Sunday, September 13, 2020

My Vancouver Dance History: September 12 Artist Salon with Justine A. Chambers

The last of the MVDH artist salons was with the amazing Justine A. Chambers, who together with Alexa Mardon gave me the vision for how to conceive of an overall structure for the book via our collaboration on the Our Present Dance Histories project (which I talk about in chapter 6).

Unfortunately, Alexa was unable to join us as she is in Amsterdam beginning her Master's. A further complication was the air quality in Vancouver on Saturday, with smoke and ash from the forest fires along the Pacific Northwest blanketing the city in an eerie and throat-choking haze. For everyone's safety we decided to forgo an in-person get-together at Morrow, with Justine and I connecting from our homes over Zoom.

Like many in Vancouver, across the country, and around the world, I could listen to Justine talk forever. Suffice to say that in these thirty-five minutes, she puts much about the strange push-pull between radical stillness and urgent assembly that we've been experiencing these past six months into brilliant perspective, including why she is re-embracing all things local. Which is super great news for this community.

While in many ways the book now feels like a document from another time (so much of what I write about has changed!), it is through conversations like these that I'm reassured of the continued and necessary dialogue on Vancouver dance that we're co-composing together.

Added bonus: some priceless Zoom bombing from Justine's son Max.

The file size of the video is once again too large to upload directly to this blog site, so you can access it here.

P



Saturday, September 12, 2020

My Vancouver Dance History: September 11 Artist Salon with James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam (plastic orchid factory)

Friday's MVDH artist salon was with plastic orchid factory's James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam. They Zoomed in from their co-op in Kits. We talked about the uncanny prescience of two pof works I discuss in the book (Digital Folk and I Miss Doing Nothing), how they and their two boys have been coping the past six months, and why despite everything they remain hopeful for the future. 

As with Tara Cheyenne's video, the file size is too big to upload here. But you can access the the Vimeo link here.

Thursday, September 10, 2020

My Vancouver Dance History: September 9 Artist Salon with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg (Tara Cheyenne Performance)

The hilarious and fabulous Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg was in the house at Morrow yesterday "talking shit" (the name of her amazing podcast) about dance during COVID, how you turn an ensemble piece into a solo (while still retaining an ensemble ethos), and the general state of our topsy-turvy world.

The video appears to be too big to upload directly to Blogger's tired interface, so here's a link to the video on Vimeo.

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Wednesday, September 9, 2020

My Vancouver Dance History: September 8 Artist Salon with Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance)

Yesterday I spent time chatting and hanging out with Dumb Instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, whom I write about (along with Action at a Distance's Vanessa Goodman, who unfortunately couldn't be with us) in Chapter 4 of the book.

Ziyian also oversees and runs Morrow, the pop-up venue at which I am hosting my book launch and artist salons this week. In the video below you get some sense of the space, including the noise from the construction that was happening next door!


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Tuesday, September 8, 2020

My Vancouver Dance History: September 7 Artist Salon with Rob Kitsos

Here is my colleague, Rob Kitsos, talking about how he has adapted to teaching and creating in our new COVID-19 world:


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Monday, September 7, 2020

My Vancouver Dance History: September 6 Artist Salon with Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi

The first of the MVDH salon conversations is with Kokoro Dance's Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, whose work I discuss in chapter 3. (Apologies for the feedback/echo; we were sharing two linked devices.)


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Launching My Vancouver Dance History: Artist Salons and Zoom Interviews

This week I am launching my new book, My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community, in a series of COVID-safe salons with the dance artists I write about.

Details: September 6 – 12, 2020 | Daily: 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM @ Morrow (Dumb Instrument Dance’s pop-up venue, 336 West Pender Street, Vancouver).

The schedule is as follows:

Sunday, September 6: Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi (Kokoro Dance)

Monday, September 7: Rob Kitsos

Tuesday, September 8: Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance)*

Wednesday, September 9: Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg (Tara Cheyenne Performance)

Thursday, September 10: Lesley Telford (Inverso Dance)

Friday, September 11: James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam (plastic orchid factory)

Saturday, September 12: Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon

*Vanessa Goodman (Action at a Distance) is unable to make it due to a prior commitment.

I will be conducting brief Zoom conversations with each of the artists about how they have adapted to the strange and unsettling times we're currently living through. I'll post the videos (and/or links) here daily.

Here's my brief introduction to the series:

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Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Random Thoughts on Performance in the Age of COVID

I hadn't anticipated writing a "performance in the time of COVID" blog post, especially on a site that's supposed to be retired. But this past Sunday afternoon's live-streamed all-request concert by local legend Veda Hille has prompted me to weigh in--if only to work through my own wildly shifting performative responses to some of the effects of this pandemic. As one of the more personal of those effects has been a temporary stymying of my ability (or desire?) to write (beyond the heaps of emails and memos and letters that have proliferated as a result of my administrative position at SFU), at the very least the following will hopefully prove a useful exercise in translating the jumble of my thoughts into slightly more coherent prose (though, no promises).

Like many the world over, I have spent the last ten weeks consuming a lot of online performance. Some of it has been fantastic, as in the case of Theatre Complicité's Encounter, in which the amazing binaural sound design seems especially suited to this headphones-wearing moment of Zoom videoconferencing--where the fixed perspectivalism of visual space has been replaced by the immersive absorption of acoustic space (that last bit of McLuhanism was mostly for Richard, but I defy anyone in a Zoom meeting of more than four to figure out instantly where to look when someone is speaking in Gallery view). But for every transportive experience like Encounter there have been reams of dreary live-streamed staged readings of cancelled productions; no matter how important or laudable the message of these works, they can't really compete with the medium (okay, that's it, I promise, but really there's a qualitative difference--including which is better suited to telling a story--between a podcast and a YouTube tutorial).

Which brings me to Sunday's concert, "Veda Hille Haunts The Cultch." Organized through Dan Mangan and Laura Simpson's Side Door Productions, the event was broadcast live from The Cultch's Historic Theatre via Zoom. Beyond the fact that it was Veda, and that she was at the top of her game in terms of singing and piano playing and storytelling, for me performer-audience intimacy transcended to a certain degree the live-digital divide by making this an all-request concert. You could email Veda your favourite songs from her catalogue, and even the odd cover suggestion, and she would draw titles from a hat (actually a coral-coloured water pitcher that sat atop her grand piano), or else spin a hand-made wheel of fortune on which several additional requested songs had been listed. When Veda picked a song and read out who had requested it (which was often more than one person), the chat box--which was lively throughout--would light up with comments and emojis, and following this thread was as entertaining as watching Veda sing. As exemplary, however, was how Mangan and his production team were able to capture the eventness of the event through their savvy camerawork. Two cameras were trained on Veda, and cut between close-ups of her singing and talking and of her fingers on the keyboard. But there was also another bird's eye view of the venue, and whenever the camera cut to this angle, I got a shivery feeling, both in the sense of momentarily feeling like I was there at the back of the house along with Veda and her crew and also perceiving a pang at the otherwise empty auditorium (and one can only note the material significance of that emptiness for Veda, who would otherwise have been performing to packed houses with a scheduled tour of her knock-out show Little Volcano, which premiered at the PuSh Festival this past January). Then, too, there were those moments--one coming during Veda's beautiful rendition of one of the songs that I had requested (Yaz's "Only You")--when Mangan cut to a montage of the screens of the online audience, which prompted enthusiastic waves and cheering, and very occasionally some displays of frolicsome exhibitionism.

Not that the success of this event has made me a full-fledged devotee of the digital dissemination of live performance. I've spent too much time looking at a screen over the past two months to accede willy-nilly to the many possibilities afforded by live-streaming (including affordability and accessibility). At the same time, I don't want to essentialize or romanticize the special co-presence between performer and spectator that supposedly comes with a live performance event. As much as sheltering in place has taught me that, introvertedly inclined though I be, I actually crave and need the company of others--especially to witness and talk about art--I find the instant nostalgia for "how things were" in theatre and performance to be specious. As many of us know, there were/are a lot of things wrong with standard performance production and presentation models, and the following debate articulated here and here about the "forgotten arts" of assembly and disassembly as they relate to the theatre is instructive about divisions within the broader global community. I am not taking a stand one way or another. These past few months I have gorged on iconic shows I would not otherwise have been able to see (hello Pina Bausch's Palermo, Palermo!), and as an educator I find video documentation of live performance to be incredibly valuable pedagogically (and our students at the School for the Contemporary Arts, seeing their scheduled end-of-semester productions and exhibitions and graduation projects evaporate one after another have adapted to various digital platforms with grace and wit and incredible ingenuity). But I also know that after all of this is over I also want to gather with others and share in all of the embodied rituals--from hugs in a crowded lobby to the sharing of laughter and applause--that come with attending (and tending to) live performance. Another thing I know, however, is that some companies may not have the means post-COVID to issue such an invitation, and so digital modes of production and dissemination might become key to survival. I refuse to make predictions or recommendations. There are too many prognosticators taking up too much space already as a result of this crisis, one that we're still very much in the middle of.

Incidentally, those two links on assembly and disassembly that I mention in the preceding paragraph came to me via an online conversation organized two weeks ago by P. Megan Andrews as part of her residency at The Dance Centre. She asked Justine A. Chambers, Olivia C. Davies, Vanessa Goodman, and Erika Mitsuhashi to talk about the "shift to the digital" in relation to their own practices. The conversation was wide-ranging and lively: how some folks were adapting in terms of projects and teaching and taking class, whether out of necessity or desire; and how others were hitting pause, using the radical stillness and enforced house arrest and new kinds of social choreography that have been imposed on their moving bodies (and the movement of bodies more generally) to ask deeper questions of their practice, their previous ways of making, and where they might want to go/what they might want to do differently in the future. It was all done via Zoom, of course, and following the online choreography of the conversation was as captivating as that conversation's content.

But I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that after I left said meeting (which seems like such a weird Zoom sign-off, given that I haven't really gone anywhere) I didn't grieve a little. I so miss the company of these smart women and pre-COVID we would ideally at this very moment be celebrating the publication of my book about the Vancouver dance community. It was scheduled to be released last week, and while copies have arrived at my publisher's warehouse (I've seen the photos of the physical copies, as the attached image attests), they have delayed distribution until August. By that time, I fear that what was meant to be a celebration of the vibrancy of the dance community will already read like a period piece. Lockdown came during the middle of VIDF and one by one, dance events in this city have been cancelled. As The Dance Centre and other spaces prepare to open their doors to limited use under enhanced protocols, I worry about the futures of so many of the artists and companies I love. I also lament that the Dance Studies Association Conference that I was organizing with Allana Lindgren and Ahalya Satkunaratnam for this October at SCA, and at which Olivia and Justine were to be featured performers/presenters, has had to be postponed; I was so looking forward to introducing the Vancouver dance community to international dance scholars and artists. At the same time (and to borrow from the theme of the conference, which should be back in 2022), I know this community is so resilient. Just look at Dumb Instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, whom I write about in my book, and who in her response to a rise in anti-Asian racism in the city has refused to be cowed, peacefully claiming her and others' just rights to assembly and movement.

So instead of moping about what might have been, here's to looking forward to when we can all gather and dance together again (in hot pink lycra, of course).

P


Saturday, February 15, 2020

taker at BoomBox

Never say never, I guess. A couple of weeks ago Billy Marchenski emailed me to see if I'd be interested in writing something about the new butoh-inspired work he and Molly McDermott were working on with their Japanese collaborator Daiichiro Yuyama. Something made me say yes, and so here we are, more than a year after saying goodbye to regular posts about what I was seeing locally in terms of performance, reviving my peculiar take on the scene. Let's hope I still have something interesting to say.

Billy and Molly are, of course, fixtures in the dance community, and have moved memorably together over many years as longtime Kokoro company members. Indeed, it was under those auspices, as part of a trip that Billy and Molly and Kokoro principals Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi took to Japan in 2016 to do a workshop with the butoh company Dairakudakan, that they met Daiichiro. The three hit it off, and decided to come together under the name gigamal to initiate a trans-national creative collaboration.

The result is taker, which was developed collectively in 2018 at the Caravan Farm Theatre, and which has additionally benefitted from the rehearsal direction of Alison Denham and the dramaturgy of Tomoya Tsujisaki. Though not conceived specifically for the space, the work seems particularly well-suited to BoomBox's semi-trailer confines, which I'm embarrassed to say I had not previously visited before last night. But waiting this long to trek down to Great Northern Way to huddle with friends behind a propane heater while sipping a cider sold to me by BoomBox Artistic Producer Diego Romero's mom did come with some benefits. These include the new, portable entrance steps that Diego ushered me up, an enhanced lighting and sound system, and the murals by Chris Bose that now adorn each side of the semi's interior. Reminiscent of cave paintings that leap with added allegorical intensity due to the shadows cast by the propane tank's flames, the decorated walls framed taker's metamorphotic story in particularly apt ways.

That story begins with Billy and Molly arising, as if magically from some primordial ooze, into the open west doorframe of the semi-trailer (a flipping, I was told, of the normal performance/audience configuration of the space). With their painted white faces, their stunned, unblinking eyes, their crouched poses, and the curling inwards of their arms and hands that accompanies their halting physical progress forward, we might think their butoh bodies are summoning for us an image of the first humans. Except that both Billy and Molly are dressed formally, in matching black slacks and white tops, and when they come to stop--Molly posed like an odalisque centre stage, Billy standing gravely behind her--we are arguably presented instead with a grotesque portrait of our contemporary late-capitalist selves, the good-looking couple whose backs are turned on the industrial wasteland that feeds their lifestyle.

That's when, peering into the void behind Billy and Molly, we notice another figure, perched on a mound outside the truck, and slowly starting to sway his body and flap his arms. This is Daiichiro, incarnating some kind of trickster figure, his body painted black (a visually powerful novelty for me, as I've been so trained to expect chalk-white bodies in butoh), his arms adorned with wings made of torn garbage bags, and sporting a red mask and beak. Inserting himself between Molly and Billy, Daiichiro's character moves like an unleashed id, sparking a transformation in our hitherto composed and kinetically contained couple. When, after Daiichiro's exit, Molly and Billy bend down to inspect a bit of plastic detritus left behind, they are hurtled literally backwards in space--and metaphorically in time.

Indeed, when next we see this pair they are clad only in traditional butoh fundoshis, their exposed white-painted bodies, joined by Daiichiro's black-painted one, now rawly attuned to the environment and the harshness of existence. This was represented most effectively for me when all three creators channeled through the language of butoh--already so attuned to states of extremity--various static poses of suffering. For example, lined up in a row with their backs to the audience, the trio at one point adopted different arm gestures that seemed to signify brokenness or confinement: Daiichiro bent at the waist, his arms crossed behind him; Billy's arms crossed above his head as if in crucifixion; and Molly's elbows bent above her mouth, her head thrown back in lamentation or horror. Working together as a single organism during this long middle sequence, the trio also interlaces their arms behind each other's heads, taking turns moving one or another's gaze this way and that as they explore this new strange world they find themselves in. Likewise, when on all fours the ensemble launches into a bit of counterpointed unison, a hand splayed first this way, then a hip that way, it put me in mind of a pack or a herd trying collectively to decide on which direction to move. The key is that this exploration is taking place together, and in relation to the environment, a concept that in the creators' notes on the piece they liken to foraging.

When, however, our trio rises up from the floor--an exquisitely slow and twisted and joint-by-joint vertical stacking of their bodies--something happens to change the dynamic of their relationship, a transition signalled by what appears to be the involuntary throwing of their bodies against the sides of the semi-trailer. Thereafter, they devolve into their own individual movement patterns, a sequence that culminates in another static freeze, but this time with the bodies of our performers at a noticeable remove from each other. This is the cue for Tomoya, who up until this point has been sitting with Diego at the control panel behind me, to make his way to the stage and, in his role as "curator," invite us to get up and inspect as closely as we wish each of the performers' bodies--as if they are anthropological specimens in a museum. Those bodies, however, will not remain frozen in time for us, and whether because of or in spite of our scrutinizing gaze, they once again start to move, making their way to where we had previously been seated, reprising a version of the piece's opening tableau--this time with Molly's odalisque perched on a bench and framed by Billy and Daiichiro hanging off of hooks on each wall.

But by flipping once again the performing and spectating spaces, the conclusion of taker also asks us to consider who, exactly, is on display--who is feeding on, or off, of whom? In terms of the ideas gigamal's team is exploring about humans' transition from foraging to scavenging, from sustaining what we need through environmental co-stewardship to extracting all that we want through individual ownership--here powerfully encapsulated in Billy's character's leaving behind of the prone bodies of Molly and Daiichiro (the woman and the man of colour)--this implicating of the audience in what we are taking away from this experience is one final satisfying moment in what is an incredibly smart and deeply thoughtful performance.

taker continues this evening at BoomBox. It will travel to Kyoto later this year, and we can look forward to a companion piece sometime next year. But maybe don't look forward to another blog post from me for awhile...

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