PuSh 2016: Harold Budd at Club PuSh

This year the PuSh Festival has relocated Club PuSh, its cabaret venue and social hub, from Performance Works on Granville Island to the recently renovated Fox Cabaret on Main Street. Among other things, this means that Richard and I can now walk to the venue, whence we repaired last night to see Harold Budd. I confess that I did not know the work of this avant-garde American composer and poet until Richard introduced me to his work upon seeing his name listed in this year's festival line-up. That said, anyone who is a fan of contemporary electronic music will have heard Budd's "ambient influence." Suffice to say that there would be no Moby without Harold Budd.

Having grown up in the Mojave desert, Budd's sound is at once spare and lush, coloured with layered melodies that on Budd's synthesizer wash over one like a time-lapse of shifting cloudscapes in the sky. Knowing we didn't need to see the stage to experience last night's standing room-only performance, Richard and I chose to grab a table in the Fox's intimate balcony lounge. There, at the back and uppermost reaches of the house, the notes of Budd and fellow keyboardist Bradford Ellis merged and dissolved in a sensory experience of sound diffusion that might have been indistinguishable from an acousmatic music presentation but for the fact that Club PuSh co-curator and local singer/songwriter/spoken word artist Veda Hille was also intoning excerpts from Budd's most recent collection of poetry, Aurora Tears. Hille's timing and delivery (holding on to a sibilant "s" here to extend a feeling of regret, punctuating a line there as a guard against such sentiment) reminded one that this performance was resolutely embodied, from the trademark "softness" of Budd's foot on his keyboard pedal, to Hille's exhalation of breath as she spoke her lines, to the hushed stillness of the entire audience as we soaked in from every open pore all that we were hearing.

Indeed, I was reminded just how much listening is a whole body experience when Richard and I both jolted forward in our seats in a simultaneous moment of recognition at Hille's reciting of a specific geographical locale embedded in Budd's poetry: Castellain Road, Maida Vale, London. Our good friend Cathy lives on that street, one we've traversed often, and one of whose intersecting byways (Pindock Mews) we've likewise had the uncanny experience of hearing pronounced live in performance (in a production of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at the Young Vic in 2002, with Cathy in attendance). It's not often that the live event that so transports one imaginatively and affectively can also do so geographically, but for Richard and I we've now experienced just this kind of travel in and through performance twice.

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PuSh 2016: Jack Charles v. The Crown

Burglar, heroin addict, serial convict, potter, actor: these are just some of the identities Jack Charles has tried on during his lifetime, many of them simultaneously. In Jack Charles v. The Crown, brought to the PuSh Festival by Australia's Ilbijerri Theatre Company, and playing at SFU Woodward's Wong Theatre through this evening, we hear directly from the man himself as he dispassionately--and with an abundance of humour and grace--states rather than pleads his case before us and an implied, but no less omnipotently disciplining, state apparatus.

Accompanied by a three-man backing band, Uncle Jack, who has appeared in films ranging from Fred Schepsi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith to the recent Hugh Jackman blockbuster Pan, and who founded Australia's first Aboriginal theatre company in 1972, tells us what it was like to grow up as a member of Australia's Stolen Generation. Like thousands of other Aboriginal children born in the 1940s and 50s, Jack was forcibly removed from his family and reserve and raised a ward of the state in a religious-run institution (the equivalent of Canada's residential schools, which Jack cited as a direct parallel in one of his many local asides during the evening). Surviving physical and sexual abuse, and growing up with virtually no knowledge of his immediate family and ancestors, Jack forged a successful career as a singer and actor. Parallel to this, he was robbing homes in wealthy enclaves of Melbourne in order to finance a growing heroin addiction.

The story Jack tells is loosely structured around the revolving door of his incarcerations, one that replaced his name with a number: 3944. At first being "in the nick" isn't so bad; it gets Jack off the street and it is there that he takes up pottery, moulding clay with his hands in a way that reconnects him with his ancestral territories, and also allowing him to pass on his skills to his fellow inmates. A potting wheel is actually a key part of this work's otherwise simple set; it sits upstage left, and at various moments over the course of the show's 75 minutes Jack sits at it and shapes a lumpy bit of clay into a bowl or vase. The moment in the play when, sitting at his wheel, Jack talks about the intimacy of sharing this act with one of his fellow convicts, their hands touching as together they work the clay, their hair and breath intermingling as they stand over the wheel, is intensely moving. Jack is a born storyteller, and he has both the life and the voice to match this vocation.

Another dramaturgical feature of the piece is the use of projections and video clips, most of them drawn from a 2009 film, Bastardy, documenting Jack's improbable life shooting smack (which we actually see), burgling homes, and treading the boards. When in that film (which screened as part of PuSh's film series this past Wednesday), Jack is confronted with the prospect of another long visit to the nick, one that will almost surely break him, he decides to go clean. With the success of the film, Jack becomes a celebrity and among the fan mail he begins to receive are notes and photographs that start to fill in the missing pieces of his stolen childhood. This gift of getting his life back in his late 60s is what in turn inspires Jack's climactic post hoc appeal to the invisible magistrates of Australia's highest court; if the temporal fallacy of colonialism can construct the land upon which Aboriginal peoples have been living for millennia as terra nullius, and can likewise read Jack's stolen black body as a blank canvas, a tabula rasa, upon which to rewrite his history, then why can't the judicial system begat by colonialism expunge the equally specious causality of his criminal record?

While for me the play had, overall, a bit too much talk, Jack's concluding speech before the courts is a moment of undeniable rhetorical power. Referencing both his great-grandfather's act of political protest and the Fanonian colonial psychosis that has marked white settler Australians as much as Aborigines, Jack names what has made him both the sum of and infinitely more than a criminal justice system's anonymizing numbers.

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PuSh 2016: Inked and Murmur

This year's PuSh International Performing Arts Festival got under way this week with performances of English dancer Aakash Odedra's Inked and Murmur, in a co-presentation with The Dance Centre, but staged at the Playhouse rather than the latter's familiar Davie Street space. I understand this was as much for technical reasons as presumably in hopes of attracting larger audiences (not to mention animating a civic space close to PuSh's new home). However, I'm not sure the new venue best served these two solo pieces. Especially during the dimly lit opening of the first work, Inked, it was hard from my vantage point in the twenty-third row to see Odedra's footwork, though as per the percussive rhythms of kathak, one could certainly hear it. Likewise, in Murmur when Odedra addresses the audience or counts out a bol (a succession of mnemonic syllables used to keep time in Indian classical dancing and music) it was sometimes hard to hear him. These two works, in their focus on cultural and personal identity through non-Western dance forms, and in their combining of movement with other theatrical expressions of storytelling, reminded me of Faustin Linyekula's Le Cargo, which played last year's PuSh Festival; the intimacy and proximity with the audience cultivated through the staging of Le Cargo at The Dance Centre was something I craved last night as I watched Odedra. The Playhouse is a terrific venue for large-scale dance works, as DanceHouse's seasons have consistently proved; but for a solo performer it can look a bit lonely up there.

At the same time, there were many wonderful and visually stunning moments during both of the pieces that make up this double bill. Inked, choreographed for Odedra by Damien Jalet, begins with a two dimensional cut-out silhouette of a human figure illuminated upstage right. Out of this trompe-l'oeil Odedra emerges, his feet rat-a-tatting on the floor as he slowly shifts and shimmies upstage centre in an arc of horizontal light. Eventually he falls to his knees centre stage in front of an ink pot, using its contents to tattoo both of his hands in black. Like magnets, the hands find each other and stay connected as Odedra begins a series of gorgeous arm waves, the fluidity of his upper limbs providing a kinetic contrast to the fixity of his lower ones, which are crossed one inside the other in a classic yoga pose. Thus contorted, Odedra proceeds to move across the stage on his knees, his hands never unclasping. The connection between the marked body and the marking of space becomes even more clear when around the now spilled pot of ink Odedra begins to draw a series of ever-widening circles on the white Marley with two pieces of black chalk, his hands extending above his head and then lowering as he rotates his back across the floor, almost like he's making snow angels. The piece concludes with Odedra, his body now covered in ink, fully vertical, launching himself into a series of faster and faster spins that is one of the signatures of kathak. From the fixed centre of the body, worlds expand and spiral.

Murmur, which Odedra has created in collaboration with the choreographer Lewis Major and the video developers Ars Electronica Futurelab, takes as its starting point the dancer's discovery, at age 21, that he is dyslexic. As he tells us at one point, with reference to his passport, how could he have lived so long not knowing that there were two "a's" at the beginning of his first name? The supplement to identity that is signalled by that extra letter is visually materialized for us when Odedra forms two capital A's with sheer white fabric on the stage floor, the ghostly ephemerality of the one's mirror image of the other encapsulated as much by the transparency of the fabric as by the ease with which Odedra later bundles up and wipes the letters away. Earlier these sheets had been suspended from the rafters, sheer scrims behind which Odedra had danced as projections tracked the outline left by his body in the manner of heat-detecting sensors. The piece concludes with Odedra dancing in a whirl of papers that have also descended from the rafters, but that are simultaneously being blown skyward by a series of fans encircling the stage. If, drawing from the first piece, Odedra's body is the inkwell, then these are the blank pages of creative inspiration and self-expression that at once await and already bear his imprint.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 2

Yesterday's meeting with Justine and Alexa at The Dance Centre was as meandering and cross-hatched with digressions as the network of dance-based connections in Vancouver that we are trying to map. We talked as much about Justine's dance history teacher at Ryerson and how she (Justine, that is) once hung upside down for 14 hours for David Bowie in LA as we did about how come Alexa and I never crossed paths in the English Department at SFU (mostly night classes in Victorian lit and creative writing on Alexa's part being the answer). But such conversations, along with those about who in the city has danced on cruise ships and the coincidence of bumping into Jay Hirabayashi's ex-wife on Vancouver Island, are precisely the affective weave we are trying to capture in some way in our otherwise documentary discourse of what happened when, where, and with whom--the registering of ordinary events and sedimented memories (a hug in a lobby, a coffee after class at Harbour Dance) that we measure not so much through their historical importance as their felt intensity. As Justine put it, we are seeking "the residue of what has happened in [Vancouver's dance] spaces, and how it still sits there."

Indeed, we're not interested in telling a definitive history of the last decade of dance in this city (with the authoritativeness of any such account being of the absolute least concern to all of us). Instead, we see ourselves opening up a window on how a community has constituted itself--and as much through social and interpersonal relationships as through dance training and technique. Of course, the whole point is that the former are inseparable from the latter, something that the dance scholar Judith Hamera has wonderfully demonstrated in her book on "dancing communities" in LA. Her ideas on the "relational infrastructure" and "mobile intimacies" engendered through dance training and performance and spectatorship (with touchstone moments for audience members also being a crucial part of our rhizomatic equation) will be a possible model for us.

That said, we did make some progress on an informal structure for our interview subjects. At present, we're thinking that it will in fact follow something of a who, what, when, where, why format: who you've trained with, danced for, danced with, created with; what work you've made/been in that's especially meaningful; when you arrived in the city and/or started dancing/making work here; and, to be sure, WHY VANCOUVER? But, again, the apparent forensic thrust of these questions isn't really the main point. We just want to get people talking and see where the narratives overlap--and diverge. Those interstices--who and what gathers in them--is what we're after.

Justine has sent out the first wave of interview requests, and the response has been quite positive. Stay tuned for further updates.

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My Year in Vancouver Dance (a review) + Vancouver Dance History, 2006-2016 (a preview)

Hard to believe that this time last year I was in the final stages of rehearsal for Le Grand Continental. The free outdoor performance on the plaza of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre--choreographed by Montreal's Sylvain Émard, programmed as part of the PuSh Festival, and featuring 70+ community dancers strutting their stuff--recently made Deborah Meyers' year-end Vancouver Sun list of top 2015 dance shows in the city. That was nice to see.

Who would have thought that the experience would go on to launch something of a parallel community site dance career, what with the Mountain View Summer Solstice and Wreck Beach Butoh experiences following in quick succession this past summer? Certainly if you'd said to me last January that I'd now be taking weekly class with Barbara Bourget, I'd have laughed in your face. Though, if we're pointing fingers, I should probably place much of the blame for all of this at the feet--quite literally--of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who has certainly spoiled me for thinking that dancing and laughing naturally go together. (Sorry Barbara!)

There were a lot of laughs yesterday on the sixth floor of The Dance Centre, where I gathered with Artistic Associate Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon to brainstorm a planned project on recent Vancouver dance history that Justine is spearheading as part of her two-year DC residency. Part living archive, part dance ethnography, part an exercise in kinaesthetic mapping and performance kinship, the collaboration is still in its very early stages. But the general idea is that the three of us will, over the next year or so, conduct video interviews with several of the city's leading dance artists in order to document the story of Vancouver dance over the past decade. Or I should say, stories. Because we are particularly keen not just to include as many voices as possible, but also to note where those voices converge and diverge on common anecdotes or topics of discussion, be they related to specific works, creation processes, tours, presenters, etc.

The temporal period we've imposed on the project coincides with Justine's arrival in the city, but also with something of a generational shift--or perhaps, more properly, supplement--in/to Vancouver dance practice, with many younger artists (several of them, like Justine, relocating to Vancouver from elsewhere) beginning to form companies and make new work and get noticed locally, nationally, and internationally. To be sure, we are also expecting that fissures will automatically open up in this timeline, with questions of aesthetic influence, and dance training, and performance collaboration and mentorship necessarily pointing backwards as much as forwards. We envision the process being rhizomatic rather than linear; as Justine put it yesterday, by the end of this we should have a constellated web of Vancouver dance-world connections in which there are zero degrees of separation between anyone.

Oh, and did I mention that all of this will culminate in a performance, and that I have agreed to participate in said performance? That part of it makes me a little sick to my stomach, not least as it will almost surely be at the Dance Centre in front of an audience made up of many of the artists whom we'll have interviewed. That's far in the future, though, and for now I can compartmentalize it in my mind as something comfortably abstract and on the distant horizon. However, I was relieved to hear from Justine and Alexa, both experienced performers, that they still want to throw up before most performances.

Watch this space--and possibly others--for updates on the progress of this project. My first task: to dig through the last decade of my collected programs.

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Saudade at SFU Woodward's

The more-than-human and the not-quite-human: for the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and the replicants in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, respectively, the non-anthropoid is not all it's cracked up to be. Notwithstanding the frailty and fallibility of human bodies and desires, Bruno Ganz's Damiel and Rutger Hauer's Roy long for a temporality, a dailiness to living, that is at once more quotidian and less absolute than the one they currently inhabit. Such is the starting point for my colleague Rob Kitsos' new interdisciplinary dance piece Saudade, on at SFU Woodward's Studio T through this Saturday. Taking both films as key sources of inspiration, Kitsos and his collaborators have crafted a performance that combines movement, text, sound, light, multimedia projections and, not least, a series of moveable screens in order to explore the mutability and the porousness of borders between different states of being, including what it only seems proper--both within the multi-modal and perceptually immersive context of this piece and the conceptual premises of each film--to call the sensory and the extra-sensory.

In addition to sharing a world-weary detective as protagonist, Wings of Desire and Blade Runner are also notable for the ways in which they showcase the experience of alienated urban living, with the overheard interior conversations of the Berliners in the former and the walls of flashing neon advertising that form the futuristic backdrop to the Los Angelenos in the latter speaking in their different ways to the frequent attenuation of meaningful and felt interpersonal relationships in big cities. It's appropriate, then, that Saudade begins with the projected image of a city skyline that fills the upstage wall dissolving into what looks like a molecular mass that gradually fills the stage floor (the media design is by Remy Siu). Into this space steps Alexa Mardon, our surrogate flȃneuse, who proceeds to walk in a grid-like pattern, the map she is making (or is the one she is following?) illuminated for her and us on the floor (the lighting is by Jaylene Pratt, in consultation with Kyla Gardiner). Mardon is dressed in grey, which in terms of the more or less monochromatic colour scheme of Lorraine Kitsos' costume design, positions her as between what I took to be Cody Cox and Erika Mitsuhashi's angels (they wear white) and Michael Kong and Felicia Lau's replicants (in shades of black). And, indeed, to the extent that Mardon's character is both a part of and separate from the other dancers at various points throughout the piece, it is possible to read her as a combination of Rachel from Blade Runner and Marion from Wings of Desire, both of whom in their different ways hover between worlds (including as love objects).

Not that Kitsos' goal is to slavishly reproduce scenes or narrative tropes from each film. To be sure, the screens are effectively used throughout to convey the different insides and outsides of the various worlds being conjured (from the geometric to the kinaesthetic to the sonic), as well as the permeability of those worlds--as when, for example, Mitsuhashi leans her ear towards one of them to hear what we can see is happening just behind it. There is also an intensely physical scene in which Kong thrashes about on the floor downstage in a manner that recalls the painfully violent death of Pris, an interesting bit of cross-gender transference. However, for me the choreography was most captivating in those moments of almost- or shadow-partnering, when one of the dancers is mimicking from behind and with a slight but perceptible delay the movements of another. Here is where we see--and feel--that aching desire for connection with a human other--a space in which one's proffered hail (and the gesture of the raised hand is key for Kitsos throughout) is not just recognized, but also returned.

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Book of Love at the Roundhouse

For their 30th anniversary season Kokoro Dance’s Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi have created Book of Love, a quartet they have been building over the past two years with company members Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski, and excerpts of which they have previously unveiled at the Vancouver International Dance Festival and the Powell Street Festival. Set to a dynamic original score by Jeffrey Ryan that is performed live by the StandingWave Ensemble, and that builds dramatically in tempo and tone, the sixty-one minute piece takes its cheeky inspiration from a song by The Magnetic Fields: “The book of love is long and boring.” However, what Bourget and Hirabayashi and their collaborators have put together is anything but ennui-inducing; instead, the piece manages to be tender and funny and surreal and lusty all at once--which is my ideal description not just of a butoh performance, but also of any lasting relationship.

Part of the surreality of Book of Love comes courtesy of London-based Jonathan Baldock’s otherworldly costumes, which clad both the dancers and musicians in priest-like cassocks of vibrant hues, albeit with longer drapey arm sleeves for the dancers, which they fling about and pitch into the air with controlled abandon in the first section of the piece. That this control comes from a finely tuned spatial and kinaesthetic awareness becomes clear when one takes note of the other distinctive element of Baldock’s costume design for the dancers: headpieces made out of overturned woven baskets, with only the tiniest of openings for eyes and mouth, making direct visual connection with one’s fellow dancers (let alone the rest of one’s own body) nearly impossible. All the more remarkable, then, that this section features the evening’s most extensive use of unison choreography, including a series of spins and turns that in this context gives new meaning to bobble-headed.

Following the removal of the headpieces and the placement of them centrestage in a sculptural configuration, like miniature, torsoless versions of the Maoi humanoid statues on Easter Island, for me the piece more or less divides into two complementary parts. In the first, the dancers pair off along gendered lines. Jay and Billy, having reconfigured their cassocks as sarongs tied at the waist, and reattaching the headpieces as humps that they now wear at their backs, slowly pivot back and forth in a central spotlight, like replica selves whose bodies and not-quite matching movements have been distorted by an invisible funhouse mirror. Meanwhile, Barbara and Molly are positioned upstage of the male dancers, each bent at the waist and taking tiny, delicate steps in tandem, two gypsy Esmereldas in search of their Quasimodos.

In the second part of the piece, the dancers discard their cassocks altogether, arranging them under their respective headpieces, with sleeves stuffed into eyes and mouths, or curled around the small side handles that stand in for ears. Now completely naked except for butoh’s traditional white body paint and fundoshi thongs, the dancers form opposite-sex partners, beginning with Jay, in a gorgeously solicitous move, repeatedly lifting Barbara, wrapping her body around his face, doing a slow quarter turn, before setting her back down and then starting the process all over again. Behind the older couple Molly and Billy are crouched in low squats, their arms raised to the sky in a hieratic pose, as if in some ritual celebration of faith and fecundity. For both, this piece suggests, are facing pages in the book of love. As Jay and Barbara come together in a series of tight pelvic clinches and spins and fumbling waltz steps, each trusting the other to find the right timing and direction and rhythm of the steps, Molly and Billy encircle each other on all fours like animals in heat, occasionally pausing to preen in an armstand and twice crossing to meet--one with tongue extended, one with mouth open to receive said tongue--in their own version of an embrace. It is on just such a strange and compelling imagistic juxtaposition of mah and maw that the piece ends--that is, we are presented with both the comforting stillness of the space between and the terrifying unknowingness of being swallowed up that defines two-becoming-one in love as in dance.

Book of Love continues at the Roundhouse through this Saturday, with a special benefit performance beginning at 5 pm December 5th. Tickets can be purchased here.

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