Basic Black

Like many in the city who went underground following the collective fever dream that was the 2010 Winter Olympics, I missed the New Zealand dance company Black Grace when they came through as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival that year. Fortunately, VIDF co-producers Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi brought them back for this year's festival, and so last night Richard and I braved the rain and made our way to the Playhouse to take in their work.

Founded in 1995 by Artistic Director and chief choreographer Neil Ieremia, Black Grace combines contemporary dance with traditional Pacific (chiefly Samoan) movement scores to create an explosive and intensely rhythmic style. This was certainly in evidence during the first two pieces on last night's program. Pati Pati, an amalgam of excerpts from older works in the company's repertoire, was highly percussive, featuring phrases built around clapping, body slapping, and vocal call and response. Likewise, the excerpt from Amata that followed took its basic compositional structure and the patterns of its floorwork from the weaves found in Samoan mats.

Following intermission, the company presented the full-length Vaka, which allowed the company to display more range in its movement vocabulary, including some delicate partnering and several graceful group lifts. While I felt the piece--like the entire program--was a little long, I was swept away by many of its sections, effectively enhanced by Bonnie Burrill's subtle lighting design and, in one stunning sequence, a series of panoramic projections.

I look forward to the company's next visit.

P.

Dis-spiriting

The hand of government that taketh away also now giveth, it would seem.

Having denied long established arts and cultural festivals in the province much-needed gaming funding, the Minister of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts, Kevin Krueger, has just announced a three-year, $30 million fund to stage BC "Spirit Festivals" across the province starting next February.

The idea is to tap into and reanimate the residual good feeling from the 2010 Olympics (about which I talked in a previous post) and, according to Krueger, to help cultural organizations across the province get a leg-up in their funding. You can read the details here.

Never mind that it was the government that slashed that funding in the first place. Or that this new fund--and its "inspiriting" mandate--is yet another disturbing incursion by the Liberals into the cultural programming of arts institutions in BC.

Why some festivals in the province are denied sustainable funding and told to fend for themselves and others (as yet to be chosen) merit infusions of cash as long as they can somehow rekindle our lost Olympic mojo has yet to be explained by Minister Krueger.

To paraphrase Kurt Cobain, this exercise in spirit-making certainly smells like something.

P.

Cultural Legacies

An upbeat article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday assessing the possible arts legacies for the city of the Cultural Olympiad. Also, several arts and cultural types in the city were polled for their thoughts.

I wish I were half as optimistic.

Plus, in the Globe, Marsha Lederman's choices for the best of the whole fest. I'm in surprising agreement with many of her picks--especially The Candahar Bar!

P.

All That Glitters

As a dancer and choreographer, Marie Chouinard incites devotion in her fans that borders on sexual ecstasy or religious mania--which is entirely appropriate given how often she taps into both of these phenomena to create her works. I am most familiar with her 2005 piece bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, in which she sends her dancers out en pointe, in harnesses, with crutches and other prostheses, wheeling barres, and otherwise constrained, in order to explore, among other ruminations on corporeal extension, the dis-abled body's relation to dance. But I have only seen excerpts of that work performed on video. Last night's world premiere performance of The Golden Mean (Live) at the Vancouver Playhouse in a DanceHouse and 2010 Cultural Olympiad co-production, was--as per the tautological parenthesis--the first dance by Chouinard I have experienced live. Entirely appropriate, therefore, that as part of my initiation into the cult of Marie I should be seated on stage.

This coincidence owed to the fact that as part of the stage design for the piece, Chouinard constructed a raised platform that jutted out into the audience, taking out several rows of seats, including those that Richard and I had bought as part of our DanceHouse subscription. Our reward for this inconvenience was the unique opportunity to view the performance from the stage itself. And while this certainly offered a novel vantage point--with Chouinard deliberately disrupting the uniformity of an ideal viewpoint signaled by her title--I can't say it gave me any deeper insight into the piece.

Nor any clear sense of why the platform-cum-catwalk was needed in the first place. Chouinard's dancers certainly made use of it, variously strutting out on it, or pushing props and huge lights to its edges. But its most regular use, as far as I could tell, was as a viewing platform for members of the company not dancing to look back at the members on stage who were. This was just one of several dramaturgical choices throughout the evening that left me confounded.

There was certainly an abundance of Chouinard's visual and aural trademarks on display: costumes that mixed a futuristic aesthetic with cowboy kitsch, and that featured Chouinard's ubiquitous unisex pasties; masks overtop masks; Louis Dufort's electro-acoustic score layered overtop the dancers' own abbreviated sentences and vocal eruptions; and props, props, props. But, as I feel is so often the case with Chouinard, the superabundance of theatricality stands in for a strong through-line, both thematically and in terms of movement. What little I could glean in the former department suggested a Hedwigesque riff on a Platonic origin myth, with the piece beginning with a bodily splitting of two twinned dancers in a process akin to cellular mitosis, and ending in a frankly clichéd and purely theatrical use of total nudity.

As for the dancing, there simply needed to be more of it. One of the things my on-stage vantage point afforded me was the opportunity to see how often most members of Chouinard's company were off-stage. And what they were doing while off-stage, which was mostly affixing props or adjusting costumes.

In a medium that "classically" is all about proportion (of position, of line, of gesture, of bodies), not to mention the variation in and of proportion, it seemed strange not to explore both the beauty and the constraints of this approach to the spaces of and between bodies in more extended pure movement sequences. After the fierce intelligence of Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot's starkly theatrical Dark Matters, the overall fussiness of The Golden Mean just struck me as banal, a lot of bells and whistles which betrayed the paucity of ideas underneath.

Leaving audiences scratching their heads about what it all means is not necessarily a sign of artistic profundity, despite what Chouinard herself states in her own rather opaque choreographic statement accompanying this work. I certainly look forward to seeing more work by Quebec's favourite dance export in the future; I just hope it's more "thought-provoking" than this.

P.

The Dark Matter of Dance Creation: Kidd Pivot at the Playhouse

In astronomy, dark matter is undetectable to the human eye, contains no atoms, and emits no electromagnetic radiation. Yet it is thought to exert a gravitational pull on visible matter. And, according to the Big Bang Theory, it is believed to make up the vast majority of our universe.

Local choreographer Crystal Pite taps into this fathomless paradox for her latest full-length dance creation for her company Kidd Pivot. Dark Matters, a co-production of Dance Victoria, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and Montreal's L'agora de la danse, played the Vancouver Playhouse last night (and the Friday before) as part of DanceHouse's second season, and as a showcase event of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. In Pite's work, dark matter becomes a metaphor both for the unconscious and for the wellsprings--and the recesses--of creative imagination. As Pite and her dancers demonstrate in this piece--and as she herself has talked about in print in relation to her own uncertainty about where and when ideas will come to her for new work--bursts of inspirational energy can just as quickly turn to a paralyzing abyss.

The 100-minute piece is structured in two parts, with the first operating as a quasi-theatrical dumb show (and, in fact, a stage dummy does make a crucial appearance at the very end) to the more pure dance explorations of the second. To this end, the curtain opens upon a makeshift set. A man (Peter Chu) sits at a table filled with paper, cloth, scissors, thread, clearly experiencing some sort of blockage. Out of this pile he pulls two marionette legs, crafting a little dance with them centre stage. Suddenly the creative juices are flowing again and over the course of a few quick blackouts (which are used most effectively throughout the first half) we are eventually introduced to his creation, a benign-looking puppet attached to wires manipulated by the rest of the Kidd Pivot company, clad all in black like the traditional puppeteers in Bunraku theatre. Our puppet is far from benign, however, and combining references to Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Coppélia (the story by Hoffman and the ballet by Saint-Léon), The Wizard of Oz, and Freud's Ego and the Id, among other texts, Pite tells the familiar story of creature rising up against creator (as in the best of Chekhov's plays, those scissors are on stage for a reason).

Except, wily creative artist that she herself is, Pite renders the familiar strange once the inevitable climax has occurred and the puppet, having stabbed his creator/amanuensis, and with nowhere left to channel his energy, himself expires. It is at this point that the black clad supernumeraries--the literal dark matter in this show--take centre stage, their previously discrete yet no less precise manipulations of the restless puppet (and it is truly a marvel to see how Pite transposes her choreographic vocabulary onto the startlingly life-like movements of the puppet, which I can only imagine required immense rehearsal time and coordination from her dancers) now unleashed in a riot of acrobatic and martial-arts like movements as they rush about, clearly discombobulated by the acts they just witnessed and abetted. Pite is having fun here, and her cultural touchstones during these sequences are as much Spider-Man and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger as they are the high art works of Shelley and Hoffmann. All of this energy culminates in an inexorable gravitational pull being exerted on the visible matter before us on stage, i.e., the set, and when this comes crashing down--as, of course, it must--Pite literally reveals to us, in the form of the Playhouse's black back stage wall, the "invisible" scaffolding of the theatrical deus ex machina: what we take to be fate is in fact just fake (as one of her supernumerary's brandished signs reminds us).

The dummy that is tossed amid all of this detritus at the end of Act I provides the visual segue to the start of Act II, as the lights come up on a single, lonely supernumerary sprawled on the bare stage. Pite plays this role herself, at once plainly disguising and making plainly visible her own creative energies as an artist . That is, in the 55 minutes that follow, and in which we witness the rest of the company (Chu, joined by Eric Beauchesne, Yannick Matthon, Cindy Salgado, and Jermaine Spivey) "animate" her trademark choreography--which is itself all about the reanimation of bodies and/in movement--we are also witnessing (although not without careful concentration) the black-clad Pite rushing about the stage moving lights, doing things behind scrims, popping up in unexpected places (including emerging from the orchestra pit at the very lip of the stage), and finally inserting herself within the other dancers' bodily chains to provide them with an added force, or a change of direction (remember her company name has "pivot" in the title), in their deliberately uncertain movements.

Pite's work has always been intensely self-referential, and this certainly feels like her most deeply personal work, mining her own creative process to reveal to her audience the at times self-shattering stitching behind any work of art. In this regard, the piece ends with Pite, alone on stage, facing the inevitable abyss of loss (for performer and audience) that comes with the end to any show, removing her black costume and sitting down on the stage in her underwear in a single pool of light, exhausted and spent. The animator herself now needs to be reanimated, and this is the cue for Chu to return for a final very moving pas de deux in which he and Pite reciprocally exchange the roles of choreographer/dancer, puppeteer/puppet, creator/doll.

I haven't done justice to all of the other wonderful dancing in the second half of Dark Matters, but one thing I did want to reference before closing is that this piece once again fully displays how amazingly original and adept Pite is at choreographing for men, especially in group and partnering sequences. The four-man striving and collapsing routine from Lost Action is referenced here at key moments, but what lingers most with me from last night is the extraordinary partnering that takes place midway through Act II between Yannick Matthon (who also appeared in Lost Action) and Jermaine Spivey. They do things alone and together with their bodies over the course of three minutes or so that had me gaping in amazement.

All in all a truly amazing evening: despite the fact I was stuck behind a very tall man and had to lean forward for most of the performance; and despite having to negotiate the crazy Olympics crowds afterwards in our hour-long journey home. The only somewhat sour note is the news that Pite and Kidd Pivot have recently accepted a two-year residency in Frankfurt. While Pite will continue to remain connected to Vancouver and the west coast, Frankfurt is able to offer her sufficient resources to create new works and pay her dancers full-time, resources that just aren't available in the current fiscal climate in BC. This is distressing mostly for the message it sends to the world at a time when we are supposed to be showcasing our artists to the world: namely that we don't really care about our own.

How dark a matter is that?

P.

Seeing and Being Seen at the Olympics: Going Digital in Vancouver and Beijing

Surfing the mass of bodies downtown yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, along with, Cue, the Vancouver Art Gallery's rotating program of videos being displayed outdoors on a giant screen in front of the gallery's south facade...

... some of the more adventurous visual arts programming around the Olympics is taking place in around Library Square. This includes outdoor installations overseen by the City of Vancouver's public art program, such as Ron Terada's brilliant "The Words Don't Fit the Picture," on the south plaza of the library:

Inside, the Library is playing host to the third of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad's CODE Live sites, which are showcasing digital artworks, including in this case the interactive installation "Room to Make Your Peace 2010." This collaborative work, which has been given official patronage by none other than Her Excellency, the Governor-General, involves people writing messages of peace on scraps of paper that they then craft into origami-like cones; the cones are then affixed with an LED light and sent up a pressurized air duct, shooting high into the air, before landing on a giant net strung across the Library atrium:

Even more pleasing to me, however, was the discovery of "Seen," a new work by Toronto-based digital artist David Rokeby:

Operating on the same principle as X-Rays, or infrared surveillance technology, Rokeby's work uses a hidden live camera to capture pedestrians' movements in the Library atrium, feeding the recorded images back through time-delay onto the four screens seen in the image above. In this way, Rokeby reveals to us, in a very de Certeau-like manner, the traces of our own unconscious movements and, as importantly, our interactions (and avoidances) with others.

Coincidentally, I had first come across Rokeby's work when I was in Beijing in the summer of 2008, doing research in advance of the Beijing Olympics, and attended one afternoon a groundbreaking show of international new media art curated by Zhang Ga at Beijing’s National Art Museum of China. Called Synthetic Times, and playing off BOCOG’s dedicated themes of "Hi-Tech Olympics" and "People’s Olympics," the show placed multi-media works by Chinese artists like Du Zhenjun, Xu Zhongmin, Xu Bing, Wu Juehui, and Miao Xiaochun alongside challenging and frequently interactive sound, video, digital, robotic, and computer installations, projections, sculptures, and immersive environments created by such international art world luminaries as Stelarc, Christoph Hildebrand, Edwin van der Heide, Anthony McCall, Jean-Michel Bruyère, and Mariana Rondon. Works were grouped according to four organising themes: "Beyond Body" explored technological extensions of the physical body, testing the limits of subjectivity through bio-mediation; "Emotive Digital" examined the ways in which machines and related electronic devices are becoming responsive creatures; "Recombinant Reality" sought to break down old Cartesian dualisms through mixed, virtual, and acoustic environments; and, finally, "Here, There and Everywhere" focused on how the internet, especially, functions as a kind of "planetary membrane."

In this last category, I was especially gripped by Rokeby’s "surveillance installation," "Taken." A split-screen dual projection, Rokeby’s piece uses infrared video cameras to capture and record in real-time the movements of gallery goers; these are then projected onto the orange, right hand side of the screen in overlapping twenty-second loops, a computer-generated, panoptical emplotment of all human activity in the room that is at once synchronous and sequential, as in the manner of most closed-circuit television monitors. Every now and then white boxes frame the heads of individual visitors; when this happens, the blue, left-hand side of the screen displays the faces of those singled out in close-up, adding randomly-generated text to suggest their possible states of mind while under observation ("nervous," "carried away," "hungry," "complicit"). These close-ups are in turn arranged as black and white thumbnails of the last 200 visitors to the room, and displayed at regular intervals, a taxonomy of our own self-monitoring.

And if, as curator Zhang claims in her introduction to the catalogue accompanying the show, a "new taxonomy" of the human needs to be written, then surely what Rokeby’s work suggests is that--again to quote Zhang--"the role of art is to ensure that the deliberation takes place not behind closed doors but in the recombinant arena of open space." As Zhang’s choice of sporting metaphor implies, the Olympics have provided an impetus to initiate such a dialogue in China at the same time as they have given the state an excuse to increase security and surveillance, including conscripting local citizens as part of reconstituted, Mao-era neighbourhood committees.

Not that Vancouver is exempt from such self-surveillance--and the urban paranoia it can engender--a fact I was reminded of yesterday when I got off the Canada Line at Broadway and Cambie after my foray downtown and looked up at the CCTV cameras looking down at me:

P.

18 days, 15 shows, 1 looming circus

Last night's performance of Moon Water by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre brought to a temporary close one of the most jam-packed two-and-a-half weeks of live art attendance I have experienced in recent memory. And it was a fittingly memorable conclusion, with Lin Hwai-Min's celebrated company weaving a magic mix of Western and Asian dance movements (including some deft martial arts moves) around selections from J.S. Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello. The final movement, ending with the entire ensemble wading gracefully through water cascading over the stage floor, was simply gorgeous.

Later Richard and I put in a brief appearance at the PuSh Festival wrap party on Granville Island. It was, in my admittedly very biased opinion, another splendid festival, with virtually everything I attended sold out and a great buzz around the shows. Here's hoping we also made some money! And here's looking forward to next year, when Executive Director Norman Armour has some exciting plans afoot in conjunction with the 125th anniversary of the city.

Speaking of Granville Island, I had snuck out there earlier in the day to stock up on some supplies. It was even more of a zoo than normal. No doubt the gorgeous weather was partly to blame. But there was also no escaping the fact that the first big wave of Olympic visitors had arrived (one just had to listen to the mix of languages being spoken as various clumps of tourists parked themselves in front of different shopkeepers' vitrines and pointed and oohed and aahed, and generally blocked the aisles for everyone else like me on a specific time-based mission...). Downtown last night was also jumping, and cars everywhere were scrambling to deal with the most recent wave of road closures (both viaducts, Georgia and Dunsmuir, having recently been shut down).

There's no avoiding the Olympic onslaught, I guess, though I myself will miss the first weekend, as I'm off to Toronto tomorrow to give a couple of talks at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph. I promised to lay off the VANOC-bashing in this blog for a while, but it is difficult not to shake one's head in disbelief at the litany of ironies piling up in the days before the opening ceremonies--starting with the weather, which has been sunny and unseasonably warm, hovering at or above 12 degrees celsius for the past two weeks. Winter, what winter?

Then there's the recent embarrassing revelation that VANOC had used footage from Leni Reifenstahl's Olympia in its Torch Relay promotional video! The announcement that the Norwegian ocean liner that was going to park itself off the coast and offer accommodation to visitors from out of town wasn't coming after all. An unflattering expose in the Guardian about how the Olympics were going to thrust the city into deep debt, while placing machine-gun toting soldiers on every street corner (so far they haven't appeared, though I am getting sick of the constantly circling helicopters). On top of the ongoing hand-wringing about how many medals will be won, as opposed to affordable housing units built as a legacy of the Games. And all while our erstwhile Premier steals a photo op on the new zip line installed across Robson Square...

Don't get me wrong--I'll be out there mixing it up with everyone else once I get back into town--mostly hanging out at the Candahar Bar (also on Granville Island), I expect, taking in the wonderful line-up of talks, shows, and parties organized by my friend Michael Turner and Reid Shier on behalf of Presentation House Gallery and the Cultural Olympiad. For better or worse, the five ring circus that is the Olympics is a mega-event one must definitely experience (especially given my own research on performance and place, as documented in this blog) up close and personal, and preferably with a video camera in tow. (See, by the way, an interesting article by Gary Stephen Ross in the latest Walrus Magazine, "A Tale of Two Cities," discussing Vancouver's local/global image in relation to the Olympics in much the same way I've been attempting to do in this blog, and the soon-to-be-released book to which it is connected. It's a bit glib for my liking--and there's no mention of the arts--but there are some great photos by Grant Harder.)

However, as I said to my students, who will likewise be documenting things over at the Performing Vancouver blog, the key part of this equation is to avoid getting arrested!

P.

Robert Lepage at SFU Woodward's

Tai Wei Foo in Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud's The Blue Dragon

This past Thursday night Richard and I were back at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward’s to take in the English-language Vancouver premiere of Robert Lepage’s The Blue Dragon, a special theatrical event that is being co-sponsored by my university, the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and Théâtre la Seizième (there will be a few performances in French). The Blue Dragon, which Lepage wrote with his co-star Marie Michaud (the English translation is by Michael Mackenzie), is both a sequel and a coda to The Dragon’s Trilogy, Lepage’s first great theatrical success. A six-hour extravaganza that premiered in 1985, The Dragon’s Trilogy tells the stories of childhood friends Jeanne and Françoise, giving us, in the process, glimpses of three different Canadian Chinatowns over the course of the twentieth century, beginning in Quebec City from 1910-35 (the green dragon), moving to Toronto during the 40s and 50s (the red dragon), and ending in Vancouver in 1985 (the white dragon), where we are introduced to Françoise’s son, Pierre Lamontagne, who runs an art gallery and dreams of visiting the real China. The Blue Dragon picks up the story twenty years later. Pierre (played by Lepage) has indeed made it to China, where he now runs a gallery in Shanghai, benefiting from a red-hot Chinese art market but also having to contend with multiple layers of government bureaucracy, corruption and censorship. Pierre’s personal life is just as complicated: embroiled in a tempestuous affair with a younger Chinese artist, Xia Ling (the dancer Tai Wei Foo), whom he has gotten pregnant just as her career is about to take off, he also comes face to face with a ghost from his past in the form of former lover Claire (Michaud), who has come to China in part because she wants to adopt a baby. On top of all this, during the course of the play Pierre learns that his father has died back in Quebec, prompting some intense soul-searching about whether or not he should return home for good.

In Connecting Flights, a collection of interviews with journalist Rémy Charest, Lepage has described the character of Pierre Lamontagne as his “alter ego,” a “linking character” who makes connections between the various threads of Lepage’s theatrical and cinematic narratives, and between those narratives and the audience: “He’s all-purpose because he is relatively young and an artist, which allows us to place him almost anywhere, in almost any circumstances. He’s a very flexible, very mobile character—a blank character, in a way. He provides the link between the story and the audience. His naïve approach towards the events he encounters reflects the spectator’s position.” However, Lepage also admits that “over the course of his incarnations, the character [of Pierre] developed a few inconsistencies.” Not the least of which are the narrative gaps in an ever-expanding and ever-more complicated fictional biography subject to the temporal discontinuities and spatial contiguities that are a hallmark of Lepage’s theatre and cinema in equal measure. But then narrative has arguably never been Lepage’s strong suit, and it should come as no surprise that Pierre, as a passing-through character more acted upon than acting, a cipher in flight from a past that nevertheless has a strange and persistent way of catching up with him, should, like his creator, spend so much time in airports, where all sense of time and space collapses in on itself in an endless succession of arrivals and departures. To this end, those readers familiar with Lepage’s first film, Le confessionnal, will likely have registered a degree of confusion about the plot of The Blue Dragon, and particularly the bit about Pierre’s father, as in the earlier film it is Pierre returning from Beijing in 1989 to bury his dad that sets in motion the unraveling of a long suppressed family mystery concerning unacknowledged paternity and abject maternity.

Feckless fathers and morbid mothers are a recurring theme in Lepage’s work, and we get them in abundance in The Blue Dragon, which presents us with three different endings concerning who among the three main characters assumes primary responsibility for Xia Ling’s baby. That none of these endings is particularly affecting—nor, in one case, even remotely plausible—stems from characters so sketchily drawn and for the most part emotionally lifeless that we never form strong connections with them or their stories. Combined with almost torpid pacing, it made for one of the more unsatisfying theatrical experiences of a Lepage show in recent memory. All of his trademark visual effects were featured in abundance (the projected calligraphy and falling snow being the most stunning), but owing perhaps to its hybrid status between his more well-known solo shows and large-cast, multi-hour epics, The Blue Dragon left me mostly cold.

P.