PuSh 2013: Jan Derbyshire

Stand-up comedy is a deadly business: it's either kill or be killed. Those instincts, when mapped onto gender, can produce some additionally toxic results, both in the plethora of misogynistic jokes about women that are the staple of many male comics' routines and in the equally misogynistic belief (prominently upheld in 2007 in the pages of Vanity Fair by the late Christopher Hitchens) that women simply aren't funny. Fortunately, local comic, playwright and multi-media artist Jan Derbyshire puts the lie to both types of character assassination, proving that women can be riotously funny, especially about men.

In her most recent comic monologue, Stood, which premiered last night at Club PuSh, Derbyshire begins by playing with the killer tropes of stand-up, adopting a wise-guy accent, aggressively heckling the audience, and shooting out classic one-liners. But the heart of Derbyshire's comedy is personal storytelling, and after setting us up with all the comic "artifice" (including an amazing imitation of Carol Channing), she gently lets slip the mask, moving into a narrative about an epic road trip she took with her father--and the movie she would make of it--that is equal parts moving, politically savvy, and just plain hilarious.

That this narrative additionally involved the conscription of Club PuSh co-curator Tim Carlson in the role of Jan's father only added to the fun.

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PuSh 2013: Cinema Musica

In addition to their always brilliant playing, what I most admire about The Turning Point Ensemble is the thoughtfulness and adventurousness of their programming, which frequently involves crossing disciplines and commissioning bold new work. Both of these elements were on display yesterday in Cinema Musica, a "live conversation" between music and film that unfolded at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, as part of the PuSh Festival.

As conductor and Co-Artistic Director Owen Underhill announced in his curtain speech, the program involved some "epic" technical demands. That said, the afternoon opened simply, with the only work not involving live musicians. Stan Brakhage's "..." Reel 5 (1998) is a hand-painted 16 mm film edited to composer James Tenney's Flocking, a work for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. While Brakhage's films are often silent, in this case the slightly dissonant call-and-response between the pianos enriches the dialogue between the two dominant visual styles of the film, which moves between images that alternately put me in mind of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Mark Rothko's multiforms.

By contrast, it was Paul Klee who came to mind in watching the piece that followed. Chromo Concerto (2007), a collaboration between composer Michael Oesterle and animator Chris Hinton, brought Underhill and a chamber-size portion of his musicians on stage, and featured a gorgeous piano solo by Chris Morano that added a different kind of tonal colour to the simple circle and line drawings by Hinton. This portion of the program concluded with Regen (1929), an early silent "city symphony" film by Joris Ivens for which Hans Eisler wrote a live score some 12 years later. Turning Point has been "instrumental" in researching the correct synchronization of sound and image, and yesterday the results were truly beguiling.

Following the first intermission was the world premiere of Good Night Vision (2013), a collaboration between visual artist Judy Radul and Turning Point that featured live and prerecorded video and performance. The piece begins with actor Aryo Khakpour commenting on a series of YouTube clips featuring thermal cameras (which operate on heat rather than light to produce their images), before noting the coincidence that the composer Ferruccio Busoni and the filmmaker Billy Wilder happened to live in the same Berlin apartment complex (though not at the same time). This, then, is the jumping off point for Radul's theoretical ruminations on film and death, music and elegy, turning two thermal cameras of her own on the Turning Point musicians as they play Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque, the ensemble's heat producing the equivalent of a negative film image.

Next up was Stan Douglas's Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C. (1993), a video installation that was originally accompanied by a computer-controlled piano playing an adaptation of Arnold Schönberg's Begleitmusik. For this screening of the film, a mash-up of early silent and film noir aesthetics that also serves as an oblique commentary on racial and environmental politics, Turning Point performed a chamber version of the score by Schönberg, who for many years tried and failed to write music for Hollywood cinema.

Finally, the afternoon concluded with another world premiere, François Houle's Suspense (2013), a rumination on the great symphonic film scores from the 1940s that was counterpointed--visually and sonically--with stop-motion images of various members of the Turning Point Ensemble projected onto a rear projection screen. Additionally, projected onto a white scrim at the front of the stage were images of gymnasts flying through the air captured with high-speed cameras by American video artists David and Hin-Jin Hodge. Visually this was all very stunning, but I'm not sure in this case the suspense created by the images went with that evoked by the music.

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PuSh 2013: Cédric Andrieux

Cédric Andrieux, on at The Dance Centre through Sunday as part of the PuSh Festival, is the latest in the series of dance portraits that Jérôme Bel (whose The Show Must Go On launched the 2010 PuSh Festival) has created in collaboration with and focusing on the lives of preeminent dancers working across a range of styles and techniques: Véronique Doisneau, a member of the corps de ballet of the Paris Opéra Ballet; Isabel Torres, prima ballerina of the Teatro Municpal do Rio de Janeiro; Pichet Kluchun, a Thai classical dance artist; Lutz Förster, longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal; and Andrieux, a contemporary dancer who for eight rigorous years danced under the recumbent but watchful eye of Merce Cunningham. Combining dance excerpts with autobiographical storytelling, these works, in Bel’s words, “mark the place where the life of an individual intersects the history of dance.” Part of that temporal marking comes from the use of first person address to the audience, speech in this instance stripping away dance’s conceit of technical virtuosity by contextualizing the time and labour that go into choreographed movement’s “timeless” execution, and in the process revealing the person behind the dancer.

And, in that respect alone, Andrieux is utterly charming. Walking onstage in sweats and toting a gym bag, he proceeds to tell us how, as a boy growing up in Brest, he fell in love with dance while watching the television series Fame. Encouraged by his mother, a fan of contemporary dance, Andrieux soon enrolls in the local dance studio, where he is immediately told that, given his body and meager talents, his prospects are not great, but that the experience will be good for his “development.” This is the first instance of Andrieux defying his critics, and soon he auditions for and is accepted into the Conservatoire in Paris, eventually graduating at the top of his class, and demonstrating for us the solo by Philippe Tréhet, Nuit Fragile, that he performed for his exam. All of this is told to us in a voice at once deadpan, brutally self-honest, and utterly sincere, with Andrieux communicating his deeply felt love of dance, but also acknowledging his own technical limitations. Not to mention the additional off-stage exigencies of the dancer’s life, which include moving to New York for love and, once accepted into Cunningham’s company, dealing with the daily tedium of maestro Merce’s unvarying routine of warm-up exercises.

The sections dealing with Cunningham form the core of Andrieux’s narrative, and open up an amazing insider perspective on one of the giants of modern dance, including what it meant to take direction from an octogenarian who composed his works on a computer and barked instructions from a chair, the humiliation of wearing Cunningham’s trademark unitards, and the music that was always an afterthought for choreographer and performers, but that caused Andrieux’s grandmother, watching and listening in the audience, such physical and emotional distress. In recalling this seminal period of his career, Andrieux makes it clear that he has the utmost respect and admiration for Cunningham as an artist. But he also lets us know—and, indeed, demonstrates for us physically in excerpts from Biped and Suite for 5—that much of Cunningham’s movement was next to impossible to perform, and extremely taxing on the body.

Which makes all the more joyful the conclusion to the evening, when, back in France with new boyfriend Douglas, Andrieux conveys the sense of liberation he felt in dancing works by Trisha Brown and Bel as part of the repertoire of the Lyon Opera Ballet, as well as the chance meeting with Bel on a train that led to their collaboration on this piece, and to the credo that forms its heart: to move without judgment.

Added bonus: following tonight's performance, I get to lead a talkback with the artist.

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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.

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PuSh 2013: Hawksley Workman

I confess that I'm probably the only person in Canada who was not familiar with the singular musical talents of Hawksley Workman. But after last night's performance of his latest cabaret act-cum-live concept album, The God that Comes, at the opening of Club PuSh I am definitely a convert to ecstatic worship of his genius.

The God that Comes, a collaboration between Workman and 2b theatre's Christian Barry, is a one man rock opera based on Euripedes' Bacchae. Workman plays all the instruments--including drums, keyboards, guitar, ukulele, and harmonica--and sings the three main roles of Dionysus, Pentheus, and Agave. An amazing instrumentalist, Workman also has a rich and theatrical voice (think Tom Waits, but up an octave or three), making him an intensely charismatic performer. He's also a perceptive reader of Greek tragedy, bringing out in canny and contemporary ways the genre's links between police states, family dysfunction, and gender dysphoria. As Workman sings, love is hard, surrender even harder: which is maybe why, for the Greeks, a mother and son inevitably end up in bed together, the one holding the other's severed head.

The God that Comes continues at Club PuSh tonight and tomorrow night. It's not to be missed.

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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.

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Atlantic Crossings

The sight and sounds of waves lapping against the shore. A woman in an Elizabethan ruff and a plastic body brace—a whale-bone corset? an exoskeleton?—who begins to move her arms and hips in slow, undulating circles as voice-over text in English and Catalan talks of the mixed histories bred into those bones. She is soon joined by two other women, both similarly attired. The three fates, perhaps, come to speak and sing and move us, along with period instruments like the alto gamba and the lute and the oud, back across the Atlantic, that middle passage whose various repertoires we all must re-cross—sometimes above deck, sometimes below—as we daily negotiate our dis-placed  identities in a globalized age that stretches back at least to Columbus.

So begins Henry Daniel’s Here Be Dragons/Non Plus Ultra, an interdisciplinary collaboration with composer Owen Underhill and dancers and musicians and performers from Barcelona and Vancouver, that, in Daniel’s words, explores “new architectures of memory and belonging, forever going east to find west and west to find east.” Its final performance is tonight at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward’s. If you are looking for an immersive sensory experience, one whose various acoustic, visual, and kinesthetic stimuli will also fire your brain, then this is the performance for you. And, apropos my Critical Writing in the Arts course, it’s the perfect barca, or vehicle, for descriptive and interpretive analysis.

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