Landline: Vancouver to Kitchener

Earlier today I took part in Boca del Lupo's latest Micro Performance Series presentation. The show was Landline: Vancouver to Kitchener, the most recent iteration of Adrienne Wong and Dustin Harvey's trans-geographical, site-based, audio-guided, participatory and smart-phone-assisted performance piece. To explain the ethos of the show by way of its development:

In 2010-11 Harvey and Wong were living and making theatre on opposite ends of the country (he in Halifax, as part of Secret Theatre, she in Vancouver as part of Neworld Theatre). Both had begun experimenting with the creation of intimate, site-based audio plays using mp3 players, arming audiences of one and two with mini-iPods and headphones, and sending them off into their respective cities to reencounter familiar and not so familiar landscapes as one might look anew at a landscape painting in a gallery with the aid of a recorded docent's voice describing the drama behind its creation. The results were Harvey's The Common Project and Wong's Look Up, the latter part of the PodPlays series that played the 2011 PuSh Festival, and which I wrote about here. Discovering their shared interest in this kind of performance-making, Harvey and Wong began discussing a cross-Canada collaboration that would, in effect, enable audiences to immerse themselves in two different locations simultaneously, using real time text-messaging to collapse the spatial distance between paired participants.

Out of these discussions came Landline, which was first live-tested between Vancouver and Halifax in 2013, and which has since hooked up citizens in Ottawa (where Wong now lives) and Dartmouth, and, just last month as part of the Edinburgh Festival, folks in that Scottish city with those living in Reykjavik. The script for Landline was also published in the Summer 2014 edition of Canadian Theatre Review (where, coincidentally, Wong has a separate article coming out next month in an issue I co-edited on art and performance in Vancouver after 2010). For Landline's return visit to Vancouver, Harvey and Wong have paired local participants up with audience members in Kitchener-Waterloo, currently playing host to the Impact Festival. Our first connection with our partners is made soon after checking in with intern Ming Hudson at Boca's Anderson Street Space. Neworld's Chelsea Haberlin confirms our cell phone numbers and then instructs us to wait for a text message reading "Stand by." Once received, we are told to reply with "Standing by," and then to take a seat and await further instructions from Wong. Along with double-sided maps of Granville Island and Kitchener's downtown core, we are each given a mini-iPod connected to a pair of headphones. At the signal given by Wong, we press play and then are off to wander on our own over the next hour.

The text we hear, as seductively voiced by Wong, mixes a story that unfolds as a series of autobiographical confessions with field recordings and facts relating to the respective locales of Vancouver and Kitchener, and successive temporal, kinaesthetic and dramaturgical prompts designed to cue scenes that we will construct with our partners in Kitchener via a series of exchanged text messages. In the first of these scenes we are asked to introduce ourselves to each other. "Give yourself a name, and describe yourself" are the instructions we hear via the audio. I took this as license to invent an identity, so I told my invisible interlocutor in Kitchener that my name was Laslo and that I was tall and very handsome and spoke with a middle European accent. He texted back that his name was Walt, that he was short with long hair, and that he liked to longboard and cook. You so cannot make up a combination like that and I immediately wanted to take back my little lie as I feared I'd betrayed our experiment in virtual intimacy even before it had really begun. (In the sequence immediately preceding our official introductions we are asked to find a place to sit down and to begin waving; we are allowed to text to see if our partners are also waving, but if we trust that they are, then no text is needed. Needless to say, neither Walt nor I texted each other.)

I tried to make up for things in the next scene exchanges by trying to find the right mix of honesty and poeticism in my texts--which is easier said than done when one is trying to text quickly with clumsy thumbs in the full-on glare of the sun (curses to those backlit Apple iPhone screens!). Still, I think I did achieve something akin to SMS lyricism in my description of standing behind the Granville Island Hotel looking at the wavy Erickson condo building across False Creek, flanked by two bridges and with a boat docked below named "See You Later" perfectly encapsulating the themes of distance and change that Walt and I were meant to be ruminating on. This, incidentally, also speaks to how much I am assuming the particular urban location one is wandering about affects Landline's co-authored text-message exchanges (not to mention the individual experience of the narrated confessions). That is, I was quite conscious of the difference between the physical landmarks Walt was describing to me (an all-ages nightclub, a park with a fountain and a clocktower) and those I was describing for him (boats floating on sun-dappled water as viewed from boardwalk, shops filled with an assortment of arts and crafts). I always feel like a tourist in my own city when I go to Granville Island, and this no doubt seeped into some of the picture postcard sentiments I was texting to Walt--including in answer to the specific question he was allowed to ask me, which was "What's it like living in Vancouver?" I talked about the rain and how expensive it is and the social inequity, but I ended by saying it was beautiful. (Incidentally, my question to Walt was about how he planned to vote in the federal election. I won't betray his confidence by revealing his answer here, except to say that it's not going to be Conservative!) I can imagine that had I been walking around the Downtown Eastside, or even Yaletown (near the since-closed Subeez Restaurant on Homer Street, from whence the first Vancouver iteration of Landline departed), my answer might have been different.

That is, of course, part of the unique alchemy of estrangement and familiarity embedded in such a performance: that our experience is shaped not just by our texts with a stranger in another city, but also by the process of making strange--paradoxically in order to make it more tangible and accessible for an other--a place we already thought we knew. It's perhaps fitting, then, that in texting what he would remember most about our conversation, Walt said it was my name: Laslo.

P.

PuSh Review #10: PodPlays-The Quartet

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.

P.