PuSh 2018: Foxconn Frequency (No. 3) at Performance Works

Last night was a double-header at the PuSh Festival. It started at Performance Works, with local collective Hong Kong Exile's latest genre-defying work. In Foxconn Frequency (No. 3): For Three Visibly Chinese Performers, HKE project lead Remy Siu uses game systems software to drill three pianists (fellow HKE member Natalie Tin Yin Gan, the classically trained Vicky Chow, and a young male prodigy who unfortunately is not named) in various keyboard exercises. They do so while sitting in front of computer monitors hooked up to 3-D printers (the inclusion of which I did not fully understand). As they complete the exercises they have been assigned, a live camera feed projects their images on the screen behind them, a red countdown clock indicating the time in which they have to complete the task, and a white line showing the progress of their labour (the projections, including brilliantly edited satellite map images, are by HKE member Milton Lim). If the performers fail to complete their exercises in the assigned time, or if they make a mistake along the way, a red Chinese character will flash on the screen. If they succeed, a white character will appear.

Over the course of the work's 80 minutes, the repetition of this conceit moves from being dramatically compelling to being sensorily overwhelming and exhausting to being just plain boring, sometimes within the space of only a few minutes. In this, the "theatre" of human-machine interface that Siu and his collaborators create in this piece presumably mimics the conditions of factory-line assembly at any one of the plants owned by the real Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer (its clients include Apple and Sony), with the company's Shenzhen location having attracted worldwide attention for a spate of worker suicides. Competition is, of course, what structures most of the action in this work: the performers are playing against the computer, but also each other, and the countdown clocks, combined with the complexity of the exercises, ramp up the dramatic stakes. I was especially drawn in at one point when Gan kept failing at a particularly tricky passage; she had to do it over and over again until she got it right, and by the end the relief in my own body when she finally succeeded was physically palpable. It's perhaps to be expected that the professional pianist, Chow, would have the lowest failure count by the end of the piece; that said, at the beginning of Foxconn the young boy--a model of cool calm throughout--was more than keeping his own.

The work is not entirely cutthroat. At various moments, the pianists are required to collaborate, with Gan and the young boy, positioned on either side of Chow, performing one passage repeatedly, eventually finding the required synchronicity in their timing. And even more interesting is when, after the boy has mysteriously opted out of the game altogether by leaving the stage (perhaps a comment on child labour or on the suicides of young Foxconn workers), Chow and Gan work to game the system itself, deliberately failing at their assigned tasks. The somewhat heavy hand of social commentary that gets imposed at the end of the piece, including a projection of a poem by Xu Lizhi, a writer and Foxconn worker who committed suicide, suggests that there is still some work to be done integrating medium and message, especially in terms of implicating and involving the audience. To this end, I wonder if in future iterations of Foxconn Frequency (will there be a number 4?) whether an immersive and interactive stage design might not be something to explore. That the audience was invited to tour the performers' play stations after the end of the performance suggests the potential in such an option.

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PuSh 2018: Meeting at Performance Works

Meeting, presented by the PuSh Festival at Performance Works through this Saturday, is a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Antony Hamilton and composer and instrument builder Alisdair Macindoe. It's also a collaboration between the two men--who both perform in the piece--and the percussive objects that Macindoe has designed for it. These objects, tiny wooden blocks with pencils attached via levers to their sides, are arranged in a large circle on the floor of the stage. Outside the circle are an array of other objects: small round and larger rectangular tin dishes; some chunkier pencilless wooden blocks; what look like a couple of miniature didgeridoos. On either side of the downstage lip of the circle are two music stands.

At the top of the show, Hamilton and Macindoe walk from the wings and enter the circle. Nothing happens. Then, after a time we hear a tapping. It echoes around the circle and then repeats as we struggle to locate the block from which it emanates. Just as we do, all 64 of the blocks erupt into a cacophony of sound and the performers start to move. At first the choreography is angular and precise, almost like robot-style breaking as the dancers pivot and twist and turn and extend their arms joint by joint in response to the rhythm of the instruments. As this rhythm grows faster and increasingly complex, so does the choreography, with Hamilton and Macindoe moving in and out of unison and also every now and then interrupting their mostly staccato and vertically-oriented gesture phrases with more bendy and fluid torso ripples and head ducks, like they are Neo and Trinity from The Matrix slowing down time to dodge a bullet.

The synching of the physical and sound scores is a bravura feat (and also perhaps explains the presence of the two music stands, which otherwise do not move). There are many moments in the first part of the piece when the audience gasps or claps in delight at different displays of syncopated virtuosity, as when the men slice the air with their hands over and over again in a mind-boggling game of non-touching patty cake, or later when they start counting together in time to the instruments' beats. But in the second part of the piece, after the performers do a slow-mo retreat from the centre of the circle (this time looking very much like Neo and Trinity), they let the objects take over completely, deconstructing the circle block by block and moving the other objects in such a proximate manner as to produce, on cue, a whole symphony of taps and chimes and bongs.

After a moment of worshipful reflection (and a bit more choreography) before the idols they have thus arrayed, Hamilton and Macindoe exit the stage. The rest of the score is produced solely by the instruments. To be sure, there is someone in the tech booth sending wireless signals (I'm assuming) to produce said sounds. Nevertheless, we are left with an image of non-human agency that resonates quite powerfully with larger philosophies of vital materialism currently circulating in performance theory.

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PuSh 2017: By Heart

The premise of Tiago Rodrigues' By Heart, playing at Performance Works as part of this year's PuSh Festival through this evening, is deceptively simple. Over the course of the performance he will teach 10 audience members to learn a sonnet by Shakespeare by heart: they will learn the first four lines together and declaim them as a group; thereafter each of the volunteers (of whom there were more than enough eager participants last night) is responsible for learning one remaining line, beginning with the first line of the second quatrain and moving through to the last line of the poem's concluding couplet. The performance will not be over until the sonnet is enunciated from beginning to end by the assembled group, and one of the physical delights of the show is to watch Rodrigues conduct his volunteers like a choir, inhaling deeply to announce the beginning of each recitation and using his arms to move from person to person, or to indicate that a line should be repeated.

The sonnet Rodrigues teaches the group is Sonnet 30, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," and it has been chosen for a reason: the great Russian writer Boris Pasternak, facing almost certain arrest and imprisonment, spoke his own translation of the verse during Stalin's show trials in 1937 and the assembled citizens of Moscow rose en masse afterwards and repeated it back to him. It was, as Rodrigues tells us, a powerful statement against tyranny and censorship: literature, learned by heart, will always elude state control, and this is one of our most profound forms of resistance. The latter sentiment Rodrigues supplies to us via the philosopher and critic George Steiner, whose discourse about this very topic on a television program Rodrigues has himself committed to memory, and from which he quotes at length throughout the performance (indeed, images of Pasternak and Steiner are printed on either side of the t-shirt that Rodrigues wears on stage). Paralleling the focus on memorization as a form of protest and resistance, which Rodrigues illustrates with many anecdotes from history and excerpts from literature (including a bravura recitation of the opening pages of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) is the story of Rodrigues's grandmother, a cook who was a voracious reader and who, as she was going blind, asked Rodrigues to pick a book for her to memorize so that she might be able to re-read it in her mind when she could no longer see.

Having raised the stakes in this way about what the on-stage audience members' real-time exercise in rote learning has come to symbolize--at once a political statement of freedom and a personal tribute to Rodrigues' grandmother--by the end of the performance, when Rodrigues conducts his choir one last time, we are on the edges of our seats willing each of them to get it right. And there was certainly lots of drama when one of the volunteers seemed to blank completely on his individual line. But with help from Rodrigues, as well as some of us not on stage, he eventually got it out and the poem continued to the end, which felt like a collective exhalation, a breath that said we will be alright if we continue in this way together--even as newly repressive regimes sweep to power across the globe. Yesterday, above all, it was reassuring to attend a performance like By Heart and know there are some things that can still escape demagogic pillorying via Twitter.

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Cock at Performance Works

Mike Bartlett's play, Cock, on at Performance Works in a Rumble Theatre production through this Sunday, centres on John (Nadeem Phillip, in an affecting though somewhat physically mannered performance). A hugely ambivalent character, John is torn between sticking it out with his long-time boyfriend, M (Shawn Macdonald, with trademark smirk), and taking a risky leap into the unknown with W (Donna Soares, giving as good as she gets), a woman John has started seeing while on a break from M. So far so melodramatic. However, what makes the play so absorbing to watch is its unique structure and rapid-fire dialogue (like Aaron Sorkin without the pontificating), along with director Stephen Drover's tense and kinetic staging of the action in the round. The characters circle and spar with each other, as if at a boxing match, and scene breaks are punctuated with quick semi-blackouts.

Those initial scenes concern John and M, with John first talking himself into leaving M and then explaining why he has returned. When M learns through their verbal jousting that part of the reason John has come back is to sort out how he feels about W, the stakes are raised considerably, and what John has both relied on and resented about M--his possessiveness--turns into an all-out war to keep him. We then shift abruptly to scenes between John and W, witnessing how they met and first come to have sex--in an hilariously choreographed scene of John's fumbling exploration and W's not unpleasant reactions made all the more remarkable for the fact that Phillip and Soares are on opposite sides of the stage floor's bullseye. The final panel in Bartlett's dramatic triptych brings all three characters together for a dinner party at which John is meant to decide between M and W--having previously hedged his bets by telling each of them that he is leaving the other. However, in true deus ex machina fashion, Bartlett introduces a fourth character, M having invited his father, F (Duncan Fraser, somewhat low energy), for moral support.

And, indeed, F does succeed in provoking one of the more impassioned speeches from John, who in response to F's statement that he has to decide "what he is," asks why can't it just be about "who" he wants to be with, regardless of gender? To be sure, Bartlett has in some senses written a true post-identity politics play. My only concern is why, among the reasons John lists to be with W, he cites a future that involves having children and growing old together? That, in the end, John opts for "what he knows" rather than "who he desires" perhaps says something about Bartlett's cynical take on the continuing problem of categorical fit in our society: the boxes are too small, but we continue shoving people--and ourselves--in them anyway.

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Blasted at Performance Works

Pedophilia (possibly incestuous), rape (vaginal and anal), cannibalism: just your typical Sunday afternoon at the theatre. At least it was for those of us in the audience at Performance Works yesterday, there to take in Pi Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, directed by Richard Wolfe and on through Saturday, April 25th. The play premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1995, where its increasingly horrific catalogue of acts of violence and sexual degradation incensed critics. Never mind that Kane was referencing the very real atrocities then taking place in Bosnia, nor that she was consciously drawing on Greek tragedy--albeit in a way that makes plainly visible all the physical nastiness that in the classical tradition happened off-stage. To upstanding London theatregoers of the time, Kane was being unnecessarily provocative, too "in yer face," to reference the label that, for better or worse, got attached to Kane and several of her fellow upstart UK playwrighting contemporaries.

Now, of course, twenty years after its premiere (and sixteen after Kane's suicide in 1999) the play feels more relevant than ever, what with the various acts of unspeakable brutality we daily witness in the media emanating from Syria, or Iraq, or Kenya, or the Ukraine--not to mention the armed interventions our own governments in the West have undertaken in order to ensure, or so we are told, that such acts don't reach our shores. To that end, a nice touch by Wolfe in this production is having the voice of current UK Prime Minister David Cameron extolling on the radio at various points all that his government has done in the name of defending the integrity of the British Isles against the infidel hordes clawing at the gates. However, to Ian (Michael Kopsa), the male protagonist of Kane's play, such measures are too little and have come too late. A virulently racist, misogynistic and homophobic journalist whose specialty is covering sensational stories involving sex and murder--but who may also be an undercover government operative (he carries a gun)--the fiftyish Ian has taken refuge in a hotel room in the middle of the vile, foul-smelling city (we presume London, but in fact it's Leeds) he has come to loathe--in part because according to him it's now overrun with "Wogs." Joining Ian is Cate (Cherise Clarke), a much younger and extremely quiescent woman who just may be: a) mentally disabled; b) Ian's daughter; c) Ian's former lover; d) all of the above. At any rate, much of the first half of the play concerns Ian's attempts to cajole Cate into having sex with him, and Cate's attempts to fend him off.  When rhetorical persuasion fails, Ian simply takes what he has been denied when Cate is unable to defend herself: dry humping her on the floor when she is unconscious as a result of one of her fits and, it is suggested after one of the play's strategic blackouts, raping her when she is out cold during the night.

The relationship between Ian and Cate would quickly descend into caricature were it not for two things. First, Kane, is at pains to show us that her protagonists are much more complex than we might at first credit them to be. Ian's rage at the world comes from a deep vulnerability, a compensatory realization that as an aging white, middle class man whose body is rapidly betraying him (and whose past sins may be catching up with him), all he wants is for someone to love him. For her part, Cate has an inner core of strength, as well as a capacity for cold assessment of the situation when she needs it. She realizes that Ian is pathetic and ridiculous, and announces as much to him; but she also has compassion for him, as she does for humanity in general (there are several references to her taking care of her mother and brother, and she is shown caring for and, after it dies, burying an abandoned baby later in the play). Indeed, it is a mark of Kane's subtlety as a playwright that, almost without us knowing it, and in apparent contradiction of what we are witnessing physically on stage, we end up feeling that there is a real bond--something that indeed approximates love--between these two damaged souls. It helps, in this regard, that the roles are played by actors as talented as Kopsa and Clarke, who in their very demanding emotional and physical interactions over the course of the play effortlessly convey the complex shared history of their characters. In fact, the play ends with a quiet scene between the couple that, precisely because of all the horror that precedes it, is shatteringly tender, and that involves Ian uttering to Cate a simple "thank you."

Except that it's not that simple, and for Ian and us in the audience to feel any measure of grace at play's end we first have to earn it. Which is where the second, and primarily structural, innovation of Kane's writing comes in. She shows us that the domestic violence between Ian and Cate inside their hotel room is parallel to, and in fact an extension of, the military violence outside by having the latter literally intrude on the former. I am referring here to the appearance of the third character in the play, the Soldier (Raresh DiMofte), whose specific allegiance (apart from that he shows to the memory of his slaughtered girlfriend) is never identified, just as the factional conflict that mysteriously creeps up on Ian and Cate remains primarily allegorical. The Soldier is Ian's shadow self, the abjected other whose return is designed to remind Ian--and us--that, in direct antithesis to the compassion represented by Cate (who, crucially, during the scenes between the two men is locked in the bathroom), perhaps what most marks us as human is that we are capable of both imagining and doing just about anything. It's a brutal truth that is almost impossible to confront--which perhaps explains why, after he sodomizes him, the Soldier chews out Ian's eyes. As I said, Kane knew her Greek tragedy.

This is the second staging of Blasted that I have seen, the first being the celebrated Soho Rep run in New York in 2008 that starred the amazing Reed Birney and Marin Ireland. I have deliberately avoided comparing the two, as I wanted to judge Wolfe's production on its own terms. To that end, my first props go to the design team (led by the ubiquitous and super-talented Drew Facey--see my previous review of Indian Arm); not only have they created a more than credibly generic hotel room, but they manage to blow it up in a believable fashion. That I have spent more time in this review than in my previous one (which you can read here) contemplating the sophistication of Kane's script speaks to Wolfe's attentive care to its layered complexity. I do think the pacing in the second half flags a bit--the blackouts that mark the space between Ian's successive "states of emergency" could come more quickly (though I do understand that there are some basic technical encumbrances that are also being dealt with here). Finally, there is the question of nudity. Given what happens in the play, a degree of it is more or less to be expected. And yet, whereas we see Clarke full frontally in a longish scene where, following Ian's night-time sexual assault, she gets out of bed and traumatically stumbles into her clothes, we only ever see Kopsa's backside--despite ample opportunity, given what happens to him, to display more (and this goes for DiMofte as well). Not that I'm making an argument for upping the titillation quotient. And I have no idea whether this was a primarily directorial or an actorly decision. In the absence of that information, however, the decision does seem to replicate some familiar tropes of gendered gratuity--tropes that Kane's play, I would argue, expressly critiques.

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Nach, Nach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nach, nach?

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PuSh Review #12: Daniel Barrow at Club PuSh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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