FUSE: This is Now at the VAG

I haven't been to a FUSE in a while and despite my difficulties in shaking this cold I'm currently battling, last night I made sure to haul myself to the latest iteration. This only partly had to do with getting a first glimpse of the current MashUp show on at the VAG--about which I have been hearing such wildly divergent things. (I'll have to go back more than once in the coming weeks to judge for myself.) I was mostly inspired by the fact that this latest iteration of FUSE was curated by Joyce Rosario, Associate Curator at the PuSh Festival. And that it featured some of my favourite local artists.

In "Backing it Up," Justine A. Chambers took the sometimes maligned, often overlooked role of the back-up dancer and moved it centre stage--or at least into a corner alcove on the second floor of the gallery, a nice bit of (de)focalization that hints at various overlapping ideas of recessiveness at play in this ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon. That is, the whole raison-d'être of back-up dancers is to recede into the distance; at the same time, no matter the dominant celebrity parent they are working for, there appears to be a standard repertoire of moves that they all inherit. Chambers plays with this by building her score on a basic step-touch sequence. To a loop of classic Motown tunes, a gaggle of Modus Operandi dancers shift their weight from one leg to the other and snap their fingers in time to the music, occasionally changing their facings and group formations. But then something far more interesting starts to happen: entropy inserts itself within this simple bit of unison. The automatic--and automaton-like--steps and snaps dissolve into a chaotic riot of off-beat tics and awkward, non-synchronous gestures, the various head shakes and eye rolls and face brushes refusing to be disciplined by an imposed technique of anonymous legibility, and imposing instead 20+ separate scores that say: "Look at me, see me, I am a body that matters--even here, in the back row."

Circling briefly around Natalie Gan's "Chinese Vaginies" (which already by 8:30 had a long waitlist), I made my way briefly to the third floor annex to take in Remy Siu's "New Eyes-Study #2," an impressive immersive installation of light and sound and smoke. Then it was up to the fourth floor for fellow Hong Kong Exile member Milton Lim's "okay.odd," an eye-popping and satirical video take on the practice of mindful meditation and linguistic free association.

I spent the most time in the adjacent rooftop pavilion, where the musician and DJ Kareem Abdul Jabaastard and the dance artist Deana Peters/Mutable Subject (together with friends, including Elissa Hanson and Kristina Lemieux and Alexa Mardon) were throwing a dance party called "This is Not a Performance!" With an amazing playlist of song mash-ups and an equally amazing view of the city, it was hard to resist this particular groove.

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PuSh 2015: 7 Important Things and FUSE

There is a moment in 7 Important Things, on at SFU Woodward's Studio T in a PuSh Festival co-presentation with Neworld Theatre, when performer and co-creator Nadia Ross turns to George Acheson, whose life story the two are telling, and points out a deeply ironic truth. Having been kicked out of his home by his father at age 16 in the 1960s for refusing to cut his hair, George, the quintessential hippie-turned-anarchist-Punk, now makes his living as a barber.

In this exchange two parallel threads explored in this work of documentary theatre from STO Union come together. On the one hand, the play is a moving yet unsentimental account of posthumous forgiveness between father and son, whose different versions of martial versus libertine masculinities set the course for George's restless wanderings. At the same time, Ross, as Acheson's interlocutor and surrogate amanuensis, is interested in casting an equally sober eye on not just how George, but western society as a whole, got from there to here. Given the promise of the 60s counterculture, with its anti-consumerist ethos of peace and love, what went so horribly wrong?

In answering this question, Ross and Acheson, who have been performing this show for eight years now and who have refined its spare and suitably low-tech dramaturgy into a fine conversational art, take care not to romanticize George's decision to drop out--especially where his treatment of women is concerned. At the same time, there is a certain smugness of tone to this piece, not least in the improvisatory bits when, for example, Ross riffs on the price of real estate in Vancouver and the "efficiency" of our post-Olympic city, only to rush to assure us that she hopes she's not offending anyone. Offend away, but don't apologize for it; such a move presumes that the audience is so immersed in and duped by the capitalist "society of the spectacle" that we can't understand let alone appreciate a critique of it.

In the talkback following the show, Ross, in explaining her cynicism about the world in which we live today, said that hope is a drug, offering an illusive promise that things will get better in the future while distracting us from fixing the present. Point taken. However, I would just add, in the context of the overwhelming sense of stasis that pervades this show, that nostalgia is an equally powerful--and paralytic--drug.

Following 7 Important Things, I made my way over to the Vancouver Art Gallery for the PuSh edition of FUSE. Usually FUSE is so packed and I arrive so late that I'm unable to see anything. Last night, however, I did get to bust a few moves on the rooftop deck to Sonic Elder, who played a sold-out show at Club PuSh on Thursday. And, on the fourth floor of the gallery, amid its prized collection of Emily Carr paintings, I was thrilled to be able to watch--and dance with--Emily Johnson. Emily, an Indigenous choreographer and dance artist from Minneapolis, is PuSh's current artist-in-residence. I get to have a conversation with her and Marie Clements (whose The Road Forward opens at the York Theatre next week) at the PuSh offices tomorrow, excerpts of which folks will hopefully get to see next Friday morning should they wish to drop by the York.

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PuSh 2014: Tucked and Plucked and FUSE

Leave it to the PuSh Festival to coordinate a PuSh Passholder appreciation event at which one is more likely to be insulted than praised. Such was the case last night at the Club, where those bad bitches from East Van, Isolde N. Barron (aka Cameron Mackenzie) and her wife Peach Cobblah (Dave Deveau) held court in Tucked and Plucked, their sassy "herstory" of the drag scene in Vancouver from the 1960s to the present.

Isolde and Peach each dazzle in a solo musical number--Isolde in classic drag diva fashion to Shirley Bassey's Let's Get this Party Started and Peach rocking it out to the more contemporary stylings of Nicki Minaj--and together they go through enough sequins, fishnets, and paint to costume more than a dozen Liza look-a-likes. However, the show is mostly devoted, à la Oprah or Ellen, to on-stage interviews with three past Empresses of the Dogwood Monarchist Society, the organization that has presided over drag coronations in this city for the past 42 years. We hear from Mona Regina Lee about the early origins of the Society and what it was like, under BC's antiquated liquor laws (and pre the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada) for queers to gather together in bottle clubs; from three-time Empress Myria Le Noir (who did a stand-out number to a slowed-down version of that drag standard I Will Survive) about the DMS's important charitable work during the early days of AIDS; and from the legendary Joan-E about dishing with Debbie Reynolds during the filming of Connie and Carla.

Then it was off to the Vancouver Art Gallery for FUSE: The Push Festival Edition. The place was packed and we arrived just in time to catch an excerpt from the 605 Collective's The Inheritor Album, the full version of which we'll see at the Dance Centre at the end of the month. I had hoped to get up to the fourth floor to see Forest Fringe in collaboration with Tim Etchells; however, I got waylaid by the Muntadas show Entre/Between, which was simply fascinating.

And, of course, there were far too many people to talk to. Kudos to VAG Curator of Public Programs and all-round friend of PuSh, Vanessa Kwan, for putting such a fantastic event together. Vanessa and her collective Norma will be appearing at Club PuSh tonight in Swan Song (for Cats); it is to be the farewell performance for the troupe and will feature, among many other things, musical accompaniment by Veda Hille.

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