Camera Obscura (Hungry Ghosts) at the Roundhouse

I first saw a staged reading of Lesley Ewen's Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts) as part of frank theatre's Clean Sheets series that accompanied the Q2Q Conference at SFU Woodward's in July 2016. Two years later it is now receiving its world premiere at the Roundhouse in a production directed by Ewen and co-presented by the frank and the Queer Arts Festival. But, as Ewen recounts in her program notes, the genesis for the play really began 16 years ago, when after seeing a retrospective of Vancouver-based visual artist Paul Wong's work at the Vancouver Art Gallery she conceived the broad outlines of the play. That it has taken so long for the work to be produced has nothing to do with Ewen's working methods, nor with the quality of her writing and artistic vision; it mostly speaks to how risk-averse are most theatre companies in this country.

Camera Obscura is a fictionalized account of Wong's creative and quasi-romantic relationship with Kenneth Fletcher, and in particular their collaboration on the photographic and video project Murder Research (1977). Based on the actual murder of a First Nations man in the alley behind Wong's house, Wong and Fletcher combined documentation of the crime scene and images of the victim's body taken from the coroner's office with a dramatization of their interpretation of the story of the murder. At once a critique of our obsession with sensationalized depictions of murder and violence and an expose of the otherwise invisible Indigenous lives of many of the victims of that violence, the work was exhibited at the Western Front, toured widely, and also yielded a book. With Wong's blessing, Ewen has used this background material to investigate the ethics of turning someone else's real-life pain into art, as well as the psychological toll that such a process presumably took on Fletcher, who, after struggling with mental illness, committed suicide a year after the creation of Murder Research.

Ewen has constructed Camera Obscura as a memory play. Brandon (Jeff Ho) is an acclaimed artist who is celebrating a career retrospective. In voiceover an unseen curator (Ewen) informs us of the provocative subject matter of his work, as well as its formalist concerns, including blurring the lines between art and life. But the voices and images behind one particular work haunt Brandon and, with the aid of some imaginative video projections by Sammy Chien, we are pulled back along with Brandon to the moment of its inception. Thereafter, the play proceeds along two intersecting lines, both of which have at their heart an ethical conundrum that Ewen wishes to both foreground and poke at. On the one hand there is the politics of non-Indigenous folks trading in and seeking to make meaningful the perceived misery of the lives of Indigenous peoples. At the same time, there is the question of what constitutes the limits of a personal and professional relationship in which everything--including suicidal ideation--is treated as a performance. However, dramatically speaking these two narrative lines receive unequal weight, with Ewen's focus tilting--perhaps inevitably--towards the domestic drama of Brandon's relationship with Kevin (Julien Galipeau), at the expense of fleshing out the story of the murdered First Nations man (played by Braiden Houle) who becomes the subject of their work.

To be sure, there is a bravura scene in which Houle rounds on Kevin for his presumption in thinking his life was without meaning before he and Brandon immortalized him in an artwork. But for the most part his character remains a mute witness to his own exploitation, in addition to physically carrying the bodies of the other characters at two different moments in the play. I understand how the voicelessness of Indigenous peoples is part of Ewen's critique of colonialism, but for me this representational silence is problematically counterposed by the over-contextualization of the ethics of Brandon's art practice. The use of voiceover is extensive throughout the play, and the cooly dispassionate appraisal of Brandon's contributions to artmaking is meant to set up what we imagine to be on the walls of the gallery's white cube and the messy "reality" that we are actually seeing in the black box of the theatre as the subject of a debate with life and death stakes. But in refusing to take sides in this debate, Ewen's play necessarily ends up reaffirming the representational over the material. Indeed, we could say that Wong's original artwork is now doubly framed.

Raising such questions is what makes Camera Obscura such an important work. It needs to be seen--and talked about.

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VIDF 2018: iyouuuswe at the Roundhouse

I liked the music a lot (the mostly original score is by composer Ki Young). And there was some great dancing, particularly by company members Jesse Obremski and Guanglei Hui. But overall I found last night's Canadian premiere of WHITE WAVE's iyouuswe at the Vancouver International Dance Festival to be structurally incoherent, with choreographer Young Soon Kim providing little to no connection between the different sections (there were nine of them)--beyond the multiplication or subtraction of dancers on stage. That I was counting entrances and exits more than I was concentrating on the movement tells you a little bit about my difficulties with this work, not least its caginess about when and how to end. There were about three different possibilities that I noted, and the less said about the one that Young chose the better.

That said, I was taken by the opening. It featured a duet by Jesse Obremski and Katie Garcia that showcased some strong side-by-side unison choreography. However, Young's vocabulary shifted noticeably in the second section, with the partnering by Lacey Baroch and Mark Willis mostly comprised by a series of acrobatic lifts. This points to another minor (or perhaps not) issue that irked me about the performance: the costumes. The five men in the piece were all dressed similarly and non-descriptly in casual pants and untucked dress shirts. The four women, however, wore shiny pants, leggings, or short shorts, accompanied by sleeveless tops that were either sequined or backless or flowing. Fine, that's a specific dramaturgical choice. But if this piece is, as the program notes state, about "developing relationships by which we struggle to find a sense of 'i' as part of a 'we,'" why emphasize so starkly the gendered differences of your dancers? Or another way of asking this is why, in accessorizing the women on stage, turn them into danced accessories of the men? This question was in my mind during most of the opposite-sex partnering sequences, but was perhaps most starkly on display during the first sub-section (!) of the penultimate section 8 sequence, in which the tiniest of the women dancers, Michelle Lim (she of the short shorts and sequined camisole), is helped to step from chair to chair by Mark Willis.

I haven't yet mentioned the chairs. There are nine of them arranged in a row upstage at the start of the piece. During the first two duets they are mostly ignored. However, an ensuing sequence of structured improvisation featuring the entire company is punctuated by the dancers' mass retreat upstage to the chairs. I freely admit that I have a weakness for choreography involving chairs (having written a play on the subject); but in this case it was hard for me to engage because I found much of the choreography to be overly familiar: a step-up and down here; a slouch to the ground and hip swivel there; throw in some retrograde; etc. There was also the fact that the dancers didn't seem to have enough room to give themselves over fully to the movement. The distance between the chairs was indeed tight, with some space no doubt lost to the many curtain legs Young was employing for added wing space (cue all those entrances and exits). Then, too, the upstage line of chairs, combined with the backstage curtain meant that the Roundhouse stage was unusually shallow. When the full company was on stage things got quite crowded, and some of the downstage dancing was additionally obstructed by the annoying bar in front of the first row that has been added to the new seats at the Roundhouse.

The latter, I gather, is for safety reasons, but last night it was just one more annoyance to my spectating pleasure.

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Ten Thousand Birds at the Roundhouse

Last night Richard and I went to an extraordinary concert at the Roundhouse put on by Music on Main (MoM). The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams' Ten Thousand Birds is a work for chamber orchestra. As its title suggests, it is based on the sounds of birdsong. However, rather than stage the work in a traditional proscenium setting, MoM Artist-in-Residence Vicky Chow and her all-star ensemble put together a roving musical installation. That is, the Roundhouse's main presentation hall was stripped of its seats, and apart from a few fixed stations for piano and percussion, the rest of the musicians move with their instruments around the space. Likewise, we are invited to do the same, experiencing what MoM Artistic Director suggests in his program note is the equivalent of "an enchanting forest walk."

It was indeed a magical experience, as much for the opportunity to be so up close to the musicians as for the richly ambient saturation of the sound. On the former front, I can only marvel at the poise and sangfroid of the artists, as they were not only negotiating our unpredictable locomotive pathways, but also our sometimes intensely proximate and scrutinizing gaze (on the way in, running into Nancy Tam, who was playing the melodica, I couldn't help myself from waving hello). Then, too, the environmental distribution of the sound meant that it was possible for one to close one's eyes (as I saw many patrons in fact do) and follow the acoustic direction of the various instruments as they came in and out--except that navigating the intersecting trajectories of other audience members would have been a bit dangerous.

I'm gathering that as music director of the piece, Chow reset Adams' score to allow for improvisation among her ensemble members. No one was using sheet music, but they did all have timers that they'd consult at various moments that no doubt cued them as to when it was their turn to come in or to fade out. But judging from the call and response between the various instruments/musicians, this framework seemed flexible. I was especially taken by the interplay between Alexander Cannon on trumpet and Jeremy Berkman on trombone: both with each other, and with the other ensemble members. Their variously short and sharp or elongated honks and beeps and toots suggested everything from an airborne gaggle of geese to a waddling group of ducks to a tree full of crows having an animated argument. The more whistling notes of Liesa Norman on flute, Terri Hron on recorder, and Tam and Nicole Linkasita on melodica conjured robins and bluebirds and other smaller avian beings. When the wind instruments were combined with strings (Newsha Khalaj on viola, Mark Haney on bass, and Nicole Li on the delightfully resonant erhu) and/or percussion (Katie Rife and Julia Chien, playing a variety of instruments), multiple symphonies burst forth in a manner of seconds, and then just as quickly disappeared--as with the birds outside our bedroom windows who both awaken us and put us to sleep.

One especially memorable sequence occurred near the end when Rife, playing the marimba in the centre of the Roundhouse space, was riffing in response to all the other calls from the other instruments swirling around her. Special mention also needs to be made of the moving duet between Chow at the piano and Liam Hockley on clarinet, their slightly more mournful tones suggestive of what it might mean if the daily toll of our birds' sounds were to stop.

If and when that ever happens, we're in real trouble, and the fact that last night's concert was presented in conjunction with the Vancouver International Bird Festival (!) and the 27th International Ornithological Congress is a reminder that, aesthetic representations aside, the music birds make is something we should all be deeply invested in maintaining.

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PuSh 2018: Endings at the Roundhouse

The concept of Tamara Saulwick's Endings, on at the Roundhouse as part of this year's PuSh Festival, sounded so interesting on paper: record players, reel-to-reel tape recorders, live speech and song, all combining into a mix-tape of voices speaking about and with the dead and departed. But the content and execution of the work felt directionless and somewhat trite.

Saulwick, working with singer-songwriter Paddy Mann and composer and sound designer Peter Knight, spends much of her time moving sound and lighting equipment about an otherwise bare black stage, and one of the things that did compel me about the piece was its subtle choreography of objects and bodies. This extended to Saulwick and Mann's downstage, on-the-floor dual DJing of a series of vinyl recordings with interview subjects reflecting on the passings of loved ones. But what surprised me about the mixing and overlaying of these voices was how conventional was the cutting between them. Saulwick would spin one record, we'd hear a snippet of conversation, and then she'd press a finger on the record to stop it. This would be the cue for Mann to lift his finger from one of his records to let us hear a snippet from another voice. And then we'd return to Saulwick's interviewee, and so on. Surprisingly, however, the cumulative effect had less to do with the formal counterpointing of multiple voices than with Saulwick's apparent desire to have us clearly distinguish the continuities between individual narratives. I was frankly surprised that Saulwick didn't exploit the capacity of her technologies to manipulate and synthesize and distort the different voices she'd recorded. When it comes to death and voices from the beyond, it seems that for Saulwick the message clearly supersedes the medium.

Which is where that other kind of medium comes in--that is, the spritualist variety. We learn that Saulwick herself has consulted one in connection with her own father's death--which seems to be the impetus for the entire show. Clearly Saulwick is aware of the connections between analog recording technologies and nineteenth-century seances focused on the transmigration of voices from the spirit world. But whereas back then the gramophone was often used as a feint, or a means of deception, here the deployment of the record and tape players is utterly--perhaps even overly--sincere.

Endings has one more performance this afternoon at 2 pm.

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PuSh 2018: MDLSX at the Roundhouse

Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Niccolò, the co-artistic directors of the Rimini-based Italian company Motus, have been making acclaimed theatre together since 1991. Much of that work is adapted from classic texts (including works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Genet, Cocteau, and so on), and is built on a large ensemble. For the past twelve years Silvia Calderoni has been a key member of that ensemble. However, in MDLSX, the work Motus is currently touring to the PuSh Festival, and which plays the Roundhouse through this Sunday, Calderoni is alone on stage, and the story she tells is mostly based on her own life.

That story is one of the terrors of gender binarism: about how Silvia grew up as a tomboy; about her parents' and medical practitioners' struggles to diagnose and understand her condition clinically; about how she eventually ran away from home, cut her hair, and lived for a time as a man; and, finally, how she decided to refuse the straitjacket of gender identification altogether (despite still answering to female pronouns). While much of this is narrated to us by Silvia (in Italian, with English surtitles), two additional--and dramaturgically essential--elements of the production design are the soundtrack of songs that Silvia plays (twenty-two tracks in all, starting with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and ending with REM), and the video projected onto a circular portal in the upstage screen with which Silvia interacts.

For the music, Silvia acts as both DJ and interpreter, each song cued to a stage of shameful discovery or political enlightenment in her life, and with the movement that accompanies it on a triangular bit of shiny cloth placed between her console and props table and the audience at once playing to and confounding our desire for bodily legibility (as when, early on in the show, doing her best Iggy Pop, the hipless Silvia shimmies out of her buttoned pants without the help of her hands). This deliberate thwarting of the standard spectating protocols for how we read performers' bodies within a proscenium staging is augmented by the fact that for much of the show Silvia acts with her back to the audience--an "affront" that is all about scrambling the traditional dramaturgy of social interaction, which in turn is all about how we present to others (to paraphrase Erving Goffman).

Much of the video footage is taken from home movies, and features images of Silvia as a young child and teenager growing up before our eyes. As Enrico said in the talkback following the performance that I was privileged to moderate, this archive of old VHS tapes proved a goldmine for the creators, its projection and overlaying with a live feed of Silvia's on-stage image as she interacts with or stares down her younger self producing an uncanny palimpsest of identities in which sum and parts are neither collapsable nor wholly separable. That video footage of Silvia singing with her father both begins and ends the performance is also a very moving testament to the fact that part of the tyranny of a binary gender system is that it doesn't just divide individuals, but also families.

Not that this show is on-stage therapy for Silvia--or the audience, for that matter. In print, and again last night at the talkback, Silvia and Daniela confirmed that it's designed to be a party, a celebration, an emancipation even. To that end, mixed in with the first-person testimony, we also get excerpts from Silvia's reading in queer and trans theory, in particular Paul B. Periciado's Contrasexual Manifesto. And, finally, while it is not announced officially anywhere in the print materials associated with the show, a main intertext for Silvia's story is Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex, about the unforgettable Detroit-born intersex character of Callie/Cal. Passages and plot points from the novel are woven liberally into the stage show's 80 minutes. The fact that the creators make no effort to distinguish what is Silvia's story and what is Cal's is an apt metaphor for the entire fiction that is gender. As I suggested at the end of the talkback last night, the problem of fit between bodies and categories is a problem with the categories, not the bodies.

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The Secret Life of Trees at VIDF

In The Secret Life of Trees, which is on at the Roundhouse as part of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival through this evening, EDAM's Peter Bingham takes his choreographic inspiration from the idea that trees communicate with each other (and presumably their environment) through their "intricate entwining root systems." Likewise, in creating this piece, Bingham and his dancers have worked to develop "different sensory pathways to connect to each other" in the space and time of performance.

Such communication begins when dancers Walter Kubanek, Chengxin Wei, Anne Cooper and Olivia Shaffer enter through one of the three square archways--one stage left, two stage right--positioned in front of the wings, portals one imagines to the forest that lies just beyond. Kubanek and Wei slide to the floor upstage, sitting back-to-back, with Wei facing the audience. Cooper and Shaffer lie supine on the floor in two rectangles of light stage right. Wei begins to move his feet, turning them in and out, left and right; he raises his arms and domes his hands, rotating them at the wrist, first this way, and then that, as if telegraphing some secret gestural message. It's one that Cooper and Shaffer pick up on, their feet responding in kind to Wei's proffered address (which we also hear, briefly, in a bit of voiceover).

Just how in sync these three dancers are becomes clear after Kubanek exits the stage and, following a robust contact sequence, the trio separates for some isolated unison floorwork. The dancers are positioned so closely to one another, and their movements are so complicated and physical that it is a wonder they don't hit each other when blindly extending a leg into space, or when rolling backwards in this or that direction. But then just as trees seem to be able to make room for one another on a crowded forest floor, so are dancers of this caliber able to draw on a highly honed kinaesthetic awareness, a keen sense not just of back and front but also, in this case, of beside.

There then follows two gorgeous duets. The first, featuring Shaffer and Delia Brett, is faster and more vigorous and covers much more stage space in its incorporation of lateral lifts and rolls, and in the dancers' explorations of different surfaces of bodily contact and support. The second, between Brett and James Gnam, is slower and more still. It begins with the two dancers walking downstage and matter-of-factly removing their shirts. As the voiceover tells us that we are about to hear a selection of plant songs, Brett slowly begins to trace her fingers in looping and intertwining patterns along Gnam's back and arms, like a childhood game of spelling out letters and words up and down a friend's spine. Brett's touch is delicate and tender, like a lover's, and Gnam's vertebrae and ribs respond to the intimacy by undulating like tree branches swaying in a gentle breeze. When Gnam reciprocates he also reaches around to touch the small and vulnerable area between Brett's throat and breastbone, which struck me as an especially solicitous moment. After this sequence the dancers move further upstage, and amid a series of black and white and colour video projections by Chris Randle that are accompanied by a voiceover narrative written and spoken by Bingham, Brett and Gnam cycle through several semi-lifted poses, their limbs a tangled system of support and ballast.

The piece concludes with a final trio, this time with Kubanek, who has been something of a silent observer up until now, joining Shaffer and Wei in a bit of balletic parody before moving into a final and highly satisfying contact sequence. If, in their rhizomatic structural threading, tree roots have a mostly horizontal orientation, and if they further work to stabilize not just the tree trunks to which they are attached, but also the soil around them, then they are an apt metaphor for the connection to and from ground that is at the heart of contact.

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Par B.L.eux at Vancouver International Dance Festival

The fifteenth annual Vancouver International Dance Festival began this week, with the featured mainstage show by Montreal's Par.B.L.eux. Snakeskins, conceived, choreographed and performed by the incomparable Benoît Lachambre (last seen in Vancouver two years ago in a duet with Lee Su-Feh), actually begins in the lobby of the Roundhouse. Lachambre, clad in jeans and with a leather harness around his torso, points his feet inward like a pigeon, balancing on the outside edges of the soles of his shoes as he shifts his weight from one leg to another, twists this way and that, and slowly extends his arms and unfurls his fingers with delicate precision. As he moves, Lachambre is circled by another man who wears a face mask of the sort favoured by WWF wrestlers, but also, given Lachambre's harness, evocative of BDSM culture. This man, dancer Daniele Albanese, is tasked with taking bits of cut-up rubber strips from a nearby table and either affixing them to the clips on Lachambre's harness, or to a large transparent screen on wheels stationed behind Lachambre. As the screen slowly fills up, an image begins to take shape, but before we can determine exactly what it is, Lachambre abruptly stops dancing and Albanese begins to wheel the screen away.

This is our cue to take our seats in the Roundhouse auditorium, where we are immediately greeted by the striking spatial architecture of Lachambre's set--in particular a canopy of tensile ropes that attach to a bit of scaffolding upstage and stretch all the way up to the downstage rafters, so that they appear to hang over the first couple of rows of the audience. That's where Richard and I chose to sit and when she joined us Ziyian Kwan noted that the effect was to enclose us inside the world of Lachambre's piece. And, indeed, to the extent that the ropes function as a kind of beautiful exoskeleton one couldn't help but feel protected rather than threatened.

Once the audience is seated and composer and musician Hahn Rowe has begun to play his stunning live score, Lachambre affixes his harness to the lower rung of the upstage scaffold, takes hold of two additional leather straps, and bends his body backwards, like an insect trying to free itself from a spider's web. Eventually this is just what Lachambre does, leaving the harness attached to the scaffold, which he then climbs atop, from whence he dons a leather jacket and similar style mask handed to him by Albanese. Lachambre is above the ropes at this point and at a certain point I knew instinctively what was going to happen next: a leap by Lachambre onto the ropes themselves, which receive his weight with the appropriate softness and give, but which also threaten to spill him onto the floor depending on where and how he moves between them. But move he does, eventually climbing almost all the way to the downstage top, before slipping between the ropes and dropping to the floor.

At this point in the piece, Lachambre momentarily steps out of character, picks up a microphone and informs us that his original idea for this section was to stage a moment of real violence involving Albanese. But he decided he couldn't do that, so after first attempting to substitute an image of empathy and compassion (by lying down beside Albanese on the floor), Lachambre instead says he will mime a scene of dangerous encounter. To this end, he demands money from a relatively nonplussed Albanese, stuffs it into his pocket along with the microphone, and then begins pacing horizontally along the stage as Rowe, having also by this point put on a face mask, performs a symphony on sheet metal from atop the scaffold. Then comes something even stranger, and yet equally beguiling: an episode involving Lachambre, his head now stuffed inside a hollowed-out basketball, explaining via an allegorical story the significance of the now finished double portrait on the screen that Albanese has continued to wheel around the stage. The story involves the connection between basketball and the ancient Mayan ballcourt game of pitz or ulama--in both cases, it would seem, a sacrifice needs to precede the regeneration of life. Like a snake shedding its skin.

And wily artist that he is, Lachambre saves his most stunning transformation to the last. Having vacated the stage after the ball story, he returns, now clad in shimmery laytex leggings. He stands under the canopy of ropes, which have now gone slack as a result of Albanese having moved the scaffolding forward. Lachambre gathers the ropes in each hand and begins to shake them, the energy emanating from his core, out through his arms, and along each vibrating cord in a series of stunningly calibrated wave motions that, combined with the lighting effects, made it look as if a series of spirit souls are being released into the cosmos. You could feel a collective intake of breath from the audience when this happened, and in a piece filled with amazing moments of virtuosic artistry this was the coup de grace.

And yet Lachambre refused to let us reward him with a conventional ovation. Rather, the piece resists closure as he and Albanese, both now released from their masks, improvise movement alongside each other to Rowe's music. The dancers, eventually joined by various stagehands, begin to deconstruct the set, exposing the back wall of the auditorium, and even the night sky beyond the Roundhouse. Every now and then each performer takes a measured bow, and we duly erupt into applause. But still they keep dancing, forcing us into the position of leave-taking.

Which, in this case, one is so reluctant to do.

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Salt Baby at Talking Stick

I always forget what an avalanche of Vancouver performance comes after PuSh: the Talking Stick Festival, which opened on Tuesday; Chutzpah!, which opened yesterday; the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival and the Vancouver International Dance Festival, both coming up at the beginning of March; and on it goes. And that's on top of all the regular subscription series and venue programming throughout the city. There's so much to see that one can forget one is supposed to have a day job.

Mercifully, mine allows me to scoot out like I did this afternoon to the Roundhouse to catch the final matinee performance of Falen Johnson's play Salt Baby, first seen in Toronto at Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA) in 2009, and now in Vancouver as part of Talking Stick. Directed by former NEPA Artistic Managing Director and Unplugging author Yvette Nolan, Salt Baby tells the eponymous story of a contemporary Mohawk and Tuscarora woman from the Six Nations reserve in Ontario (Dakota Hebert). Though she has her status card, and though she remains deeply connected to her father (Curtis Peeteetuce) and the spirit of her dead grandfather (Colin Dingwall, excellent in a number of roles), Salt Baby, who can pass as white and who has lived for many years in the polyglot "big city" (presumably Toronto), feels anxious about her heritage, and in particular the exact mix of her Native blood. In part these feelings are exacerbated by Salt Baby's budding romantic relationship with, Al, a young white man (a winsome Nathan Howe) whose initially obtuse and naive and gradually more genuine questions about her family background prompt a crisis of identity in Salt Baby. On a visit home to see her father, Salt Baby begins asking questions about her genealogy that leads her on a quest--via conversations with family friends, a dubious online choose-your-own-adventure-style survey, an even more dubious psychic, and finally a community elder--to discover the truth about her ancestors. But it's the DNA test that Al suggests she take and that her father resists helping her with that looms as the real source of Salt Baby's ontological dilemma: if she takes it, she risks discovering that she is not who she thought she was; but, even more pertinently, she risks reducing her identity to the sum of her genes.

What elevates the will she or won't she plot question above a mere device to maintain narrative suspense is Johnson's recognition that paternity for Salt Baby--and Indigenous peoples more generally--is not just an existential cri de coeur or a mathematical abstraction; it has real-world and historically material consequences. Notwithstanding our twenty-first century rainbow celebration of cross-cultural relationships, the irony is that couples like Salt Baby and Al actually fulfill what was once a de facto government policy in this country: forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples through intermarriage (and see, in this regard, former deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs and celebrated Canadian poet Duncan Campbell Scott's "The Onandaga Madonna"). Indeed, Salt Baby's father, in querying his daughter's need to know, definitively, what tribes she descends from, notes that in the early part of the twentieth century several Indigenous peoples voluntary switched their tribal affiliations in order to keep dwindling band numbers up. (As an aside, I also want to point out that the first homecoming scene between Salt Baby and her father contains what I take to be an overt reference to George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe; upon entering her father's house, Salt Baby kicks off her shoes, noting that walking on concrete in the city always makes her feet hurt. This is an echo of a line spoken by Rita Joe's sister in Ryga, that when Rita first came to Vancouver her feet hurt.)

What makes all of this so dramatically affecting is that Johnson skillfully grounds these larger cultural--and expressly gendered--questions in an honest, funny, and incredibly believable romance between Salt Baby and Al. Indeed, as blissfully ignorant as Al might at first seem (we cringe, during the first scene, when he asks Salt Baby to speak some Mohawk to him), we gradually come to understand that the results of the DNA test are not an issue for him, and, indeed, that he eventually comes to rue his suggestion that she take the test in the first place. A genetic map won't make Al love Salt Baby any more or any less. Whereas for Salt Baby, Al's whiteness, regardless of whether or not she goes through with the test, will always be an impediment--and for precisely the reasons noted above. The burden of reproductive futurity dooms Salt Baby and Al, and it says something that in the scene where this is revealed (as well as a later one, when, after having broken up, Salt Baby and Al reencounter each other at an old hangout following a disastrous date between Salt Baby and an Indigenous man) the mostly teenage audience audibly sighed.

While I feel that the play is about 10-15 minutes too long, I was gripped throughout. All of the actors are superb, and the production is deftly directed by Nolan, who inserts some notable elements of physical movement in between scenes, most memorably a seductive dance between Salt Baby and Al just before they have sex for the first time. (As another aside, I am pleased to see that Nolan's The Unplugging, which received its premiere at the Arts Club's Revue Stage in 2013--and which I write about here--is getting a remount in Toronto, in a co-production between NEPA and the Factory Theatre, later this March.) A shout out, as well, to the simple yet highly evocative set design by Norm Daschle and Johanna de Vries, which makes effective use of a series of wooden containers and a suspended bamboo frame upstage to conjure different spaces; for example, sheets hung from the frame and between which Salt Baby and Al snuggle post-coitally become a nifty top view of Al's bed. The sound design (by Devon Bonneau, who also did the lights) also features a funky mix of songs by Indigenous artists, including Jennifer Kreisberg, whose Road Forward collaborator, Marie Clements, I was sitting beside in the theatre.

The Talking Stick Festival continues through March 1, with plenty to see. Check out the offerings here.

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PuSh 2015: Phantasmagoria

Loose Leaf Collective's Phantasmagoria: Circus of Dreams is a work of physical theatre devised and produced by students in the Bachelor of Performing Arts completion degree, a unique joint program between Capilano University, Douglas College, Langara College, and Vancouver Community College. Showcasing the acting, musical, movement, visual, and design talents of 23 talented young creators, the concept for the piece derives from the carnival side show, with vignettes made up of conjoined twins, a man-eating siren, and tap-dancing wind-up dolls, among others.

Not everything worked, and some of the transitions between scenes were either too rushed or filled with too much dead space. However, as an overall sensory experience, there is no denying the impact of the piece, particularly in terms of scenography and costume design.

Special kudos to the twinned Joni Mitchell-esque harlequins on keyboards and cello, and also to the woman who played the clown. The latter was no pratfalling jester out for the easy laugh; rather, in true bouffon style, she had an edge of meanness to her, harassing and cajoling the audience and her fellow performers in equal measure. And, as befitted her role (and the piece as a whole), she also brought things back to the body in the most grotesque and visceral way when she squatted and mimed a shit on stage. When's the last time you saw that in a theatre in Vancouver?

Another great thing to see: last night's performance was sold-out. In fact, so overworked was Roundhouse front-of-house manager Donna Soares that she conscripted me and two of my LGC dance crew who had turned up to see the show, Diane and Kuei-Ming, into helping out as ushers. I'm not sure if the lack of staff was a failing of the Roundhouse or the PuSh Festival; either way, I was happy to help direct folks to their seats.

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Le Grand Continental: Rehearsal 18

Having decamped the Ukrainian Centre for the Roundhouse, last night's rehearsal also marked Sylvain's return, and our introduction to the children who will be spotlighted during the "Fatboy Slim" section. Everyone in our corner was very appreciative of the extra space afforded by the Roundhouse theatre, not least Sara, Leslie and Jane, who no longer have to bang against a wall during the stage right travel sections of "Stockfunk" and "India." That said, while the lighting lent an added element of theatricality to the whole proceedings, it also made things even hotter than the already stifling UC. I definitely sweated the most so far.

Then again, that could just be due to Sylvain putting us through our paces. He seemed genuinely impressed by most of what he saw, although our eagerness to please combined with the excitement of being in a new space contributed to a bit of a bungle on our first few attempts of "India": we went too fast to begin with and our first cross was a disaster. But we recovered quickly and we were all on our marks by the end of things.

After that we spent a lot of time on "Cumbia," with Sylvain reminding us that the devil is in the details. This meant, among other things, correcting our focus during the walk-like-an-Egyptian bit; encouraging us to look scarier (and to scream) during the downstage and upstage monster crunches; and inviting us to travel more on the walk leading into the soldier steps.

But all of this was preceded by our first full run-through of the "Fatboy Slim" section, which meant we were finally let in on the secret of the children's participation, and their role in drawing attention to and then initiating our rising up from our slumped positions on the floor. I'll leave that secret as something to be discovered by audiences who attend the performances. For now, I'll just say that I was relieved to discover that beyond a few arm snaps and some general shaking and writhing there wasn't a lot of new choreography to learn.

On my way to rehearsal I'd stopped by Value Village on East Hastings to ferret out some costume possibilities. I was mostly disappointed by what I found, but I did come away with one shirt that was chosen because it matched the colour of one of the pairs of trainers I'll likely be wearing during two of the four performances. Most of the folks I showed it to gave it a thumbs up. But I still need something to go under it to keep me warm and to wick away the moisture. So far I've been thwarted by Mountain Equipment Co-Op and most sports stores. Hilary and Sara and Diane variously suggested Mark's Work Warehouse, American Apparel and Winners--all of which I've been told are cheaper than Value Village! And you can return things! None of this solves the problem of what to do about a second costume, but at least we're making some progress.

On Wednesday Sylvain will start by definitively setting our entrances. Then it's more time with the kids and back to refining each section. During the second hour we'll be joined by some of PuSh's Patrons Circle members, who have been invited to sit in on one of our rehearsals as a perk for their donations to the organization. Hilary and I joked that they may ask for their money back. But Individual Giving Coordinator Katie Koncan, who dropped by last night to see how things were going, said she was gobsmacked by how much progress we'd made and that she was sure everyone would be most impressed.

In truth, the visitors' presence will likely be a good thing. Sylvain has been reminding us since the beginning that we're going to have people all around us during the actual performances and that they'll be very much in our faces, going wild and screaming and yelling out our names. But, still, the idea of an audience is something I've so far bracketed off as an abstraction, a bit unreal and way in the future.

Look's like that future is now here, and that it comes with people expecting to be entertained. Nothing to do but dance for them, baby.

P.

S'envoler at VIDF

I regret that for various reasons I have not been able to attend more of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival. Last night Richard and I finally got to our first show. S'envoler, which has one final performance at the Roundhouse this evening, is choreographed by Estelle Clareton, in collaboration with Kathy Casey's Montréal Danse. Originally created four years ago with the research and performance participation of twelve dancers, this version features ten, including Clareton herself.

Inspired by the migratory patterns of birds, Clareton structures the work around the spatial and kinesthetic motifs of group and solo movement patterns and shapes. The dancers begin in a tightly massed clump, twitching and fluttering across the stage, a head or a hand occasionally poking out. The clump eventually unfolds into a horizontal line, birds on a wire who jostle and bump into each other and shift positions in a comical version of an avian chorus line. Three of the dancers break away to form a trio, which unleashes different versions of individual and partnered flight in the rest of the group, the stage now a riot of restless, venturesome bodies that come together and move apart in ways that are at once intensely physical and surprisingly tender.

In the talkback following last night's performance Clareton remarked on the relationship between set movement structures and improvisation in the piece, noting that while most of the work is choreographed, within different sections the dancers are free to explore their own expressive impulses. This keeps things fresh and alive, but also helps to advance Clareton's conceptual and practical goals of exploring the relationship between the individual and the group, as out of the chaos and jumble of distinct phrasings and eccentric gestures will suddenly emerge a gorgeous bit of unison.

Clareton and the dancers also talked about the two rubber boots filled with water that lead to the work's slip-and-slide finale. Clareton said that she knew early on she wanted some representation of oceanic flight in the work. And the dancers talked about how, when it became clear they'd be moving on and through a wet surface, managing that risk simply became about mastering a new technique: how to weight one's body to move safely, what to do at the end of a slide, etc. A fascinating glimpse into the creation of a very rare bird.

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PuSh 2014: Night

It was a strange, yet thoroughly satisfying, case of day for Night this afternoon as I forsook the beautiful southern BC sunshine in Vancouver in order to plunge into the arctic darkness of Nunuvut's Pond Inlet, as imagined by the Toronto-based theatre company Human Cargo.

Written and directed by Christopher Morris, and featuring a stellar cast of four who perform the text in English and Inuktitut, Night--which plays the PuSh Festival through this Sunday in a co-presentation with Touchstone Theatre--is about many things, not the least of which is the opacity of bones, and what per force remains unknowable about the lives and stories and cultures of others. This is a lesson Daniella (Linnea Swan) learns the hard way; she is a white anthropologist from Toronto who has come to Pond Inlet in order to repatriate the bones of Lemeac Auqsaq, who was removed from the community during a TB outbreak several decades earlier. Having died in the south, his remains were promptly acquired by a museum for forensic research purposes. Daniella is returning the bones against the express wishes of the institution she works for and, she thinks, at the bidding of Lemeac's granddaughter, Piuyuq (Tiffany Ayalik), who happens to share the patriarch's name. But it turns out the email Daniella received came from Piuyuq's best friend, Gloria (Reneltta Arluk), who in an effort to escape the nightmare existence of her own home life is seeking with this gesture to reconcile Piuyuq with her father Jako (Jonathan Fisher), who in addition to never having said goodbye to his father has also recently lost his wife in a tragic accident for which Piuyuq blames him.

Needless to say, the happy and harmonious repatriation ceremony Daniella imagined does not come to pass, and the differently situated good intentions of the outsider anthropologist and the insider best friend lead to a spiralling set of recriminations that inevitably ends in tragedy. And yet the play eschews both empty pathos and easy solutions, prompting hard questions about what it means for southern Canadians to give up their paternalistic attitudes about life in the north (and what, instead, might replace those attitudes), as well as what it means for Indigenous northerners not to get buried under the weight of an inherited victimhood. This mutually reinforcing dialectic was brought out in the talkback following the performance, in which Ayalik talked about the youth suicide rate in Nunuvut (40 times the national average) alongside the ongoing cultural vibrancy of the community.

As compelling as Night is in terms of content, its formal construction and design elements also merit comment. At a tight 75 minutes, the play's action never flags, something aided immeasurably by the movement-based transitions between scenes, just one aspect of an overall physical score that enhances the text by tapping into a different, kinaesthetic quality of an audience's empathetic identification. Then, too, there is the amazing lighting design by Michelle Ramsay, that somehow manages to convey the light that, as again was alluded to in the talkback, is always a part of the arctic dark. Couple this with an immersive soundscore by Lyon Smith and Gillian Gallow's simple yet symbolically suggestive set, and you have the ossuary bones (to come back to my opening metaphor) of all great theatre--which is always about what disappears. And what remains.

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Birds On a Wire

After a couple of productions that were somewhat conceptual and narrative in nature, it was nice to have a new piece from Peter Bingham and his EDAM dancers that was more physical and "classically" contact.

City of Crows, on at the Roundhouse through this evening as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival, begins with a trio. To live improvised music by Diane Labrosse, company members Delia Brett, Anne Cooper, and Monica Strehike begin individually with simple movements--bending at the knees, stretching arms out from the torso, jumping in place--before gathering each others' arms, and weight, and moving to the floor for the tumbling and rolling and shared structures of support that are a trademark of Bingham's choreography. At one point, with the three women stretched out on their stomachs, Brett pointed to a tiny spot on the floor. Cooper curled herself into a fetal position and moved into it; then Strehike did the same, only this time placing her body on top of Cooper's, followed, of course, by Brett. In another memorable moment, the women form a vertical line upstage right, swaying their upper bodies left to right in counterpoint, and then their heads forwards and backwards, as if balancing on a tree branch.

Following this opening (and a brief costume change), Brett, Cooper, and Strehike are joined on stage by Alana Gerecke, Farley Johansson, and Stacey Murchison, who sit downstage. Clad all in black, and with their heads just visible above the first rows of the audience, they look like birds on a wire, watching attentively like crows do, waiting for the moment when they will suddenly take flight. And fly the do, with Bingham's other signature--gravity-defying lifts--much in evidence in the partnering between Johansson and Gerecke and Murchison. All of this is accompanied by amazing black and white video images by Chris Randle; projected on a floor to ceiling screen, they create an added immersive sense of space that in several instances make it feel as if the birds are actually in the room with us.

The EDAM dancers are so engrossing to watch not simply because of how gorgeously they move, but also because they are clearly so comfortable with each other. There is an ease and familiarity in their movements, an understanding that when they torque this way, or leap that way, someone will be there with a limb or planar surface of their body for support. Which is in large part why I like watching Bingham's male partnering, especially when--as is the case here--it is practiced by the expert likes of Johansson and James Gnam, who joins the group from the stage left wings for the final sequence of the piece. In the playful toss and tumble that ensues (watched and eventually joined by Gerecke and Murchison), there is no competition or latent eroticism: it's just two guys showing us what their bodies can do when they agree to work together.

Like the way crows communicate and socialize, contact improv depends on collective intelligence and trust and mutual support. Having displayed theirs so compellingly in this piece, the EDAM company deservedly earns ours.

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Talking Turkey

It's a measure of my immense admiration for her work that Jan Derbyshire was able to lure me, on what was one of the most spectacular days we've had so far this summer, to a Saturday matinee performance of her newest play, Turkey in the Woods, on at the Roundhouse Community Centre through this Wednesday. Programmed as part of Vancouver's fifth annual Queer Arts Festival, in a co-production with Screaming Weenie Productions (through whom the play received an early development reading two years ago), the play focuses on Hale (in a drily mordant turn by the playwright herself), a manic-depressive recovering alcoholic lesbian. Did I mention it's a romantic comedy?

As the play opens, Hale has abandoned her long-suffering lover, Peach (Morgan Brayton), in Vancouver in order to join her mother (Suzie Payne) and her sister Lilah (Cherise Clarke) in the wilds of Alberta for a Thanksgiving weekend reunion meant to lay the ghosts of family dysfunction that have long haunted Hale to rest. However, those ghosts turn out to be as numerous as Ma’s compensatory white lies and as hearty as sister Lilah's liver (she, like everyone else in the family--including a father and brother we hear about but do not see--drinks to excess, though in her case she might actually have a legitimate reason in the degenerative spinal disease she may or may not be suffering from). As this description so far suggests, the first half of Turkey pushes the limits of family psychodrama to some absurd extremes, and Derbyshire is fearless in testing her audience's identification with her characters by a) burdening them with multiple neuroses, and b) making none of them terribly likeable. It's a credit to all of the performers that they give their all to the material, making these three women's simultaneous desire to connect and inability to overlook the obstacles to that connection seem absolutely real, no matter the surreality of their circumstances--including building a picnic table amidst the backdrop of hunters stalking wild turkeys for dinner (which seems as apt a metaphor as any for the unfinished business of self-discovery at the heart of this play).

My one complaint (besides the somewhat clunky and overly static blocking of director James Fagan Tait) is that, at present, the play’s structure feels a bit too skewed toward the biological family trio. We hear about Peach very early in the play, but we do not meet her physically until the last third of the 90 minute one-act, when she arrives, deus-ex-machina-like (in spike-healed boots, no less), to rescue Hale from the morass into which she has further enmeshed herself. But not before she forces Hale to reinvent herself (and the play) on the spot, casting off her abject self as a daughter and sister weighted down by the past and stepping boldly into her present role as romantic partner. It’s a tall order, but Brayton makes the most of what in less experienced playwriting hands might have been just a walk-on part. Trust me when I say that it’s not, and that the dramatic payoff is well worth the wait.

Which is where the kiss comes in, a kiss Derbyshire had talked about in press for the piece, and which absolutely delivers on her goal to serve up some girl-on-girl heat that would melt even your grandmother’s knees.

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PuSh 2012 Review #6: Looking for a Missing Employee at the Roundhouse

On September 25, 1996, a low-level bureaucrat in Lebanon's Ministry of Finance disappeared. Shortly thereafter there appeared a small item in one of Beirut's daily newspapers announcing this fact, and tying the disappearance to the loss of several billion Lebanese pounds from the coffers of the Ministry. A few days later the disappeared man's wife published an item denouncing the slander against her husband and appealing for information concerning his whereabouts. And so things continued for the next four months, with different newspapers tracking the story: quoting government sources and the disappeared man's family in equal measure; regularly reporting on the fluctuating amount of money stolen; implicating other individuals; linking the whole affair to a coincident scandal involving fraudulent stamps; and gradually revealing the depths of corruption within several other ministries.

Following every twist and turn in the story was Lebanese performance artist Rabih Mroué, who clipped related items from three different newspapers and pasted them into notebooks. Mroué has brought these notebooks with him to the PuSh Festival (in a performance co-presented with the Grunt and Contemporary Art Galleries), and out of this textual archive he weaves a Kafkaesque tale (and, yes, there is at one point a reference to a Josef K.) of deception, innuendo, and rumour that is as intriguing for how it is presented as for what it says. Indeed, because Mroué reconstructs the story of the missing employee entirely from published newspaper accounts that are two decades old, and for an international audience that would in large part be significantly removed--not just temporally and geographically, but also culturally and politically--from their import, drama and suspense must be created via their re-presentation and remediation. To that end, the notebooks of clipped and pasted newspaper articles are projected onto a screen via an overhead camera, with Mroué flipping through them and summarizing their content in largely chronological order, occasionally offering a comic aside or barbed comment on the contradictions contained within them, but for the most part literally letting them speak for themselves.

Except, of course, that it is Mroué doing the speaking, acting as our medium by translating the accounts from Arabic into English, and by helping to place the specifics of the missing employee's story in the larger political and cultural context not just of Lebanon, but of the entire Middle East region (the various reports of the employee having absconded to either Egypt or Syria or the no-man's land between Lebanon and Israel offer an occasion for Mroué to make oblique references to both present and past conflicts). Moreover, the spectral quality of Mroué's second-hand reportage is further enhanced by the fact that he does not sit, à la Spalding Gray (with whom he has justly been compared), at the empty table and chair positioned centre stage to tell us his tale, but rather among us in the audience, with his image then projected onto a small screen just behind the chair. It's an eerie and uncanny effect: Mroué is at once materially among us, re-discovering and in effect co-creating the story of the missing employee with us; at the same time, he is electronically and digitally removed from us, a virtual Big Brother governing how we receive the story. And, in this regard, the careful spectator starts to observe how Mroué at various moments chooses to edit the newspapers' own editing of the story, saying he is at loss for how to translate some of the Arabic phrasings, deciding not to convey the content of some of the articles at all, going back and forth between different newspapers at strategic moments, and censoring some of the accompanying photographs from our view.

How, in the end, can we know what is true and what is a lie? This is in fact the question put to us at the start of the show by Ghassan Halawani, the visual artist who is Mroué's performance collaborator. Like Mroué, Halawani sits among us in the audience, but with blank sheets of bristol board in front of him, and upon which he first writes a couple of epigraphs (including the one about truth and lies being only a hair's breadth apart) and then attempts to construct the timeline and order the facts of the missing employee's story. By the end of Mroué's spoken account of that story, Halawani's visual record is a mess of scratched out names, competing figures, and cancelled possibilities, its inadequacy as a final explanation for what happened underscored (or overwritten?) by the water that Halawani squirts upon the board at the end, blurring the different colour-coded jottings into a hopeless jumble.

As for Mroué, after he finishes recounting the missing employee's story, he continues to stare at us from the small centre-stage screen--even after the house lights come up, even after he receives a smattering of applause, even as the audience gets up to leave. It's a challenge that makes us uncomfortable, maybe because it implicates us in the double violence done to the employee (real and textual), maybe because it refuses us the closure promised by the last of the recited newspaper items. As Mroué's witty, complex, and ultimately chilling piece shows, there is always more than one story to be told.

Looking for a Missing Employee continues at the Roundhouse through this Saturday; a talkback with the artist moderated by Vanessa Kwan follows this evening's performance.

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