PuSh 2013: The Road Forward

Marie Clements rocked the house last night at Club PuSh with the premiere of The Road Forward, a multi-media blues-rock musical developed by Clements' and Michelle St. John's red diva projects, and featuring an original score by composer, musical director, and performer Jennifer Kreisberg--who together with St. John and fellow diva Cheri Maracle make up the work's girl power vocal soul. Originally created as a 9-minute piece for the closing performance of the Aboriginal Pavilion at the 2010 Winter Olympics, The Road Forward has since been expanded into a full-length evening that mixes traditional drum songs with Clements' and Kreisberg's newly commissioned set-list, and even a few adapted classics--including a rockin' version of "Lady Marmalade" on which St. John, Kreisberg, and Maracle all get to vocalize like there's no tomorrow.

As Clements tells us in the program, The Road Forward was conceived in response to her discovery, at the offices of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, of 40 years worth of archives from The Native Voice, a newspaper that chronicled and advocated for change in Aboriginal communities across the Americas from the 1930s to the 1970s, and about which Clements knew next to nothing. Archival images from the newspaper--many of them sourced and collected by my student Rachel Braeuer, who served as a research assistant on the project--are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage throughout the performance, and Clements and crew also make a direct link--in images and song--to the role that social media are currently playing in the Idle No More movement, with a live Twitter feed scrolling across a drum face downstage left.

It was a truly moving and galvanizing evening, one that needs to be repeated. I hope that The Road Forward returns (either to PuSh, or to another venue/festival) soon, and also that it tours. It deserves as wide an audience as possible. For the time being, I celebrate Clements' immensely generous vision and achievement, and the supporting roles that both my favourite performing arts organization and the Department of English at SFU (where Clements is currently writer in residence) played in bringing about last night.

P.

Golden Boy?

All this month, as Vancouver has lamely tried to relive and recapture the "spirit" of a certain mega-event that took place last year, I have tried to choke down the bile in my throat by studiously avoiding any mention of civic displays of Olympic nostalgia in these posts. Schadenfreude, however, is a completely other story. I have to admit that I emitted a chortle of glee the other day when I read in the Vancouver Sun that the IOC is investigating statements made in Furlong's recently published memoir, Patriot Hearts, that Furlong and members of Vancouver's bid team offered help to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luhzkov in preparing their bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics in exchange for Russia's three delegate votes for Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics bid. Three votes turned out to be precisely the margin by which Vancouver won out over Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Furlong claims he did nothing wrong, just as he insists cultivating close ties with Norway's and Ireland's IOC reps during the bid process was completely above board. As, apparently, was flying IOC member and FIFA head honcho Sepp Blatter (himself of highly dubious moral integrity when it comes to World Cup bid and sponsorship scandals) by helicopter to Jack Poole's Mission estate. But given earlier revelations this month by the CBC of email correspondence from Furlong that VANOC knew of the potential dangers of the Whistler luge track on which Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili lost his life the opening day of the Olympics, one wonders if some of the golden glow around Furlong isn't starting to fade.

Not that this won't all blow over very soon. I'm sure Globe columnist Gary Mason (and co-author of Patriot Hearts) will come out with guns blazing in defense of Furlong--just as he's recently led the cheerleading around the apparent real estate miracle condo king Bob Rennie is effecting at the troubled Athlete's Village. But for the moment I relish the inspiriting boost to my own Olympic cynicism that these revelations have provided.

P.

In Brief, Take 2

An interesting phone call the other day from the Vancouver Playhouse. A volunteer was following up on our attendance at Brief Encounter, no doubt wanting us to spread the word about its manifold charms to other potential audience members. When I told her we left at intermission there was a pause, a curt thank you, and then a click. Guess we won't be hearing back from them again soon--although I am going to be giving the company one more chance this season with Melissa Gibson's This in January. I read the New York Times rave when it played Off-Broadway; and this production will star Megan Follows, who bowled me over in an otherwise hit-and-miss revival of Cloud Nine in Toronto last February.

Speaking of phone calls from performing arts organizations, kudos to Ballet BC for their alacritous and gracious stewardship etiquette in response to a recent donation I made. I had phoned up their box office to place an order for two mini-pack subscriptions to the remainder of the season after receiving an email in my inbox about this short term offer. This deal is a very smart marketing move on the part of Artistic Director Emily Molnar and Executive Director Jay Rankin, as it allows them to capitalize on the success of their season-opening November program (which I had to miss) as well as the added Christmas cross-marketing of their Nutcracker offering. Equally smart is having box office staff (I was served by the most capable Ashley) ask you at the time of purchase whether you would also like to make a tax-deductible donation to the company. As I'm learning more and more at PuSh, nine times out of ten all you have to do to get people to give to something they believe in is ask. Such was the case with me, and I appreciated the follow-up phone call the next day from Development Manager Roger Kayo thanking me for my donation.

On the subject of arts funding, I note that George Abbott is alone among the declared candidates to replace Gordon Campbell as Liberal Party leader and Premier of the province in vowing to restore gaming and other monies to 2008-9 levels. Chump change should, as most expect, that harridan from talk radio, Christy Clark, win the contest. Even more depressing are the latest poll numbers, which indicate the Liberals, with Campbell on the way out, have now overtaken the Carole James-less NDP in voter popularity. Et tu, Jenny Kwan?

Other things of mildly vexatious interest: Mayor Gregor Robertson can't get through to 911 to report gang shootings in his neighbourhood, but he and his Vision-dominated Council can steamroll through, against overwhelming citizen opposition, a travesty of a plan to "re-green" Hastings Park. How expanding the PNE and Playland fits into such a mandate is beyond me.

Meanwhile VAG chief Kathleen Bartels and the City continue to be miles apart on a potential deal to find a new downtown site for the gallery. Heather Deal is quoted in the Georgia Straight as saying that the main post office depot at Georgia and Hamilton is likely to close soon, suggesting that as a possible alternate site to Larwell Park, which Bartels and the VAG Board covet. Hell, yes!! It's a wonderful, vast modernist building, perfectly situated across from the Queen E and the Playhouse, with no doubt heaps of underground storage space, and square footage up the whazoo for the right architect to go crazy with. But Ms. Bartels doesn't seem interested, confirming that she wants a new signature building to cement her legacy as Director rather than finding the right solution to showcase the collection.

Finally, I was amused by the recent report from Canada's Officer of Official Languages, Graham Fraser, criticizing the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics for their inadequate use of French. Well, duh! Anyone watching on TV could have figured that out. Did we really need a months-long, and no doubt expensive, report to tell us what we already know? I mean the ceremonies themselves were overseen by an Australian; and VANOC CEO John Furlong is a unilingual Irishman. Furlong, by the way, dismissed the report, noting that 40 odd complaints from peeved Francophones couldn't compare with the thousands upon thousands of congratulations VANOC received on the ceremonies. What nobody seems to realize in all of this is how outdated is the notion of linguistic nationalism. It's been a tenuous reason for holding the country together at the best of times, and in our polyglot 21st-century, transnational world, it just not signify at all.

P.

Schadenfreude

Yesterday's headline from the Vancouver Sun: "City eyes incentives to lure buyers to Olympic village."

Today's in the BC edition of the Globe and Mail: "Vancouver taxpayers could get snowed under with losses on Olympic athletes' village."

One hesitates to say I told you so...

P.

A Post-Olympic Ghost Town

First we learn that more than 65% of market housing units in the False Creek South Athletes' Village development now known as Millennium Water remain unsold.

Now we're told that the 252 city-owned rental units earmarked for social housing sit empty as well, with various non-profits who otherwise might tender bids to operate one or more of the three available buildings stymied by City Council's unusual demands--including the handing over of any surplus revenue generated.

The cost overruns on the controversial development are admittedly severe, a situation the current Vision Vancouver-led municipal government inherited from its predecessor. However, this isn't the way to go about remedying things. Even folks at BC Housing remain perplexed.

Empty luxury condos, vacant produce aisles at Urban Fare, and rows of gleaming new exercise equipment waiting to be used at the city's newest--and most under-accessed--community centre are one thing. To abet the shortage of affordable housing in the city through such shenanigans is just plain scandalous.

P.

Were They Worth It?

So the numbers are in, and apparently the little wingding Vancouver threw for the world this past February cost close to $1 billion--$925 million, to be exact. That is, if you go by the government's internal accounting--which is, shall we say, rather creative.

Gary Mason, in the Globe, thinks all of this was a small price to pay for the pride and confidence and overall warm, fuzzy feeling Vancouverites have been left with as a result of the Olympics.

Vaughn Palmer, in the Sun, is a bit more sober in his assessment of the figures, wondering how Finance Minister Colin Hansen can get away with saying that the $325 million extra on top of the $600 million the BC Liberals (and Premier Campbell, in particular) kept repeating the Games would cost doesn't represent an overrun of 50%.

Apparently because that $600 million, according to Hansen, was just for a specific list of projects. And none of those projects, nor any of those covered by the additional $325 million taxpayers are on the hook for, includes the Canada Line from YVR to downtown ($2 billion extra), the new convention centre ($900 million extra), or the expansion of the Sea-to-Sky Highway ($800 million extra).

Indeed, if the government were honest, and factored in all Olympics-related costs, we're looking at a price-tag of at least $5-6 billion--and that's a conservative estimate.

But then this government is not honest. Witness the HST. And as anyone working in the arts in this province well knows, there definitely won't be any attempt to connect the dots between Olympic cost overruns and the decimation of funding to cultural industries and social programs.

That would require the sort of audit Mr. Hansen is unprepared to authorize.

P.

Cheese: Toronto/Vancouver

Last night my sister-in-law, Arline, and I sat beside each other on her basement couch in Oshawa and offered a blow-by-blow critique of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Arline teaches high school drama, and so knows a thing or three about basic dramaturgy. Both of us agreed that the pacing was too slow, the human-to-effects scale and bodily massings totally out of whack (especially in the forest dancing sequences, when the members of the Alberta Ballet were simply too few and far between), and the overall national narrative simply riddled with kitschy cliches.

That's what you get, I guess, when you have an Australian running the show. Not only is Quebec more or less left out of the picture (earlier talks with Cirque de Soleil, Robert Lepage, and other Quebecois performing arts icons to participate in the events broke down, apparently, over creative differences), but BC and Vancouver have to cede their own wealth of local talent to national and international interlopers. Oh, right, but that's what we have the Cultural Olympiad for...

I wonder how much representatives of the Four Host First Nations were involved in the actually planning of the proceedings. The welcome was crucial, I understand, but whether in that particular iconographic/spectacularized way is open to debate: totems, giant spirit bears, and dancing in ceremonial regalia as the athletes march in more or less covers things, I guess. And getting that over and done with early allows us to get on with the real westward expansionist narrative. Clearly no one explained the concept of Indian time to Jacques Rogge and members of the dignitaries box, the seats reserved for the chiefs of the FHFN being noticeably unoccupied during the early going.

Granted, those killer whales were pretty cool. And slam poet Shane Koyczan got in some pretty good oral/aural riffs. And k.d. lang still has the smoothest alto in the music biz, doing for Leonard Cohen what she'd previously done for Roy Orbison (though ditch the white suit, sister--black is always more slimming). But what was with the mechanical failure with the torch tower at the end? And the motorcade of the Great One to the outdoor torch at Coal Harbour was pretty anticlimactic (were all five of the final torch bearers chosen on the basis of their aquiline noses?).

Likely the pelting rain on top of the protesters on top of the earlier news of the tragic death of the Georgian luger during a training run at Whistler earlier in the day was enough to make John Furlong want to reach for the nearest whiskey bottle. No excuse, however, for not, over the course of the past seven years, at least learning a few more sentences and phrases in decently accented French.

Watching the Opening Ceremonies from Toronto felt entirely appropriate, so disconnected am I from the events now that they have actually descended on the city, and so mediatized a spectacle are the Olympics in general. Much better to leave the live theatre-going to decent fare like the two plays I saw in Toronto on Wednesday: a matinee of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, in a CanStage/Obsidian Theatre co-production, and featuring a star-making performance by Raven Dauda as Esther; and an evening performance of Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 at the Panasonic Theatre on Yonge Street, in a Mirvish Theatre production directed by Alisa Palmer (who had previously directed a much lauded remount of Top Girls in the city).

Hard to believe, in particular, that Churchill's play is more than 30 years old. Palmer played things a bit too much for belly laughs for my liking, but Churchill's gender politics are still as fresh as ever, and I was especially impressed by the performance of ex-Anne Shirley herself, Megan Follows. Indeed, after seeing this production I am more convinced than ever by the recent argument (published in the Guardian, was it?) that following Harold Pinter's death, the leading UK playwright is not David Hare or Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn or Alan Bennett, but none other than Ms. Churchill herself. What would she make of London 2012, I wonder?

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.