New Aesthetics and the Vancouver Sublime

Yesterday, at the invitation of Theatre Replacement's James Long, Maiko Bae Yamamoto, and Sarah Moore, I gave a talk at SFU Woodward's to participants of the 2014 New Aesthetics workshop, as well as interested members of the public. New Aesthetics, now in its second year, is a two-week summer intensive in which mid-career artists from Vancouver, elsewhere in BC, various parts of Canada, and the United States share their practices with each other, while also working in the studio with two internationally respected performance makers. This year's facilitators are Mariano Pensotti, from Argentina, and Toshiki Okada, from Japan--both of whom have presented their work to Vancouver audiences as part of the PuSh Festival (along with SFU'S School for the Contemporary Arts, a community partner in the workshop).

This year, the folks at TR were interested in supplementing the in-studio discussions and exercises with public conversations led by local artists (including Althea Thauberger, who will be speaking next Tuesday afternoon) and critics (me). Having been given a sense from Jamie and Sarah of what Mariano and Toshiki were planning for the NA participants, I pitched a talk that would focus, among other things, on "walking and talking; fiction and ethnography; social choreography and mobile intimacies; art in public places; and the Vancouver sublime." The latter topic, excerpted from a larger inquiry into recent site dance in the city, generated a fair amount of discussion. Seeing as we're in the midst of some pretty sublime Vancouver weather of late--but mostly because it's been a few weeks since I've seen any live performance, and I'm starting to feel negligent in my blogging duties--I thought I would share the introduction to the paper from which yesterday's remarks on dance and the Vancouver sublime were adapted.

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"Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn"

Against the painterly, late evening backdrop of the north shore mountains, and with the last of the sun’s rays glistening off the water of Burrard Inlet, the first bars of The Flaming Lips’ “What is the Light?” issue from a set of makeshift speakers as first one body, and then another, and then another, manifests on the horizon. Each seems to have emerged directly from the sea, and now advancing up the beach and onto the grass where ranks of onlookers are gathered—some of us purposefully and expectant, others accidentally and merely perplexed—these strangers pause to hail us. One, a man, raises his arm above his head in a static wave, while the woman to his right drops to one knee, supplicant to our collective gaze. Yet another woman, younger than the first, merely stops and stares. Soon these three are joined by others, until they number more than twenty, male and female, young and old, of different shapes and sizes and abilities, all gradually fanning out onto the grass and adding to the group’s cumulative repertoire of proffered gestures: here a woman puts her hands to her head and slowly folds in on herself; there a man opens his chest to the sky; and over there a young girl and a woman I take to be her mother lay down on their backs. Eventually all of the performers will end up supine on the ground. Until, suddenly—how did I miss this?—they are not and, standing upright once again, they begin to march en masse toward the first row of the assembled audience. Despite the warmth of the evening, the open and friendly faces of the performers and my fellow spectators, I feel a slight shiver down my spine and I wonder, in retrospect, if this is due to my excitement at the “destination experience” I am having in my own city, or a suppressed anxiety about who else in this park is being excluded from the eventfulness of this event.

Over three successive weekends in July 2013 I attended four different performances of outdoor, site-based dance in Vancouver, each yielding moments that were similarly sublime—in the dual Burkean sense of inspiring aesthetic awe and inducing feelings of uncertainty, sensory confusion, even fleeting terror (Burke 2008 [1757]). These moments occurred as part of: the Dancing on the Edge Festival’s (DOTE) presentation of the Ontario-based series Dusk Dances, from which my opening description derives, and staged for the first time in 2013 at CRAB/Portside Park in the Downtown Eastside (DTES); New Works’ All Over the Map midday program of “global” dance and music on Granville Island; and Kokoro Dance’s 18th annual Wreck Beach Butoh, held at low tide every summer on Vancouver’s famous clothing optional beach. In the larger essay that flows from these introductory remarks, I suggest that these performances, and my experience of them, help to map a kinesthetics of place particular to the city’s urban geography, and to the cultural, economic, and social asymmetries historically embedded in Vancouver’s performance of publicness. As Lance Berelowitz has persuasively argued, that performance owes much to Vancouver’s waterfront setting, with the consequence that a great deal of “Vancouver’s constructed public realm” takes place “at the edge,” especially along its sprawling seawall and in its many beachfront parks, spaces of leisure activity that have gradually superseded in importance the city’s working waterfront, and that “substitute for the more traditional centrifugal public spaces of older cities” (2009: 128). However, far from being “theatres for vital, legitimate political expression”—as, ideally, most urban public spaces should be—these apparently “’natural’” and “socially neutral” amenities mask, according to Berelowitz, a “highly contrived, ideologically controlled and commodified reality, in which the city’s beaches [and related waterfront destinations, including Granville Island] can be understood as a series of discrete public spaces, in terms not only of built environment but also in social formation, use, and regulation” (245).

Contributing to the “artifice” of publicness produced by these spaces are the increasingly choreographed and highly spectacularized performance events that take place within them, of which the annual Celebration of Light fireworks festival at English Bay is paradigmatic in Berelowitz’s estimation (257-8). The sited dances I am concerned with are in many ways the antithesis of the Celebration of Light’s commercialized ethos. At the same time, each also displays different degrees of social and environmental awareness and solicits different levels of community participation, an attentiveness to the civic dimensions of public ritual that is more or less acute, I want to argue, depending on the extent to which the dances take opportunistic advantage of their sites in order to either strategically uphold or tactically resist the normative placed-based discourses that adhere to those sites. Those discourses, I assert, can be articulated as three versions of a distinctly “Vancouver sublime,” producing a cognitive map of the city that moves—east to west—from the biopolitical to the touristic to the natur(al)ist.

In using dance to lay bare the ideological fissures undergirding Vancouver’s “sense of place,” I am seeking, on the one hand, to foreground the fundamental importance of the physical experience of movement to what Frederic Jameson sees as the alienated metropolitan subject’s “practical reconquest” of the “urban totality” in which she finds herself (1991: 51)—of which we may take (differences in gender notwithstanding) any of Walter Benjamin’s flanêur, Guy Debord’s psychogeographer, or Michel de Certeau’s city walker as exemplary (see Benjamin 1983; Debord 2006 [1955]; and de Certeau 1984). At the same time, I am also hoping to use these case studies from Canada’s west coast to explore, more broadly, the “place” of kinesis within performance studies as a discipline, especially as it helps to connect, conceptually and methodologically, the field’s different strands of aesthetic, ethnographic, and social analysis. Here I take my cue from Dwight Conquergood, who challenged us to push beyond Victor Turner’ influential notion of performance as poeisis, as “making, not faking” (Turner 1982: 93), and to embrace performance as an expressly kinetic form of doing, “as movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress boundaries and trouble closure” (Conquergood 1995: 138). Bearing in mind as well Conquergood’s injunction that “performance-centered research takes as both its subject matter and method the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history” (1991: 187), I thus include as part of my larger analysis partial transcriptions of some of the verbalized thoughts and observations I recorded on three separate walks I took in April 2014 in an attempt to map, both cognitively and kinesthetically, the physical distances and affective connections between my different sites of research.

The idea for this comes from the sensory and performance anthropologist Andrew Irving, who has pioneered a kind of ethnography of interiority, taking a page from modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf by recording the stop-and-start narratives of his subject-informants’ inner lifeworlds as they wander the streets of Kampala or New York City, their observable social actions sometimes more, sometimes less congruent with the dramas going on inside their heads (see Irving 2007; 2011, “Strange”; 2011, “New York”). Because my walks were task-oriented, and tied to specific routes between fixed points, it is perhaps no surprise that the dialogues I conducted with myself (when I actually remembered to speak into the head phone mic attached to my smart phone) end up reproducing aspects of the coercive power structures on display in the city’s grid system, my remarks often tied to familiar landmarks that demarcate a strategic version/vision of recent urban development in Vancouver. At the same time, I have taken abundant liberties with the performative transcription of my autoethnography, tactically editing, reordering, interpolating, and even inventing in order to interrupt prescribed circuits of movement and excavate their sedimented layers of history, deliberately leading readers astray with discursive perambulations that derail the logical flow of my argument. But I am also seeking, in these sections, to superimpose another kind of map of Vancouver, one that constellates the landscape of performance and performance studies research in and of Vancouver by putting my exteriorized interior monologue in dialogue with the voices of other scholars and artists.

In so doing, I am drawing not only on Michel de Certeau’s characterization of city walking as an enunciative act similar to writing and speech, but also on his distinction between the strategic as that which represents the “triumph of place over time” and the tactical as a mobile nowhere “that must accept the chance offerings of the moment” (1984: 36-7; emphasis in original). Thinking about site-specific dance in relation to the social choreography of cities thus means paying attention not just to the (pan)optics of where that dance takes place, but the much more ephemeral and fluid kinesthetics of when, a movement in time between past and present that can produce surprising instances of situational confluence or juxtaposition. As Susan Leigh Foster has argued, in her discussion of the specific social and choreographic tactics deployed by American site-based dance and contact improvisation in the 1970s, “tacticians seeking insights into the kinds of resistive action pertinent to their moment will find that their responses can only be formulated while in motion, in response to the movement that their situation creates” (2002: 144). Applying this principle of kinetic intersection to the aesthetic and identity formations produced through different dance communities in the contemporary global city, Judith Hamera (who studied with Conquergood), has similarly argued for contextualizing dance technique as part of a larger archive of the social work of bodies in “practices of everyday urban life,” one in which “movement with and around other bodies” produces a “relational infrastructure” that binds bodies “together in socialities with strategic ambitions” and produces “modes of reflexivity” that “tactically limit or engender forms of solidarity and subjectivity” (2007: 3, 22). Further, Hamera argues that these mobile intimacies engendered by dancing communities—friendships between dancers, instructors and students, performers and audience members—in turn comprise an important layer of the “civic infrastructure” of contemporary urban living, making the case via her specific Los Angeles focus “for even closer examinations of the ways the daily operations of performance expose, manage, finesse, evade, and often transform the tensions, constraints and opportunities that must be continually negotiated by embodied subjects within the global city” (210).

I am similarly interested in what social, aesthetic, community, and civic relationships get mobilized or, to use Hamera’s phrase, “danced into being,” in outdoor site dance in Vancouver, as well as both the physical and metaphysical limits placed on these relationships by the political horizons in and through which they are constituted. “Such horizons,” according to Randy Martin, often “promise to enlarge the sense of what is possible,” but can also get “lost in daily experience to the enormous scale of society” (1998: 14), a terror in the infiniteness of our local obligations to each other as residents of the global city that in this instance I am calling the urban sublime. For Martin, the bodily mobilizations of dance, especially as they “contest a given space,” can “condense” and make “palpable” what otherwise remains immensely obscure about political mobilization; while Martin resists idealizing dance as “the solution in formal terms to absences in other domains of social practice,” he does suggest that an analysis of the “politics of form” in dance can serve as a method for “generating concepts that are available to theoretical appropriation,” including for critiques of different “forms of politics” (1998: 14-15). This is the method I am attempting in the paper derived from this introduction, using recent examples of site dance in Vancouver to advance a theory about the sublime experience of the city, and its politics of place.

References: 

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1983.

Berelowitz, Lance. Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757. Second edition. Ed. James T. Boulton. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Conquergood, Dwight. “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.” Communications Monographs 58 (1991): 179-94.

---. “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion.” TDR: The Drama Review 39.4 (1995): 137-41.

Debord, Guy. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” 1955. In The Situationist International Anthology. Ed. and trans. Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006. 8-11.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Foster, Susan Leigh. “Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics: Danced Inventions of Theatricality and Performativity.” SubStance 31.2-3 (2002): 125-46.

Hamera, Judith. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 

Irving, Andrew. “Ethnography, Art, and Death.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 185-208. 

---. “Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25.1 (2011): 22-44.

---. “New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens.” cities@manchester, 12 December 2011. http://citiesmcr.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/new-york-stories-the-lives-of-other-citizens/.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Martin, Randy. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

Blame Australia: A "Circum-Pacific" Approach to Vancouver 2010

Patrons enjoying a pint at the Candahar Bar, an installation by Theo Sims, for Presentation House Gallery, at the PTC Studios on Granville Island.

Well, the Games are (blessedly) over. Let the post-mortems begin (starting with that cliché-ridden Closing Ceremonies). In fact, I’ll save mine for the time being, or at least until we get a better picture of the long-term fallout for the city (although I will admit to breathing a huge sigh of relief that Canada won the men's hockey game--not because I'm a hockey fan, but because I shudder to think what would have happened downtown had they lost). Instead, let me offer you a different sort of take, one that is excerpted from my forthcoming book, which includes a chapter comparing the Beijing and Vancouver Games, and which was supposed to be out at the beginning of this month, before Vancouver’s Opening Ceremonies. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed, but that didn’t stop my friend and colleague Michael Turner from inviting me to present on my research as part of the final day of programming at the Candahar Bar on Granville Island. Here’s what I had to say.

For his contribution to the 2006 Sydney Biennale, curated by Charles Merewether around the theme ‘Zones of Contact’, China’s most celebrated contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei, created World Map, an 8-metre long, 6-metre wide, and 1-metre high installation that used 2,000 layers of precisely cut cloth to construct and fit together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle a replica international atlas. Given the media interest in Ai’s high-profile collaboration with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on the design of the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Bird’s Nest Stadium, viewers might be forgiven for initially reading World Map as a cynical marketing stunt, high-end advertising for the benign globalism of sport as trumpeted by the official slogan of the Beijing Games: ‘One World, One Dream’. However, Ai, famous for giving the finger to Tiananmen Square, has never been one to toe the official party line, even when enforced as rigidly as the Communist Party of China’s. Indeed, little more than a year later, in August 2007, Ai would publicly condemn the Olympics as a glorified propaganda exercise, criticising those artists—including his former classmate Zhang Yimou, tasked with overseeing the opening and closing ceremonies—who had agreed to collaborate with such a regime.


Ai Weiwei's World Map.

In fact, World Map is more in keeping with past works by Ai that likewise engage with the nation as at once an imaginary cultural construct authenticated by a global consumer market and as a real physical entity monitored by local government. So, for example, Ai is famous for deliberately destroying pottery from the Han and Ming Dynasties, or defacing it with bright paint and logos from Coca-Cola; and in his Map of China series he carves monumental sculptures of the ‘official’ geographical mass of the People’s Republic (including Taiwan) out of beams salvaged from Qing Dynasty temples. As with World Map, these objects’ abstract metaphysical representations of place are interrupted, challenged, and rendered mutable by an audience’s local - and very tactile - encounter with the medium of their performance: latex, wood, felt. As such, the fabric used in Ai’s Biennale piece, and the time and effort required to cut, pile, and fit it, speak to the conflicting and situationally contingent layers of history, politics, and economics that continue to circumscribe the contact zones available between nations in this age of globalisation, with China’s ability to stage a media event as extravagant as the Beijing Olympics, no less than its ability to serve as primary manufacturer to the worldwide garment industry, dependent on abundant local supplies of cheap labour.

At the same Sydney Biennale, Vancouver-based Anishinabe-Canadian artist, and Candahar participant, Rebecca Belmore, exhibited America 2006. Combining textile work with sculpture, the installation saw her stitch together by hand fragments from the flags of all the countries of the Americas in a manner that at once served as a witty comment on the United States’ diminishing geopolitical influence within the hemisphere (its flag ended up next to Venezuela’s) and as a serious indictment of the dispossession and cultural genocide of the continents’ Indigenous peoples. In Belmore’s work, ‘contact’ thus has a very specific historical referent, and to the extent that all territory in the Americas might still be considered occupied or colonised space, borders per force remain arbitrary and transferable, which makes Belmore’s opening night Candahar performance all the more resonant. Likewise, allegiance to a flag can only be defined in terms of instrumental outcomes, a point made abundantly clear by members of the Native Warrior Society and local artist Alex Morrison in equal measure. In both the original NWS photo that ran in local newspapers in March 2007 and Morrison’s equally daring appropriation and re-staging of this image, it is the clearly visible Mohawk flag in the foreground rather than the fragment of the Olympic flag displayed in the background that is meant to give VANOC and FHFN members, along with all BC residents generally, pause. For it necessarily evokes memories of the 78-day armed stand-off in Kanesatake in the summer of 1990.

Rebecca Belmore's America 2006.

The Native Warrior Society with the stolen Olympic flag, March 2007.

A performance event like the Olympics trades equally in images of global cosmopolitanism and tribal nationalism, and most often via recourse to the very emblems used by Ai and Belmore in their respective installations: a map of the world, and various countries’ individually brandished flags. As crucially, what these works also demonstrate is that it is local audiences’ embodied and place-based engagements with the different symbolic registers of the national and the global that provide both international art fairs and international sports showcases with their real drama. In other words, the ‘dream’ of worldliness is revealed to be nothing less, and nothing more, than the sum of one’s material location in the world. And it is here, I would argue, that we see the city emerge to challenge the nation as the key site of local performative inquiry and global political connection. In this respect, Vancouver’s geopolitical positioning as Canada’s “gateway to the Pacific,” in the lingo of Premier Gordo and the original Vancouver 2010 Olympic Bid Book, is key, and explains why, in making sense of the competing local/global claims of these Games, we should be looking east to Beijing (and Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and Sydney) rather than east to Ottawa.

Coincidentally, my partner, Richard, and I were having drinks on a patio in Sydney in June 2003, enjoying spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, when our server, upon learning where we were from, informed us that Vancouver had been picked by the IOC to host the 2010 Winter Games. It seemed strangely appropriate to be receiving this news Down Under, during the antipodean winter season, with Sydneysiders huddled under heat lamps in what for us were relatively balmy conditions. Let me dwell a bit further on Sydney’s relevance to Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010, and to the local/global approach to performance, place, and politics I adopted in my research on the Olympics more generally. That relevance has as much to do with the fact that Sydney had only narrowly beat out Beijing for the right to host the first Summer Olympics of the new millennium on a controversial fourth ballot held by IOC members in 1993, as it does with disgruntled expat silver-medal-winning freestyle skiers wearing their national colours too lightly for media in Sydney and Vancouver alike, or with David Atkins, the Australian Executive Producer of the Vancouver 2010 Opening and Closing Ceremonies, failing to understand not just the place of Quebec within Canada’s national imaginary but, more pertinently, the local significance of holding the Opening Ceremonies on the eve of Chinese New Year. That is, the Olympics—the national logic of its competitive structure notwithstanding—are at once tranparently transnational, or global, in their message-making—their event brand strictly controlled by a supra-national corporation, the IOC, and an athlete’s or coach’s “franchise” loyalty as fickle as that of a World Cup player—and resolutely local in their biopolitics, with the host city registering the material effects of the administration of an Olympics’ message with more or less resistance depending on specific contexts.

In Sydney in 2003 I kept experiencing déjà vu. The Harbour Bridge reminded me of the Lion’s Gate, the vast expanse of green known as The Domain of Stanley Park. The ocean we share also gives each city a rich supply of accessible sandy beaches. Then, too, Canada and Australia’s linked colonial past, and the forced relocation of Aboriginal peoples that forms its shameful backdrop, means that Vancouver and Sydney are home to large numbers of urban Aboriginals, many of whom live in poverty and/or, by necessity, are involved in prostitution or the drug trade. The centres for these activities are the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and the Kings Cross area of Sydney, both home to controversial safe injection sites, and both subject to increasing pressures related to gentrification. As Pacific Rim cities, Sydney and Vancouver also have large Asian populations, with Chinese immigration to both cities—and attendant racist immigration laws—dating back to the nineteenth century and momentarily spiking in the years leading up to the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong back to the People’s Republic of China. Finally, Sydney and Vancouver are both lifestyle cities with extremely inflated real-estate markets.

In fact, it is the connection between the migratory flows of the recent Chinese diaspora and the equally migratory flows of global financial capital that at last brings me to the main point of departure for my research on Beijing and Vancouver as Olympic host cities, showcasing how both cities (and others besides, including Sydney, but also Hong Kong and Shanghai) form part of an economic and geopolitical nexus of Pacific Rim property speculation and urban redevelopment. Indeed, in terms of the performance of place, and its local/global significations, one must not underestimate the relationship between ‘mega-events’ like the Olympics and what Kris Olds, with particular attention to Vancouver, has called urban mega-projects, ‘large scale (re)development projects composed of a mix of commercial, residential, retail, industrial, leisure, and infrastructure uses’, often built on abandoned inner-city tracts of land, and usually oriented around signature buildings (see his Globalization and Urban Change, 2001, p.6). The Sydney Olympic Park redevelopment of Homebush Bay has provided the model for most summer and winter Olympics host cities post-2000. Similarly, ‘mega-events’, according to Maurice Roche, are ‘large-scale cultural events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance’, and which are likewise designed to project a particular global image of the host city, repositioning that city ‘in the world of global inter-city and economic competition’ (see Mega-Events and Modernity, 2000, p.10).

In developing his theory of the ‘sociology’ of mega-events, Roche focuses his attention not just on the Olympics, but also on the historical legacy of World Expositions, and in terms of the specific ‘event horizon’ governing my comparison of the Beijing and Vancouver Games, it is worth contextualising my discussion a bit further by first looking back to the 1986 Expo in Vancouver (and it’s great that we have excerpts from Jeremy Shaw’s “Something’s Happening Here” poster project lining the stairwell up to Candahar) and forward to the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. Connecting both events are the ongoing UMPs that resulted from the successful host city selection process, not to mention legendary Hong Kong business tycoon and property developer Li Ka-shing’s strategic involvement in some of the more significant of those projects. After all, it was Li, chief shareholder and managing director of the property development firms Cheung Kong (CK) and Hutchison Whampoa (HW), who together with his eldest son Victor formed Concord Pacific in 1987 with the aim of buying and developing the former Expo 86 lands on the north side of Vancouver’s False Creek. In the 20 years since the sale of the land to Concord Pacific, and in particular since the Li family transferred control of the firm to Terry Hui in 1993, the area has been transformed into one of the most densely populated downtowns in North America, and has become an urban planning model for similar developments around the world. And yet this global performance of place has come at a local price, with an increasing lack of affordable housing in Vancouver’s urban core resulting in a form of enclosure that sees companies like Concord Pacific at once encroaching on and seeking to contain the social blight of the DTES, for example, through a phalanx of luxury condominium towers.

While Li’s primary investment interests in Shanghai relate to the operation of container ports in the Mingdong and Pudong districts, HW’s property development wing has sought to capitalise on the real estate potential associated with the extraordinary urban transformation of Shanghai into a global financial, high tech, transportation, and trade zone centred around the Pudong New Area Project and the Lujiazui Central Finance District. Specifically, HW has a number of grand luxury property and hotel developments currently in various stages of development throughout these areas. However, unlike Vancouver, the major development initiatives in Shanghai over the past two decades have been fueled by the economic (and political) engines of Beijing, rather than Hong Kong. Arguably it is the Chinese government’s desire to see Shanghai overtake Hong Kong as the major financial capital of Asia and, consequently, regain some of the glory of its cosmopolitan past that explains an architectural re-branding of a city now in eclipse of Tokyo as the stand-in for urban futurity in Hollywood.

A telling sign that Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo is seen within China as a showcase event as - if not more - significant as the Beijing Olympics is the fact that a clock counting down the Expo’s opening in August 2010 was installed in Shanghai’s People’s Square in February 2003, more than a year before a similar clock counting down the Beijing Olympics was installed in Tiananmen Square. Of course it was an earlier countdown clock in Tiananmen, this one ticking off the days to the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty in 1997, that established the precedent of symbolically showcasing the future-oriented temporality of China’s emergence as a major player on the world stage. And if, in this regard, the coming out party that was the Beijing Olympics was measured in the West - as an indicator of China’s social progress - against the brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen in 1989, in China the timing of the Olympics arguably had much more to do with celebrating the country’s amazing economic progress in the thirty years since Deng Xiaoping opened the door to global markets in 1978.

While no countdown clock was put in place in anticipation of Expo 86, one was installed in February 2007 in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery to inaugurate the three-year countdown to the 2010 Olympics. The clock was an Omega, the official timekeeper of both the Beijing and Vancouver Games, and this is as good a metaphor as any for the compression and consolidation of the local specificities of space and time into the unreal, non-material scapes and flows of globalisation. But the well-orchestrated ceremonial unveilings of these various clocks also speak, metonymically, to the relevance of a performance studies approach to the Olympics as a mass public spectacle that, to adapt Guy Debord, obliges one to participate in an abstract construction of the world at the same time as it separates one from the concrete material conditions of the local as it is produced by that world (see The Society of the Spectacle). As television broadcast statistics consistently bear out, events like the Olympics really do focus the eyes of the world on a given city, and not just for the two weeks of the Games themselves. Whether or not those eyes all share in the dreams being sold in and by that city is another matter entirely, and in the larger study from which this talk is excerpted I examine the different local, national, and international investments and contradictions in the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics’ showcasing - sometimes willfully, sometimes not - of questions relating to urban sustainability, cultural heritage, and human rights.

For the purposes of time, let me skip over the environmental and cultural comparisons and conclude very briefly by stating that in focusing on human rights, my aim has not been to vaunt Vancouver and to single out China for special condemnation in sacrificing individual rights of public expression and assembly to the supra-political stage managing of Beijing’s collective Olympic optics. As Helen Jefferson Lenskyj usefully reminds us, the IOC, ‘an autonomous, non-elected body’, abets host cities’ curtailment of basic civic rights by insisting that organisers play by their tightly controlled rules (see Olympic Industry Resistance, 2008, p.23), including a guarantee that there will be no public protests in or adjacent to Olympic venues, or any behaviour that might be considered an affront to Olympic values (and valuation). Hence Vancouver’s Safe Streets Act, which mimics similar anti-panhandling legislation passed in advance of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 2000 Sydney Olympics; and hence the controversy surrounding Vancouver’s anti-Olympics sign by-law. Rather, I want simply to suggest that Beijing’s attempts to control not just the message of its Olympics (‘One World, One Dream’), but also their mediation (via, among other electronic channels, the World Wide Web), returns us to the special applicability of performance in highlighting a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of local and global practices of place. That is, as noted China and Pacific Rim scholar Arif Dirlik has commented, in terms of the fostering of ‘place-based consciousness’, the spatially abstracted routes of globalisation are often pitted against the concrete locations and historical roots of everyday social and political activity (see Dirlik's essay in his co-edited collection Place and Politics in an Age of Globalisation, 2001, p.15).

Thus, China’s swift and brutal suppression of the protests in Tibet, for example, was read by most Western media - and certainly CNN - as evidence of China’s failure to integrate itself successfully and fully within a global development narrative of capitalist modernity, where universal human rights necessarily follow upon economic prosperity. However, the subsequent protests against the torch relay in London, Paris, and San Francisco, among other international locales, were seen within China - and not just by the state-run news agency Xinhua - as further evidence of the West’s ongoing marginalisation and isolation of the country. As my colleague Zhao Yuezhi has noted, were China ever in fact to lift the ‘great firewall’ it has erected around the Internet, foreign web browsers might be quite shocked by what they read, with many popular - and populist - blogs trading in a nationalist discourse far more jingoistic and muscularly anti-Western than that promoted by the CCP, and playing to an impatient and expectant generation of only children coming of age with no memory of Tiananmen, let alone the Cultural Revolution. Some of these referential paradoxes were underscored for me as a result of an informal email survey I conducted in June of 2008, asking Chinese students studying at my university to compare Beijing’s hosting of the Summer Olympics with what - if anything - they had taken note of regarding Vancouver’s preparations for the 2010 Winter Games. One young woman’s response was particularly illuminating, framing the politics - and performance - of place at work in the two Olympic cities not simply in terms of differences in national temperament, but also, implicitly, in terms of a critique of neo-liberalism’s abstract prioritisation of individual human rights at the expense of ‘place-based’ considerations of new models of collectivisation, even post-Maoist ones that have resulted in the (apparently willing) resettlement of her own family:

Like millions of Chinese people in my generation, I have been waiting for the Beijing Olympic Games since I was 13 years old. Finally, I can see my home city shine on the world stage this summer. It is a feeling most Canadians will never be able to understand. It is more about … national pride and glory than having fun. It is about sacrificing individual freedom for the greater good of the country…. I am sure you know all about the new Olympic venues being built in Beijing. But you might not know that tens of thousand[s] of citizens had to move away to make the land available for the venues. My family happened to be one of them and we were honored to do so, although we had to lose some money due to the resettlement…. The difference between the Chinese philosophy and the Canadian philosophy is what the general public considers to be more valuable: individual freedom or … national pride. In China, people who fight for individual rights might gain more property and glamour, but people who sacrifice their rights for the country gain more respect. It is a fresh image for me to see how Canadian people see their Vancouver Olympics…. I saw people protesting against the Olympics on Commercial Drive, [saying] that it’s a businessmen’s money-making event…. Athletes have to advertise through sponsors to get their funding. When I ask Canadian people how they feel about winning the right to hold the [W]inter Olympics, many of them don’t even care (personal email).

What lessons might such a complexly articulated statement hold for Vancouver, where, as this student suggests, we take for granted our right to protest as well as our right to disinterestedness? And how might thinking critically about both the real differences and the complex lines of historical connection in local audiences’ responses to globally mediated sports spectacles like the Olympics in turn foster a particular politics of place that resists the universalist narratives of development (athletic, economic, social) championed by supra-national institutions like the IOC? The well-publicized rights challenges launched by Pivot Legal Society, the IOCC, Carnegie Community Action Project, United Native Nations, and VANDU on behalf of the street homeless in the Downtown East Side in advance of the 2010 Olympics offer one possible way to begin answering these questions by exposing the performative exclusions embodied within the very category of the human that such narratives are meant to uphold, highlighting some of the social groups left behind when host cities harness their particular urban aspirations to abstracted messages of Olympic inspiration: if human bodies can be engineered - via equipment vested or drugs ingested - to go ‘faster, higher, stronger’, then why can’t the places those bodies reside? Yet as women ski jumpers’ own unsuccessful rights challenge against VANOC and the IOC attests, such fundamental inequities are actually built into the very fabric of an athletic movement based on the cohesion of body and world that has for most of its history done its best to ignore over half of the bodies in the world.

Whither sport. Despite its Charter’s principled avowal that ‘the practice of sport is a human right’, the Olympic Movement remains deeply entrenched within binaries of human difference. Sex and gender are chief among them, but exclusionary divisions and categories based on race, class, sexuality, age, religion, physical mobility, and geography are just as persistent. Indeed, one of the main arguments in awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics - that the world’s most populous nation should have the right to host the world’s premiere sporting event - seems slightly specious when one considers that most of the sports showcased at that event were invented by white European men at the height of colonialism. In the politicised spectacle of place promotion that is the Olympics, final medal tallies belie not just the unspoken story of ‘performance enhancement’, but also a long history of the global south, or the communist east, having to beat the West at its own game.

Whether art. In May 2008 Ai was back in Sydney for the first international retrospective of his work, also curated by Charles Merewether as a joint exhibition between the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the Campbelltown Arts Centre, and meant to overlap with the 2008 Sydney Biennale. The show featured the world premiere of the video Fairytale, a three-hour documentary following from concept to realisation Ai’s invited contribution of the same name to Documenta 12. In Ai’s piece we see the process behind his invitation and facilitation of the journey of 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel in the summer of 2007, where in groups of 200 over successive one week periods, participants, having first been extensively interviewed on everything from their definition of a fairytale to whether or not art can change the world, lived and ate communally, toured the city and the Documenta shows in matching uniforms, and came together at the end of each day for various group demonstrations orchestrated by Ai. Participants acted both as spectators and performers, conventional ‘tourists’ and exhibitionary ‘specimens’, the resulting spectacle designed at once as an experiment in cross-cultural exchange through art and as a more pointed local intervention into the West’s fantasies of the history of collectivisation and social interaction in China.

A still from Ai Weiwei's Fairytale.

A more recent history of collectivisation and social interaction in Vancouver informed Althea Thauberger’s September 2008 site-specific Carrall Street, in which she threw a one-night live art spotlight (quite literally) on a contact zone in the city that runs a scant six blocks - from the red brick buildings of historic Gastown, through the strewn hypodermics of Pigeon Park, to the gleaming real estate offices of Concord Pacific on the north side of False Creek - but that in that distance maps a fraught and polarising social history relating to the ethics of livability and the politics of development in Vancouver. Working with housed and unhoused DTES residents, local service organisations, artists and theatre directors, politicians and city planners, Thauberger and her collaborators created both scripted and improvised scenes in which the roles of performer and spectator, local denizen and curious passer-by would deliberately blur on a stretch of streetscape cordoned off and brightly illuminated like a film set. For me, the piece’s plainly visible fictional scaffolding, and the highly telegraphed orchestration of its ‘scenes’ threw into relief the different performance publics (between business owners and residents, artists and activists, tourists and addicts, security guards and the homeless) that are daily negotiated at street level. In the process, Thauberger brought out in ways often obscured by abstract policy discussions relating to the proposed revitalisation of the area, the historical connections between this particular street’s past (as a tavern-lined, working-class byway connecting Vancouver’s old port to Chinatown), present (as a thoroughfare traversed on one end by visiting tourists and local hipsters negotiating both the tack and trend of Gastown, and, on the other, by the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill citizens of the DTES), and future (as a showcase street targeted for a controversial clean-up and beautification in advance of the Olympics).

Documenting Althea Thauberger's Carrall Street.

Fairytale and Carrall Street thus read as interesting comments on a showcase event like the Olympics. The dream of global cosmopolitanism is always a game where the competing national and transnational stakes and scales of what it means to be human play out in local acts of display and concealment, celebration and protest, formation and fragmentation.

P.

Deficit Budgets and Surplus Performances

Let me begin with the political news before we get to the performances:

I was interested to read in the paper yesterday that Jim Green, former COPE and Vision city councillor and one-time mayoral hopeful, has been appointed by Millennium Development Corporation to get the troubled Athletes' Village project back on track regarding its financing and post-Olympics neighbourhood conversion. Despite the all-round quagmire that has resulted from this project (another bonding company revised the city's credit rating to "negative" yesterday), this latest development is, I believe, good news. Green has already stated that one of his primary goals will be to see that the commitment to social housing in the original proposal for the project remains a priority.

Coincidentally, the British government has just released hundreds of millions of pounds from its contingency fund to keep construction on London's 2012 Olympic venues, including its own embattled Athletes' Village, on track. Given what a hit the UK has taken in the global financial meltdown, one wonders why the grand Olympic-related development projects planned for east London have not yet been scaled back. Likely because the London Development Agency is a big stakeholder and is still hoping to do for the Lower Lea Valley and the working class and racial minority communities of Stratford and Hackney what Canary Wharf did for the Docklands in the 1980s. This is all billed as economic revitalization, of course, but when one considers the residents who live in these areas, it starts to look more like a social engineering project. Build better transport and nice recreational facilities, and with that will come tourists, followed by more job opportunities, quality health care, and a higher standard of living. I believe this process is called gentrification.

Vancouver's own Carrall Street Greenway project is a glorified beautification project to allow more pleasant direct access for Olympic tourists and the next wave of condo purchasers expected to follow in their wake from Gastown to the downtown portion of our famed seawall. To this end, the hypodermic-strewn Pigeon Park is undergoing a make-over that not only includes the painting over of graffiti on walls, the repaving of its concrete, and the replacement of benches and tables, but also the installation of high-powered street lamps to deter loitering, malingering, and public drug use. See, in this regard, my comments on Althea Thauberger's Carrall Street in my very first post to this blog.

Parliament is back in session after its unprecedented proroguement last December. The Tories have presented their economic "stimulus" budget and are feeling a tad more conciliatory this time around, particularly towards arts and culture, which they are giving some $335 million in total. Here, in thumbnail, are the details:

• Two-year funding of $60-million to support infrastructure-related costs for local and community cultural and heritage institutions such as local theatres, libraries, and small museums
• Increasing funding by $20-million over the next two years and $13-million per year thereafter to the National Arts Training Contribution Program
• Providing $30-million over the next two years to support access to Canadian magazines and community newspapers
• Providing $28.6 over the next two years to the Canada New Media Fund, and $14.3-million annually thereafter
• Providing the Canadian Television Fund with $200 million in funding over the next two years

I have to say this is much better than I expected. However, the news is not so great on the education front. Despite $2 billion for universities and colleges to fix their aging buildings, some $87.5 million for new graduate scholarships, and $750 million for the Canada Foundation for Innovation research infrastructure fund (which all goes to science-related projects anyway), the government is actually reducing the base budgets of the three federal research granting councils (SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR). That means my colleagues and I, especially those of us who work in the humanities, which always shoulders the brunt of such cuts, will have a much harder time conducting new research. Which in turn means our students will be shortchanged. At a time when Obama is calling for major investment in education south of the border, this move is short-sighted and sad.

It appears the Liberals, under new leader Michael Ignatieff, will support the budget (as was expected), but according to CBC Radio this morning old Iggy is flexing his muscle somewhat (and drawing Harper's attention to his steadily increasing poll numbers) by insisting on accountability updates from the government on the results of its spending in March, June, and December of this year. Each of these updates will apparently be treated as a vote of confidence. One doubts that Harper will be able to get away with a replay of December's shenanigans a second time, which is no doubt what Iggy is counting on. That and the fact, like Chretien before him, he will be able to position himself and the Liberals as the ones who will pull the country out of deficit mode. Indeed, there is something strangely satisfying in seeing Harper, who swore he would never do so, follow his erstwhile mentor Mulroney in plunging the Conservatives down the path of deficit spending.

Now on to some performance-related matters:

Vancouver's Second Cultural Olympiad is in full-swing, and the line-up already seems much better than last year, particularly in the international offerings. Well worth checking out, in this regard, is the Action-Camera: Beijing Performance Photography show that opened at UBC's Belkin Art Gallery two weeks ago. Curated by Keith Wallace, the show is a survey of the relationship between performance art and photography in China as both emerged from the underground scene in Beijing's East Village in the 1990s. That relationship, as the large-scale, professionally illuminated, and formally composed C-prints in the show attest, has little to do with documenting for historical posterity the officially discouraged and temporally ephemeral live public performances and body art actions of East Village pioneers like Ma Liuming, Rong Rong, Zhang Huan, and Xing Danwen. Rather, these and other artists are using the medium of the camera itself to stage agitprop performances of individual self-expression and collective national consciousness as highly choreographed, repeatable, and overdetermined with paradoxical meaning as any Photoshopped and digitally manipulated images released by the Chinese state in the lead up to its Olympics (and, significantly, many of the images in the show, including ones by Hong Hao and Li Wei, do in fact use Photoshop to achieve their performative effects). As Wallace suggests in his catalogue essay to the show, this places a special onus on audiences in terms of negotiating between a locally distinctive and culturally specific versus globally assimilative and formally partial comprehension of the work. For example, do we read bad boy Ai Weiwei's contribution to the show, his 1995 triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, as a logical extension of the Duchampian questioning of the cultural value of art via the ready-made, or as an iconoclastic comment on Ai's part about the relative national worth bestowed by China on an historical past that predates the Cultural Revolution?

I've actually been doing a bit of work on Ai in connection with the Olympics chapter in my new book. The man is an artistic polymath, and I've been particularly taken with the series of digital video and photographic works documenting the urban transformation of Beijing that he embarked upon in the early part of this century, coincident with his hiring by Herzog and de Meuron as design consultant on the Bird's Nest Stadium. For example, in the C-prints that make up his Provisional Landscape series of photographs, Ai represents a spatially and temporally "void" Beijing as a perpetual construction site, recording "empty" images of areas targeted for redevelopment and repurposing in the lead up to the Olympics at the moment just after the old built environment has been demolished and just before work on the new one has begun, the detritus of the past a passive rebuke to dreams of future progress:

Ai's images, though much smaller in scale, remind me of Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky's massive and visually stunning photographs of "manufactured" industrial landscapes. As a result of Jennifer Baichwal's award-winning documentary film on the artist, Burtynsky has become famous for his towering portraits of several hallmarks of China's industrial progress, including the Three Gorges Dam. However, An Uneasy Beauty, a solo exhibition of the artist's work that recently opened at the Surrey Art Gallery, also as part of the Cultural Olympiad programming, reminded me that he has documented the visible evidence of our planet's collective consumption and waste at sites much closer to home. The Surrey show features 24 images Burtynsky shot in Western Canada between 1985 and 2007, including compositionally precise photos of oil sand extraction sites at Fort McMurray, Alberta, open-pit mines in northern BC, and the container port of Vancouver. 

Designed and exhibited as a series, the photos trace both the material roots and spectral routes of our dependence on non-renewable energy resources, a global fuel economy that leads from Alberta's oil fields, through Vancouver's port, to the bulldozers, heavy diggers, and forklifts awaiting start up in Ai's photos of Beijing. The human-altered landscapes in Ai's and Burtynsky's photos are likewise linked in that they are devoid of bodies and yet paradoxically demand of their viewing audiences bodily engagement, a sensorially immersive accounting of how we are locally implicated in these "placeless" spaces by the cars we drive, the food we eat, even the entertainment and sporting spectacles we attend. At the same time, both Ai and Burtynsky have separately stated that their work is not meant to be read as an overt judgment, not as political indictments but as performance indicators. In this, Burtynsky's lens, like Ai's, would find a rich resource of subject matter in the venue building sites of any number of recent or future Olympic host cities, including Vancouver and London:

The 2009 PuSh Festival, also the recipient of Vancouver Cultural Olympiad funding, is in full swing. Richard and I have seen three offerings so far:

1. Five Days in March: a play written and directed by Toshiki Okada and starring a group of talented young performers from Tokyo's chelfitsch Theatre Company. The entire piece is written as narrative exposition; a group of urban hipsters successively recounts and revises a tale of a young man and woman meeting up following a rock concert and spending the next five days have continuous sex in a Tokyo love hotel against the backdrop of the US invasion of Iraq--and the controlled and closely monitored Japanese student protests against the invasion. The story is deliberately inconsequential and slight, the repetition of the scenes as dramatically bathetic as the sex our lovers are having, and one soon realizes it's not all that important to follow the English surtitles. What becomes compelling, then, is watching the performances, in particular the young actors' exaggerated bodily gestures (stretching a leg, tugging at a shirt sleeve, bouncing awkwardly on one foot) as they successively, and mostly affectlessly, add another layer to the story. The movement, which occupies a physical realm somewhere between hyper-kinetic fidgeting and choreographed dance, seems to speak at once to the restless narcissism and aimless irony of this particular generation of Japanese, for whom a spontaneous love affair and a stage-managed war are equally anticlimactic.
2. while going to a condition/Accumulated Layout: two solo pieces by the Japanese dancer, choreographer, and sound and lighting designer Hiroaki Umeda. Borrowing from butoh and hip hop, Umeda's work begins slowly, marrying small movements (the repeated flick of a wrist, or turn of the head) to percussive bursts of sound and sharp light pulses. Through a steadily more rapid and propulsive process of accumulation, sound, light, and movement increase and merge in intensity, until Umeda is sculpting a fully immersive sensory environment that truly defies description (hence the poverty of my own accounting of his extraordinary performance).
3. The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac: inaugurating the new Club PuSh, what organizers are calling a festival-within-the-festival (and designed to create a more intimate, cabaret-like performance atmosphere, complete with tables and booze for sale), was New York performance and drag artist Taylor Mac. I confess to being completely oblivious to Mr. Mac's singular talents before last night, but boy am I ever a convert. The show was simply amazing, with Mac combining political satire, autobiographical musings, virtuoso musical numbers and ukulele-playing, heavy doses of camp irony, and of course a fierce sartorial style, to beguile us all about the benefits of sometimes stepping out of the bubble of white light into the darkness, and about what it means to prepare oneself to be surprised. I look forward to exploring more of his work. In the meantime, I leave you with this offering.

Lots more from PuSh is on the horizon, and I hope to be back soon with another report on what I've seen. 

P

PPP: A Brief Introduction

Welcome to my blog, which emerges out of a book I am currently finishing that has the same subtitle. In both book and blog my aim is to connect my ongoing academic interests in theatre, film, literature, and the performing arts (I teach in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, in a suburb of Vancouver) with the material realities of life as a political being in an era when the local and the global have never been more dynamically interconnected (as the current world financial meltdown so dramatically reveals). My goal is to explore what, if anything going to a play in Vancouver (or a concert in Rio, or a soccer match in Seoul, or a political rally in Johannesburg) can teach us about becoming better citizens of the world--how the performance of place, and the place of performance, can lead to a progressive political engagement with issues of larger global concern.

In other words, in the posts that follow I am interested in exploring how the local aesthetic experience of, or participation in, performance (be it a theatrical production, a sporting event, a religious ceremony, or a political demonstration) relates to, and even provides a model for, how one lives in the world socially. As the parenthesis in the last sentence suggests, I define performance very broadly. In the weeks and months ahead expect to find analyses and interpretations of works of theatre, visual art, and social and religious ritual; comparisons of competing performances of promotion and protest that accompany global sporting events like the Olympics (just concluded in Beijing and coming to my hometown of Vancouver in 2010); perorations on unfolding social, political, historical, and environmental dramas like elections, wars, and natural disasters; discussions of local organizing around urban development and sustainability; and so on. To borrow a distinction from the influential performance studies theorist Richard Schechner, in this blog I give equal attention to "make-believe" performances, those pretend acts of dress-up and role-playing that we associate, for example, with the fictional world of the stage, and performances that are aimed more at "making belief," "real world" dramas that, in their unfolding, enact a particular vision of that world (see his Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2002). To the extent that belief in that vision might be more or less acceptable to different audiences depending on their place in the world, accounts for the competing social and political perspectives that will inevitably emerge in response to or alongside such performances.

Performance, or live art, is uniquely situated to engage with the political because its "unfolding-in-the-moment" quality forces audiences to consider carefully--and often to confront viscerally--the role of context, nor just the "what" or "how" of performance, but the "where," "when," and ideally "why" of performance, of what it means to come together as an audience in the first place, and what other as-yet imagined social relationships might emerge from this otherwise random connection to the work being performed. To put this another way, the very ephemerality and contingency of performance (one never knows who exactly one will be sitting or standing beside, or what precisely will happen) asks us to ponder, at some level, the ways we are obliged to each other as fellow human beings. In this way, the local spaces of performance, and the persons within whom it is embodied, constitute sites where broader political engagements and movements might be initiated. In turn, localness gets transposed back into a concept of worldness, of being in and of the world, by virtue of performance's double structure of address: that is, the particular place of its production, and the multiple spaces of its reception, recognition, and redistribution (including on the Internet--hence this blog).

Let me be clear: I don't wish to overstate the role that a work of local community theatre might play in helping to remedy complex world conflicts and crises. But I do believe that the structures of performance can help theatricalize and make newly compelling for local audiences various scenarios of present-day global political urgency. So, for example, that locally produced piece of community theatre might inspire its neighbourhood audience to connect their place-based behaviour to an issue like global climate change (as was the case with David Diamond and Headlines Theatre's series of forum theatre workshops, 2 degrees of fear and desire, in Vancouver last fall). At the same time, I want to suggest that events played out on the world stage (wars, acts of terror, religious gatherings, natural disasters, sporting contests, human rights protests) can never be interpreted apart from the local constituencies to whom they are being mediated, even if only electronically. In other words, to the extent that I am making a case in this blog for the way performance practice overlaps with political praxis as a project aimed at re-making the world, I am likewise arguing that we must never lose sight of the place of that overlap.

Which brings me to the role of Vancouver in this blog. I've lived in the city for close to two decades now, and while it still ain't no London or New York, in that time the local performing arts scene has improved exponentially. While there are heaps of individuals, companies, and artist collectives responsible for this--the majority of whom I hope eventually to write about in some form or another in future posts--let me single out initially some folks and institutions that are especially dear to my heart:

1. The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (held here every January) and its tireless impresario, Norman Armour: although the acts might not always be as big or famous, I think that in terms of the boldness of the work presented, PuSh rivals BAM's Next Wave Festival for cutting-edge experimental theatre and performance. The image above is of me getting my haircut by children at last year's festival, as part of Darren O'Donnell and Mammalian Diving Reflex's presentation of Haircuts by Children.

2. The Scotiabank Dance Centre; the Dancing on the Edge Festival; the annual Dances for Small Stages event on Commercial Drive; Dance All Sorts; companies like battery opera, Edam, Judith Marcuse Projects (who recently co-founded the Centre for Art and Social Change at my university), kidd pivot (Crystal Pite is a goddess), and the 605 Collective: Vancouver has a happening dance scene, let me tell you.

3. The LIVE Performance Art Biennale, which will have its 6th iteration in the fall of 2009, and which in 2007 was organized around the theme of the "public." I quote from their website, as it bears on what I'm trying to get at in introducing this blog: "Public is always local--yet defines global. Who and where are we? Who and where are others? How are we similar? How are we different? What do we have in common? In interpreting 'Public,' performative art might manifest as: an action presented in public, an intervention into public, the participation of public, or a descriptive reference to public. Intent, form and expression can shift and change. The theme of 'Public' affords us occasion to examine performance art both locally and globally. A new generation of artists is reinventing boundaries through an exploding world-wide network of organizations, venues, symposia, and festivals."

4. The Vancouver International Film Festival, the 27th annual version of which is just winding down this week, and which in its intimacy and intellectualism is the antithesis of Toronto: i.e., it's about the films, not about the stars. (Two recommendations from this year from opposite generic poles: Terrence Davies' latest experimental documentary, Of Time and the City, at once a paean to and a pastiche of his birthplace, Liverpool; and the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, which is actually a complex allegory of adolescent outsiderness and the bullying that frequently accompanies it.)

5. Two experimental theatre companies, Boca del Lupo and the Electric Company, that grew out of productively synergistic relationships forged by their founders at Simon Fraser's School for the Contemporary Arts and Langara College's Studio 58, respectively.

6. Artist-run centres like the venerable Western Front and Artspeak Gallery: the latter, in recently going "off-site," has begin to generate some very interesting site-specific work, including Althea Thauberger's Carrall Street. At the September 30th event, Thauberger used the streetscape on which Artspeak fronts as her one-night stage (or, perhaps more accurately, film set), mixing hired "actors" performing scripted/improvised scenes with random interactions between local denizens and passers-by to actively blur the roles between performer and spectator, and in the process to show some of the historical connections between the street's past (as a tavern-lined, working-class byway connecting Vancouver's old port to Chinatown), present (as a thoroughfare traversed on one end by visiting tourists and local hipsters negotiating both the tack and trend of Gastown, and, on the other, by the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill citizens of the Downtown Eastside [DTES], the poorest postal zone in Canada), and future (as a showcase street ripe for civic greening and Olympic redevelopment).

Despite some reservations I have about the overall success and politics of Thauberger's work, it does get at what I see as a crucial connection between live art and what it only seems right to call an urban ethics of livability. In the 20 years since the sale of the former Expo lands in Vancouver's False Creek North neighbourhood to Li Ka-shing's Concord Pacific, the area has been transformed into one of the most densely populated downtown neighbourhoods in North America, and has become a model, in terms of urban planning, for similar developments targeted at the globe-trotting super-rich around the world. And yet this global performance of place has come at a local price--quite literally--with an increasing lack of affordable housing in Vancouver's urban core resulting in a form of enclosure that sees companies like Concord Pacific at once encroaching on and seeking to contain the social blight of the DTES, for example, through a phalanx of luxury condominium towers, most of whose units are owned internationally. As the city now looks across the water, to South False Creek, site of the Athletes' Village for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and earmarked for major redevelopment thereafter, it would do well to seek alternative models of place promotion, ones that better reconcile local integration with global destination.

Indeed, let me lay all my cards on the table and state that one of the main reasons I am starting this blog at this particular moment--after forswearing numerous times ever joining this particular electronic revolution--is to monitor the pace and progress of change in Vancouver (in all its forms) in the lead-up to the Olympics, and to connect these changes to larger patterns of urban and political transformation around the world. I am proposing to do so through the particular lens of performance because I believe, along with the curators of LIVE 5 cited above, that the publics and counter-publics formed as a result of us coming together--however temporarily or fragmentarily--as an audience tell us in turn something about how we participate in the world, and about the concrete material conditions of the local as it both produces and is produced by that world.

On that note, I think I'll sign off on this first post. I promise future ones won't be quite so earnest and dryly academic in tone (though I can't promise with what frequency they will appear--this one was supposed to make its debut last month and took three separate tries to finally get posted). A few performance-related thoughts on several upcoming elections (local, national, and international) should produce much occasion for satire. I promise not to go on about Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin (though we could have used her last night on a rather weak Thursday night version of SNL's Weekend Update). But taking swipes at Stephen Harper and his supercilious grin is, I think, fair game. The backlash around the Conservatives' cuts to the arts in this country has already forced their hand regarding Bill C-10, it seems; now let's use the momentum from Harper's stumbling performance in response to the economic panic to boot his party out of office altogether, or at the very least sizably reduce their existing minority. A shout-out, in this regard, to Michael Byers, NDP candidate for my riding of Vancouver Centre. And, looking ahead to November's municipal elections in Vancouver, consider this my endorsement for Gregor Robertson and the Vision Vancouver slate.

But before all that, and before I can regale you with further descriptions and analyses of performances specific to Vancouver, there's a trip to the UK and Europe in the offing. Richard and I are making the most of our respective leave years by fitting in lots of travel--work-related, of course. (More on Richard, my partner in the theatre of life, in future posts.) Expect a report on the art and theatre we see.

P