Wells Hill at SFU Woodward's

It's been almost three years since Richard and I saw the first excerpt of Vanessa Goodman's Wells Hill at the Chutzpah! Festival. We've been following the progress of the piece ever since and last night we joined a capacity audience at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre for the world premiere of the full length piece. In a unique partnership between DanceHouse, SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs and the School for the Contemporary Arts (of which Goodman is an alumna), Goodman and her creative team have been in residence at Woodward's this past summer, and then again for the past month and a half rehearsing in the actual Wong space. Including Thursday night's preview, the piece is getting four instead of the usual (for DanceHouse) two performances, and a whole suite of cognate discursive events relating to Goodman's subjects of Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould have been curated by Richard.

Vanessa also commissioned me to write an essay on the piece for its premiere, which you can find on her Action at a Distance company website. I won't repeat what I had to say there, and will instead concentrate on my experience of some of the changes and refinements to the work since I last experienced a run-through back in the summer. One of the biggest things I noticed was the tightening of the overall structure. Goodman has divided the work into two clear parts, which she sees as corresponding to our pre- and post-Internet ages. Both are marked by the appearance of talismanic glass icon in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. At the start of the show, as Lara Barclay performs a sinewy and graceful solo to one of Gould's Goldberg Variations, the curve and extension of her long limbs accentuated by the shimmery translucent shift designed for her by Diane Park, the rest of the ensemble stares blankly at the empty pyramid, which we might in this instance read as a stand in for a television set. The glass pyramid returns at the start of the second half of the piece, but this time projected into it is a holographic image of McLuhan talking about the effects of media, with the conceit of Goodman's dancers (and, to be sure, us in the audience) now staring into rather than at or through the glass container, combined with McLuhan's quasi-3D animation, signalling the more immersive and interactive media environment heralded by the advent of the Internet. That this shift has both connected us and atomized us in unprecedented ways as social beings is wonderfully brought out in the conclusion to the piece. Structurally we are returned to the beginning with the musical reprise of Gould's solo piano refrain. This time, however, while five of the dancers sit downstage right, Bevin Poole and Bynh Ho perform a soft and slow duet that in its fluidity and seeming bonelessness recalls Barclay's opening solo. At the same time, the fact that Poole and Ho, dancing side by side and clearly responding to the directional force and energy of each other's movements, never touch leaves us to question how truly connected to each other we are in today's wired world.

As I say at greater length in my essay, Goodman's overall goal in making this piece has never been to explain or illustrate concepts from McLuhan and Gould through dance. Instead, she has taken what I've called the "'homely' coincidence" of growing up in the house once owned by McLuhan, and where the two men had lengthy conversations, to explore how dance, as an embodied medium, is contiguous with, rather than separate from, other kinds of media technologies. To this end, one of McLuhan's concepts that Goodman is most taken with is that media are themselves extensions of our bodies, even becoming part of our nervous systems to the extent that they act upon us as much as we act upon them (her example during last night's pre-show talk about our Pavlovian response to the buzzing or dinging of our various devices captures this best). In Wells Hill, Goodman explores this idea not just through the choreography, but also through the creation of a total media environment that feels uncannily immersive. That is, last night my own spectating body was not just stimulated by the sight of a twitchily hyper-kinetic Alexa Mardon buzzing about the stage like a computer cursor gone rogue as the rest of the group walks robotically this way or that; or by Arash Khakpour and Dario Dinuzzi breaking out of the latter formation to either throw themselves horizontally to the floor or shimmy vertically towards the ceiling; or even by the unexpected surprise of Karissa Barry, clad in an illuminated body suit of the sort worn for motion capture or digital character modelling in gaming and computer animation, pulsing and swaying on the other side of the footlights, right in front of the first row of the audience. My senses were also triggered by the throb of the respective sound compositions of Gabriel Saloman and Scott Morgan (Loscil), by the pixelated and increasingly accelerated wash of the projections designed by Goodman, Ben Didier and Milton Lim, and by the amazing lighting design by James Proudfoot, which uses the distinctive flash and jump in current that accompanies the turning on and off of flourescent tubes to terrific effect. In other words, despite its traditional proscenium staging, Wells Hill is a piece where the audience definitely feels part of the feedback loop of communication, in which the output from the stage most definitely affects our individual sensual experience, but in which the collective processing of that experience is likewise put back into the system of the show.

While this ideally describes the special interactive experience of any live performance, and while I cannot pretend to be unbiased about the merits of this show, I do believe that Wells Hill is that rare work where the abundant ideas informing its creation do not get in the way of its in-the-moment physical enjoyment. It is especially wonderful to see Goodman making this work here, drawing from the abundant talents of such gifted local dancers and designers. And now here's hoping it has a long and robust touring life.

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Dance Work/Work Dance at the Audain Gallery, SFU

By now there is a long tradition of dance in gallery and museum spaces. The Judson Church artist-choreographers pioneered this concept back in the 1960s. And, more recently, Ralph Lemon curated the series Some sweet day in 2012, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first Judson concert with a series at MoMA that paired works by founding Judson artists like Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay alongside pieces by a younger generation of choreographers, including Jerome Bel and Faustin Linyekula. (Hay's "Blues" created something of a minor scandal with its unexamined racial and gender politics, but that's another story.) Often, however, in jettisoning the concert stage, these artists merely re-erected the proscenium inside the gallery: whether seated on the floor in a storefront space in Soho in 1962 or on tiered chairs in the atrium of MoMA in 2012, the audience continues to be disciplined by the time-specificty of the traditional dance program (first this piece and then this piece, each followed by applause), and so is not encouraged to think very deeply about the relationship between the dance and the institutional politics of the exhibition space.

It is just this kind of thinking that dance artist Emmalena Fredriksson is trying to activate in Dance Work/Work Dance, which she has created in partial fulfillment of her MFA requirements in the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU, and which is on at the Audain Gallery at SFU Woodward's through this Saturday. Fredriksson has composed four durational pieces, each based on an improvisational looping score, which her roster of ten dancers (herself included) performs on a rotating basis over the course of the gallery's opening hours. The works are set in distinct yet proximate sections of the gallery's white cube, and apart from two drawings on the floor in the central exhibition space, a few found objects in one of the adjacent rooms, and a conceptualist map-cum-table of the dancers' scheduled rotations through each piece on the wall facing Hastings Street, no art objects per se are displayed. Visitors to the gallery must actively wander through the exhibition space in order to encounter each work, always aware that however absorbed we become in watching one piece, another is happening nearby--and aware as well that the longer we stay and watch each, the more texture they will gain (by virtue of the different dancers bringing their own distinct physicality and movement vocabulary, not to mention aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, to each score's set of instructions).

Add to this the fact that we are also watching our fellow spectators watching and that, depending on when and in what manner we enter the exhibition space, we might be wont to mistake a cluster of carefully posed and intent audience bodies as part of the work, and one begins to see just how complex Fredriksson's piece is. (It is not for nothing that one of the books included in the display case at the gallery's entrance is Jacques Ranciere's The Emancipated Spectator.) Shifting our disciplinary frames of reference by placing dance in a gallery setting, Fredriksson is asking us to rethink the ways we have been trained to receive dance as art (the "dance work" part of her title). But, in so doing, she is also confronting us very materially with the labour that goes into making dance dance--as both a noun and a verb. To "work dance" is to call on a repertory set of skills that are intuitive and deeply felt; that have a starting point in time and space but not necessarily any fixed end; that repeat but also respond to variation; that are unique and individual but also fit into a larger pattern. All of this is evident in the written scores Fredriksson has composed for and with her dancers (and which we are provided in the exhibition catalogue), and the cumulative effect of watching the execution of movement last night--both the moments of stillness and the moments of more accelerated energy--was what so often gets obfuscated in traditional concert dance, especially ballet: the time and effort that goes into making dance look timeless and effortless.

That goes for the audience as well. To do justice to the work of Fredriksson and her collaborators, we need to put a requisite amount of time and effort into working through all of the different kinds of dance that are going on, including our own. As Fredriksson writes in the catalogue, "To dance like no one is watching and everything is seen, to watch like no one is dancing and everything is dance."

P.

An empty house (full of air) at Pandora Park

Luciana D'Anunciacao is a multidisciplinary artist who works with video, sound, lighting, fabrics, textures, found objects and her own body to create immersive and deeply sensory durational performances and installations. She recently graduated with an MFA from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, and with the collective Dance Troupe Practice currently has a three-year artist residency with the Vancouver Parks Board, based out of the fieldhouse at Pandora Park, on the east side.

As part of the first phase of this residency, D'Anunciacao has collaborated with Carolina Bergonzoni to create a site-specific movement piece that takes place within the confined space of the fieldhouse, a kind of caretaker's cottage attached to the park. Actually, the work begins in an even more constricted and spatially delimited manner, with audience members clustered around the door to the cottage, watching as D'Anunciacao, standing upright, and Bergonzoni, squished horizontally along a low shelf, shift their limbs and redistribute their weight within the very shallow and narrow interior of the front closet. Restricting their movements even further are the large plastic pillows filled with air that the performers--both wearing matching pajama tops and bottoms--must work with and around. 

The air bags are intriguingly paradoxical props. On the one hand, they function as a further impediment to the mobility and presumed desire for extrication of the performers. At the same time, they serve as a protective buffer between their bodies and the hard surfaces and sharp edges of the space they are moving within. And it must be said, on this front, that D'Anunciacao and Bergonzoni are by no means cautious and delicate movers in this part of the piece, despite the physical restrictions placed upon them; I offered several empathetic winces for battered elbows and hips as both women flung themselves about with abandon. And yet, as much as the performers' costumes conjure the image of the air bags as comforting and pliably soft pillows, witnessing D'Anunciacao bury her face more than once within a well of plastic also brought to mind all those warnings one received as a kid about not putting plastic bags over your head. Here, another aspect of the air bags bears mentioning: the sound they make when the performers move with or against them. This reverberating acoustic echo was something that, from my own restricted viewing position, I came to anticipate and listen for as a reassurance that the performers were still in fact moving.

Eventually D'Anunciacao and Bergonzoni extricate themselves from the closet and bolt, along with their air bags, to two separate rooms at the back of the cottage. This is our cue to enter the performance space and take our seats within its tiny open kitchen. After a duet of opening and closing doors set to a bit of adapted text from a Brazilian writer, the final portion of the performance takes place in the kitchen. Retrieving two new air bags--one from the oven, the other from the fridge--D'Anunciacao and Bergonzoni roll with them across virtually every surface and into almost every nook and cranny in the room. This includes not just some inventive partnering on the floor, but also a sequence of amazing bodily juxtapositions involving the surfaces of appliances and countertops and the interiors of cabinets. Indeed, it was a compelling visual contrast to see D'Anunciacao, the taller of the two performers, maneuver her body along stove and counter tops, dipping her head into the sink while Bergonzoni, who is physically more compact, folded her limbs into the inside of the cabinet underneath. I wouldn't have been surprised, at that point, if they had gone on to change places by squeezing each of their bodies through the drain.

All of which speaks to how organically this piece was in tune with its site. I look forward to what else D'Aunciacao and her collective creates over the next three years.

P. 

New Aesthetics and the Vancouver Sublime

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

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

***

"Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cold War at SFU Woodward's

Toronto playwright Michael Hollingsworth's The History of the Village of Small Huts is a 21-play cycle on Canadian history from contact to Brian Mulroney. Each play has a cast of 25-30 and is composed of a series of short, tableau-like scenes that sometimes number in the hundreds, cumulatively animating a stretch of time that might span just a few years or several decades. In the process, we are introduced to the key political elites during the period, as well as various social others, Hollingsworth's exposing of the machinations within Canadian corridors of power always juxtaposed against a counter-history from below.

In the case of The Cold War, on through March 1st at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre in a Contemporary Arts mainstage theatre production directed by DD Kugler, this dialectic of history from above and history from below can be found in the alternating through-lines of the rise and fall of Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (a wonderful Kiki Al Rahmani, who captures the Chief's trademark voice perfectly) and the journey from domestic bliss to nightmare of housewife Mary Muffet (an affecting June Fukumura). Sold on the postwar dream of the suburban nuclear family, Mary's happiness begins to slide in inverse proportion to the number of household consumer items her neanderthal husband (just back from the war and now working on the Avro Arrow) buys her. Eventually she is committed to the psychiatric care of Dr. Ewan Cameron (a gleefully over-the-top Carmine Santavenere, with a spot-on Scottish accent), who infamously led CIA-funded experiments with LSD and sleep deprivation on scores of unsuspecting patients at McGill.

Add to all of this a rogue's gallery of spies (including Igor Gouzenko and Gerta Munsinger), RCMP surveillance operatives, beatniks, and four self-aggrandizing, power mad, or just plain mad Prime Ministers (Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent, Diefenbaker, and Lester B. Pearson), and you have the makings of a story that is all the more operatic because it's true. Not that Hollingsworth doesn't have his own ideological take on the proceedings--his portraits of Diefenbaker (the arch defender of Canadian sovereignty) and Pearson (portrayed as a politically grasping dupe of American interests) might strike many as surprisingly revisionist. But that's partly the point--to paint with broad political strokes in order to incite interest in and debate on a history most Canadians ignore.

The stylistic strokes are equally broad. As per the name of Hollingsworth and Co-Artistic Director Deanne Taylor's company, VideoCabaret, the plays in the Small Huts series are meant to be presented on a framed black-box stage that resembles a TV set. A succession of tight spots illuminate the characters within any given scene in a montage-like sequence, with the acting largely presentational and  pantomimic. That is, dialogue is spoken out to the audience and the wonderful student actors--in white face paint and sporting a succession of false mustaches and wigs--contort their faces into exaggerated masks and plant or shimmy their bodies in commedia-like poses that immediately telegraph their roles to the audience. It's the perfect form for Hollingsworth's caustic wit and satiric commentary and this production captures it all with exuberant panache.

P.

PuSh 2014: Inheritor Album

605 Collective's Inheritor Album, on at the Dance Centre in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival through tomorrow, opens with a stunning movement image. As six dancers begin running clockwise in a circle, a light projection on the floor reveals a spinning 78" record (the gorgeous animations used throughout the piece are by Miwa Matreyek). The dancers take turns tagging and pushing off each other, until one of them breaks away and begins running the other way. It's an apt metaphor for the intersection of collective versus individual identity that is at the heart of the concept of inheritance (familial, cultural, artistic) and the musical concept album, which though loosely united around a general idea or theme always has one or two breakout songs.

But, as my SFU Contemporary Arts colleague Rob Kitsos pointed out in the talkback following last night's performance, the opening also speaks to the nature of hip hop as a dance style, structured as it is around the idea of a "crew" who are all grooving in a circle to the same beats, but who also challenge and egg each other on with individual displays of virtuosic B-boy freestyling. There are plenty of those moments in this performance, but what I love about the 605 Collective is they are also not afraid of unison. In Inheritor Album audiences get some of the best contemporary group movement they'll see on any dance stage, not least in its seamless fusing of choreographic styles and training.

The six performers talked about their eclectic and varied dance training during the talkback, and how most of it--with the possible exception of tap--was reflected in some way or another in the piece. Core 605 members Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley also talked about reconstructing the work in less than a month on three new dancers (Hayden Fong, Waldean Nelson, and Renée Sigouin; the sixth dancer is Laura Avery, part of the original production last year along with Shay Kuebler, Justine Chambers, and David Raymond). To start, the main challenge is just teaching and learning the movement in such a short amount of time; however, once that movement was in the new dancers' bodies, Martin was able to work with them to adapt it to their own particular improvisational strengths.

And by such methods one builds a crew.

P.

Drawing Inside and Outside the Lines at EDAM

EDAM's fall mixed program, inside the lines/the lines inside, was just the kind of treat that was needed on a rainy evening following Halloween.

Artistic Director Peter Bingham started things off with Reinventing the Curve, a new contact duet danced by Monica Strehlke and Farley Johansson. The piece begins with Strehlke closing her eyes and Johanssson whispering her name; Strehlke leans into the call, and this becomes the mechanism for a solo exploration of the body moving through space, with Strehlke guided only by Marc Stewart's music and Johannson's beckoning signposting. Eventually Strehlke comes to a stop and the sequence is repeated, this time with Johansson closing his eyes and Strehlke serving as guide. Physical contact is, however, eventually made by the two dancers, with two sequences of inventive partnering featuring great floor (and wall) work especially standing out. In between, Bingham also includes a long stretch of unison movement--unusual for him, but structurally very effective in this piece.

Next up was New Raw, a piece created and performed by Deanna Peters in collaboration with Molly McDermott, Elissa Hanson, and Alexa Mardon. It's a fierce exploration of grrrlness that uses an eclectic musical score and a range of bodily tempos and rhythms to show a spectrum of female "fronts." Of particular interest in that respect was that all four performers are introduced to us with their faces turned away or obscured. By the end of the piece, however, as they move back and forth between upstage and downstage, showing us just how fully in their bodies they are, they are very much in our faces, and the piece builds to a thrilling climax.

The final piece on the program was my colleague Rob Kitsos's Con-found, an experiment in real-time composition created in collaboration with students and alumni from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts. Losing things--wallets on rollercoasters, phone numbers, one's memory--becomes the thematic refrain around which the performers build a series of movement, textual, and musical phrases, choosing when and how to build the work as a whole in the moment of performance itself. The text may, at times, have dominated the movement, and sometimes transitions were lost in the confusion of bodies criss-crossing the stage; however, there were also sublime moments of supplementation and synchronicity, when the repetition or steady accretion of a simple gesture (hands fluttering before chests) and the arrangement of bodies on stage (in horizontal or vertical lines, in aligned pairs on the floor or against a wall) were starkly beautiful.

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PSi 19 Day 3

Performance is hard work, especially in the heat currently enveloping the Bay Area. Nevertheless, we soldier on. Highlights from Day 3 at PSi 19:

1. A great panel on performance and food featuring former student Ted Whittall, who has a fantastic career ahead of him.

2. Lunch with former Vancouver colleague Jisha Menon, now at Stanford, and just returned from a sabbatical in Bangalore to jump back into the fray of helping to manage a conference of this scale.

3. A plenary panel between Thomas Richards, of the Growtowski Workcenter, and Daphne Brooks, from Princeton, on race, the body, and the dynamic range between sonic resonance and sonic dissidence. Though both had amazingly insightful things to say (particularly Brooks on Sarah Vaughn's interpretation of Summertime), this second "plenary dialogue" proved that the format is so far not working. Here's hoping tomorrow's conversation between Peggy Phelan and Una Chaudhuri is just that--a conversation.

4. Hearing Shannon Jackson put performance/art's post-medium condition(s) in disciplinary perspective.

5. Witnessing Guillermo Gomez-Pena play with, occupy, and generally reimagine multiple borders at the Pigott Theatre, including the one that perhaps remains the most pernicious for performance: that of the proscenium (are you listening Ron Athey?).

6. Catching the beginnings of a durational piece--Wreckage Upon Wreckage--conceived and executed by a group of talented artists from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, including project lead Nancy Tam, Daniel O'Shea, Sean Marshall Jr., and Finley Hyde.

SFU MFA candidate Didier Morelli (and my TA from this past spring semester) was also participating in a performance praxis session this evening, but I was too bagged to make it (sorry Didier!).

Oh, and I also contributed an account of 10 minutes of my time spent at PSi to Spatula and Barcode's collective and cumulative Record of the Time we've all spent here--though in hindsight I think I may have got my designated entry time wrong!

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VAG Decision + SFU Visual Art Graduating Show

Finally!

Now that we've temporarily put the VAG soap-opera to rest, check out the future of visual art practice in this city by taking in I Need All the Friends I Can Get, the SFU Visual Art BFA Graduating Show, on at the Audain Gallery at SFU Woodward's until April 27th.

Among other things, it features the work of six of my students from FPA 319W--all amazingly talented.

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Artful Art Song at SFU

Last night, amid the ongoing line-up of spring arts showcases featuring the work of our super-talented Contemporary Arts students at SFU Woodward's, it was the musicians' turn to shine.

As Professor David McIntyre (doing double duty as conductor for the evening) announced before the concert, at SFU the music program is focused exclusively on composition. There is no performance-training component. Instead, senior composition students benefit each year from collaborating with a stellar line-up of local guest artists, who are invited to interpret and offer feedback on the students' work. Additionally, students hone their skills by composing to a rotating set of instruments and forms, depending on who is teaching the course. This year the focus was on the art song tradition, with students invited to set existing text to music for piano (guest artist Tina Chang), viola (guest artist Marcus Takizawa), soprano voice (guest artist Heather Pawsey) and mezzo-soprano voice (guest artist Melanie Adams).

Six songs and one opera scene were presented and, with one exception, I was consistently amazed not just by the depth and intelligence of the compositions themselves, but also by the startlingly original choices in text. (The one exception, in this regard, was the rather cliched use of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as the text for Chris Lachowski's otherwise charming score.) Highlights included Maren Lisac's dramatic call and response setting of Shane Rhodes' found poem "as may have been grunted" (comprised of words taken from the transcript of Treaty 5 negotiated in 1875 between Queen Victoria and the First Nations of Northern Manitoba); JJ Hartmann's thematic explorations of temporal phrasing and duration in relation to Elee Gardiner's "Backstich," a poem about sewing; Clinton Ackerman's wise and witty staging of two arias based on a scene from Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets in which Joanne (Pawsey) asks Rhonda (Adams) to help her commit suicide like Ophelia (demonstrating, in the process, that Thompson is perhaps our most operatic of playwrights and that Lion in the Streets, her masterwork, is perhaps ripe for just such an adaptation); and Lee Cannon-Brown's gracefully spare and simple score for Robert Creeley's "Intervals," a poem that is itself about "identity singing."

Scott Jeffrey chose Canadian poet (and Globe and Mail reviewer) Fraser Sutherland's "In the Provinces" as the basis for his song, and in the dissonant play of the viola with the cascading harmonics of the piano brilliantly captured the mix of wit, irony, and social critique at work in the poem. Alex Mah, graduating this year, worked with Contemporary Arts film professor and award-winning poet Colin Browne, setting "Swan" (from Browne's recently published collection The Properties) in a way that not only evoked 1960s experiments in sound poetry, but that also highlighted the contemporary art song's debt to minimalism.

That specific artistic debt is something Alex and Scott have been educating me on in their final essays for my FPA 319W course ("Critical Writing in the Arts"), which, respectively, are on on the indie classical music label/collective Bedroom Community and its most famous art song composer, Nico Muhly. Both Alex and Scott write as crisply as they compose, and I wish them and all their colleagues much success in their future careers.

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War: Requiem at SFU Woodward's

Things are bustling at SFU Woodward's, where several year-end shows highlight the immense talent and creativity of Contemporary Arts students across the disciplines. Last night I got a chance to see the senior repertory dance students shine in War: Requiem, an intense, athletic, and visually stunning show overseen and co-created by Rob Kitsos, and featuring additional choreography by the 605 Collective, Shauna Elton, and Vanessa Goodman.

The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.

Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).

It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.

Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.

War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.

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Picnic at SFU Woodward's

William Inge's Picnic, recently revived on Broadway, is also the School for the Contemporary Arts' spring mainstage production at SFU Woodward's, directed by Bill Dow. The first thing you notice upon entering the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre is how Dow has radically reconfigured the playing space.

While the play is still technically staged proscenium-style, rather than using the well (and its hidden wings and flyspace) at the west end of the theatre normally reserved for such proceedings, Dow has shifted the axis 90 degrees, configuring his set horizontally along the south side wall, with its exposed brick, blond wood, and steel stairs leading to the balcony. This provides the perfect backdrop to Carmen Alatorre's stunning set, a see-through plywood and steel-framed scaffolding of the Potts and Owens houses, complete with swinging porch doors and a second-story window on the latter through which the men of the town spy upon local beauty Madge Owens (a quietly coiled Amanda Williamson). A row of chairs, in a range of mid-century styles, sits in the space behind and between the two houses; here members of the cast will take turns sitting when not on stage, watching the proceedings like a Greek chorus, their positioning opposite the audience providing a nice visual metaphor for the sense of enclosure, judgment, and stifling small-town surveillance felt by many of the characters in the play, not least the two Owens sisters (Kiki Al Rahmani plays the younger, bookish Millie with a perfect mixture of frustrated longing and youthful impatience). Finally, between the set and the audience risers is a long strip of astroturf, a picnic table positioned on it centre stage, between the two houses. Much of the action will take place on or around this table. But the green carpet also extends past the set, to the Wong Theatre's normal playing space. Which, we learn at the top of the play, is not empty; rather, it contains a grand piano. Here composer Janelle Reid will sit throughout the play, punctuating its action at key moments with soaring original musical arrangements of the poetry of Sappho, the perfect librettist of unfulfilled want (which, in fact, provides the play with its closing acapella refrain).

In his directorial notes, Dow says that he sees in Picnic shades of Euripides' Bacchae, with the drifter Hal Carter (a languid Sean Marshall Jr.) the sexy stranger who comes to town and unleashes in the womenfolk hitherto suppressed passions and desires. It's a persuasive reading, not least in terms of the play's strict adherence to the classical unities of time, space and action (the plot of Picnic unfolds over the course of a single Labour Day). And the female members of the cast, most playing well above their actual ages, are collectively superb in capturing the desperation and resentment that festers in women (young and old) suffocating--in different ways--under the oppressiveness of 1950s gender conventions. (Likewise, the men in the cast together embody a social obtuseness to this oppression, which they ignore at their own peril--as the bachelor Howard Bevans, played with just the right mixture of confounded humour by the lanky Jesse Meredith, discovers when he finds himself suddenly engaged to the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney [a terrific Keely O'Brien].)

And yet this production is by no means a period piece. In preparation for attending it, Richard and I recently rented the 1955 film, starring William Holden and Kim Stanley. It seemed hopelessly dated, and watching a rather long-in-the-tooth Holden spout all those "Hey baby's" was positively cringe-worthy. But under the able direction of Dow, this young cast finds their characters' inner core of "want," and in the process they make this play exciting and new.

Picnic has one more performance tonight, at 8 pm.

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Picturing Motion

Every year the dance students in Contemporary Arts at SFU curate and produce a mixed program showcasing their original choreography, and featuring the performance and design talents of their peers. This year's program, entitled Motion, Picture, was put together under the artistic directorship of Robert Azevedo and Heather Lamoureux, and has one more performance this evening in Studio D at SFU Woodward's.

Here's what I noticed last night:

• Opposite-sex partnering that was heavy on romantic longing and bittersweet partings.

• Same-sex partnering that, albeit in very different ways, grappled with questions of doubling and the connections between self and other.

• A noticeable emphasis on gestural vocabularies that were variously conspiratorial, confessional, and confrontational.

• Ensemble work that mixed serial unison in tight bodily massings with repetition of random individual phrasings scattered about the stage.

• Some startling multi-directional lighting effects, including diagonal corridors, dappled washes from the side, and one rock star back light.

• Double endings: once with music, once without.

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10 Lies and a Truth

A quick shout-out to the program of SFU Contemporary Arts student directing projects on now through December 1st at Studio T, SFU Woodward's. Grouped under the collective title 10 Lies and a Truth, these 11 short works showcase the talents of the next generation of Vancouver theatre artists, giving senior students in the Theatre Program a chance to helm their own production.

Last night's pairing of one-acts featured two absurdist works of political theatre from the 1960s. The first was Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek's Striptease, about two similarly attired men trapped in a room, and forced to answer to a giant prosthetic hand. Director Sarah Bernstein handles the mix of humour and critique within Mrozek's irony with a sure touch, balancing physical whimsy with respect for the rhythms--linguistic and ideological--of the characters' speechifying. And lead performers Robert Andow and Marc Castellini have great chemistry.

Next up was Chilean playwright Jorge Diaz's Love Yourself Above All Others, a biting satire about class-consciousness whose central conceit is that the aristocrats--Carmine Santavenere as The Gentleman and Sharon Ramirez as The Lady--ride their servants--Kiki Al Rahmani as Placida and Wesley Rogers as Epifanio--like animals, all the while spouting rhetorically empty maxims about revolution and democracy. Layering on the Latin American stereotypes and iconography with wildly inventive theatricality, director Manuela Sosa creates a hot-house dance-musical (complete with breakout salsa steps and a climactic hip hop number) that doesn't let its knowing smirk get in the way of a clear-eyed presentation of some big ideas. Not the least of which are the representational and material inequities that continue to beset the relationship between the "West" and the "Global South." All the performers throw themselves into their parts with absolute abandon, and the entire piece is as visually and physically stunning as it is intellectually stimulating.

The Directing Projects continue tonight and tomorrow night at 8 pm, with offerings from Conor Wylie, Janelle Reid, and Sean Marshall, Jr.

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