, and which Richard and I caught yesterday on opening night. Indeed, Astrid did extract a promise from the audience to tell all our friends.

Die Roten Punkte is the life/work performance art project of Astrid and Otto, a brother and sister rock duo whom we're meant to understand are orphans from Berlin (their parents either died in a train wreck or were mauled by a lion--it's not entirely clear), but who may just be a pair of friends/lovers/theatre artists from Melbourne. They're the White Stripes of the Fringe Festival circuit, complete with Astrid on drums and Otto on guitar. They blend parodic punk with hilarious on-stage banter and storytelling, the point of which is usually to highlight Astrid's sybaritic appetites and Otto's self-effacing gullibility.

Apart from one extended bit about the "artiest song" in their repertoire (which begins with Otto sampling the sound inside his head), the "art rock" premise of this show is less a structuring narrative motif than an extended conceit for the elaboration of their performative on-stage selves. In Astrid's case, this begins with her dress, pieces of which she removes to hilarious effect during one of the show's highlights. Indeed, these two are as adept at physical comedy as they are at deadpan comic banter and extravagantly theatrical musicianship (Astrid wielding her drum sticks is a sight to behold). They're also fabulous dancers, as they proved during the evening's encore, a song about a robot who thinks he's a lion that featured Otto on a portable electric keyboard and Astrid on cowbell (!).

Astrid and Otto are guileless performers, so much fun to watch because it's clear they are having as much fun themselves. Indeed, the back and forth between the performers and audience felt genuinely warm, especially during a sequence in which Otto referenced the Vancouver invention of the plastic banana protector.

Kunst Rock is the perfect summertime show, light, breezy, hilarious, and with an infectious beat. Kudos to the Cultch for launching their 2011/12 season early, and with such a winning piece.

2011-07-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

A brief shout-out to Rice & Beans Theatre's current production of Mobilis in Mobili, on now at Pacific Theatre (12th Ave. and Hemlock) through tomorrow evening. The second installment of the company's "Element Series," the one-act play is a loose adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea--by way of Vincenzo Natali's Cube it seemed at certain points to this viewer.

Writer-director Pedro Chamale, working collaboratively with his cast and crew, makes canny use of Pacific's tricky studio space, and also incorporates lots of innovative movement into the piece (the choreography was by CarliAnn Forthun). Condensing the essence of Verne's story to the choice of death versus joining his crew for unlimited underwater adventures that Nemo (Deneh Thompson) presents his three "rescued" captives--Professor Aronnax (Tristan Bacon), his assistant Conseil (Chelsea MacDonald), and the bull-headed Canadian harpoonist Ned Land (Rase Calvert)--the piece manages to construct an interesting metaphysical exploration of the question of choice versus constraint.

Bar None

2011-07-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

At the Dancing on the Edge Festival's Edge Five presentation last night at the Firehall, Richard and I thrilled to the premiere of colleague and Objecthood collaborator Rob Kitsos' newest work. In Barego, Kitsos, together with Ballet BC dancers Leon Feizo-Gas and Alexis Fletcher and SFU Contemporary Arts alum Mark Arboleda, offer a meditation on the bar as a space where individual subjectivity and private desires (you can read the invisible slash mark in the title) come up against the rituals of public spectacle and collective judgment. Against a widescreen rear projection film loop consisting of a largely continuous pan of what I took to be the new Charles Bar at SFU Woodward's, and making strategic spatial use of three white barstools (which I like to think of as an homage by Rob to Objecthood), the four dancers mine (and at times mime) the subtle choreography so often exhibited in drinking establishments: from the way we perch on or fall off our stools to the complex sequence of hand and head movements involved in doing tequila shots; from the purposeful tango of would-be seduction to the elegant ballet of blissful inebriation. In solos, duos, and trios, Rob structures his movement around the twin poles of alienation and sociability, display and concealment that are always operating in the space of the bar: by that I mean that the dancers come together and move apart in patterns that telegraph at once the intoxicating effects of fellow-feeling and the sobering estrangement that comes when that feeling is withheld or not returned (including by the self).

Having worked with Rob, I know he likes to play with stage space, and that he is not afraid to have more than one thing going on at the same time movement-wise. I'm with him on this, as static dancers within a mise-en-scène is something that drives me nuts (and an element of Quiet that I couldn't understand, especially as Zaides' twice-repeated placement of his non-moving dancers downstage right effectively blocked the view of the left side of the house). All of which is to say that I appreciated how Rob played with foreground and background in Barego, including the incorporation of the film. One's attention is constantly being divided in a bar--focused near (on one's drink or potential conquest) and far (the animated conversations at adjacent tables, the sports game being broadcast on the television monitor, and so on)--so the fact that ours was as well during various sequences last night felt appropriate.

Acutely aware that bars are also prime sites of talk, with the confession, the boast, and the seduction all vying for performative supremacy, Rob incorporates audio excerpts from bar scenes in popular films into the work. Indeed, Rob himself offers up a memorable lip synch of a speech by Shelley "The Machine" Levene, the character Jack Lemmon played in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it's a treat to watch Fletcher incarnate the dissolute Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway) from Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (Mickey Rourke's Henry to Dunaway's Wanda in that film: "What do you do?" Dunaway/Wanda: "I drink.").

One of the things that makes Rob's work so compelling to watch is that he not a "pure dance" choreographer; less interested in the technical execution of his movement, than in that movement's integration into a larger interdisciplinary aesthetic (one that often includes film/video, music, props, and big heaps of theatricality), Rob offers multiple avenues of access to the questions he chooses to explore. Movement is always central to this exploration, but it is never abstracted or marked off for its own sake. To this end, it is especially exciting to watch the classically trained Fletcher and Feizo-Gaz, so memorable as the leads in Rob's Long Story Short, his contribution to Ballet BC's Surfacing program at the Dance Centre in 2009, cut loose even further in Barego. The program notes state that the dancers had a hand in the choreography, and at moments last night line and extension definitely came to the fore; but Rob's inimitable choreography (where limbs contract and buckle as much as they straighten) kept everyone (dancers and audience alike) suitably off balance.

My one complaint: I wanted the piece to be longer. This definitely feels to me like a piece that can be expanded into something evening-length, and I do hope that Rob continues to work on it.

Actually, I have a second complaint, and it has to do with the work that precedes Rob's on the Edge Five program: Benjamin Kamino's Nudity.Desire. Over-theorized (Agamben, Deleuze, and Zizek are all cited in the program notes) and under-performed, the work betrayed, for me, the worst excesses of bad performance art. Why it's been paired with Rob's piece I cannot fathom. If you're planning to head to the matinee on Saturday (which I urge you to do), perhaps think about arriving at intermission.

Loud and Unclear

2011-07-10T14:15:00.000-07:00

I didn’t get the chickens. At the end of Arkadi Zaides’ Quiet, which had its second and final performance at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival last night at the Firehall, three of the four male dancers remove what look like cardboard cutouts of chicken heads—each attached to a wooden strut—from the set designed by Tel Aviv graffiti artist Klone. They then proceed to menace the fourth dancer with them, "pecking" at him with the cutouts as he withdraws inside himself, or scurries across the floor.

One is left struggling with how to interpret the image, especially in a piece that up until that point had traded fairly literally (and at times didactically) in the physical representation of conflict, aggression, mistrust, violence, and the sundry “emergency states” (both internal and external) that have come to characterize the co-dependent relationship between Palestinians and Israelis that is at the heart of Zaides’ work. The intensity of movement displayed by the dancers in Quiet came through loud and clear, and was never less than compelling. And yet I can’t say that, overall, I was very moved by the piece.

And I find that just as perplexing as the meaning of the chickens.

P.

SummerWorks and the Ongoing Conservative Cultural Chill

2011-06-29T08:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone who doubted that a Conservative majority under Stephen Harper would be anything other than benign business as usual--particularly where arts and culture are concerned--should take careful stock of the recent announcement that Canadian Heritage has, after five years of providing federal funding for the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto, rejected the Festival's most recent grant request of $47,000, representing a 20% shortfall in the organization's budget just weeks before the 2011 Festival is to open on August 5th.

Folks may recall that SummerWorks was rebuked last year by Herr Harper himself for staging Homegrown, a play that dealt--a little too sympathetically in the eyes of the Prime Minister's Office--with the friendship between playwright Catherine Frid and a member of the Toronto 18. That this year's withdrawal of funding is tied to last year's programming is abundantly clear, and such blatant ideological intervention into cultural content on the part of the government should cause all in this country significant alarm.

As Guy Dixon notes in today's Globe and Mail, the decision also has consequences beyond the chill it sends to other arts and cultural organizations dependent on federal funding. SummerWorks is an important testing ground for new theatrical work in this country, as well as a venue visited by ADs, curators, and cultural programmers at other festivals across the country looking to partner on daring and provocative productions. This could have consequences not just for what audiences get to see in Toronto, but what the rest of us don't get to see.

Then, too, we should listen carefully to what's being telegraphed by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who is quoted at the end of Dixon's piece as stating that ALL cultural groups should be on notice that they cannot necessarily depend on continued public funding from the federal government, no matter their track records in the past. Because, of course, those of us who appreciate and support arts and culture in our society are just a bunch of snobbish elites who don't vote the right way.

Prove Flaherty and the Conservatives wrong, Canada, by writing to the Prime Minister and Heritage Canada protesting their funding decision regarding SummerWorks. And, as importantly, consider donating to the Festival to help them with this year's shortfall. You can do so here.

Incongruity

2011-06-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

We've been talking a lot about the importance of incongruity as a structuring principle of comedy in one of my classes this summer. Here are a few of the political incongruities that gave me a chuckle this past weekend:

1. Just in time for the 42nd edition of New York City's Pride Parade yesterday (at which a chastened Tracy Morgan served as honorary marshall--kidding!), Governor Cuomo signed a bill on Friday making New York the sixth state in the US (plus the District of Columbia) legalizing same-sex marriage. As the lead article in Sunday's New York Times pointed out, "the biggest and most influential donors to the New York campaign were Republicans." But as the paper's former restaurant critic Frank Bruni put it elsewhere in a very personal (and movingly written) op-ed piece--with what I take to be only the slightest whiff of irony--perhaps the greater incongruity is that this is a victory that the LGBT community is celebrating in the first place: "Why such widespread backing, from such surprising quarters? One major reason is that the wish and push to be married cast gay men and lesbians in the most benign, conservative light imaginable, not as enemies of tradition but as aspirants to it. In the quest for integration and validation, saying “I do” to “I do” is much more effective — not to mention more reflective of the way most gay people live — than strutting in leather on a parade float. We’re not trying to undermine the institution of marriage, a task ably handled by the likes of Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and too many other onetime role models to mention. We’re paying it an enormous compliment."

2. Meanwhile, here at home, after nearly a year investigating across party lines allegations of Canadian troops' complicity in detainee torture in Afghanistan, Stephen Harper's government has released thousands more pages of transcripts. Once again, most of the information on those pages is blacked out. Word is that some of it has to do with asbestos being used to build the prisons where the alleged torture took place.

3. In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Mayor Gregor Robertson admitted that he didn't know how many police were on the streets the night of the the Stanley Cup riots, and that Police Chief Jim Chu wouldn't tell him. Apparently last year's release of the same information was a "mistake" and that as Chair of the Police Board, the mayor has no input into operations, only for "police and budget." But wouldn't both of those things--personnel and money--fall into the category of operations in most organizations? At least Robertson agrees with Premier Clark that those responsible for the worst of the mayhem should be duly punished. As the above photo details, they are starting with bad spellers.

Fire and Ice

2011-06-17T06:33:00.000-07:00

The above images confirm why I am not a hockey fan, and why I dreaded the outcome of Wednesday night's final game.

Lots of finger-pointing and hand-wringing about why this happened, who's to blame, and the black eye this is giving to the City's image little over a year after the general euphoria of the Olympics (those initial Black Block riots notwithstanding).

Given what happened in 1994, given the mob mentality stoked and abetted (including by the mayor, the premier, and even my university president) at every level leading up to this series and especially the do-or-die Game 7, and given that a major attraction of the sport is watching players beat the shit out of each other on the ice, why is anyone surprised?

The phrase "Go Canucks Go" has never been a benign and supportive cheer from my perspective; rather, I have always found it to be oppressive in its ubiquity, and tinged with menace.

Not Completely As I Would Have Liked It

2011-06-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

There is much to admire in David Mackay's production of As You Like It at Bard on the Beach, which I caught in preview performance last night along with several members of my Women and Comedy class (we are discussing the play next week). Lois Anderson is a spirited, intensely physical, and very sexual Rosalind, and she is matched in comic timing, vivacity, and stage presence by Luisa Jojic as Celia. These two bosom buddies do not moon coquettishly over the de Boys brothers (Todd Thomson as Orlando and Sebastian Kroon as Oliver), but rather openly display their desire and revel in the frank ribaldry of Shakespeare's language. As such, we are given much lustier portraits of both women than we normally see in productions, their respective sexual ids having been unleashed by the wilds of Arden--a point reinforced especially by the staging of one of the songs requested by Jaques (John Murphy) of Duke Senior's men in Act IV as a fever dream of Celia's.

At the same time, I did chafe a little at what struck me as the resolutely heteronormative channeling of the women's open sexuality. After all, the play is pretty clear in suggesting that Celia and Rosalind, who share a bed in addition to an intensely symbiotic friendship, are same-sex cousins who kiss, and very likely a lot more else besides. When Rosalind falls for Orlando, Celia is openly jealous, and as critics like Julie Crawford have suggested, one way to interpret the speed with which Celia accedes to Oliver's marriage proposal so late in the play (and so soon after first laying eyes on him) is that she sees in a union with Orlando's newly reconciled brother a way to remain close to her own "most true" bosom buddy--Rosalind.

Of course, one of the delicious ironies of As You Like It is that the marital epithalamium is actually forestalled at the end of the play. To be sure, the god Hymen is magically conjured by Rosalind to unite each of the four couples (Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Oliver; Touchstone and Audrey; Silvius and the truculent Phoebe), but the bonds are actually never pronounced and Duke Senior's concluding couplet announcing their imminence is followed by Rosalind's epilogue, which takes us out of the fictional temporality of traditional comic closure and into the subjunctive temporality of the play's real-world staging ("If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me..."). Spoken by a boy actor who has just finished playing a woman playing a boy playing a woman, both the potential cross-gender and same-sex pathways encapsulated by this phrase are made manifest not just in the radically unstable referent behind the first-person pronoun, but also in the equally ambiguous second person addressee, whose multiple and multi-directional identifications cannot be pinned down.

So what happens if you excise the epilogue altogether, as this Bard production does? For one thing, you necessarily make marriage the de facto end point, both structurally in terms of the play and ideologically in terms of normalizing the free play of gender identifications and sexual desires that up until that point had reigned in Arden. The homoerotic associations that resurface in Rosalind's epilogue, and that link it to her cross-dressing elsewhere in the play, are here jettisoned in favour of an explicit staging of the revelries only hinted at in Duke Senior's final lines.

As disturbing, to me, is the fact that removing the epilogue also imperils if not destroys altogether the complicity established between performers and audience, that we are not only in on the joke (of gender and sexuality, generally, but also of theatrical masquerade more specifically), but that we are enjoying the joke. In a production that has up until this point traded in broad winks at the audience, not least in Ryan Beil's delightful capering, ad libbing, and general breaking of the fourth wall as Touchstone, this seems a curious final choice. And falling back on an excuse of changing theatrical conventions--i.e., that to a contemporary audience a female actor speaking the epilogue as written just wouldn't make sense--betrays an equally grievous failure of imagination in presuming audience members' identifications with both the character of Rosalind and the actor playing her are singular and straightforward.

Bee in a Bonnet

2011-06-05T07:11:00.000-07:00

Last night I braved the hordes of depraved Canucks fans crowding around the open windows and patios of pubs broadcasting Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals to attend a benefit for Théâtre la Seizième at the Playhouse featuring The Daily Show's Samantha Bee. Turns out la Seizième's Artistic and Managing Director, Craig Holzschuh, went to school with Bee at the University of Ottawa, and was able to convince her to come to Vancouver to talk about her career as "the funniest Canadian woman on American television" in order to raise some funds for Vancouver's resident French-language theatre company. As I'm teaching a course right now on Women and Comedy (and helping to organize an affiliated scholarly workshop on the topic for the beginning of August), I thought it would be a good opportunity for some of my students and I to get a glimpse of the process behind Bee's particular brand of subversive humour.

I have actually only ever watched a few clips from The Daily Show, but I am familiar enough with Jon Stewart's fake news concept to know that its basic premise is divided between Stewart, as anchor, satirically parsing the main headlines of the day or interviewing invited guests, and field correspondents (of whom Bee is "the most senior" on the show) doing more in-depth reports on some of the everyday people behind or affected by various events Stewart and the show's producers deem worthy of comedic ribbing. Last night Bee set up two of her more memorable reports, one on the "gayification" of NASCAR, and the other on the 2008 Republican National Convention, in which, following the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, she tried to get various delegates to even utter the word "choice." I don't know which was funnier: the actual audio clips of the reports that aired on the show, or Bee giving us a blow-by-blow of how the reports were put together.

The evening was not structured as a stand-up routine (Bee is trained as an actor), but rather as a conversation between Bee and Holzschuh, with questions taken from the audience at various moments throughout. The format worked well, as Bee is a born comic storyteller, her anecdotes displaying just the right combination of pointed wit and digressive self-deprecation to keep the audience in stitches. And if, as Tina Fey has recently argued in Bossypants, the writer is always queen in comedy, then Bee wears the crown regally. For me, the absolutely funniest part of last night came when Bee read an hilarious excerpt from her book I Know I Am But What Are You?, in which she details how a crazy family vacation to the Maritimes that got tacked on to another couple's honeymoon led to her parents introducing the facts of life to her via an explanation of lesbian sex.

Although it doesn't do the full context of the story justice, here is a YouTube clip of a pregnant Bee reading from the relevant section of the book:

As good a rebuttal as any to the specious claim that women aren't funny.

A Knockout Point

2011-06-04T14:50:00.000-07:00

I have always been a huge fan of the particular brand of metatheatre developed by Daniel MacIvor at da da kamera, the company he founded in 1986 and ran with producing partner Sherrie Johnson (now resident curator at PuSh) until 2006--and out of which came several important collaborations with director Daniel Brooks. Never Swim Alone (1991) was one of MacIvor's first big successes, and last night I caught Hardline Productions' excellent staging of the play at their tiny studio space in Gastown.

In Never Swim Alone, two friends from childhood, Bill (Raes Calvert) and Frank (Sean Harris Oliver), work through their adult frustrations and anxieties (with work, with their marriages, with material success or the lack thereof) in a literal game of one-upmanship, each doing his best to humiliate the other and so score a point from the comely bathing suit-clad female Referee (Lisa Goebel) overseeing their competition. All of this is done in a largely presentational style, with the actors speaking directly to the audience, or in warring "duologues," verbal sparring that produces a fusillade of words we thrill to hearing even as we recognize its largely assaultive function.

In this respect, the fit between MacIvor and Hardline is a good one, as the company's mandate is to produce plays "that punch you in the face"--at least figuratively speaking. And in terms of linguistic knockouts, it is arguably with this play that MacIvor patented da da kamera's trademark theatrical patter: fast, furious, repetitive, with a logic that accrues as much through rhythm and sound as through content and sense, and where the beats come not between the words but within them. Never Swim Alone is a verbal fugue on speed, with the characters' overlapping and counterpointed voices adding rich resonance to the one refrain they actually speak in unison--"beat you to the point." In the language of the play, this refers both to a swimming race gone horribly wrong from the boys' past and the increasingly extreme physical stakes that will eventually come to hijack their verbal jousting in the present.

Needless to say, all of this requires virtuosic performers with amazing timing and great articulation. Hardline's cast did not disappoint, with narry a dropped line or missed cue, and with great presence and physicality to back up their delivery. As written, MacIvor's characters are more functional types than psychologically complex individuals, but it is a credit to the performers--and to director Genevieve Fleming--that Bill and Frank and the Referee do not remain mere ciphers, and that they convey a range of emotions throughout the tightly paced 50-minute show.

Calvert and Oliver, Hardline's Co-Artistic Directors, along with Fleming and Goebel and much of the crew, are products of Studio 58. Once again we have that venerable institution to thank for gifting to the city another amazing upstart local theatre company.

Pre

2011-05-28T14:56:00.000-07:00

A short post on _post, the plastic orchid factory's newest show, on at The Dance Centre through this evening.

As I am just in the midst of reading Jennifer Homans' Apollo's Angels, her comprehensive, well-researched, and at times very politically slanted and polemical cultural history of ballet (for her everything seems to end with Balanchine), I was very taken with Artistic Director and choreographer James Gnam's witty and intelligent dialogue with his own classical training. Like Homans, Gnam begins by going back to Louis XIV's codification of French court dance in the 17th century. But Gnam's entrance as a latter-day Sun King and his brief demonstration of the discreet and restrained "noble" steps that begat ballet (the bravura jumps and spins would come later, with the Italians and the Russians) is actually preceded by a future anterior performance contained within the company bios in the program.

Each of these bios goes on at length about the performers' respective dance training (though, unfortunately, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam's seems to have been cut off in the printing), the physical and emotional highs and lows they experienced in relation to that training, and what eventually led them to trade the classical world for contemporary performance. In this way, _post is much more than a mere deconstruction of ballet's virtuosic steps and rigidly codified rules. It is, rather, much more dialectical in spirit, at once homage and critique, with each dancer's personal relationship to what they both learned and lacked in their classical training deeply informing the piece, and the obvious joy with which they perform it (something emphasized in last night's talkback, moderated by Lee Su-Feh).

Everything about the piece has been very carefully thought out, from the unique stage design and set-up, to James Proudfoot's always inspired lighting, to the amazing costume design by Kate Burrows (Regency space-age is how I would label it), and the abundant humour. At times I think the show's central prop--40 feet of white tulle that is wound up and unfurled at various key moments, and that variously functions as a grand pompadour-style wig for Louis/Gnam, and a cocoon, wedding dress, winding sheet, and, finally, the world's longest tutu for each of the female dancers--literally gets in the way. Certainly the business of folding and unfolding it distracted me on more than one occasion from the dancing and the delicacy of the choreography. Highlights in this regard include Natalie LeFebvre Gnam's amazing off-balance solo on "half point" (that is, she wears only one shoe, with the other remaining sock-clad); Alison Denham and Gnam's propulsive and floor-oriented duet in their spherical plastic tutus; and Denham and Bevin Poole's proprioceptive exchange of movement and text.

A final shout out to Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner's sound design. As an art form, ballet has always been subservient to music (indeed, story ballet started as an operatic entre-acte), and _post's layered, halting, hiccupy score nicely frees the dancers to explore first and foremost their bodies' internal rhythmic relationships with space, with each other--and with us.

Nach, Nach

2011-05-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

It is certainly a major coup for local companies GasHeart Theatre and Theatre Conspiracy to have secured the world English-language premiere of Heiner Müller's Macbeth: nach Shakespeare (1971), commissioning a translation from renowned director and Müller collaborator/authority Carl Weber expressly for this production, on at Performance Works till this Sunday. I just wish I liked the results better.

In their program notes, director Quinn Harris and dramturg Jack Paterson go on at length about how Müller, whose famously deconstructive approach to the Bard's work is most iconically represented in Hamletmachine (1977), took on a rewriting of Macbeth in part because he found it one of Shakespeare's least successful plays, wrongly concentrating the appetite for absolute power in one tyrannical couple and failing to account for, or even show, the effects of such power on the subordinate classes. Müller's response, in an otherwise surprisingly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's story, is to argue that the Macbeths' bloodthirstiness is symptomatic of the institutionalized exercise of power among the network of ruling elites in Scotland, with Duncan and Macduff and even, it is suggested at the very end of the play, a newly crowned Malcolm just as ruthless and violent and Machiavellian in seeking to establish their dominion over all others. Additionally, Müller inserts scenes showing that the people who pay the greatest price in such a system are not potential elite rivals, but rather the rank and file lower class subjects (the grunt soldiers, the servants, the peasants) whom the ruling classes dispatch to carry out their dirty work--or merely dispatch. In so doing, Müller inherited and extended the socially critical theatrical legacy of Brecht in the GDR, asking with pointed historical reference how Soviet-style communist rule in 1971 differed from life in Germany under the Nazis.

But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after Bosnia, after the end of Apartheid, after the Rwandan genocide, after 9/11 and the war on terror and Abu Ghraib, after the Arab Spring: after all the afters, how do you, as Harris asks in her note, make Müller's themes newly relevant "forty years later for an audience in Vancouver"? I certainly agree with this production's creative team that those themes are perhaps more resonant than ever. I just think that in striving to demonstrate this, we are given a mish-mash of cultural references that are more confusing than coherent in their tone.

Indeed, it is the overall tone of this production (or the lack thereof) that I found the most vexing. It veers wildly from reveling in grotesque humour to solemn sermonizing, not just within single scenes, but often individual speeches. I appreciate how this is in itself an appropriate alienation-effect, keeping the audience off guard in terms of how and with whom we should be identifying in the play. But I think the comic and the serious in Harris' staging operate less in a deliberately dialectical and destabilizing theatre of ideas sort of way than in a more inchoate and impressionistic theatre of images sort of way. The abundant use of technology in this production might actually be more of a hindrance than a help, both in terms of the live video streaming (I'm not sure I understood the point of the witches' doll scene) and the pre-recorded episodes.

A case in point in terms of the latter is the scene in which the drunk and lame Porter rouses himself to attend to the knocking of Macduff and Ross. Sarah Afful's on-stage interaction with Evelyn Chew and Courtney Lancaster (who play soldiers, but who also double, along with Afful, as the three witches) is very funny and affecting. But her slow hobble to the stage exit is followed by an even longer video sequence in which we follow on closed-circuit TV her progress along the length of Performance Works' vertical lobby to the main outside entrance to Granville Island. The Porter's reward for letting Macduff and Ross in is having the hand severed from his one remaining arm, but the shock of this gratuitous violence is undercut not just by the distancing effects of the video medium, but because that medium had also previously established the tone of this scene as one of comic play. Thus, when Macduff and Ross "re-enter" the stage and toss a prosthetic hand at the soldiers (who like us have been following the events on screen) it elicits a giggle rather than a gasp.

In fact, this is the case with all of the bodily appendages that get hacked off and prosthetically waved around in this production, and I have to say that I was a bit underwhelmed by what I had expected from earlier reviews to be a stage awash in blood and the detritus of human violence. Bright splotches of red do splatter the stage (and individual actors' bodies) at several strategic moments, but not enough, I would argue, to signal the mise-en-scène of theatrical extremity and horror that I think Harris and her crew are after here. Either go all out like Polanski and flood the stage in rivers of blood (expensive and not easy to clean up, I admit), or else telegraph the shock of the violence in other, more subtle ways. To this end, the single red splotch of colour that found its way onto the otherwise immaculate white blouse of Jennifer Mawhinney's Lady Macbeth during Duncan's murder (likely an accident) was far more visually powerful to me than the various drips and pools that collected over the course of the evening on the stage floor, and which anyway in the end had more of an inadvertently humourous acoustic effect, as in stepping through them the actors' shoes inevitably became sticky, a sound thereafter reproduced whenever they walked on stage.

The uneasy tension between the comic and the serious extends, in my mind, to problems in transitions between scenes, and to an at times indistinguishable doubling of roles. It is perhaps Harris' point to suggest that the witches and the soldiers are more or less of a piece in terms of their powerlessness to predict anything other than what is the normal course of events under a dictatorship. But modulating performances and vocal registers a bit more would at least help audience members distinguish who is who in a given scene, especially when performers rush on and off the stage in such a frenzy.

There is a great deal to admire in this production, not least another fantastic performance by Mawhinney (so amazing in Theatre Conspiracy and Rumble Productions' Blackbird). And everyone involved is to be applauded many times over for realizing that Müller's play had an afterlife in English. I'm just not sure they are yet sure of what--or who--they were after in their staging.

Nach, nach?

Congratulations Alana!

2011-05-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

Kudos to my doctoral student Alana Gerecke for being named one of fourteen 2011 Trudeau Scholars. As a result of the award, Alana is eligible to receive funding of up to $180,000 over the next three years in support of her research on site-specific dance and urban publics.

Read all about Alana's groundbreaking work here.

Harper Watch #1

2011-05-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

So it didn't take long. After introducing his new cabinet to the public and then absconding into the Ottawa afternoon, the newly major Stephen Harper had his staff quietly issue a press release announcing three new appointments to the Senate.

Here's the kicker: all three were defeated Tory candidates in the last election. What's more, two (Larry Smith and Fabian Manning) had resigned seats they previously held in the Senate in order to run in the election. They now join Josée Verner in being rewarded with a patronage appointment from the PM in lieu of being duly and democratically elected by the people.

I guess that means Harpy has given up on that promise of an elected upper chamber altogether. Mark my words, there will be more such shenanigans to come.

Canadian Realpolitick

2011-05-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

I guess the head-in-the-sand attitude I'd adopted in the immediate aftermath of the May 2nd federal election results will no longer hold. The new political landscape has been brought home to me by three separate events this week:

1. At their annual march on Parliament Hill, pro-life activists looked newly emboldened, despite what Harper said during the campaign about not reopening the abortion debate. Apparently several of his bankbenchers haven't yet received this memo, because several of them were there making speeches about what was now possible for their movement with a Tory majority.

2. The Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the case surrounding InSite, Vancouver's safe injection site in the Downtown Eastside. The city and the province want the clinic to remain in operation, backed by overwhelming statistical evidence on how many lives have been saved since its doors opened. Ottawa is arguing that the clinic's special dispensation to operate outside the Criminal Code is untenable, especially as that Code is administered federally. According to their lawyer, however, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Tories would shut InSite down, despite what previous cabinet ministers have stated.

3. And speaking of the Supreme Court, the announcement by Justices Ian Binnie and Louise Charron that they will take early retirement from the bench, combined with the mandatory retirements at 75 of three other Justices (Morris Fish, Louis LeBel and Marshall Rothstein) over the next four years, gives Harper the opportunity to recast what he has previously decried as an overly activist judiciary in profoundly conservative ways. Making the Court subservient to a Parliament whose democratic principles Harper has already proven he's more than willing to cast aside at whim would of course entrench his authority even further.

If most of the voters who chose the Conservatives this time around did so on the basis of their economic stewardship, they may be in for a very rude surprise in the coming years.

Just saying.

Kidd Pivot's Kinesthetics

2011-05-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

At the talk-back session following last night’s performance of Kidd Pivot’s The You Show at the Cultch (which I reviewed in its Shadbolt Centre workshop phase back in October), Crystal Pite brought up once again the notion of kinesthetic empathy that she has been using in most press around the show to explain why she cast the four duets that make up the evening-length presentation in the second person. As Pite explained, when her dancers reach their arms behind them, or torque their bodies backward, or fall onto the floor, she is hypothesizing that, in witnessing those actions, we will feel something similar in our own bodies, whether as a result of our own storehouse of corporeal memories the dancers’ movements trigger, or by virtue of imaginatively simulating those movements ourselves. In the first and last pieces (“A Picture of You Falling” and “A Picture of You Flying,” respectively) she provides additional verbal cues in the form of spoken text that, through direct address, invites a further layer of identification of what we are watching.

Needless to say, this “resonated” quite powerfully with me, especially as I have just finished reading Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) in connection with similar physical and affective processes at work in dance-theatre generally, and Pina Bausch’s repertoire more specifically. Drawing on Foster (whose work I’m convinced Pite has read), I’m interested in asking what the relationship is between physical motion, emotion, and social movements. I pose this question not just in the ideal terms of what action-oriented group formations and mobile politics the choreographed display of the first two terms in the equation might conspire to incite, but also, on a quite literally pedestrian level, in how the corporeal foundations of dance and theatre can get us to think more muscularly about the ways we move beside each other in the world.

In this regard, I find singularly instructive the research of Foster, who in tracing the parallel and entwined histories of kinesthesia and empathy (in neurobiology, psychology, aesthetic theory, and dance criticism) from the eighteenth century to the present suggests that choreographed dance (and movement-based performance more generally) is an especially useful critical and cultural lens through which to discuss a—by no means fixed, unmediated, or transhistorical—notion of fellow-feeling. From the influential modern dance critic John Martin’s early theories of “kinesthetic sympathy” and the spectator’s inductive muscular transference of the emotional intention of a dancer’s movement (what he first termed “metakinesis” and later “inner mimicry”) to Vittorio Gallese’s recent influential research on “mirror neurons” and the mutually resonant physical and emotional relationship between enacting, observing, and simulating movement, Foster considers the ways choreographed dance makes all the more apprehendable a notion of kinesthetic empathy that Gallese, for one, sees as foundational to human social interaction.

Foster poses the relevance of such inquiries not just to the politics of the body, but to the larger body politic, at the outset of her book: “Are there ways in which a shared physical semiosis might enable bodies, in all their historical and cultural specificity, to commune with one another?” Like Foster, I do not yet have an answer to that question, but I do think dance-theatre as emotionally and physically complex as that composed by Pite might help us reflect upon it.

P.

Gina and Pina

2011-05-08T13:09:00.001-07:00

Maybe it's because I have just been writing about her, but O Vertigo's La chambre blanche, which closed DanceHouse's third season in spectacular fashion last night at the Playhouse, reminded me of Pina Bausch: both aesthetically in terms of its mixing of dance and theatre; and thematically in its exploration of various states of confinement, not least those that subtend oppressive and antagonistic gender roles.

Originally created by O Vertigo Artistic Director Ginette Laurin in 1992, La chambre blanche underwent a complete choreographic revisioning in 2008. One thing that remained consistent, however, was the piece's iconic set, which, like Bausch's famously memorable mise-en-scènes, establishes the overall expressive tone and at once enables and constrains the movement patterns that will be explored within it. In the case of Laurin's work, the set is single room of a turn-of-the-century asylum or sanatorium, complete with high concrete walls, black and white tiled floor, ceiling-level windows, floor-level heating grates, and a single doorway upstage centre that opens onto a corridor containing a working faucet and a stack of buckets.

The dancer-inmates (6 women and 3 men) enter, clad only in white underwear and black street shoes. One of the men begins a sequence of movements near one of the women, who remains motionless and unflinching as he proceeds to cut, jab, and thrust at the air immediately around her, a series of potentially violent blows clearly directed toward her vulnerable and exposed body, but also just as clearly failing to find their target. And, indeed, it is the woman who finally initiates contact, blocking one of the man's would-be punches (precisely cued to Nicolas Bernier and Jacques Poulin-Denis' pulsating music) with her hand, which is the signal for the other dancers, until then lying still on the floor, to join in the fray.

And join in they do, walking, running, jumping, spinning, falling, crawling, sliding, and colliding in patterns that physicalize both the compulsive repetition and the resignation that is tied (quite literally) to the spatial and social extremity of their situation: bound within and to this enclosed and confining room and, as a necessary but perhaps unwelcome consequence, to each other. As such, the group contact between the dancers throughout La chambre blanche alternates and escalates (often quite rapidly and dramatically) between the twin poles of tenderness and aggression: one dancer is helped to scale the walls to look out one of the windows, while others are pinned against them; bodies supported and embraced one moment just as quickly get shoved aside or deliberately knocked down.

And in all of this, exhaustion provides no means of escape. The pace of this piece is as relentless as its emotional assault. Pauses are worked in to the choreography to allow dancers to switch into a version of black evening dress, don bunny masks (shades of The Shining?) and, in the case of the women, to slip on pointe shoes; but otherwise quiet, private moments, where the dancers can retreat from the intensity of the group, are few and far between. One exception occurs when different dancers break off from the physical hurly-burly to lean against and whisper into either of the miked heating grates, their amplified voices seeking to express fragments of their personal narratives that have otherwise been subsumed by the dizzying group movement. But even these snatches of individual lucidity and attempted self-differentiation eventually give way to the primal sounds of the group: screams, moans, groans, pants, giggles, laughs, and screeches replace intelligible--and individuated--speech as the evening wears on.

La chambre blanche ends with an image both gorgeous and haunting: one of the women dancers, clad in a white bodice-cum-straight jacket, flits on pointe centre-stage, the long sleeves of the jacket tucked into chinks in the asylum walls on either side of her. Laurin has stated that she first created the piece as a reaction to Marc Lépine's 1989 murder of 14 women at Montreal's École Polytechnique. In its reimagining for contemporary audiences the work has necessarily taken on additional cultural meanings and references (not least, as Carolyn suggested to me afterward, Abu Ghraib); however, this closing presentation of a defenseless, vulnerable, objectified, and institutionally immobilized woman still retains its Bauschian power.

Film Heaven

2011-05-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

RIP Videomatica, Vancouver's premiere specialty video store. According to today's Vancouver Sun, the iconic West 4th outlet will soon be shuttering its doors after 28 years in business, a victim of rising internet downloading.

Co-owners Graham Peat and Brian Bosworth are hoping to keep the collection (which includes approximately 30,000 DVDs, 1,000 Blu-ray discs, and 5,000 VHS tapes) together, likely by donating it to a cultural or educational institution. I sure hope so, as Videomatica is still the go-to place for obscure and hard-to-find titles, or for works that have not yet been transferred to DVD. Just last fall, in fact, I borrowed Videomatica's VHS copy of John Greyson's The Law of Enclosures in order to re-watch the film for a paper I was writing.

With local philanthropist Yosef Wosk involved in the talks around the collection, maybe the recipient institution might actually be SFU. That would be fantastic, a major coup for the film program in Contemporary Arts as it settles into its new digs at SFU Woodward's.

Speaking of which: this past Thursday at SFU Woodward's saw the opening night screening of the Contemporary Arts film grads' fourth-year films. It was a long evening--16 short films over 3+ hours--but well worth it, filled with many outstanding moments, including a cameo in one of the strongest films, Lisa Pham's Landing, by the Commercial Drive location of Black Dog Video, which I guess now inevitably inherits Videomatica's mantle.

I can't do justice to all the highlights in the program, which ranged across genres and styles. But I would like to give a special shout out to three films whose creators were instrumental in the making of Objecthood last year, and whose talents--judging by there efforts here--are limitless: Graham and Nelson Talbot's Looking Up; Jessica Han's Bill, Please!; and Sammy Chien's Patterns of Liquid Stars.

You can catch all three films, along with the rest of the program, tonight at SFU Woodward's, starting at 7 pm.

Anniversaries in Movement and Music

2011-04-16T06:31:00.000-07:00

Two out of four ain't bad.

At last night's season-ending Double Anniversary celebration of Ballet BC (25 years and teetering in the balance) and The Turning Point Ensemble (simply on fire after 5 years), we were presented with four world premieres by Canadian choreographers, each paired with original music performed live by TPE. But the first and last pieces, former Ballet BC company member Wen Wei Wang's In Motion and Gioconda Barbuto's Touch, left me unmoved--despite the kinesthetic appeal of their titles. Interestingly, both also revealed the greatest debt to classical tradition, with Wang's piece largely performed on point, and Barbuto's trading heavily on extension and line. But pretty poses are not enough if the corps lacks an emotional core, and the only time I felt a real connection to the dancers in either piece was during the gorgeous pas de deux performed by Dario Dinuzzi and Gilbert Small in Wang's piece. This was done to solo violin, with Mary Sokol Brown stepping out from the ensemble (positioned upstage, behind a scrim, one consequence of which was that the music for this first piece, a gorgeous composition by TPE conductor Owen Underhill, had to be amplified through speakers) to literally accompany the dancers centre stage.

For Serge Bennathan's Les chercheurs de dieu and BBC company member Donald Sales' Moththe TPE musicians were back in the orchestra pit and the unamplified sound was much more resonate. As was the dancing. Bennathan's piece, set to a newly commissioned score by Michael Oesterle, reminded me at the beginning of Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein's collaborations in West Side Story. The dancers were moving in packs, low to the ground, with the occasional vertical explosion, arms stretched to the ceiling, hands and fingers pulsing, quickening toward and by an energy other than their own. It was a force that transferred horizontally to the audience as well.

Finally, Sales' Moth, dedicated to the memory of his older brother, was a deeply moving meditation on grief. On a stage lit with tea candles, supplemented by the subtle artificial amber glow created by lighting designer James Proudfoot (who did a superb job lighting all four pieces), five female and one male dancer strip through the layers of denial and blame and guilt in successive solos that in their controlled abandon reveal both the vulnerability and the resiliency of the human body. A final pas de deux between Peter Smida (who has perhaps the perfect male dancer's body) and one of the female dancers (I'm sorry to say I can't remember which) to an "Epilogue for cello and piano" composed by Underhill was just stunning.

BBC Artistic Director Emily Molnar has announced the company's next season, and it is jam packed with visiting companies (including the National Ballet of Canada, which will be celebrating its own 60th anniversary) and new work (culminating in a full evening of pieces by new resident choreographer José Navas). I hope they can do a good sell, as last night's house was pretty thin, even with the added subscription base and audience from Turning Point. Granted, they were competing with a Canucks playoff game (a sad comment on this city). However, I think the company's recovery is still on very shaky ground. Despite the wobbles last night, the risks Molnar is taking in her programming, including cross-disciplinary collaborations like this one with TPE, deserve to be rewarded.

Here's hoping the company is around for at least another 25 years.

Blindness

2011-04-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

I will cringe through every minute of the federal leaders' debate this evening in advance of casting my ballot on May 2nd, even though I agree with Elizabeth May that the broadcast consortium's vexation over competition from NHL hockey is rather rich in light of their cavalier banning of her from the proceedings. After the federal election (the predicted outcome of which I truly fear), I will look wearily ahead to this summer's provincial referendum on the HST (five whole weeks, apparently, to tick off YES or NO to that one). Depending on those results, we may soon be heading to the polls in BC, though Christy Clark had better win a byelection first (she's just confirmed she'll seek Campbell's Point Grey seat, but not when).

But it's this November's municipal elections that I'm already most preoccupied with. Who to vote for now that it seems Mayor Robertson and Vision Vancouver have definitively lost their way, bowing at every level, it would seem, to unseen elites rather than truly representing the citizens who elected them in the first place? I cite as evidence the following:

1. The Olympic Village Boondoggle: According to Gary Mason, in today's Globe, the $40-50 million Vancouver taxpayers are now predicted to be on the hook for re Millennium's default on its loan from the city (and which last week City Hall claimed was down sharply from the predicted $150 million plus we were potentially looking at before the complex went into receivership and a rebranding campaign was launched to sell the remaining condos) is actually more like $230 million once the additional $180 million Millennium has failed to pay back for the land is factored into the equation. I realize the previous administration got us into this mess, but I agree with Mason (of whom I am not normally a fan, and who in general has been a rabid Olympics boosterer) that being less than fiscally honest with residents is repugnant.

All of this raises the question of why Olympic host cities are required to build such facilities in the first place--most always the biggest single expense, and generally leaving a morass of debt and recrimination after the event. Can't the athletes be put up in hotels, or billeted with families? Or erect temporary structures--tents, anyone?--that can be easily removed or converted into container-type social housing after the fact. Surely there has to be a better solution than burdening cities around the world with similar problem buildings on redeveloped land that will be difficult to flog in any market, let alone one following a global recession.

2. The Right to Protest: Word in today's paper that Robertson has asked that a proposed bylaw banning the erection of temporary structures as part of civic protests be revisited and reworked does little to reassure one that this administration hasn't in fact been taking direction from the Chinese government--and specifically on the matter of the Falun Gong protesters whose daily vigil outside the Chinese consulate on Granville Street the proposed bylaw seems expressly designed to target. What a spectacular abrogation of the basic principles of civic democracy! It's enough to make one want to reconsider CSIS Director Robert Fadden's remarks last year regarding Chinese influence over Canadian municipal elected officials.

3. Casinos: I am also not sanguine about today's announcement from Paragon, the BC Place developer that wants to build a major new casino adjacent the sports complex, that it has found a partner in Marriott for the hotel that is also to be part of the project. This is just the sort of 5-star endorsement that makes this Council start seeing dollar signs. Despite the overwhelming community--and police--opposition to the development, I predict that a negative vote next Tuesday is far from assured.

Instead of bread and circuses, why not think more creatively about arts and culture? After tentatively endorsing the Vancouver Art Gallery's move to Larwill Park, Council has been deafeningly silent on Bing Thom's inspired proposal for a new recital hall and performing arts complex at the VAG's current site.

4. Fireworks: More bread and circuses. A final item that caught my attention in today's press was word that the infernal Celebration of Light, the annual fireworks competition held very summer off English Bay, has been given new financial legs, thanks in part to money and in-kind sponsorships from the City. Why? Most West End residents hate the event; it provides license to homophobic louts from the suburbs to get drunk and go looking to bash some fags; and as far as I can see it's largely an empty and pointless spectacle.

Much like the past three years at City Hall.

Vancouver 125: Views from the Bridge

2011-04-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday officially marked the 125th anniversary of Vancouver's incorporation as a city. I celebrated by filing my taxes.

And by attending a PuSh Board Meeting. Which was only appropriate. Not because our meeting was held a stone's throw from Jack Poole Plaza, site of the permanently relocated prosthetic Olympic cauldron, and host yesterday to various bands and celebrations. Rather, spending time with my fellow Board members reviewing the success of this past year's Festival felt right on the city's birthday fête because we were the ones that got this whole party rolling back in January.

Speaking of rolling out Vancouver 125 art-related projects, the Digital Natives public art installation launched at the beginning of this week. Curated by Lorna Brown and Clint Burnham, the project broadcasts 10 second Twitter-length messages from invited artists and other contributors on the electronic billboard at the southwestern end of the Burrard Street Bridge. The messages cycle amongst the regular rotation of advertisements on the billboard, and many have been translated into First Nations languages. Members of the public are also invited to respond by tweeting their own messages to @diginativ; they will then be considered for broadcast on the billboard and/or for inclusion on the project's website.

Digital Natives runs until the end of this month.

Tea for Ai Weiwei

2011-04-05T06:27:00.000-07:00

In a further sign that authorities in Beijing are determined the Arab spring will not spread to China, and that the Jasmine Revolution will be thwarted at all costs, one of the country's most high-profile artistic gadflies, Ai Weiwei, has been arrested. Police also apparently seized 30 computers from his home. Here's the story in The Guardian.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that a public art installation designed by Ai, and set to occupy the fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, will go ahead as scheduled--even if the artist is unable to be present.

I guess one always knew this would happen eventually, given Ai's outspokenness. Still, it was thought his significant international profile offered him a degree of immunity. With that no longer the case, it's now up to the international art community that has embraced Ai's work to put political pressure on Beijing.

On the Hunt at the Queen E

2011-03-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

The real revelation of last night's performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Queen E, visiting the city for the first time in 18 years as guests of Ballet BC, was incoming Artistic Director Robert Battle's The Hunt (2001).

An ensemble work for six male dancers, the piece is set to a pounding afrobeat score by the French industrial percussion band Les Tambours du Bronx. Clad only in flowing, red-satin lined brown skirts, the dancers throw themselves into Battle's propulsive, muscular movement, manically spinning and jumping and stomping and chasing and encircling as they alternate between predator and prey. Either way, they move seamlessly as a group, and one of the most thrilling aspects of the choreography is the close bodily proximity Battle is able to maintain between his posse of dancers even as they drive across the stage at breathtaking speeds. To this end, there is also, amidst all this frenzy, some surprisingly tender partnering on display, including quasi-waltz phrases, with the dancers' bodies leaning into and enfolding one another, spent with exhaustion and eroticism in equal measure.

Clearly part of the hunt here is for new patterns and rituals of male bonding. Indeed, coming after Ailey's Cry--his 1971 ode to Black womanhood that was originally a single long solo for outgoing Artistic Director Judith Jamison, but has since been reworked for three female dancers--The Hunt rendered even more complex and unstable the representations of Black masculinity on offer in Ailey's work. How, for example, to read the two courtier figures in Memoria (1979), which was first up on the program and, I must say, as showing something of its age? Or what of the male trio in the "Sinner Man" sequence of Ailey's signature Revelations (1960), which closed the performance and, as one would expect, brought down the house? It was hard for me not to read the former as a couple and the latter as perhaps repenting sins of the male flesh that Ailey felt couldn't explicitly be named. Just as his own sexuality and death from AIDS still appears a taboo topic within the company mythology.

At any rate, Battle seems prepared to open up the company's repertoire to new interpretations and new choreographic influences, even as he maintains the spiritual (in all senses of that word) ties to tradition. More of his work is on display in the matinee performance today, alongside that of fellow contemporary choreographers Christopher Huggins and Ron Brown.

Margie Gillis' Thread at SFU Woodward's

2011-03-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

Last night's premiere of Margie Gillis' Thread at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's was dedicated to the citizens of Libya and Japan. Amid all the media images showing the mounting devastation in both countries, it's reassuring to have an artist like Gillis remind us that what binds us most to one another, to our nameless other, is first and foremost our bodily vulnerability.

Thread is a meditation on the fabric--the lengthways warp and the crossways weft--of human connection, and it is structured as a journey. The piece opens with Margie attached at the waist to a cable suspended from the upstage left rafters--an umbilical cord?--and framed within a diagonal of light. It ends with her bent and crumbled on the floor in a tiny spot, a long white cloth spiraling around her body like a winding sheet.

Gillis has always been a gorgeous upper-body mover, her undulating arms frequently arcing and tracing and extending still further into the air via the striking costumes she wears--here designed by Vandal. Such was the case in a captivating middle section when a white dress with longs sleeves that extended well beyond Gillis' hands, in a manner akin to a straitjacket, occasioned some of the evening's most rending choreography. However, an earlier section in the piece also reminded me of both the subtlety and the complexity of Gillis' footwork. In this section, Gillis works with an elastic string pinned to the floor (see the photo above), threading her ankles and calves and thighs (and eventually her arms) in and around and under the string in such a way as to recall those games of elastic I watched my female classmates play at recess as a young kid--and which I always longed to join.

Thread also features co-performers Eleanor Duckworth (a nimble mover well into her 70s) and Marc Daigle, lighting design by Pierre Lavoie, and original music by Larsen Lupin. The show continues tonight at 8 p.m.

Turning Point On Fire at the Cultch

2011-03-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

Proving that their stunning 2009 collaborative re-interpretation of Erik Satie's Relâche was not a one-off, the Turning Point Ensemble, Simone Orlando, and Josh Beamish's MOVE: the company, have done it once again, giving us a brand new Firebird 100 years after its Paris premiere.

Winner of the 2011 Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award for Music, Turning Point's Artistic Director and resident conductor, Owen Underhill, has commissioned a new chamber arrangement of Stravinsky's original score by Michael Bushnell. This comprises the first 35-minute half of the evening's program, and this lighter, more delicate version, featuring wind instruments, harp, and timpani and percussion to wonderful effect, was received rapturously by last night's audience at The Cultch.

After a 30-minute intermission, the audience returns to discover a cleared stage and the Turning Point musicians arranged on different levels of upstage scaffolding, part of Alan Storey's amazing set, complete with spiraling staircase and moveable ledges. MOVE Artistic Director and principal dancer Josh Beamish sits at the foot of the stairs, dressed in grey, and methodically folding innumerable paper cranes, which litter the floor at his feet. As the musicians warm up and tune their instruments, MOVE company members Cai Glover, Heather Dotto, and Gavin Stewart take turns improvising movement sequences as audience members file to their seats. When the house lights dim and Underhill assumes his position in the tech box behind the orchestra seating, from whence he will conduct Jocelyn Morlock's original score, we are ready for the start of Luft, Orlando's bold and beautiful choreographic take on the quest motif in the Firebird story.

As the Prince Ivan figure, I don't think I have ever seen Beamish dance as gorgeously, his amazing technique perfectly matched to Orlando's delicate and precise (and classically influenced) movement vocabulary. The amount of muscle control alone that it takes to flutter one's arms and hands the way Beamish effortlessly appears to do is astounding. Natalie Portman, eat your heart out! (And, yes, there is a Black Swan/White Swan motif at play here.) Expertly paired with Beamish as the Firebird is Alison Denham, and their pas de deux (particularly the floorwork) was especially captivating. The other dancers provide graceful accompaniment throughout, and, indeed, one of the most pleasing aspects of Luft is how thoroughly the MOVE dancers embody the musicality of Orlando's choreography, which in turn helps to highlight Morlock's lush score.

In short, this is a cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration that I hope goes far into the future, yielding still more bold reinterpretations of the classics. I personally vote for The Rite of Spring next! We have, dare I say, in Owen Underhill Vancouver's very own version of Diaghilev. And Turning Point, in its commissioning of and collaboration with other artists, is fast becoming a Ballets Russes for the 21st century.

Firebird is on at the Cultch through this Saturday.

Fred and John

2011-03-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

Following up on my pledge to use this blog in part to continue tracking some of the issues first raised in the book from whence it derives its name, I have an update, via today's New York Times, of my discussion of Fred Phelps, Westboro Baptist Church, and the performance and politics of hate speech in Chapter 4.

It was in the Times that I read that the US Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, has sided with Phelps et al. on their right to protest at military funerals, blaming America's war dead on the country's too-liberal tolerance of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, coming from a Roberts-led bench that has steadfastly defended First Amendment rights in previous decisions, the reasoning here followed a familiar path: “Debate on public issues should be robust, uninhibited and wide-open,” according to Roberts, because “speech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.”

Life Lived as a Sentence

2011-03-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

Random thoughts on Life Sentences, Peter Bingham's mixed program for EDAM last night at the Roundhouse, on through this evening as part of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival:

1. Sentences on life: I was pleasantly surprised by the recorded text (along with video, and of course EDAM's always amazing music/soundscapes and lighting design--yay James P.!) that preceded several of the pieces. Though not always the case, I generally see Bingham's work--and contact improvisation more generally--as eschewing any overtly narrative or storying impulse. And, indeed, last night the connections between the choreography and the spoken text were by no means explicitly evoked. Still, for each piece we were given some sort of external frame through which to view the dancing (starting with Chris Randle's photo retrospective outside the performance space, which captures many shots of EDAM dancers, both older and newer).

2. Sentencing life: Captivity and time were major themes subtending the entire program (foregrounded especially by James Proudfoot's tight spots in the third and fourth pieces), and as the aesthetics of dance are all about repetition, the work of moving bodies over time, it is hard not to read much of this material as a reflexive (and retrospective?) commentary on a life of/in dance. It was all very Proustian.

3. Live bodies as sentences: For me, the thrill of Bingham's contact improv has always been watching the dancers fling their bodies at and toward each other with such abandon, only to land upon and/or receive each other's weight with such lightness and delicacy and grace. If I can employ a typographic metaphor, in Bingham's work bodies often start out in a given sequence as exclamation marks (and verticality is important here), only to finish as question marks, dipping toward the floor, or rolling over another's rounded back, asking "Where do we go from here"? This was most in evidence in the first and last pieces on the program, with James Gnam and Farley Johansson reinventing the laws of gravity in the duet Right in Front of You, and then being joined, at the end of the evening, by Alana Gerecke (yay Alana!) and Stacey Murchison for the closing quartet Release Me. Capture and release were certainly in evidence in many of the lifts and jumps on display here, and it always boggles my mind the degree of trust needed to accomplish some of Bingham's moves. Blind back flips by Alana into James' outstretched hands--that's a statement you don't want to have too much doubt about!

Life Sentences was preceded by a free show by battery opera, featuring Artistic Director Lee Su-Feh and Victoria-based dancer Chung Jung-Ah being each other's private dancer in public. What amazing movers they both are.

Ten Things I've Learned

2011-03-02T11:33:00.000-08:00

Josh Bowman, friend, former student, and, for a time, PuSh Fundraising Manager, has a great blog called Ten Things I've Learned.

This month he's invited a bunch of us to submit guest posts. Today my submission has been posted. You can read it here.

I chose to revisit some of the things I learned from the Chairs collaboration.

Thanks, Josh, for the opportunity to engage in this process.

Golden Girl?

2011-03-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

No, I don't mean Natalie Portman, though she did look ravishing at Sunday's Oscars, and even if we were rooting for Annette Bening, it's hard to hate any woman who not only survives a Darren Aronofsky movie but scores two men two boot. Granted, one is more fleet-footed than the other (and even has the last name to prove it).

I'm actually referring to Christy Clark, newly minted Premier-elect of British Columbia. Though I have no intention of voting Liberal in the next provincial election, I was silently rooting in this race for George Abbott, who is the most left-leaning of the leadership candidates, and who actually came out and said that he would restore arts and culture funding to 2008 levels.

What, one wonders, is Clark's stance on such an issue? How does it square with her "Families First" platform? I'm always deeply suspicious of such slogans, as their populist message usually masks a conservative agenda regarding what is perceived as elitist add-ons like the performing arts, etc. Never mind that an education in the arts should be a prime criterion for every family.

But then we already know how Clark feels about education...

Golden Boy?

2011-02-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

All this month, as Vancouver has lamely tried to relive and recapture the "spirit" of a certain mega-event that took place last year, I have tried to choke down the bile in my throat by studiously avoiding any mention of civic displays of Olympic nostalgia in these posts. Schadenfreude, however, is a completely other story. I have to admit that I emitted a chortle of glee the other day when I read in the Vancouver Sun that the IOC is investigating statements made in Furlong's recently published memoir, Patriot Hearts, that Furlong and members of Vancouver's bid team offered help to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luhzkov in preparing their bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics in exchange for Russia's three delegate votes for Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics bid. Three votes turned out to be precisely the margin by which Vancouver won out over Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Furlong claims he did nothing wrong, just as he insists cultivating close ties with Norway's and Ireland's IOC reps during the bid process was completely above board. As, apparently, was flying IOC member and FIFA head honcho Sepp Blatter (himself of highly dubious moral integrity when it comes to World Cup bid and sponsorship scandals) by helicopter to Jack Poole's Mission estate. But given earlier revelations this month by the CBC of email correspondence from Furlong that VANOC knew of the potential dangers of the Whistler luge track on which Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili lost his life the opening day of the Olympics, one wonders if some of the golden glow around Furlong isn't starting to fade.

Not that this won't all blow over very soon. I'm sure Globe columnist Gary Mason (and co-author of Patriot Hearts) will come out with guns blazing in defense of Furlong--just as he's recently led the cheerleading around the apparent real estate miracle condo king Bob Rennie is effecting at the troubled Athlete's Village. But for the moment I relish the inspiriting boost to my own Olympic cynicism that these revelations have provided.

KCDC at Chutzpah!

2011-02-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

Every year The Chutzpah! Festival, Vancouver's annual showcase of Jewish Performing Arts, programs a very strong dance series. Last year, for example, Azure Barton, the Canadian phenom who's taken New York and Broadway by storm, came to the Norman Rothstein Theatre with her company and wowed the crowd. This year, the international headliners are the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, overseen since 1996 by Artistic Director Rami Be'er, and on a par with Ohad Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company in terms of both national and international reputation.

Be'er refers to himself as a "total creator," responsible, in his mostly evening-length pieces, not just for the choreography, but also the design, the lighting, and the choice of music. If in Ekodoom, the piece KCDC brought to this year's Chutzpah! Festival, those elements didn't necessarily cohere into an intelligible whole, they nevertheless offered time and again expressive artistry of a technical sophistication and an emotional depth that was breathtaking. As with Batsheva's recent DanceHouse appearance at the playhouse, KCDC gave audience members something to look at even before the house lights went down: a female dancer, naked to the waist and with her skin covered in dark, muddy make-up, straining against the confines of a tiny square box--from which there appears to grow some sort of fruit tree. It was an arresting visual image, and one that went on for quite some time as the sold-out crowd slowly settled into their seats.

What followed after the house lights went down was a series of physically intense and imaginatively powerful scenes, often featuring the full company of 15 dancers, and each exploring not just the roots of violence and conflict, but also possible routes toward reconciliation and healing. Most striking in this regard were two mass movement motifs that grab our attention at the start of the piece: one featured four columns of upstage dancers moving in aggressive unison downstage and striking poses of supplication and apparent torture/distress, punctuated every now and then by individual bursts of violent, thrashing movement; the other took the form of an assembly line of the entire company moving jerkily and mechanistically to pulsating electropop, like army inductees going off to war, or prisoners to an internment camp. These two movement sequences recur at the end of the work. However, rather than the assembly line marching the dancers off the stage, and leaving us bleakly pondering their fate, at a certain point (and the piece did feel like it had more than one ending) the line itself starts to fragment. As the music soundtrack proclaims "Everybody gets a little lost sometimes," the dancers one by one break free and slowly drift apart physically--but expressly in order to come together emotionally and socially. Some of them kneel on the floor, others remain upright, and one stands on her head. All but the last begin, one by one, floating their hands up across their torsos and in front of their faces, a gesture at once of purification and of prayer--and one that repeats, most assuredly, what must never be lost in our global wandering and return.

The entire piece, to which I cannot do justice in this brief review, was a mash-up of styles (contemporary/jazz, ballet, Israeli folk dance), and frequently of tone. I don't think everything worked seamlessly, but there's no denying that all the KCDC dancers are phenomenally strong. For the first 15 minutes or so, I was struggling to get a grip on the piece generally, and the choreography specifically. But by the time of the second pas de deux, in which the male dancer (the one with the tattoo on his upper thigh) blew my mind with his technical proficiency and physical intensity, I was totally hooked.

Kudos to everyone at Chutzpah! for adding once again to the vibrancy of Vancouver's contemporary dance scene. I look forward to next year's offerings. In the meantime, it's on to the Vancouver International Dance Festival next week.

Ballet BC at the Queen E

2011-02-19T09:12:00.001-08:00

You have to hand it to Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar. She is really working her international dance connections during this make-or-break 25th anniversary season for the company. And she's also piling on the new commissions.

This weekend's program, Volo, on at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre through this evening, featured a heavy Netherlands Dance Theatre connection: there was an excerpt from former legendary company leader Jirí Kylián's Toss of a Dice, an affecting pas de deux featuring guest artists Medhi Walerski and Lesley Telford; Jorma Elo's 1st Flash, which premiered at NDT in 2003; and a new work, Petite Cérémonie, set on the full Ballet BC company (including apprentices Alexander Burton and Livona Ellis, who made wonderful impression in her solo) by Walerski, a former NDT principal dancer and now a freelance choreographer. Throw in another world premiere, sweet, by Canadian Shawn Hounsell (whose new full-length work, Wonderland, created for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and based on Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, arrives in town soon), and it was quite a jam-packed evening.

Would that the house itself was also bursting at the seams. There were a lot of empty orchestra seats last night, and but for the Financial Divas (some sort of group corporate outing by female business executives) taking up most of the mezzanine, the audience might have been smaller still. To be sure, the company lost a lot of core supporters during its recent financial troubles; and its subsequent rebranding as a "contemporary" ballet troupe under Molnar's direction is not without risks in terms of finding the right balance between those traditional types who want to see their dancers en pointe and a younger generation raised on So You Think You Can Dance? and whose only exposure to classical ballet has likely come via the recent psychodrama of Black Swan.

Frankly, last night could have used more drama. The dancing, as always, was technically accomplished, and threading through the first three works was some very interesting partnering, much of it walking (often en pointe) a tightrope between classical elements of line and unison, and their deliberate deconstruction. However, the emotion of these works seemed to be displaced almost wholly onto the music and the lighting design/scenography. The audience responded with enthusiasm to Walerski's Petite Cérémonie, and it was great to see the full company having heaps of fun in this playful take on what was pitched, on the one hand, as a "boxed" meditation on gender difference, but which I read as a more interesting commentary on the ritual processes associated with the "black box" of theatre. Still, the work was not without its cliches, including a somewhat trite musical selection, and the insertion of spoken text (uttered by new company member Dario Dinuzzi, who also juggles) that seemed entirely random.

Our seatmates (my Pilates instructors Sarah and Natasha) told us that last November's mixed program was, overall, much better. Unfortunately, we had to miss that offering, as we were away in Seattle. But I have no regrets about signing up as a mini-pack subscriber for the remainder of this season, which includes a visit by the Alvin Ailey Company in March, and a "double anniversary" celebration with Turning Point Ensemble (featuring live music and more world premieres) in April. Plus next season we have recently appointed resident choreographer José Navas' reinterpretation of Giselle to look forward to. I predict that will be Ballet BC's own "turning point"--a new story ballet by a rising choreographic star who proved with The bliss that from their limbs all movement takes he knows what it means to stamp this company as classically contemporary.

Now all we have to do is ensure Molnar and her troupe make it to that moment. She announced in her curtain speech that they are in the midst of a $300,000 fundraising campaign, almost half of which has been raised. That's great news, but there's a ways to go yet. I urge all dance lovers in BC to do their bit.

Odious

2011-02-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

The only political scandal more galling than the Bev Oda affair

Is wondering when the opposition will actually grow a pair.

Holding Moonbeams

2011-02-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Last night we took a break from PuSh to attend the second presentation in this year's DanceHouse season at the Playhouse. Doug Elkins and Friends' Fräulein Maria is about as much fun as you're likely to have at the theatre in this or any other lifetime. It's also incredibly moving, fiercely intelligent, and wholly sincere as an homage not just to the cultural artifact that inspired it, but to the many dance genres from which it samples.

In his pre-show chat, Elkins gave a most engaging--and suitably elliptical--redaction of how he conceived the piece. Having grown up loving the The Sound of Music (the movie version with Julie Andrews, not the Broadway version with Mary Martin) and singing along to the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes, Elkins' Proustian attachment to the work, and the memories it evoked, was reawakened while introducing his children to the film. First produced in a small-scale version at Joe's Pub in New York in 2006, it was an immediate hit, and after securing the permission of the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate (no mean feat, that) the work was expanded to its current 13-performer, 65-minute scope in 2008. It has been touring the United States ever since, with Vancouver its first international stop.

The show begins with Michael Preston, the show's co-director, warming up the audience vocally in his role as an Uncle Max-like impresario, conducting us in a version of "Do-Re-Mi." Then we hear the voice of Richard Rodgers commenting on audiences' deep affection for the character of Maria, before the curtain parts and Preston, with the aid of other company members and a few unfurled bolts of green and blue cloth, literally sets about making the hills come alive. Julie Andrews' bright soprano is the cue for the appearance of our Maria, and this is the occasion for the first of many surprises in the evening: in Elkins' version there are three Marias, one of them played by a man! Not only does this allow for some creative partnering and group sequences over the course of the show, but it also serves as an interesting comment on the multiple layers of spectatorial identification (some of them cross-gender) at work in the complex of character/role/actor.

Nuns in hoodies voguing to "How Do You Solve a Problem?" (led by the wonderful Deborah Lohse, who later gives a spirited turn as the haughty Baroness); a six-foot tall male Liesl in a pink tutu (the classically trained John Sorensen-Jolink) dancing with black B-boy Kurt to "I am Sixteen"; a capoeira-infused reprise of "Do-Re-Mi"; and a moving pas de deux X 3 for our finally united heroine and Captain Von Trapp: these were just a few of my favourite things from last night. Elkins himself dances two of the stand-out numbers in the show: a duet on a park bench with Preston (menacing red arm band now in place) to "Edelweiss" that involves a tightly choreographed, Godot-style exchange of a fedora, and that also quietly acknowledges the Holocaust; and a hilarious hip-hop solo as Mother Superior to "Climb Every Mountain."

Fräulein Maria is witty and knowing without being overly clever and precious. The work moves beyond mere parody to something far more generous, inviting us to reflect on what about the original movie was so captivating in the first place, and to participate in the joyous act of aligning the human voice at its purist with physical movement at its most gleefully buoyant and euphoric. Don't get me wrong: the dancers last night were all serious technicians, as adept at step-dancing and salsa as ballet and ballroom. But virtuosity was less the point than a more profound sense of kinesthetic connection: communicating to us, through their bodies, their pleasure at dancing together--and together for us--on stage. Just as the singing nun works her surrogate magic on the Von Trapps, so are we proprioceptively transported (and I think I mean that quite literally) by Doug Elkins and his friends. Outside on the sidewalk as we hum along to the score and do a little shuffle, we become (if only for a moment) flibbertigibbets, will-o'-the-wisps, clowns.

How, finally, do you find the words that mean Fräulein Maria? You don't. You just hold on to the experience for as long as you can.

PuSh Review #12: Daniel Barrow at Club PuSh

2011-02-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

After all the high-tech pyrotechnics of some of this year's PuSh shows (see, especially, Ryoji Ikeda's Datamatics, at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre on Thursday, which I'm told was fantastic), it seemed appropriate to end my own Festival experience on a decidedly more low-tech note. Thus it was that I made my way once again last night to Club PuSh, at Performance Works, for a first glimpse of Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based visual and performance artist Daniel Barrow's unique aesthetic.

Barrow combines old-fashioned storytelling with "manual" animation, projecting, layering and manipulating his own stunning drawings on an overhead projector while he intones an accompanying spoken-word narrative into an adjacent microphone. For this year's PuSh Festival, Barrow premiered a new work, Good Gets Better, which maps his childhood fascination with the Kissing Bandit onto the classic Harlequin figure in order to explore questions of melancholy and the beauty of sadness. Barrow's thief of the night steals from the super rich not necessarily to give to the poor, but rather to plant within those he has robbed a nascent notion of the value of valuelessness. A second work, Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors, is at once an ode to the social aesthetics of gay cruising, a love letter to Winnipeg, and a rumination on artistic influence and genealogy, with portraiture and the epistolary novel, among other self-reflective forms, occasioning various crises of identification in our tortured, watchful narrator.

Barrow's repurposing of obsolescent technologies combines with a romantic sensibility to bathe his audiences in a lush wash of nostalgia: for the picture books and puppet shows and shadow animation of one's youth; and, perhaps most poignantly, for what memories of those media have to say about how open to wonderment one was when young. In this age of big-budget spectacle and digital effects, it's refreshing to have artists like Barrow use the digits on their hands to transport us back every now and then to the magic of the analogue world.

A special shout-out to Florence Barrett, costume designer extraordinaire on The Objecthood of Chairs, who worked as Barrow's assistant last night, passing him successive overhead drawings with precision and aplomb.

Here endeth my 2011 PuSh reviews. With the dress rehearsal of La Marea and a partial viewing of Iqaluit (which I still hope to finish), I saw 14 shows over 20 days--which just might be a record for me. According to our latest figures, attendance this year is up more than 20%, surpassing 23,000. And it's not over yet: performances of several shows continue today and tomorrow. Consult the PuSh Festival website for more details, and see you next year.

Checking In

2011-02-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

When you think of making an hour-long visit to a hotel room in your own city, likely the shortlist of scenarios of what's going to happen in that room is pretty small. In fact, David McIntosh's new site-specific dance-theatre piece for battery opera, M/HOTEL, on at the Holiday Inn on Howe Street through this Sunday, suggests a much broader spectrum of things to enjoy with strangers in said rooms than hospital corners on bedsheets and those tiny, pre-wrapped toiletries.

I don't want to give away what happens, but I suggest arriving early (rooms are available hourly beginning at 6 pm) and spending the night. Look for David in the Lobby Bar to collect your room key. Rates negotiable.

PuSh Review #11: Peter Panties at The Cultch

2011-02-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

From the start, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan was a character with a massive identity crisis: a boy who doesn't want to grown up, who can fly and whose best friend is a fairy, and who is traditionally played by a female actress in the stage version. So it makes sense that, over the years, Peter has become a creative canvas on which to project other, highly personalized, versions of difference and outsiderness. Perhaps the most extreme example of this was Michael Jackson's attempt to build his own Neverland, and to surround himself with a steady supply of "lost boys."

Local theatre artist Niall McNeil keeps things safely in the realm of make-believe in Peter Panties, a new musical play that opens at the Cultch's Historic Theatre tonight in a co-production between Neworld Theatre and Leaky Heaven Circus, and co-presented by the Cultch and the PuSh Festival. I caught a preview performance last night, and it was a most surreal experience. Working with co-writer Marcus Youssef, McNeil has used his own longstanding fascination with and interpretive deconstruction of the Peter Pan story to craft a pop-culture mash-up for our cynical, forensic (there is a CSI intertext) twenty-first century that nevertheless retains the sense of wonder and mythic possibility that was such a key element of the original story.

In Peter Panties, an oversexed Peter very much wants to grow up, settle down, and have a kid with Wendy (though there also seems to be a noticeable sexual frisson between Peter and Wendy's mother, Mrs. Darling). Tinkerbell, meanwhile, has a hate-on for Wendy, and seems to be working in cahoots with Hook and Starkey to see that she ends up dead. As for Wendy, who emerges as the protagonist of this story, her narrative arc appears to be one of increasing dis-enchantment: with her dull life at home chez Mother Darling; with the dreamworld of Neverland, which subjects her to violence and abduction; and with her fairytale marriage to Peter--which turns out to be just that, a fairytale, and which furthermore leaves her a young, single mother. Indeed, watching this Wendy I was very much put in mind of Joyce Carol Oates' teenage protagonist Connie, from her famous story "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" However, unlike the moral allegory at work in Oates' story, Peter Panties remains at heart a comic fantasy and so, true to form, we end on an upswing, with a second marriage for the resurrected Wendy--this time to Niall himself. Peter is left picking at his green tights back in Neverland.

Overall, the production is pervaded by a sense of wonderfully anarchic chaos. It is less about retelling the Peter Pan story in a straight-up, comprehensible way than examining the creative process of storytelling itself. To this end, we hear in voice-over before the house lights go down McNeil and Youssef talking through their ideas for the play, exchanges that are later projected in video format on a white sheet. And a recurring refrain among several characters is what happens backstage, including, we are led to believe, some creative workings through of creative differences. Banquo's ghost, escaped from the Scottish play, also serves as a metatheatrical reference point in this regard.

Indeed, for me this play is mostly a love letter to the magic of the theatre, a magic that is all about showing the wires, and making do with what is at hand, but that nevertheless thrills and astounds because, together, we choose to believe (however tenuously or temporarily) in the power of this magic. And, here, director Steven Hill does not disappoint: the coups-de-théâtre in this show are achieved so simply (Tinkerbell holding Peter's cape while he flies past Mrs. Darling's window, Wendy and a mermaid duking it out in a shadow boxing match), but are no less gasp-inducing because of that.

Not everything in the production had gelled by last night: the pacing was slow to begin with; it was hard to hear what Veda Hille and her band, The Bark Dogs, were singing at times; and I'm not sure the lighting design, which keeps too many characters in too many scenes in semi-darkness for too long, completely works. That said, I had great fun, and I'm sure things will only get tighter over the course of the play's run.

That run in fact extends beyond the end of the PuSh Festival, to February 13th.

PuSh Review #10: PodPlays-The Quartet

2011-01-31T12:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the sky was cloudless, the air crisp, and my time mostly disposable. In other words, it was the perfect occasion for a brisk afternoon walk of the city--which is exactly what I did courtesy of the PuSh Festival's PodPlays, a quartet of outdoor audio dramas commissioned by Neworld Theatre and the Playwrights Theatre Centre that leads participants on a surprising and intimate guided tour of Vancouver's downtown core.

The tour begins in the Cordova Street atrium at SFU Woodward's, where efficient Neworld staff equip one with a portable media player, a set of headphones, and a map. Then all you do is hit the play button and await direction. A warm, pleasant female voice (that of Yumi Ogawa, our guide and host) instructs you to climb to the top of the spiral staircase adjacent the Nester's store (something I'd yet to do since the reopening of the Woodward's complex) and face the eastern brick wall. This is the departure point for the first play, Look Up, written by Neworld's Adrienne Wong, and performed by Wong and Todd Thomson. As you are guided through a pedestrian overpass, a carpark, and eventually east on Water and Alexander Streets, you learn of a couple's move to Vancouver and their evolving relationship with the city, and with each other.

At the old Alexander Street Pump Station you begin the second leg of your tour: Five Meditations on the Future City, written by Proximity Arts' Christine Stoddard and Tanya Marquart, and narrated by Karin Konoval, leads you to Main Street, over the bridge at the north end of it, and through CRAB Park. Looking at the train tracks below the bridge, or across Burrard Inlet to the North Shore mountains, or at the memorial marker in the park to the murdered and missing women of the Downtown Eastside, you are invited to contemplate all that a future-oriented urban temporality necessarily overwrites.

Through a parking lot for cruise ship passengers you arrive at Waterfront Road, and the start of the third play. Portside Walk is written and performed by battery opera's David McIntosh, and it takes you west, towards Canada Place and the new Vancouver Convention Centre. But at the same time as the text directs you to look at the flying buttresses of these monuments to the city's global cosmopolitan progress it also insistently digs deeper, to the buried roots and the much-trafficked routes of that progress, a scenario of transnational contact, conquest, and migration that we continue to replay to this day--not least in terms of those unseen underclasses who service our taken-for-granted urban mega-projects and amenities. To this end, it's a singular achievement of this third--and, I think, strongest--link in the quartet that we actually traverse the service road underneath the new convention centre. A carpark elevator eventually takes you to the more salubrious outdoor plaza of the centre, complete with the cauldron from the recent Olympic Winter Games.

Cross Cordova and Hastings, and then up Burrard: you're off on the final leg of the tour. G...Cordova, written by Martin Kinch, and performed by Patrick Keating and the wonderful Gina Stockdale (whose dulcet tones I absolutely loved having in my ear) concerns a son and his aging, Alzheimerish mother. In this piece, which eventually deposits you at the Vancouver Art Gallery, lapses in individual memory get inscribed onto the built environment, becoming a metaphor for a collective urban amnesia that of course haunts all four plays.

Cities are built spaces, to be sure, but they are first and foremost embodied spaces. As Michel de Certeau has famously argued, walking is "an elementary form" of experiencing the city, a tactical procedure which produces new maps that don't always correspond with the official criss-crossings of streets you find in guidebooks or A-Zs, maps which are anyway out of proportion in terms of scale, and which (as per the very alphabetical designation of A-Z) are all about shepherding folks (usually tourists) to a destination rather than exploring a location. De Certeau notes that we are not always able to read the maps we write with our bodies, but in the very fleeting moments of passing and being passed by we nevertheless open up cracks in the pavement, steal time, and breathe life into possible new intersections.

PodPlays will remind you of this, and so much more. It continues next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with departures leaving every 5 minutes between 12 and 4 pm.

PuSh Review #9: Hard Core Logo LIVE at the Rickshaw

2011-01-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

Hard Core Logo is the punk performance piece that keeps on giving. First there was Michael Turner’s 1993 “novel-in-verse,” at once a fictionalized account of his own time in the Hard Rock Miners and a quasi-documentary archive of Vancouver’s not-so-secret punk history. Generically, the book was as effective a détournement of artistic forms (including Situationist-inspired collage) as frontman Joe Dick’s convincing of his bandmates to go acoustic for their reunion tour was colossally misguided. Then came Bruce McDonald’s 1996 film treatment, itself an inspired mash-up of styles, including the mockumentary, the road movie, and the buddy flick. A year later, Nick Craine’s graphic novel, Hard Core Logo: Portrait of a Thousand Punks, mixed elements from Turner’s novel and McDonald’s film to create a new, hybrid verbal-visual version of the story. And now, hot on the heels of McDonald’s movie sequel (which apparently focuses on a female punk rocker haunted by Joe’s ghost and visited in the flesh by Bucky Haight), we have Hard Core Logo: LIVE. This theatrical adaptation is currently playing at the Rickshaw Theatre on East Hastings as part of the PuSh Festival, in a co-production with local companies November Theatre (of Black Rider fame) and Touchstone Theatre, and the Edmonton-based Theatre Network.

The concert scenes were the best part of McDonald’s film, complete with body slamming, copious on-stage drinking and exchanges of body fluids and, in the case of the band’s climactic meltdown in Edmonton, a full-on slap down between Joe and lead guitarist Billy Tallent to off-his-meds John Oxenberger’s spoken word refrain of “In the end there’s love.” So it makes sense, in a live stage version, to focus on the band’s gigs, and to incorporate the venue and the audience into the action as much as possible. To this end, the Rickshaw’s grungy, past-its-prime look feels wholly appropriate, and while I shivered the whole way through the performance, even the lack of heat seemed authentic. Additionally, creator Michael Scholar, Jr., who plays Joe, commissioned original music from DOA’s Joe “Shithead” Keithley to accompany Turner’s lyrics. I understand that much of that music was prerecorded; however, it is loud, Toby Berner’s Pipefitter is certainly playing the drums, everyone in the band is in fine vocal form, and if most in the audience tended to respect the fourth wall of theatre instead of the open window of the punk concert hall, they nevertheless showed their enthusiastic appreciation after each song.

What was surprising to me was just how many of the non-musical vignettes from the book and the film the creators of this stage version retained. Long, expository scenes link the musical numbers, in which the bandmates talk directly to the audience (as they do to McDonald’s camera in the film) and John (a wonderful Clinton Carew) reads, as per Turner’s book, from his journal. Indeed, I would go so far to say that Hard Core Logo: LIVE is perhaps too faithful to its source texts. It’s almost as if Scholar did not want to have to take sides, incorporating the set pieces from McDonald’s film (including not just all of the van scenes, but the toy claymation truck and rolling blacktop pavement as well) alongside stuff from the book that the film left out (Act 2 even opens with an acoustic version of “Big Bush Party after School”). It makes for a very long evening, and while the piece certainly works as an homage, I’m not sure it yet stands on its own as something new—and newly responsive to its theatrical context. While Rachael Johnston (fantastic in a number of roles) nails Bucky Haight’s accent and faded Brit-punk ennui, the acid trip scene inevitably ends up looking like a cheap imitation of the one in the film, and precisely because it attempts to mirror the celluloid version too closely. And I don’t think the film’s ending works for the stage, especially if Joe then rises from the dead—or to heaven, depending on how you read the scene—for one more number, in this case a spirited version of “That’s Life” arranged by Keithley. That said, one of the major coups of this piece is Jamie Nesbitt’s superb projection design. And the opening anthropological film by Jason Margolis, “A Punkerland Who’s Who,” is hilarious, and a nice nod to Turner’s own academic training in ethnography.

One final thing that could have been foregrounded a little better, I thought, was the performance of punk masculinity that is such a big part of this work. The film, famously, pivots on a hoax that Joe—to his, and the band’s, eventual destruction—insists on perpetuating. It concerns the ostensible reason for the band’s reunion, i.e., that Bucky has supposedly been shot. However, I have argued elsewhere that another hoax at play in the book and film is that of the “non-performative performance” of heteronormative masculinity, which insists that real feeling between men must be hidden under layers of bluff swagger and sublimated within a theatrical masquerade of (in this case) subcultural identity. In other words, one of punk’s many performative operations (in addition to anti-establishment and class dis-affiliations) is that it continues to let boys be boys, retaining and expressing, for example, a polymorphous affection for one another in ways that the “real world” of grown-up men (where any kind of emotion and labour must be channeled in more productive directions) simply will not allow. Hard Core Logo, the film, makes it abundantly clear that for Joe the band is his way of holding on not just to Billy, but to a masculine persona that he simply cannot bring himself to retire. Maybe it was because I didn’t feel the right sparks between Scholar’s Joe and Telly James’s somewhat passive Billy, but last night—in a setting where the theatricality of gender should be front and centre (as in, for example, Johnston’s cross-dressing)—it seemed to me that dominant masculinity remained a fairly stable default referent.

Hard Core Logo: LIVE continues at the Rickshaw to February 6th.

P.

PuSh Review #8: Sound Machine at The Dance Centre

2011-01-29T08:27:00.000-08:00

Massimo Bertinelli (left) and Béatrice Jaccard in sound machine

Ever wonder what a mushroom sounds like? How about a tomato? What song would a fish sing if it could? These and other questions form the surreal, off-beat core of Zurich-based compagnie drift's sound machine, on at The Dance Centre through this evening in a co-production between PuSh and the Centre's Global Dance Connections series.

Beginning with the premise that the inaudible can somehow be made audible, performers/lab technicians Béatrice Jaccard, Massimo Bertinelli, and François Gendre use laptop computers, live and recorded video feeds, digitally wired gloves, and all manner of additional technology to first translate the sounds of silence into musical algorithms, and then to compose songs and movement sequences around them. The result is what they call a "musical concert in dance." And, indeed, the trio put me in mind of a Dadaist version of Jacques Brel, complete with Jaccard's body at one point doing a kinesthetic version of "La Valse à mille fois."

Absurd. Unexpected. Deeply satisfying. In other words, everything we've come to expect from a PuSh show.

PuSh Review #7: Bonanza at SFU Woodward's

2011-01-28T07:24:00.000-08:00

"Love thy neighbour as thyself." So, famously, reads the Biblical imperative in Leviticus 19:18. To this Sigmund Freud responded in Civilization and Its Discontents: Why? And why as myself? Since then countless political philosophers and theorists have taken the neighbour as both the ideal and the limit of social and political relations, that which figures the bare minimum of non-familial association and the impossibility of such an association ever being fully realized.

For most of us living in major urban centres like Vancouver such abstract questions can remain just that--abstract. Not so for the people living in Bonanza, Colorado, a once-thriving mining town now facing possible dis-incorporation because of ongoing feuding between its seven permanent residents. The bizarre permutations and obscure origins of these feuds are captured by the Antwerp-based collective Berlin (confusing, that), who in a series of works known as Holocene (the name of our current geological period) have, since 2003, been assembling through film, sculpture, photography, and live performance various immersive and rigorously researched "city portraits." These portraits include major metropolises like Moscow and Jerusalem, but also more remote regions like Bonanza and Iqaluit (which is also showing, in the Cordova Street atrium of SFU Woodward's, as part of the PuSh Festival).

Bonanza is an installation comprised of five film screens and a scale model of the town, complete with working street lamps and an automatic garage door on the town fire station, which also doubles as council meeting hall (or star chamber, as Mark refers to it at one point). As we are introduced to each of the residents, we discover the paradox at the heart of their respective attachments to this place, and to each other: they crave the isolation Bonanza offers and yet this isolation also binds them in a destructive form of co-dependence that has now descended into factionalism, gossip and intimidation. In a town so small, that basically means everyone is fighting.

Part of the fascination of Bonanza is its quasi-anthropological depiction of the competing spiritualities at play amongst the residents. Mark is deeply Christian and believes God means for him to stay in the town, no matter how bad things get. Richard is likewise a priest, although ministers to a congregation outside Bonanza, and so when at home appears to turn off that part of himself, perhaps explaining his predilection for sci-fi novels and generally staying apart from the skirmishes amongst his neighbours. Darva and Shikiah are new-age types who seek to channel the positive energy of the town and literally (according to them) see their surroundings in different shades than everyone else. Certainly they operate on a separate plane from Mary, who is apparently a witch, though she never identifies herself as such (she does have black teeth, though). And then there are Ed and Gail, who are just plain crackers, and whose lawsuit against the town council and its non-resident mayor, Joan, have brought the long-simmering tensions in the area to a head.

However, this piece refuses to let its audience remain at a safe observational distance. At the same time as they show how the world insistently intrudes upon Bonanza (not least in the form of the hundreds of part-time summer residents), Berlin also suggests what this microcosm of "un-neighbourliness" has to teach the world about the ethics of pluralism and cosmopolitanism and stranger-relations.

Bonanza continues at SFU Woodward's Studio T through this Saturday.

PuSh Review #6: Gloria's Cause at Club PuSh

2011-01-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

In New York this past fall all the talk was of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, the emo-rock musical based on the outsized life of the seventh President of the United States that began at the Public before transferring to Broadway for a brief run. But here on the west coast, Seattle-based Dayna Hanson was quietly putting together an even more subversive dance-pop deconstruction of the American Revolution. Gloria's Cause premiered at On the Boards in early December 2010, and now arrives in Vancouver as the lead-off production at Club PuSh, the PuSh Festival's sidebar program at Peformance Works, which presents experimental, highly theatrical, multi-disciplinary work in a more intimate, cabaret-style setting--complete with licensed bar and live music after most evenings' marquee events.

I can't begin to do justice to the complexity of this piece. Combining theatre, dance, music, and multi-media projections, Hanson and her company of incredibly talented performers (everyone plays a musical instrument, many more than one) take the rhetoric and iconography inherited from 1776 (a bald eagle mask is put to hilarious use) and subject it to contemporary interrogation. What does it mean to be free? What is the price of that freedom? And what is the difference between freedom to and freedom from? These and other questions form the core of a series of disconnected scenes and tableaux from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period (some instantly recognizable, others more obscure) that are deliberately anachronistic in their temporal and narrative juxtapositions, as well as their scenography: Mohawk alliances being negotiated with the French and English in a contemporary board room setting; a drunken George Washington defending himself on a Jerry Springer-style talk show; and so on. In this way, Hanson's creative method is very Benjaminian in its approach to history, constellating moments from the past as part of the present precisely in order to shock viewers out of a passive acceptance of the status quo and to arm them with the tools to take political action in the "hear-and-now."

To this end, the timeliness of this show is one of its most insistent messages. From the Tea Party to Iraq, and from Tucson to President Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday night: watching Gloria's Cause in light of recent events in the United States is to understand what a long and unresolved shadow the thirteen colonies' difficult transformation into a nation still casts over American politics. As well as, to quote Benjamin, what it "means to take control of a memory [whether true or false], as it flashes in a moment of danger" ("On the Concept of History" VI).

Gloria's Cause runs for only one more performance, tonight at 8 pm. Afterwards, Hanson and friends will rock the house with a live musical set starting at 10 pm. I urge everyone who might read this blog in the next few hours to head on down to Performance Works to catch both acts. You will not be disappointed.

PuSh Review #5: City of Dreams at the Roundhouse

2011-01-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

City of Dreams opened last night at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. It's a collaboration between Londoners Peter Reder (a theatre artist) and Tom Wallace (a sound designer) and several local artists brought together by Urban Crawl, a local company led by urban geographer and artistic director Caleb Johnston that works across disciplines to produce art that prompts "physical and social dialogue."

The piece is a performative installation that the audience watches being built from the ground up. Six performers draw a map of the city of Vancouver on the stage floor using hundreds of found objects (twigs, bricks, sand, shells, etc.). This is accompanied by a soundscape made up of various sounds (wind, rain, First Nations drumming and song, construction, steam engines, car horns, etc) and excerpts of oral testimony from different periods of the region's history (referencing, among other events, the fire at Hastings Mill in 1886, the riots in Chinatown in 1907, and the interurban railway that used to run from downtown all the way to Steveston). The work progresses slowly and at first the piece can seem quite static, but once you realize what's happening (Oh, that's False Creek! Hey, there's Stanley Park!), and you start to recognize various landmarks and locate yourself in relation to the map, there is a steady accretion of meaning, and the installation becomes incredibly compelling.

As we move forward in time, objects get added or removed, boundaries shift, and the map starts to change: a colonial settlement rises on a First Nations burial ground, two fingers traced through sand signify the building of the CPR, a dotted line to the east signifies the Trans-Canada highway, False Creek gets filled in, and so on. Most evocatively for me, the transformation of downtown is signified by first flipping horizontally-placed bricks to a vertical position, and then by replacing many of these with square glass vases. With each significant addition and transformation to the map, a small tea light candle is lit to mark the site, if only as trace or outline or memory. And, in this regard, an equally riveting aspect of the show is the delicacy and solemnity and grace with which the six performers silently go about their work building the map.

As with 100% Vancouver, the result is a stunning new way of looking at Vancouver, and, fittingly, the audience is invited to tour the stage at the conclusion of the piece.

City of Dreams continues through this Saturday, and is accompanied by a free exhibition called "Counter Mapping" curated by Johnston, in which several local artists rewrite, disrupt, and experiment with new ways of being in and moving through our local urban landscape.

PuSh Review #4: In the Solitude of Cotton Fields at Performance Works

2011-01-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

PuSh Acting Managing Director Kent Gallie said to me just before the Festival that he thought In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, which ended its run at Performance Works last night, might be this year's White Cabin. In other words, edgy, surreal, sensorially and emotionally extreme in a suitably Eastern European way. He was right.

In the Solitude is rising young Polish director Radoslaw Rychcik's bold new staging of a 1986 play by the late French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès. His generation's answer to Genet before his AIDS-related death in 1989, Koltès's work is known for the brutality of its themes and the lyrical poetry of its language. And, indeed, one of the extraordinary things about this production is how that poetry translates simultaneously via the actors' spoken Polish and via the projected English subtitles. Those subtitles were sometimes obscured by the puffs of white smoke billowing across the stage--including, unfortunately, during the final exchange of dialogue--but one is easily able to discern the broad parameters of the relationship unfolding before us.

Two men meet for some sort of illicit exchange. One, The Dealer (Wojciech Niemczk), has something to sell; the other, The Client (Tomasz Nosinski), wishes to buy. However, the object of this exchange remains unnamed. Is it drugs, sex, something else? It doesn't really matter, as the text informs us that the real subject of the play, and what both men are themselves subject to, is desire itself. Or, to put things in the proper psychoanalytical context, the desire to desire. The two men are bound together in terms of what each can give the other, but paradoxically their relationship is sustained only to the extent that their desire remains unfulfilled. It is this space of lonely, needful encounter--the cotton fields of the title, presumably--that this play explores, where the boundaries between men and beasts dissolve and where the requisite poses of humility (on the part of The Dealer) and hauteur (on the part of The Client) need to be adopted in order to maintain the fiction of reciprocity and an equal exchange of power.

All of this might appear tediously pretentious were it staged in a conventionally naturalistic way, and a production of this sort in 2002 in New York was savaged by the Times. However, Rychcik adapts the posturing and swagger implicit in the characters' competing monologues to the punk concert setting (a mini-theme at this year's Festival, what with Hard Core Logo: Live opening next week at the Rickshaw), complete with live musical accompaniment by the band Natural Born Chillers and dual downstage floor mikes into which the performers bark, scream, and hiss their lines, and in front of which they strut, dance, and pose. Dressed in matching mod suits, and with kohl-rimmed eyes (Nosinski) and eventually ruby-red lips (Niemczyk), the two performers were riveting from the moment they stepped on the stage and started to shimmy, groove, and bust to the music. The energy was electric, the atmosphere was loud, and the tension in the room did not let up until the performers' climactic embrace.

This is precisely the sort of performance that would not come through Vancouver without the PuSh Festival and, in this specific case, our wonderful co-producers, Pi Theatre. The enthusiastic reception by last night's audience is in part a recognition of this. That In the Solitude's concert/cabaret-style setting also inaugurated, to a certain extent, Performance Works as the venue for Club PuSh before its official opening next Wednesday was an added bonus. To that end, the Natural Born Chillers came back on stage after the performance for a late-night set to celebrate the end not just of this show's run, but an extraordinarily successful first week of the Festival.

PuSh Review #3: 100% Vancouver at SFU Woodward's

2011-01-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

Last night was the premiere of 100% Vancouver at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's. Developed by the Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll, who brought PuSh audiences last year's Best Before, the show is a locally produced (in this case by Theatre Replacement, in conjunction with PuSh and SFU Woodward's Cultural Programming Office) version of similar performances previously staged in Berlin and Vienna. Using Rimini's trademark theatrical protocol of having "everyday experts" (i.e. non-professional actors) reflect back to audiences a version of the communities from which they come, 100% Vancouver gathers on stage 100 Vancouverites who each represent 1% of the city's total population, and who have been selected according to the following demographic criteria, as gleaned from most recent (2006) census data: gender, age, marital status, ethnicity/mother tongue, and neighbourhood. As Tim Carlson, dramaturge for the piece, notes in an essay included in the publication booklet accompanying the production (wonderfully produced by local arts press Fillip, together with a boxed set of cards of each of the performers), whereas in Best Before's video-game format audience members were invited to create--via their on-screen avatars--virtual versions of themselves, in 100% Vancouver "flesh-and-bone citizens" literally stand in for the abstract virtuality of numerical statistics.

Theoretically this process of statistical embodiment is supposed to unfold as a daisy chain of once-removed relationships, as each individual selected is in turn responsible for finding someone whom they know who matches the requisite demographic profile of the next link in the chain, and so on. However, as expert number 1 of 100, statistics librarian Patti Wotherspoon, tells us at the top of the show, in the case of 100% Vancouver, the producers had to step in on several occasions to shore up gaps in the chain by calling on their own acquaintances and by putting out an open call for participants matching the statistical data they hadn't yet humanized in a participating expert. And even with these measures, Wotherspoon also let us know that three neighbourhoods--including, most interestingly, Shaughnessy--failed to be represented on stage.

Given her own professional expertise, Wotherspoon also had something to say about the creative use and interpretation of statistics, as well as the politics of the Canadian long-form census, the last iteration of which (in 2006) was the starting point for this show, and whose 2011 application will be its last thanks to the Conservative Party's own misuse and misinterpretation of public opinion. One of the questions asked of the participants in 100% Vancouver is in fact how many of them support the long form census; the overwhelming majority respond in the affirmative. And expert number 69, Patricia Morris, offers a compelling account at one point in the show of administering the 2006 census door-to-door in her neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside, visiting SROs and asking the occupants--often while parties were in full swing--whether they had every used farm machinery.

One would think that all of this would make for some pretty lifeless theatre, but from the opening roll-call of names and special objects as each expert/participant paraded out onto the circular stage and paused before one of two microphones to identify themselves and something that defines them, I was hooked. Based on video interviews with each participant, Carlson and director Amiel Gladstone have put together a portrait of the city that at once spotlights individual stories through oral testimony (number 86, Joan Symons, who moved to Vancouver to escape memories of her first husband, who died in WW II, only to lose her eight-year old daughter a few years later, and who subsequently became a real estate agent and now has 22 grandchildren; or number 70, Minh Thai Nguyen, who came to Vancouver from Vietnam only five months ago to provide better educational opportunities for his children, and who was hilarious on the social similarities between Vietnamese and Canadians) and creates striking visual tableaux. Indeed, the massings of bodies into ME and NOT ME categories in response to a series of questions ("Were you born in Canada?" "Do you recycle?" "Do you smoke pot?" "Have you been in prison?" "Do you know someone First Nations?" "Are you happy?," etc) offers a revealing profile of Vancouver, as George Pendle suggests in his essay in the accompanying publication, "not just demographichally, but temperamentally and morally as well."

I have lived in Vancouver 20 years now, just under half of my life, and way longer than anywhere else. I like to think I know something of the city, its neighbourhoods, and the residents of those neighbourhoods; this show confirms that I do at the same time that it points to how much more there is for me to discover.

100% Vancouver is a major gift to our city, and you have just two more opportunities to catch it. Today's 4 pm matinee is technically sold out, although there may be rush tickets at the door. And there are still tickets to this evening's performance at 7 pm. I urge you to attend if you can.

PuSh Review #2: Floating at Arts Club Revue Stage

2011-01-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

Last night it was the premiere of Floating, which runs at the Arts Club Revue Stage on Granville Island until February 5th in a co-production between the PuSh Festival and Arts Club Theatre Company.

Floating comes from the weird and wonderful mind of Hugh Hughes, a Welshman who has created three highly successful, award-winning shows for the Cambridge-based Hoipolloi Theatre that have gone on to make a big splash at the Edinburgh Fringe. Floating is the first of these--and, indeed, the first ever work Hughes created for the theatre--and on one level it concerns the metaphysics of geology. Specifically, the tale Hughes recounts--ably assisted by Sioned Rowlands, who plays a number of roles, including Hughes' grandmother, his old schoolmaster, and his best friend Gareth--is about the bizarre events in 1982, when Hughes' birthplace, the North Wales island of Anglesey, started floating away from the mainland, and the accompanying crisis of connection this prompted in Hughes himself.

A projected quotation from Luis Buñuel at the top of the show about dreams invading our memories and our ability to transform lies into truth suggests we should approach Hughes' particular brand of mimesis more as poeisis, a faking that becomes a making (in Victor Turner's conception of performance), in this case not just of Hughes' relationship with his homeland and culture, but of the bond he nightly (re)makes with his audience. However, this latter connection (an important word for Hughes, one he keeps on a cue-card in his pants pocket and routinely removes to show to spectators) first requires a dis-connection (on the flip side of that same cue-card). To this end, house lights remain up for much of the performance, and there is a very immediate and obvious breaking of the fourth wall of traditional theatre to speak directly to the audience, and to invite them into not just the story but Hughes' creative process as well.

All of this poses risks, of course, both for the performers and the audience, and last night there were some awkward, and even slightly uncomfortable, moments, when the responses Hughes seemed to be soliciting from the audience turned out not to be the ones he apparently wanted to hear, and then when he could not coax any response at all. But Hughes is such a charismatic performer, Rowlands has so much to do physically on stage, and the production as a whole is filled with such low-tech charm, that by the end of the show the connection Hughes is seeking to build/bridge both with the island of Anglesey and between the traditionally separate islands of stage and audience is reestablished.

PuSh Review #1: Circa at Freddy Wood

2011-01-20T08:21:00.000-08:00

Herewith the first in what I hope will be a regular series of promptly posted capsule reviews of the PuSh shows I'm seeing this year.

Last night it was Circa at the Freddy Wood, brought to us by the eponymous troupe from Brisbane, Australia that wowed PuSh audiences two years ago at Performance Works. In his remarks during the curtain speech, the Australian Consul referenced the devastating floods that have ravaged Queensland and directed us to the State's official website (www.qld.gov.au) should we wish to donate to the reconstruction fund.

However, it was anything but a sombre evening. Circa specializes in what is known as the "new circus," and while this means, among other things, dispensing not just with animals, but also the more vaudevillian and side-show aspects of the traditional circus, they are certainly still out to entertain. They do this primarily through amazing feats of physical daring, combining incredible displays of strength, balance, contortion, and dexterity with acrobatics, tumbling, and choreographed dance. To say that some of their moves defy the laws of gravity (and those of physics, more generally) does not nearly go far enough in describing how the three men and two women that are part of this show fling their bodies through space, or balance on each other's shoulders and heads (and just about every other limb imaginable), or dangle from ropes and stand on a trapeze--suffice to say that in the latter case the performer is using neither his hands nor his feet.

This is the sort of show where spontaneous gasps and bursts of applause erupt from the audience throughout the evening, and on their own the various routines might have started to become indistinguishable in their virtuosity were they not also leavened by a playful sense of humour that lets the audience know the performers are not taking themselves too seriously. Much of this humour is gendered in interesting ways, and a mocking of strong-man masculinity earlier in the show that occurs through an interesting contrast of two of the male performers' bodies comes full circle at the end when one of the women emerges from the wings in stilettos and proceeds to walk all over one of these men (to the strains of Leonard Cohen's "Came So Far for Beauty," no less).

Equally compelling is the intimacy and stripped-down quality of Circa's performance aesthetic. This is not Cirque du Soleil, with its own big-top tent, countless performers, over-the-top costumes and make-up, and elaborate narrative conceits. Here we have five performers on a bare stage, with just a few props and compelling sound and lighting design. This allows us to concentrate, in ways that Cirque's theatrical sleights of hand seek to elide, on the extraordinary bodily effort that goes into every aspect of this show. Muscles are rippling before us, steadying steps need to be taken for balance, and sometimes moves aren't always executed according to plan or have to begin again. This doesn't lessen our pleasure in the performance any; indeed, I would say that it heightens it. While the thrill of a show like this is largely vicarious (how do they do that? how can I possibly watch them do that?), it also invites a degree of corporeal identification, at once through a recognition on the part of spectators of what our bodies can't do, and what, in different contexts but arguably with equal amounts of effort and grace, they can.

Circa continues at the Freddy Wood through this Saturday. The troupe will also be performing a family-oriented show, 46 Circus Acts in 45 Minutes, at the same venue this Sunday at 2 pm. As always, purchase your tickets at the PuSh Festival website.

PuSh's Tidal Launch

2011-01-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

It sure was a swell party last night at Club 560, where the 7th annual PuSh International Performing Arts Festival was launched at a Gala event also inaugurating the official celebrations of the 125th anniversary of Vancouver's incorporation as a city. Lots of people, great buzz, loads of media coverage (courtesy of CTV and others), and of course our distinguished (and so, so pretty) Mayor, who among other things, declared Chinatown the newest hip neighbourhood.

PuSh got lots of plugging from Board President Max Wyman, looking as distinguished as ever, and of course from Executive Director Norman Armour, whose inspired remarks about this year's PuSh theme of "cityness" let everyone know whose idea this dual launch really was.

I could only stay for the first part of the ceremonies, but that was long enough to catch Veda Hille leading her Vancouver Complaints Choir in a rousing and hilarious paean to all that could be better about our city--as well as all that is good, but about which we still like to kvetch. Catch Veda and gang at Club PuSh at Performance Works on Granville Island on January 29th at 8 pm, where full-length show Happy Birthday Teenage City will be unveiled.

After the speeches and a few canapes, it was over to Water Street, between Abbott and Carrell, for a tech preview of La Marea (The Tide), the site-specific collaboration between local company Boca del Lupo and Argentinian writer and director Mario Pensotti. La Marea tells nine different stories concurrently in 10 minute cycles that repeat over the course of two hours every evening between 7 and 9 pm from tonight through this Saturday. Spectators can come and go at their leisure, moving from scenes performed in various storefronts, in an apartment window, outdoors on two corners and, in one case, in the middle of the street. The characters (all acted by students from SFU, UBC, and Langara's Studio 58), in pairs and occasionally alone, are working through mini-dramas involving various states and stages of connection, with couples just getting together, and others about to break up, and still others fantasizing about what wasn't or what will be said in relationships that have already dissolved or are as yet to be imagined. In all cases, this is communicated to the spectator through projected subtitles, and part of the drama of the piece is not just piecing together the connections between the various scenes, but also in establishing the relationship between text and embodiment in terms of each "performance."

Then, too, there is the site of the performance. While the street has been closed off to traffic during each night's performance, pedestrians and members of the community still wander the sidewalks, and one's encounters with them can be just as interesting and powerful. Last night, for example, I was given a number of condoms from a local women's support network, and was also serenaded by a Scotsman named George, who sang a couple of traditional Irish (!) ballads.

Talk about cityness! A fantastic beginning to what promises to be a fabulous PuSh Festival.

That

2011-01-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

Megan Follows stars in This, at the Vancouver Playhouse until January 29.

I had been looking forward to seeing the Vancouver Playhouse production of Melissa James Gibson's This for two main reasons. First, Charles Isherwood gave the play a rave review in the New York Times when it opened Off-Broadway in 2009. I very much admire Isherwood's critical judgment, and his tastes and sensibilities mirror my own much more closely than those of his colleague, Ben Brantley (who, for example, absolutely loved Brief Encounter). Second, the Vancouver production of This was to star Megan Follows, who had impressed me to no end in Toronto last February in a revival of Cloud 9. Having seen the play last night, I can now say that on the first count--Isherwood's lauding of the playscript--I have some major caveats. However, on the second--the lead performance in this production--I was thoroughly impressed. Follows is a knock-out as Jane.

James Gibson, daughter of former BC Liberal Party leader Gordon Gibson, is a local girl who has made good in New York, racking up impressive playwriting credits ([sic]; Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance; Current Nobody) and even more impressive reviews. And This is very much a New York play, focused as it is on four intelligent, witty, arty, and navel-gazing upper middle-class thirtysomething friends struggling to name the exact source of their middle-aged malaise and malcontent. To be sure, in Jane's case there is a fairly clear cause: the premature death of her husband a year before. She just won't own up to the full immensity of her grief, and her increasing difficulties communicating with her daughter and stoic refusal to remove her dead husband's ashes from the top of her fridge are symptoms of her stasis (and rather textbook Freudian) melancholia. Tom (Todd Thomson) and Marrell (Karen Holness) are exhausted new parents whose difficulty adjusting to their altered lifestyle mask deeper faultlines in their relationship. And, finally, Alan (a wonderfully wry Dmitry Chepovetsky), is the requisite self-deprecating, borderline alchoholic gay sidekick in this self-obsessed quartet, no one's "dear friend" as he likes to point out, but everyone's default confessor, if only by virtue of his burdensome talent for remembering everything he hears or is told. Indeed, he is a professional mnemonist by trade. Who knew there was such a thing? Kudos, however, to James Gibson for not just making this a schtick and reducing Alan to complete caricature; Alan's powers of recall do in fact form a key component of the plot's climax.

Into this menage comes Jean-Pierre (Fabrice Grover), a globe-trotting physician with Doctors Without Borders whom Marrell meets at the jazz club where she performs and invites to the play's opening dinner party as a possible match for Jane. Jean-Pierre is clearly meant to show up the triteness and pettiness--the "dinkiness," to borrow and adapt a phrase from Alan--of these four friends' personal burdens of angst and betrayal in light of the urgent life and death concerns he daily deals with. And yet, as a character, Jean-Pierre largely remains a cipher; we never learn what exactly he does with DWB (nor what the "pre-conference" he has to rush off to is all about) and only overhear one telephone conversation he has in French with an apparent colleague, whom he repeatedly tells to "parler à Bob." It is hard for us to condemn the shallowness of these New Yorkers' lives through Jean-Pierre when he himself remains so shallowly drawn and, as such, he remains mostly a mute (albeit exotically so) screen on and through which the other characters project their own anxieties and desires. And, it would seem, the bisexual Jean-Pierre is willing to accommodate all takers.

Indeed, the real drama of the play has nothing to do with Jean-Pierre at all; instead, it centers on Tom and Jane's fateful one-night stand after the opening dinner party, and the consequent guilt Jane feels towards Marrell and, latterly, the memory of her dead husband. This question of Jane's double betrayal is really at the heart of the play, and leads to its high-stakes climax, in which Jane both reveals to her best friend that she has slept with Tom and to herself that she still misses her own husband. Interestingly, she can only do the latter after she disabuses the assembled audience about her marriage being perfect; it just seemed that way because her husband had the misfortune to die young. Which in turn accounts for her fortune (if it can be called that) in hereafter being granted some sort of nobility she didn't in fact earn. It's a powerful scene, full of some of James Gibson's best (because most honest) writing, and allowing Follows a bravura moment of primal acting, going back to drama's ritual beginnings in her smearing of her face with her dead husband's ashes.

In the pre-show publicity on the Playhouse production, James Gibson has said in various press interviews that with This she started out wanting to write a play about adultery, but that she ended up writing something else. She doesn't exactly say what that something else is, but I would suggest it's the process of grief and mourning (for a dead lover and the death of love in equal measure). Certainly these are the elements that provide the most heft for me in this play, and the most satisfying moments of performance. I just wish that James Gibson had been better able to connect her residual focus on the betrayal that accompanies adultery with her nascent exploration of the different kind of betrayal that's also involved in doing the work of mourning. That connection is certainly there, not least in the opening party game that Jane doesn't want to play and that ends up going fantastically wrong. (As an aside, the party game, combined with other elements in the play, not least Alan's role as snide commentator, put me in mind of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band. Perhaps not the first play others would think of in connection with this one, but there are, I think, striking similarities, and it's perhaps no coincidence that a revival of Crowley's play opened in New York around the same time as James Gibson's play.) However, too often for me James Gibson's innate cleverness as a writer gets in the way of what she clearly wants us to see is the real weight of her words. Nowhere was this more in evidence, for me, than in the opening scene, when the familiar conceit of the misunderstood referent in overlapping dialogue was very much in danger of wearing out its welcome.

There were similar moments elsewhere in the play, when what I suspect is James Gibson's sheer love of language, and her immense talent for constructing witty exchanges around words and the different syntactical possibilities for their delivery sends mixed messages not just about the substance, but also the tone, of a given scene. See, in this regard, Jane and Alan late in the play talking about her use of the Yiddish word "schwitzy"--clearly James Gibson wants this light banter about linguistic appropriation to do double duty re race relations in 21st-century America, but it ends up sounding forced and certainly tangential to the main concerns of the play. Though Marrell is black and Tom is white, and while Jane was also married to a black man, the topic of biracial couples is left largely unexplored in the play. Which is fine--why make it an issue? Except that this late exchange does just that by drawing attention to this topic's lack of exploration elsewhere in the play. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the love of language in the theatre. So long as that love is in service of the dramatic action. And so long as it's clear the characters love language as much as the playwright.

As a play, This, it seems to me, is not sure if it wants to be a drawing-room comedy or a Greek tragedy. Mostly it comes off as the former rather than the latter. But that certainly doesn't make it uninteresting. James Gibson is an very talented writer, and I will continue to follow her work.

Of that you can be sure.