The Sensationalists at The Cultch

The 605 Collective, even when they're standing still, are always so interesting to watch. Their latest full-length creation, The Sensationalists, plays the Vancouver East Cultural Centre's Historic Stage through this Saturday. A collaboration with Theatre Replacement's Maiko Bae Yamamoto, who directed the piece and contributed to its movement design over the course of an amazing two-year development and rehearsal process, the piece is an experiment in immersion--both kinaesthetically and acoustically.

The experience begins in the lobby, with the 605 ensemble--co-directors Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin, along with fellow performers Laura Avery, Walter Kubanek, Lexi Vajda, Jane Osborne, and some additional  repertory members--mingling among the audience members around the box office and bar area. Some whisper secrets in patrons' ears; others, leaning back from a bar chair, reach out and clasp your hand for balance, or else, wearing headphones, lean up against you and sway ever so slightly. Occasionally they also form bodily massings amongst themselves, piling on top of one another, both belly to belly and side to side, along a wall, and also freely and fully supporting each other's weight in the middle of the floor by crouching into a ball and offering their backs as platforms to climb and kneel upon. I was offered the latter opportunity by a woman who was about half my size and though I was worried I would crush her I also couldn't resist this invitation of proximate interaction and shared bodily contact.

This is, to a large degree, the entire premise of the piece, for after the pre-show lobby experience we are led by the ensemble toward the theatre, where we have to make a choice: do we join the dancers on the floor, fully immersing ourselves in the choreography while standing and moving about at orchestra-level for the first 50 minutes of the piece; or do we head for the balcony and partake of the bird's eye view of what's going on below, sacrificing the extra sensory involvement for a double dose of surveillance, watching our fellow audience members watching? Truth be told, you have to make this decision in advance, at the time of ticket purchase (as differential costs are involved). Richard and I had opted for the balcony--Richard because he didn't want to stand for that long, and me because, while initially drawn to the idea of moving among and with the dancers, the critic in me craved the additional visual perspective on the aesthetics of the piece that I would get through physical distance. Talking with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in the lobby about this decision, she dubbed us Statler and Waldorf, the two crusty critics from The Muppet Show, and imagined us carrying on a running commentary on the piece, or at the very least her own and everyone else's wardrobe choices. And while several others we spoke to said we'd made the wrong choice, Maiko herself reassured us that the balcony option had its own--albeit different--benefits. (That I saw local dancer-choreographers Peter Bingham and Wen Wei Wang also heading upstairs also did much to set my wavering mind at ease.)

Once inside the theatre, the piece begins (as it were) with Gelley teaching Kubanek a simple arm movement phrase to accompany a spoken utterance about the Milky Way. Kubanek repeats this several times, in the process teaching it to the audience members milling about him. Before I noticed his bare feet, I was at first uncertain whether Kubanek was a dancer or an audience member (I hadn't noted his movement presence in the lobby), and of course such sense confusion is a natural offshoot of the total sensory experience of the piece. How precisely does the apparently "reactive" movement of the audience on the floor, in walking about the stage to get a better view or to make space for a bit of spontaneous partnering or to avoid being conscripted into said partnering, differ from the "active" movement (whether choreographed or improvised) of the dancers? Indeed, one of the most fascinating things for me, in the balcony, was watching the different choreographic structures individual audience members developed and quite often repeated over the course of the first 50 minutes. My friend and colleague DD Kugler kept restlessly circling the perimeter of the natural circle the audience mostly formed. Whereas Sophie and Lara largely stayed put--at least in the beginning--in the upstage left corner. Two folks I didn't know--a man in a red shirt and a woman in a purple blouse--for the most part managed to position themselves in the centre of the action. As such, more than once they found themselves responding directly to the dancers' mimed instructions--most compellingly when, along with others, they formed a chorus line of weighted ballast and support as Martin "walked" upside down across their backs.

As interesting as this was to watch, there was also, after a while, a visual sameness to the quality of the immersion. It was like I was watching a rave in slow motion and, sure enough, at one point the taller members of the audience are brought together to form a mosh pit, arms extended vertically to transport the smallest of the female dancers from the upstage wall to downstage floor. In fact, the most visually stunning image for me was when the dancers instructed all of the audience members to mass upstage in a tableaux while they segued into some preliminary unison work. This was the prelude to the orchestra audience then being invited to take a seat and don, with those of us in the balcony, a set of headphones. With Gabriel Saloman's ambient electronic score echoing inside our ears, Martin speaks into a microphone a list of items that I took to be the sort that gave him goose bumps--as, presumably, the intimate amplification of the sound of his voice via our individual headsets was meant to replicate.

In this concluding section of the piece, the ensemble reverts to the more traditional conventions of concert dance, but I have to say that I didn't mind at all. In fact by this point I was craving exactly this kind of movement, with 605's trademark forward accelerations and suspensions in mid-air thrilling to take in, especially when done collectively as a group. There is also a stunning duet between Gelley and Martin that struck me as a seamless blending of their hip hop training with some obvious influence from contact improv. By the end of the piece, as the group masses at the upstage wall once again, supporting each other as they climb and reach for the rafters, the link between the two sections of the piece became more clear, with the first half modelling the embodied skill-set--support, weight transfer, reactive instincts, intimacy, trust--we all have within us, but that these dancers have refined into an art.

P.

12 Minutes Max at The Dance Centre

After a little bit of a hiatus 12 Minutes Max has made a welcome return to The Dance Centre this past year. This is thanks in large measure to dancer and educator Kathryn Ricketts, who has overseen the last few Vancouver iterations of this unique process of research-creation facilitation and presentation of work-in-progress. The concept of 12 Minutes Max is that selected dance artists are given access to studio time and outside curatorial/dramaturgical eyes in order to explore and play with ideas for new work; they are then given the opportunity to present some of the results of their research before an audience at a public showing in which they have a maximum of twelve minutes of stage time.

Back in town from her new gig as a faculty member at the University of Regina, Kathryn was joined by fellow curators Kat Single-Dain and Maiko Yamamoto yesterday evening as they welcomed the artists chosen for this latest edition of 12 Minutes Max: Con8 Collective (Charlotte Newman and Georgina Alpen); Julianne Chapple; MAYCE (Robert Azevedo, Marisa Gold, and Antonio Somero); and Ziyian Kwan of dumb instrument Dance. It was great to see former students who make up MAYCE and one half of Con8 experiment in different--and very intelligent--ways with unison movement (about which there was an interesting question in the talkback), gestural repetition, and audience recognition. Julianne Chapple used an interesting ovoid steel sculpture designed by multidisciplinary artist Ed Spence to explore movement within and without its limits.

But mostly I was there to support Ziyian, who had invited me into the studio last week to witness and give feedback on some of the ideas she was exploring. Those ideas centre around love, which provides the framework for a commissioned piece that, as a duet with Noam Gagnon, will premiere later this July at the Dancing on the Edge Festival. For now, Ziyian was working on her own with various props to tackle head-on the outsized conventions and cultural cliches associated with romantic love. I won't spoil things for folks who intend to see the finished piece in July by identifying what those props are; but I will note here that they combine to contribute in multiply interesting ways to the intentionally "precarious" (Ziyian's word) movement vocabulary that Ziyian is exploring in her research.

Because love buoys you and it throws you off balance. You chase after it and sometimes it chases after you. Even if you're standing still, you can't help but feel its force--like Cupid's arrow piercing your flesh (another idea Ziyian is working with). It's been a pleasure seeing the development of these ideas, just as it was a pleasure to listen to Ziyian talk about them last night. I look forward to the next phase of the work's evolution.

P.

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.

***

"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.

Jack and the Beanstalk at the York Theatre

Last night Richard and I had the privilege to be among the first audiences to see a production in the restored York Theatre, on Commercial Drive at East Georgia. Theatre Replacement's Jack and the Beanstalk: An East Van Panto officially inaugurated the newly renovated space last night, just over a century after it first opened in 1912, and more than 30 years after Tom Durrie founded the Save the York Theatre Society in 1981 following the Vancouver Little Theatre Association's vacating of the building and its conversion to a cinema.

Durrie was in attendance last night, as were a host of civic and provincial dignitaries, prominent local arts producers and administrators, the generally excited public, and a gaggle of even more excited kids. As with the equally important renovation of the Stanley Theatre on South Granville, the architectural challenge for the York was clearly to fit a fully functioning 400-seat theatre (complete with flies and wings) within the existing footprint while also creating a visually interesting street facade. From what I was able to see and explore last night (which didn't include the stage, as Richard and opted not to stay for the after-party), this has been accomplished--the sole expense being, as again with the Stanley, significant lobby space. Indeed, the York's downstairs and upstairs lobbies are even smaller than the Stanley's, just a long thin wedge between the box office and the bar in the case of the former, and into which several hundred bodies were crammed last night to listen to Vancouver East Cultural Centre Executive Director Heather Redfern's opening remarks at a pre-reception. The Cultch, now a thriving arts juggernaut on the east side, will oversee the York Theatre, mostly renting it out to outside presenters, but also, as in this case, partnering with local companies and organizations to premiere new work or host important touring productions (as will be the case during the PuSh Festival, when Tanya Tagak's take on Nanook of the North opens there).

Richard and I had tickets for the last row of the balcony (GG), but there was nothing wrong with our seats. The sight lines were perfect, the acoustics impeccable, and the show itself a total gas. Charlie Demers' script, in adapting the venerable fairy tale to its local setting, does not spare the satire (even when directed at several members of the audience) and also doesn't talk down to its pint-sized viewers, whose wonder and energy must inevitably sustain the piece. Veda Hille's score is another marvel of offbeat syncopation and humour, and I was thrilled to see she'd incorporated into it another version of Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" (complete with trademark headband). Amiel Gladstone's direction was snappy in tempo and filled with wonderfully visual bits of stage magic. The actors, all except for lead Maiko Bae Yamamoto (who should perform--and sing--more often) in multiple roles, filled their outsized panto peronas (quite literally in the case of Allan Zinyk, who played both the Giant and Jack's mom) with charismatic aplomb.

In short, it was a wonderful way to open an important new cultural space in the city. Congratulations to all involved in getting us to this moment.

P.