Olympic Legacies?

An article in yesterday's Globe and Mail questioning the long-term benefits of Cultural Olympiads for local artists and arts communities. Apparently attendance at marquee galleries and museums in London plunged in the lead-up to the most recent Summer Games. And Robert Everett-Green does a good job documenting the wholesale negative consequences the Olympics and BC's giveth-with-one-hand-and-taketh-away-with-the-other approach to cultural funding has had on the Vancouver arts community, where we are down one regional theatre company, and where granting levels still haven't returned to pre-Olympics levels.

Meanwhile over at the Georgia Straight a Vancouver Olympics-related scandal of potentially momentous consequence. Investigative reporter Laura Robinson has uncovered that former VANOC CEO John Furlong, celebrated far and wide in this province and country for his stewardship of the 2010 Games, appears to have deliberately fudged key details from his personal and professional past, including when he arrived in Canada. In his 2011 autobiography, Patriot Hearts, Furlong claims he emigrated to this country in 1974, to take up a teaching position at a high school in Prince George. In fact, Furlong arrived in 1969 as an Oblate Frontier Apostle missionary, working at a Residential School in Burns Lake. Several former students at the school have signed affidavits testifying to Furlong's mental and physical abuse.

We'll see where this story goes, but kudos to Robinson and the Straight for breaking it. I guess the fact that Gary Mason co-wrote Patriot Hearts with Furlong meant that the Globe was not interested in pursuing questions about Furlong's CV.

P.

The Story of the Olympics So Far...

... has been mostly negative, at least to judge by the international media--especially the British tabloid press, which has already dubbed Vancouver 2010 the "worst Olympics ever."

From Georgian luger Nordal Kumaritashvili's tragic death on opening day, to criticisms of the lack of French and ethnic diversity during the Opening Ceremonies, to faulty ice-resurfacing machines in Richmond, to poor weather and cancelled tickets on Cypress Mountain, to out-of-province anarchist vandals trashing Bay storefront Windows on Granville Street, to an Olympic torch imprisoned behind chain-link fencing, to general transportation woes galore, and now a strike by restaurant workers at YVR: it seems VANOC can't catch a break.

It would be easy to sit back and nurse one's Schadenfreude if the longer term consequences for the local communities whom we were all told would benefit from Vancouver's two shining weeks in the global spotlight didn't look so grim: shops, businesses, and restaurants outside the downtown core that stand idle and empty, regular customers having been scared away by unnecessary traffic restrictions and general scare tactics about the difficulty of getting around the city; an arts community that, notwithstanding the just showcasing of the city's immense creative talent and imaginative resources during the Games, is still facing cuts of upwards of 90% in the upcoming provincial budget at the beginning of March; and community and social housing activists who have seen the grand promises to push to end homelessness made in Vancouver's Bid Book and the Inner-City Inclusiveness Statement evaporate amid cost-overruns.

Better to sit back and nurse a beer at The Candahar Bar on Granville Island (1889 Cartwright Street, 3rd Floor), which is what Richard and I did last night (taking the Olympic line trolley to get there--here's hoping that, regardless of Bombardier's claims that it wants its loaned cars returned, that's one transportation legacy that remains). A project by artist and curator Theo Sims, The Candahar Bar is a working reconstruction of a Belfast public house, complete with authentic Northern Irish bartenders pulling pints for thirsty installation participants/spectators. Produced by North Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery (in conjunction with the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad), the installation, open noon to 4 pm and 8 pm to midnight daily, coincides with a nightly line-up of artist's talks, performances, discussions, and DJing sessions programmed by my good friend and SFU English's current Writer-in-Residence, Michael Turner.

Last night was a series of music, sound, and performance art pieces called "Clamour and Toll," guest curated by the Or Gallery's Eli Bornowsky. Richard and I stayed for Christian Nicolay and Ya-chu Kang's opening "Recipe for Morning Rituals," a whimsical sound and theatrical experiment in which the performers mime waking up and doing exercises, before going on to "play various instruments and/or objects to compose the dream you just had." That was followed by Absurdus' "Strains of Liquid," a "noise experiment" that uses John Cage-like principles of indeterminacy to creative "electroacoustic conversations" between amplified violin and keyboard, digitized music via computer, and ambient sound.

All in all a most enjoyable way to block out the white noise that has become the cacophonous meta-discourse on these Olympics.

For something really worth listening to on the subject of the Olympics, check out the following conversation being launched by W2 Community Media Arts and Abandon Normal Devices tonight down on West Hastings:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Abandon Normal Devices and W2 Launch Cultural Collaboration Between Vancouver 2010 and London 2012

February 16, 2010 - Vancouver, BC - On February 18, 2009, Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and W2 will launch a four day programme constituting the only Games-time cultural collaboration between Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. The programme will feature academics, artists, producers, activists and scientists from the UK, Canada, Netherlands and the US.

The speakers will come together for debates and film screenings that consider the impact of the politics of ability and disability on the Olympics, the implications of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children for the future of sport, and the connections between environmental debates and the Games.

The programme will take place at W2 Culture + Media House at 112 West Hastings on February 18th, 20th and 21st. It is produced in association with FACT, Tenantspin and Dada for Vancouver 2010 and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme in England’s Northwest.

AND is an environmentally-friendly collaboration and will be entirely webcast. Some of the speakers will participate by remote video and interested audiences can participate in the live-streaming debates and discussions by visiting http://www.creativetechnology.org/ and selecting W2 TV.

Admission to AND is by donation. Check http://www.creativetechnology.org/events/abandon-normal-devices for a list of speakers.

Feb 18 CONTRACT: 7pm-9pm

An Olympic Games raises a number of exciting and challenging questions for a city. It proposes new spheres of investment, the redistribution of funds, inclusion and areas of exclusion, new laws that affect civil life and a vast, global media profile. How do these structures affect the obligations of citizens and institutions who become bound by collaborative contracts? And how does the scrutinization of this work by traditional and new media affect local identity and global perceptions? What can be learned from Vancouver 2010? How can this inform London 2012? How is work by artists contributing to urban city and citizenship development?

Feb 20 COMPETE: Faster, Higher, Stronger 4:30pm-8:30pm

The Olympic Games are measures of human excellence but what happens when those measures are disrupted by self-augmentation and body modification? Our biological apparatus is in flux, vulnerable, yet re-imagined by technology. What will ability and disability mean in an era of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children? How are artists contributing to this research and debate? For example, genetically screening for ‘perfect pitch’ may produce ideal singers, but whose ideal? Alternatively, what will the integration of future technology within biology mean for how humans communicate with each other via performances (dance, music or sport)?

Feb 21 INFECT: Environment, Pollution, Resilience 7pm-9pm

The third Olympic pillar after sport and culture is the ‘environment’. Yet, the 21st century environment is characterized by debates about climate change, pollution, global warming and new forms of disease. Our desire to transcend our biology is inextricable from the complex ways in which our own resilience can be suddenly brought into question, as manifested by the ‘swine flu’ pandemic, itself a new(s) virus. Can humanity be ‘fixed’ or are utopian projects merely processes of normality maintenance? How does artistic research engage with and inform the health, wellbeing and environmental agenda?

AND, which is based in England's Northwest, is a cross-regional festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture. It is part of the cultural legacy project of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. AND exists to create a space where artists and filmmakers can offer striking new perspectives, and visitors can enjoy, discuss and interact with ideas, in a festival that questions the normal and champions a different approach.

W2 Community Media Arts is a highly anticipated project opening in 2010 at the landmark Woodward’s redevelopment in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. In the lead-up to opening, W2 is operating the 13,000 sq ft W2 Culture + Media House across the street at 112 W Hastings. W2 provides a vibrant and complementary focal point in the redevelopment of Woodward’s and acts as a catalyst in the revitalization of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside by emphasizing the development capacity by and for DTES residents.

An overview of W2 Culture+Media House is covered by City of Vancouver's Snap 2010 Stories seen here: http://www.youtube.com/vancouvercityhall#p/a/u/2/yf8JDncHpoE.

For more information, please contact Irwin Oostinde, Executive Director of W2 at 604.689.9896, 1.877.689.9896, mobile 604-644-4349 or e-mail irwin@creativetechnology.org.

P.

What's Happening Here?

The Bid, Plan and Reality Workshop on the 2010 Winter Olympics organized by my colleagues in Urban Studies at SFU took place this past Monday at Harbour Centre, and certainly yielded some interesting conversations. If I was a little disappointed by the unexamined boosterism and general rewriting of civic history by Gordon Price (former city councilor) and Brent Toderian (current Director of Planning at City Hall), I was nevertheless convinced that the members of the first panel—Frances Bula (former Vancouver Sun reporter and freelance urban affairs critic), Nathan Edelson (former city planner), and Jim Green (former city councilor and consultant to the Millennium Group, who are overseeing the construction of the Athletes’ Village)—were sincere (if, perhaps, somewhat naïve) in stating that their support of the Games stemmed from their belief that the event could bring about an end to homelessness in the city. At the very least, as they pointed out, the agreements established between various stakeholders regarding this issue during the bid process (the Vancouver Agreement and the Inner-City Inclusivity Statement, in particular) did at least get the three levels of government (federal, provincial, an municipal) on side on this issue for the first time.

On the subject of how the Olympics do or do not help cities prioritize issues of concern that they are already facing, Professor Andy Thornley, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Visiting Fellow in Urban Sustainability and Development in SFU’s Urban Studies Program this week, made an interesting point: mega-events such as these can be ways for municipal governments to jump-start planning projects—and, as importantly, attract appropriate investment from the private and public sectors alike—that might otherwise get bogged down in years of bickering and bureaucracy. While I’m not sure this was the case regarding homelessness in Vancouver, and while it seems to me that for every victory on that front as a result of the Olympics (SROs saved, low-barrier shelters opened) there continue to be opportunities wasted or eroded, it is sobering to consider how the development imperative has been absorbed into urban governance as a way of advancing at times competing or contrasting social agendas. (In this regard, Dr. Thornley made a point that “Red” Ken Livingstone was on side from the beginning with London’s 2012 bid as a way of advancing his plan for redeveloping the Lower Lea Valley area of the city.)

As for myself and my fellow speakers on the arts and culture panel, Duncan Low (former executive director of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre and current graduate student in Urban Studies at SFU) and Irwin Oostindie (Executive Director of W2), we were far lass sanguine about the benefits of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad as they might contribute to any possible arts legacies for the city. Duncan and Irwin put things much better than I did, but for what it’s worth I include my remarks here. I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to the fact that the SFU Urban Studies Olympics Outcomes Project will be holding another symposium on the 2010 Games this October 22-24, also at Harbour Centre. This time, the urban impacts of the Vancouver Games will be placed in a more comparative global framework, while still paying attention to local legacies. Check out the Urban Studies website for more details. And now for what I said on Monday:

As most here likely recall, Vancouver’s original Olympic bid promised five years of Olympics-related cultural programming beginning in 2006 and leading up to a five-week Arts Festival beginning in mid-January 2010 and running through the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Soon after Robert Kerr was finally appointed as the program director for Vancouver and Whistler’s Cultural Olympiad, in mid July 2006 (with most arts programming in the city already set and prime venues booked), it was announced that this ambitious 5-year plan was being scaled back to three, with the Cultural Olympiad officially beginning in February 2008. Even here, however, the liaison between VANOC and arts and culture groups in the city was less than ideal, and in the confusion surrounding application procedures and deadlines that first Olympiad mostly ended up piggy-backing on previously programmed events. In other words, between the bold goals announced in Vancouver’s bid regarding Olympics-related culture and the struggle to implement a plan to achieve—however modestly—at least some of those goals, a sobering reality emerged to most cultural workers in the city: they could expect a temporary—and, to be sure, much-welcomed—increase in funding in the short term, but on the question of possible longer term cultural legacies and strategies for putting in place more sustainable sources of funding for local artists and arts and culture industries, VANOC has been deafeningly silent.

For me, this question of temporality is key, especially for the ways in which arts and culture are integrated within and/or coopted by the Olympic Movement. As Raymond T. Grant, the artistic director for the 2002 Olympic Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, put it to a meeting of the Whistler Chamber of Commerce in 2005, the organizing committee of an Olympics Games is solely focused on planning for the two-week event itself; in fact, nowhere in the IOC’s charter does it state that an organizing committee has any responsibility to deliver any legacy from an Olympic Games. Now that is not to say that, in formulating its bid, said committee doesn’t trumpet a rhetoric of social, environmental, and cultural legacy; but the reality is that such a future-oriented temporality de facto becomes the primary responsibility of the host city. Which is why we perhaps see a disconnect between how VANOC and members of Vancouver’s arts and culture community approach the “eventness” of the Cultural Olympiad, which we might frame in terms of a (globally) productivist vs. a (locally) sustainable model. That is, whereas the performance model of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad as it has been conceived by VANOC seems to be all about producing or subventing specifically sanctioned events that are confined to the temporal and spatial logic, or governmentality, of the larger mega-event and its influx of tourists they are ostensibly serving, local cultural groups and producers are, I would argue, more concerned about forging more durable associations between producers and audiences joined in mutual endeavor and creative experimentation about what the arts can or should do to stimulate and reinvigorate public debate about how the arts should be funded and managed civically, provincially, and nationally. As Grant put it to his Whistler audience, “the legacy of the Games in Salt Lake City was little more than a photo album to offer to our world visitors. And this despite a $101 million dollar surplus!”

While Pierre de Coubertin, in founding the modern Olympics in 1894, declared culture to be “the second pillar of the Olympic Movement—equal to sport,” it has mostly played the role of second fiddle. This has much to do with questions of visibility and profile, as well as both the expansive definition and unformalized structure given to questions of cultural presentation by the IOC. For example, the budget for culture—as outlined in Vancouver’s own bid book—is meant to cover not just arts festival programming leading up to and during the Games, but also educational programming, the torch relay, and the opening and closing ceremonies. Additionally, the IOC mandates no specific requirements in terms of cultural programming beyond a broadly multi-disciplinary mix of national and international artistic representation of “the highest calibre.” The rest is up to individual organizing committees, and in Vancouver’s case that seems to have translated into a rather ad-hoc approach, one that has for the most part followed Sydney’s lead in closely linking cultural representation and inclusion to First Nations participation and visibility, but that arguably has failed to emulate Sydney in terms of liaising with and soliciting the participation of local performing arts producers and administrators, whether as VANOC board members or as members of the creative team charged with bringing off what, in terms of a media spectacle that, at least since Rome in 1960, is specifically designed for television broadcast, the most important moments of artistic and cultural display: the opening and closing ceremonies.

The Vancouver ceremonies’ executive director is the Australian David Atkins, who produced Sydney’s 2000 Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Leaving aside the grumbling in many quarters about the marginalization of high-profile Quebec talent like Cirque de Soleil, lemieux.pilon 4d art, and Robert Lepage (all of whom were involved in talks with VANOC at one stage or another, and all of whom eventually walked away as a result of creative differences), what struck me when Atkins’ creative team was announced in April of this year was the distinct under-representation of local Vancouver talent. The Choreographic Director, Jean-Grand Maître, is from Alberta (by way of Quebec); the Design Director, Douglas Paraschuk, has spent 21 seasons at Stratford; the Music Director, David Pierce, is from Calgary; the Costume Designers, Dean and Dan Caten, are from Toronto; the Lighting Designer, Bob Dickinson (no relation), and the Sound Designer, Bruce Jackson, are both American. Then again, given that the $20 million the federal government has promised towards the opening and closing ceremonies is apparently contingent on their message “adequately reflect[ing] the priorities of the Government and help[ing] to achieve its domestic and international branding goals” (there is much talk about the ceremonies playing up Canada’s current combat role in Afghanistan), perhaps a Crystal Pite or a Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald or an Owen Underhill is glad to be out of the mix.

It is worth noting in terms of visibility and profile, that starting with the first Olympic Arts Festival, in 1912, and continuing until the Melbourne Games in 1956, the cultural programming was actually competitive—artists, like athletes, competed for medals in various categories of the plastic and performing arts. However, as Beatriz Garcia and Andy Miah note, an expanding international base of artists and disciplines, along with routine problems relating to the comparison and judgment of different artworks and styles (the cultural equivalent of figure skating scandals in the Winter Olympics), led to the decision to substitute the competition structure with an exhibitionary and festival one. This led to a consequent diminishment of the status and relevance of the Games’ cultural programming, a problem that has only been steadily exacerbated by the lack of media coverage given to this programming; with accredited journalists and licensed television broadcast networks totally focused on the athletes and sports events, they rely on pre-recorded segments relating to the arts or local urban colour (in our case expect the requisite exposés of the DTES—already inaugurated by Dan Rather) rather than engaging with the actual cultural amenities and atmosphere of the city itself. This, in turn, creates problems in terms of attracting additional sponsorship funding for arts and culture related events—whether for the temporary “live sites” around the city during the Olympics themselves, which are still well short of their targeted sponsorship goals, of for longer term endowments for financially and socially sustainable legacy projects. Consequently, as Garcia and Miah also note, the Cultural Olympiad has always occupied an historically awkward position in the Olympics organizing committees’ corporate management structures. Organizing committees know they are mandated to address culture in some way, but generally prefer expedient, media-friendly event solutions that broadcast well globally rather than the more difficult, time-consuming, and costly planning and prioritizing of cultural policy and a vision of the place and role of the arts in the city that accounts for the very different needs and expectations of local audiences. Which is why, since Salt Lake in 2002, so much money has been spent on programming around medal ceremonies—this is what will play well on TV.

The idea of the Cultural Olympiad, first introduced in Barcelona in 1992, as a multi-year showcase where art and performance can take centre stage, and where local audiences especially can partake of and benefit from unique programming opportunities, is thus always already compensatory, an understanding of culture and performance as something that needs to be compressed and packaged for quick and easy consumption within a delimited period of time, rather than as a valuable resource that, among other things, is involved in documenting and commenting on the transformation of the social space in which it is produced (including the transformations wrought by a mega-event like the Olympics). To that end, I think it is important to talk about some of the actual performances and exhibitions that constitute the archive of Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad in the lead up to 2010. It is very likely that all the world (and all that we) will remember of 2010 are those images we see on TV of the opening and closing ceremonies and the medal presentations; but several local visual artists have already begun intervening in this project of civic memorialization to remind us, from a present anterior position, of what, in the future, and what from the past, we may be in danger of forgetting.

To this end, let me very briefly reference a material encounter with the recent urban development history of Vancouver that is, I believe, on display in the year-long poster project undertaken by artist Jeremy Shaw as part of Presentation House Gallery’s contribution to the 2009 Cultural Olympiad. Called Something’s Happening Here, the project sees Shaw employing a similar appropriative aesthetic to an artist like Alex Morrison (whom I talk about at greater length in my forthcoming book). Specifically, Shaw takes promotional materials and souvenir ephemera, along with news articles and archival photographs, associated with Expo 86 to create street-style posters that have been distributed across the city of Vancouver since late February 2009, and that will continue to appear through to the beginning of the 2010 Olympic Games. Something’s Happening Here (the title is taken from an Expo-era poster, but also deliberately recalls the first line of the iconic Buffalo Springfield protest song, "For What It's Worth") is, at the PHG website explains, “intended to open a discussion on how global events like Expo and the Olympics impact on the creation of civic space through an architectural legacy of buildings and monuments, and significantly, how such events live on through a collective civic memory. In redeploying images that invoke a recently bygone era, Something’s Happening Here affects a momentary, recuperative snapshot of Vancouver’s history on the cusp of a new moment.”

As markers of past actions that also serve as announcements of a forthcoming event, Shaw’s posters return us to the question of temporality by materializing time as a span that can be re-enacted. The question then becomes, in this context of mega-events and civic memorialization (where time and space get collapsed, often unthinkingly, through a “once in a lifetime” mentality), whether we want things re-enacted in precisely the same way. And here, I would argue, that Shaw’s posters perform an action akin to the temporal documentation of video art. In other words, they function as evidence, in this case linking, through their very materiality (mounted on construction site walls and street lamps, they will be successively ripped down or plastered over), one showcase event to another by, among other things, asking us to consider what of our city we might in the interim have likewise torn down, or covered up. Or even failed to build.

And here I will use the example of Shaw as a largely photo-conceptual artist to leave you to ponder the deepening quagmire around the future site of an expanded Vancouver Art Gallery. You will recall that Gordon Campbell stunned many in the city when he announced, in May of last year, that in addition to BC Place getting a new roof post-Olympics, the VAG would be relocated to North False Creek, on the site of the current Plaza of Nations. This despite the Gallery’s own stated preference for the former Greyhound bus depot at Georgia and Beatty, across from Queen Elizabeth Theatre; the new site’s lack of proximity to downtown and the consequent public transportation difficulties; and the wisdom of locating an art gallery next to two sports facilities, a casino, a Costco, and several residential towers. Not to mention, as Frances Bula has recently noted in her blog, that Campbell, despite having long ceased to be Mayor of Vancouver, seemed to have vaulted over the city in making a side deal with the development company that owned the property. Flash forward to last week, when it was announced in the news that the Gallery, having done a feasibility study, would likely take a pass on the site, owing to all of the reasons cited above, plus the added costs that would come with building on landfill. Campbell’s original announcement, as so many of his do, made for a great photo-op: look what cultural opportunities we’re creating as a result of the Olympics!

In reality, however, there was no legacy planning or foresight involved here. Had there been, Vancouver would have, from the very beginning, followed the example of Turin, which consciously identified arts and culture as the most significant legacy that would be provided from the Olympics in helping it to make a transition from a post-industrial car manufacturing city to a service-based and creative economy. And they did so not by resting on the laurels of their historical cultural patrimony (something that Vancouver, in any case, could not do), but by consciously rebranding themselves as a contemporary art destination. Vancouver, as a globally recognized centre of photoconceptual production, and as the largest city in a province whose own traditional resource economy has long since collapsed, had the same opportunity. And incorporating a discussion of where and when to re-site the VAG (with its collection of Jeff Walls, and its current exhibitions showcasing the work of Andreas Gursky and Stan Douglas) into the bid discussion from the very beginning would arguably have been a catalyst for the creation and revitalization of an artistic corridor that could have (and could still) take as its starting point the west, rather than the east, side of the Queen E. Indeed, the postal sorting plant at Georgia and Cambie, as many have noted, offers a stunning modernist space that would be able to accommodate, unlike the VAG’s current location, not just a far more sizeable chunk of the gallery’s permanent collection, but also the original large-scale formats of Gursky’s best-known photographs (which have been controversially re-sized for the current VAG show). What’s more, with its relative proximity to the DTES, a new VAG on this site would arguably, in combination with the new Woodward’s development, be a major force in helping to regenerate this area outside of the constraints of a boom or bust, have or have-not real estate market.

P.

PuSh Pull

The PuSh Festival wrapped up this past weekend. In the end, I couldn’t get to the Children’s Choice Awards event on Sunday (chose to bang away at a paper instead, as the writing had finally started to flow). Organizers had invited back the kids from Bridgeview Elementary in Surrey who had participated in last year’s Haircuts by Children by Darren O’Donnell’s Mammalian Diving Reflex (where yours truly was shorn). They were given free reign to check out the shows (though presumably not Ronnie Burkett’s R-rated Billy Twinkle—see below), and this was to be the red carpet moment where they revealed what they liked and disliked. I’m bummed that I had to give it a pass, but here’s my own verdict on the rest of the shows we saw:

1. Transmission of the Invisible: conceived, choreographed, designed, and scored by Toronto-based Peter Chin, of Tribal Crackling Wind, this was a collaboration between dancers from Canada and Cambodia that sought to explore the fusion between modern western and classical Cambodian gesture and movement. I’m not sure I was able to figure out entirely the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural codes at work in the interactions between the two male Cambodian dancers and the two female and one male Canadian dancers, though there were definitely some interesting racial and gender politics operating throughout. As a piece of intercultural performance, I appreciated Chin’s exploration of the difficulties of assimilating and making meaning from different cultural forms, but I also felt, paradoxically, that the accompanying video installation by Cylla von Tiedemann (one of my favourite dance photographers) demanded interpretation, especially as it featured, in my recollection, only the western dancers, presumably on the streets of Phnom Penh. An additional treat was a delightful solo by Chin himself, which preceded the piece—after which he bounded exuberantly up into the audience, and sat with us to watch the main performance.

2. Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy: Ronnie Burkett was back in town with his Theatre of Marionettes, this time offering what surely is his most self-lacerating and nakedly autobiographical puppet play yet. Billy, you see, is himself a puppeteer, working on a cruise ship with his “Stars in Miniature,” which include, most memorably, a saucy burlesque dancer, a roller-skating bear, and a dipsomaniacal off-key amateur opera singer. In the middle of one of the nightly routines he has been performing for years, Billy loses it over an audience member who won’t stop talking. He soon finds himself out of a job and contemplating suicide by hurling himself over the prow of the ship. Enter Sid Diamond, or rather his ghost, in the form of a bunny-eared sock puppet. Sid, it turns out, mentored Billy when he was just starting out, and has always lamented his pupil throwing away his talent on popular cruise ship entertainment rather than developing a more classical repertory such as his own (Sid does puppet Shakespeare, you see, and reacts badly when Billy introduces into his act a parody of The Taming of the Shrew called The Taming of the Moo). Sid’s job is to review Billy’s life for him, reminding him of why he started in the business in the first place, and what he himself has to teach to others. In exchange, Sid gets released from the quasi-limbo state in which he has been caught since his death. As usual with Burkett, the play is filled with bawdy humour, lots of camp asides, and of course delightful set pieces of marionette wizardry, including in this case Burkett manipulating Billy manipulating his own mini-puppets. I have read that Burkett interviewed older puppeteers who in fact worked the cruise ship circuit in the 50s and 60s, and the requiem of the title in part refers to those in-the-process-of-being-lost traditions of both artistic and queer tutelage. One hopes, in this regard, it is not also a requiem for Ronnie himself, and what his daring stagecraft has to teach a theatre public that thinks puppets are only for kids. And yet, after this one does wonder what he’ll do next. Perhaps that sock puppet is one clue of a change in direction?

3. The Invisible: the latest one-woman show from Montreal wunderkind and Lepage collaborator Marie Brassard. Richard and I had seen her piece Jimmy at one of the first PuSh Festivals several years ago, and so were anticipating this event very much. Like Jimmy, it continued Brassard’s explorations with sound, voice manipulation, and lighting effects. However, unlike Jimmy, which was a tight, focused bit of storytelling about the mutability of gender and identity, and which made of the technology of her dramaturgy an intimate dreamscape in which we, in the audience, felt invited to participate (in part via a canny breaking of the fourth wall at a key moment), The Invisible meandered randomly from a discussion of 19th-century spiritualism and the fascination with ectoplasm, to an account of a literary hoax in the southern United States involving an androgynous male prostitute called JT LeRoy, to various excerpts from Marie’s own dreams (the woman must be in analysis). And Marie (who is a tiny little thing) looked lost on Freddy Wood’s cavernous proscenium stage. As Josh Bowman, PuSh’s Fundraising Manager (and a former student), put it to me after the show, the piece was more compelling as a sound installation than as a work of theatre. But even here, Marie was verging on self-indulgence and the voice modulation shtick now feels somewhat gimmicky.

4. Nanay: a testimonial play conceived and co-written by Richard’s colleague Geraldine Pratt, who teaches in the Geography Department at UBC, and whose research has for a long time focused on Filipina nannies who come to Canada through the Live-In Caregiver Program, taking care of other people’s children while separated, often for years at a time, from their own children back in the Philippines. Using interviews with the caregivers, as well as their Canadian employers, and Canadian government officials, Pratt and her collaborators (including co-writer Caleb Johnston and members of the Philippine Women’s Centre of BC) created different theatrical environments in which they staged the stakeholders’ various stories, often in radically different dramaturgical ways. Audience members were given clipboards and a form at the outset, and were invited to write down our thoughts on whose stories we found most compelling, and whether or not we found all sides of the issue presented fairly. Afterwards, there was a talk back session, but we were not able to stay, as the performance went way overtime (we attended the first show), and we had to get to another event. However, I’m not sure what I would have said had I stayed. For there did seem to be a very radical divide in terms of how the nannies’ stories were told (literally up front and personal, as we crowded into a small kitchen space or a cold storage area to listen to compelling narratives of loss, privation and indignity that were presented with a minimum of theatrical ornamentation) and how those of their employers’ were presented (whether as melodrama or as farce, and with a clear sense—via the use of scrims, video projects, and the placement of the audience in tiered rows at a distance from the actors—that these were being staged as entertainment). Verbatim theatre is tricky, but with the right dramaturgy, it can be done well—cf. The Larmaie Project, or DV8 Physical Theatre’s recent To Be Straight With You. Unfortunately, I think Nanay ultimately missed the mark.

5. Assembly: Radix Theatre’s exploration of wholeness and fragmentation via a motivational speaking seminar that goes awry was one of my favourite shows at this year’s festival. Laugh-out loud hilarious and featuring expert and revealing (quite literally) performances from actors and co-creators Katy Harris-McLeod, Andrew Laurenson, Billy Marchenski, and Emelia Symington Fedy. From the mid-1908s era hotel boardroom where the piece begins (in the Granville Island Hotel, a place I’d never before been inside), to the nametags we were invited to wear, to the Madonna headset mics that adorn our “dream team” of speakers, Assembly mercilessly parodies the worst clichés of countless professional seminars and exploratory retreats many of us have had to attend over the years. But when Harris-McLeod starts to refer to different unprintable words for a certain part of her anatomy in order to distinguish the winners from the losers in the rat race of life, you know you’re in strange territory indeed. It only gets stranger, with a rather X-Files-like moment of exhibitionary display leading to a still more surprising—because so quietly moving—conclusion.

6. Live from a Bush of Ghosts: an interesting mixed-media experiment from Theatre Conspiracy about the “fallout” of electronic culture. Inspired by Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial landscapes (see my previous post), Brian Eno and David Byrne’s recording My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s novel of the same name, writer Tim Carlson enlisted the DJing talents of local hip-hop duo No Luck Club, the live video mixing wizardry of Candelario Andrade, and the dancing and acting skills of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, to make connections between First World waste, Third World disposal, and Fourth World retrieval. Some of the digital and electronic effects were amazing, but I’m still struggling to piece together all of the story episodes, some of which worked better than others.

All in all a most satisfying and culturally edifying experience. Kudos to Norman Armour and his staff for PuShing the envelope of performance yet again in Vancouver. Whatever one ultimately thinks of the work, it is never boring.

Many of the performances at PuSh were included as part of the programming for 2010’s Cultural Olympiad, which is currently underway as we approach (tomorrow, I believe) the one year mark for the grand event itself. There’s been a lot of discussion in the arts community about what happens after that. While Armour and others are indeed grateful for the one-off boosts in funding and profile that Cultural Olympiad programming and sponsorship is providing in the lead up to the Winter Games, people are also lamenting a lack of longer-term arts legacy planning as part of the general Olympic mandate. There is evidence that the new administration in City Hall is undergoing its own rethink of its cultural programming structures, perhaps going so far as to create an independent Vancouver Arts Council that gets money from the city, but that also operates on an arms-length basis; but one wishes that Vancouver had hewed more closely in its Olympic preparations to the Turin model, which used the cultural opportunities created by the Games to revitalize its entire arts infrastructure, making the city a leading destination for contemporary art in Italy. The hasty and ill-conceived announcement by Premier Campbell about a new False Creek location for the Vancouver Art Gallery that would be part of a post-Games effort to build an “entertainment” district in the area adjacent BC Place (which would itself get a facelift as a potential home venue for the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team and as a more used destination for touring rock bands) is symptomatic of the short-sighted thinking on these matters. Rather than an “entertainment” destination, the city should be thinking about arts and culture integration, with the VAG, for instance, better suited to the Post Office location on Georgia and Hamilton, across from the Playhouse and Queen E, and in a prime location to make links with other arts and community organizations in the Downtown Eastside. But nobody asked me.

P.

Deficit Budgets and Surplus Performances

Let me begin with the political news before we get to the performances:

I was interested to read in the paper yesterday that Jim Green, former COPE and Vision city councillor and one-time mayoral hopeful, has been appointed by Millennium Development Corporation to get the troubled Athletes' Village project back on track regarding its financing and post-Olympics neighbourhood conversion. Despite the all-round quagmire that has resulted from this project (another bonding company revised the city's credit rating to "negative" yesterday), this latest development is, I believe, good news. Green has already stated that one of his primary goals will be to see that the commitment to social housing in the original proposal for the project remains a priority.

Coincidentally, the British government has just released hundreds of millions of pounds from its contingency fund to keep construction on London's 2012 Olympic venues, including its own embattled Athletes' Village, on track. Given what a hit the UK has taken in the global financial meltdown, one wonders why the grand Olympic-related development projects planned for east London have not yet been scaled back. Likely because the London Development Agency is a big stakeholder and is still hoping to do for the Lower Lea Valley and the working class and racial minority communities of Stratford and Hackney what Canary Wharf did for the Docklands in the 1980s. This is all billed as economic revitalization, of course, but when one considers the residents who live in these areas, it starts to look more like a social engineering project. Build better transport and nice recreational facilities, and with that will come tourists, followed by more job opportunities, quality health care, and a higher standard of living. I believe this process is called gentrification.

Vancouver's own Carrall Street Greenway project is a glorified beautification project to allow more pleasant direct access for Olympic tourists and the next wave of condo purchasers expected to follow in their wake from Gastown to the downtown portion of our famed seawall. To this end, the hypodermic-strewn Pigeon Park is undergoing a make-over that not only includes the painting over of graffiti on walls, the repaving of its concrete, and the replacement of benches and tables, but also the installation of high-powered street lamps to deter loitering, malingering, and public drug use. See, in this regard, my comments on Althea Thauberger's Carrall Street in my very first post to this blog.

Parliament is back in session after its unprecedented proroguement last December. The Tories have presented their economic "stimulus" budget and are feeling a tad more conciliatory this time around, particularly towards arts and culture, which they are giving some $335 million in total. Here, in thumbnail, are the details:

• Two-year funding of $60-million to support infrastructure-related costs for local and community cultural and heritage institutions such as local theatres, libraries, and small museums
• Increasing funding by $20-million over the next two years and $13-million per year thereafter to the National Arts Training Contribution Program
• Providing $30-million over the next two years to support access to Canadian magazines and community newspapers
• Providing $28.6 over the next two years to the Canada New Media Fund, and $14.3-million annually thereafter
• Providing the Canadian Television Fund with $200 million in funding over the next two years

I have to say this is much better than I expected. However, the news is not so great on the education front. Despite $2 billion for universities and colleges to fix their aging buildings, some $87.5 million for new graduate scholarships, and $750 million for the Canada Foundation for Innovation research infrastructure fund (which all goes to science-related projects anyway), the government is actually reducing the base budgets of the three federal research granting councils (SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR). That means my colleagues and I, especially those of us who work in the humanities, which always shoulders the brunt of such cuts, will have a much harder time conducting new research. Which in turn means our students will be shortchanged. At a time when Obama is calling for major investment in education south of the border, this move is short-sighted and sad.

It appears the Liberals, under new leader Michael Ignatieff, will support the budget (as was expected), but according to CBC Radio this morning old Iggy is flexing his muscle somewhat (and drawing Harper's attention to his steadily increasing poll numbers) by insisting on accountability updates from the government on the results of its spending in March, June, and December of this year. Each of these updates will apparently be treated as a vote of confidence. One doubts that Harper will be able to get away with a replay of December's shenanigans a second time, which is no doubt what Iggy is counting on. That and the fact, like Chretien before him, he will be able to position himself and the Liberals as the ones who will pull the country out of deficit mode. Indeed, there is something strangely satisfying in seeing Harper, who swore he would never do so, follow his erstwhile mentor Mulroney in plunging the Conservatives down the path of deficit spending.

Now on to some performance-related matters:

Vancouver's Second Cultural Olympiad is in full-swing, and the line-up already seems much better than last year, particularly in the international offerings. Well worth checking out, in this regard, is the Action-Camera: Beijing Performance Photography show that opened at UBC's Belkin Art Gallery two weeks ago. Curated by Keith Wallace, the show is a survey of the relationship between performance art and photography in China as both emerged from the underground scene in Beijing's East Village in the 1990s. That relationship, as the large-scale, professionally illuminated, and formally composed C-prints in the show attest, has little to do with documenting for historical posterity the officially discouraged and temporally ephemeral live public performances and body art actions of East Village pioneers like Ma Liuming, Rong Rong, Zhang Huan, and Xing Danwen. Rather, these and other artists are using the medium of the camera itself to stage agitprop performances of individual self-expression and collective national consciousness as highly choreographed, repeatable, and overdetermined with paradoxical meaning as any Photoshopped and digitally manipulated images released by the Chinese state in the lead up to its Olympics (and, significantly, many of the images in the show, including ones by Hong Hao and Li Wei, do in fact use Photoshop to achieve their performative effects). As Wallace suggests in his catalogue essay to the show, this places a special onus on audiences in terms of negotiating between a locally distinctive and culturally specific versus globally assimilative and formally partial comprehension of the work. For example, do we read bad boy Ai Weiwei's contribution to the show, his 1995 triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, as a logical extension of the Duchampian questioning of the cultural value of art via the ready-made, or as an iconoclastic comment on Ai's part about the relative national worth bestowed by China on an historical past that predates the Cultural Revolution?

I've actually been doing a bit of work on Ai in connection with the Olympics chapter in my new book. The man is an artistic polymath, and I've been particularly taken with the series of digital video and photographic works documenting the urban transformation of Beijing that he embarked upon in the early part of this century, coincident with his hiring by Herzog and de Meuron as design consultant on the Bird's Nest Stadium. For example, in the C-prints that make up his Provisional Landscape series of photographs, Ai represents a spatially and temporally "void" Beijing as a perpetual construction site, recording "empty" images of areas targeted for redevelopment and repurposing in the lead up to the Olympics at the moment just after the old built environment has been demolished and just before work on the new one has begun, the detritus of the past a passive rebuke to dreams of future progress:

Ai's images, though much smaller in scale, remind me of Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky's massive and visually stunning photographs of "manufactured" industrial landscapes. As a result of Jennifer Baichwal's award-winning documentary film on the artist, Burtynsky has become famous for his towering portraits of several hallmarks of China's industrial progress, including the Three Gorges Dam. However, An Uneasy Beauty, a solo exhibition of the artist's work that recently opened at the Surrey Art Gallery, also as part of the Cultural Olympiad programming, reminded me that he has documented the visible evidence of our planet's collective consumption and waste at sites much closer to home. The Surrey show features 24 images Burtynsky shot in Western Canada between 1985 and 2007, including compositionally precise photos of oil sand extraction sites at Fort McMurray, Alberta, open-pit mines in northern BC, and the container port of Vancouver. 

Designed and exhibited as a series, the photos trace both the material roots and spectral routes of our dependence on non-renewable energy resources, a global fuel economy that leads from Alberta's oil fields, through Vancouver's port, to the bulldozers, heavy diggers, and forklifts awaiting start up in Ai's photos of Beijing. The human-altered landscapes in Ai's and Burtynsky's photos are likewise linked in that they are devoid of bodies and yet paradoxically demand of their viewing audiences bodily engagement, a sensorially immersive accounting of how we are locally implicated in these "placeless" spaces by the cars we drive, the food we eat, even the entertainment and sporting spectacles we attend. At the same time, both Ai and Burtynsky have separately stated that their work is not meant to be read as an overt judgment, not as political indictments but as performance indicators. In this, Burtynsky's lens, like Ai's, would find a rich resource of subject matter in the venue building sites of any number of recent or future Olympic host cities, including Vancouver and London:

The 2009 PuSh Festival, also the recipient of Vancouver Cultural Olympiad funding, is in full swing. Richard and I have seen three offerings so far:

1. Five Days in March: a play written and directed by Toshiki Okada and starring a group of talented young performers from Tokyo's chelfitsch Theatre Company. The entire piece is written as narrative exposition; a group of urban hipsters successively recounts and revises a tale of a young man and woman meeting up following a rock concert and spending the next five days have continuous sex in a Tokyo love hotel against the backdrop of the US invasion of Iraq--and the controlled and closely monitored Japanese student protests against the invasion. The story is deliberately inconsequential and slight, the repetition of the scenes as dramatically bathetic as the sex our lovers are having, and one soon realizes it's not all that important to follow the English surtitles. What becomes compelling, then, is watching the performances, in particular the young actors' exaggerated bodily gestures (stretching a leg, tugging at a shirt sleeve, bouncing awkwardly on one foot) as they successively, and mostly affectlessly, add another layer to the story. The movement, which occupies a physical realm somewhere between hyper-kinetic fidgeting and choreographed dance, seems to speak at once to the restless narcissism and aimless irony of this particular generation of Japanese, for whom a spontaneous love affair and a stage-managed war are equally anticlimactic.
2. while going to a condition/Accumulated Layout: two solo pieces by the Japanese dancer, choreographer, and sound and lighting designer Hiroaki Umeda. Borrowing from butoh and hip hop, Umeda's work begins slowly, marrying small movements (the repeated flick of a wrist, or turn of the head) to percussive bursts of sound and sharp light pulses. Through a steadily more rapid and propulsive process of accumulation, sound, light, and movement increase and merge in intensity, until Umeda is sculpting a fully immersive sensory environment that truly defies description (hence the poverty of my own accounting of his extraordinary performance).
3. The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac: inaugurating the new Club PuSh, what organizers are calling a festival-within-the-festival (and designed to create a more intimate, cabaret-like performance atmosphere, complete with tables and booze for sale), was New York performance and drag artist Taylor Mac. I confess to being completely oblivious to Mr. Mac's singular talents before last night, but boy am I ever a convert. The show was simply amazing, with Mac combining political satire, autobiographical musings, virtuoso musical numbers and ukulele-playing, heavy doses of camp irony, and of course a fierce sartorial style, to beguile us all about the benefits of sometimes stepping out of the bubble of white light into the darkness, and about what it means to prepare oneself to be surprised. I look forward to exploring more of his work. In the meantime, I leave you with this offering.

Lots more from PuSh is on the horizon, and I hope to be back soon with another report on what I've seen. 

P