PuSh 2012 Review #7: Guided Tour at the Vancouver Art Gallery

Anyone who saw City of Dreams at last year's PuSh Festival knows of UK artist Peter Reder's uncanny ability to reveal a city anew to its residents. In that piece the pleasure of rediscovery was facilitated by the creation of an evolving historical and geographical map of Vancouver on the floor of the Roundhouse using a succession of everyday objects and found artifacts. This year Reder is back with Guided Tour, a site-specific work co-presented with Boca Del Lupo and the Vancouver Art Gallery that transports an audience of 30 after hours through the hidden corridors of the latter institution.

The fact that Reder first premiered this piece at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005, and has since toured it to different galleries, museums and auditoriums in Russia, Romania, Singapore, Spain, and the United States should clue us in to the fact that, as our guide, Reder is not particularly interested in revealing the complete history and design of a building about which many of us in the audience know as much, if not more, than him. And, indeed, when at the start of last night's 9 pm tour, while we were standing in the magnificent first floor rotunda, one man asked a question about the concrete construction, Reder happily admitted that he hadn't the faintest idea what the answer might be. This is not to say that Reder hasn't done his research, delving into the building's origins as a courthouse and discussing with some authority its architectural conversion into an art gallery in the 1980s by Arthur Erickson.

But he is also up front in telling us that, as far as he has been able to determine, that's all the history there is to the place, just two layers: its present use and its past heritage. The competing dialectic between these temporal and spatial poles, and between which is real and which ersatz (the preserved courtroom that's now used as a film set or the representations of representations on the gallery walls?), obscures all of the sedimented layers in between, piling them up like rubble before the leaden feet of Walter Benjamin's recording angel. We actually meet that angel at the end of the tour: deep in the bowels of the building, among piles of crated art and empty display cases, she appears before us on a video, a sweet old granny wearing fluffy white wings, sipping tea, and reading Proust.

This is not the first juxtaposition of the two writers. Earlier in the tour, when we are shown into the gallery library, and someone in the group comments on the smell of old books, Reder launches into a discussion of Marcel biting into the tea-soaked madeleine in La Recherche, and the involuntary memories that come flooding back to him as a result. Afterwards, in the hallway outside, Reder pauses briefly to discuss Benjamin's angel of history being blown backwards into the future. And this, I would argue, is the more compelling dialectic at work in the piece: the juxtaposition of the violence of institutional history, which seeks not just to obliterate the past, but to re-purpose it, with the counter-narrative of personal memory, which always partially exceeds or escapes or resists aesthetic capture and exhibitionary display. How else to explain Reder's family slide show near the end of the tour, which far from containing his experiences within the gallery setting actually succeeds in taking us out of what we think that space should be for?

At the outset of the tour Reder informs us that in preparation he has been reading various "how to" guides on being a guide, and among other things learning various phrases to deploy on his audiences. The most important one, he tells us, is "follow me." And that, by the end of this intimate and revelatory piece, is precisely what we have done.

P.

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

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

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

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

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

P.