PuSh 2013: Sometimes I Think I Can See You

Following a delightful lunch and conversation with A Crack in Everything creators Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey (who graciously agreed to talk to my Dance-Theatre class about their work), the three of us walked to the Vancouver Public Library to check out two of the pieces (or 1 1/2, really) that make up the 2103 PuSh Festival's "Fiction(s) Series."

Unfortunately, all of the "books" in the Human Library had been checked out for the day. And so we contented ourselves with lingering in the VPL's public concourse watching text unfurl on giant television screens as two local writers equipped with laptops spun spontaneous prose out of what they were witnessing. The brainchild of PuSh Festival favourite Mariano Pensotti (La Marea in 2011, El pasado es un animal grotesco in 2012), Sometimes I Think I Can See You gives new meaning to the digital book, transforming the act of writing into a visual performance, and asking what it means to read privately in public spaces, where any moment we might become a character in someone else's narrative.

I did not stay for very long, though long enough to say hello to Mariano (who was running between the VPL and the Vancouver Art Gallery, site of the work's other public outpost), and to witness one utterly beguiling moment. One of the authors (who, I confess, I did not recognize), in a J.M. Barrie moment of make-believe making belief, asked her readers to clap--at which point a group of Asian language students who had been following the text burst into spontaneous and enthusiastic applause.

A PuSh moment if ever there was one.

P.

PuSh 2013: A Crack in Everything

After our opening Gala at Club 560 on Monday night, the 2013 PuSh Festival officially launched last night at SFU Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Theatre with zoe/juniper’s A Crack in Everything. In keeping with discussions I’ve been having with students in my Critical Writing in the Arts class this semester—and in part as a necessary mechanism of time-management—I’m going to keep my PuSh reviews short this year, and consequently tilted more toward descriptive and experiential rather than interpretive analysis.

Appropriate, therefore, that A Crack is such a sensorially rich and immersive piece, starting with Juniper Shuey’s video projections, which convey a porosity, a liquid viscosity, in keeping with the shiny white vinyl covering the floor of the stage. At times, especially in those moments when the equally stunning musical score (which combines well-known lieder and opera arias by Schubert and Purcell with original electro-acoustic compositions by Greg Haines) is stilled, and the dancers slowly take each other’s hands and then step and pivot in duos and trios in Zoe Scofield’s unique take on courtly dance, it’s as if the dancers are floating on a cloud, or (and here the title of the piece may be relevant) negotiating the slippery surface of a lake that’s not quite frozen. But the fact that we hear in these same moments the sticky sound of the dancers’ steps, along with the effort of their breathing, means that they are also one with that surface, and elsewhere Scofield exploits this in her choreography by using the floor like a trampoline or a sponge, launching her dancers vertically or sinking them horizontally into complex patterns of unison movement.

All of which is to say that for me the sense most triggered by this show was touch. From that porous vinyl floor, to the layers of opaque, sheer, and transparent scrims and screens (including one onto which Scofield traces the outline of her body in red marker), to perhaps the evening’s most stunning image—that of the dancers moving with lengths of red thread in their mouths: tactility was my way into this arresting and complex work.

P.