An empty house (full of air) at Pandora Park

Luciana D'Anunciacao is a multidisciplinary artist who works with video, sound, lighting, fabrics, textures, found objects and her own body to create immersive and deeply sensory durational performances and installations. She recently graduated with an MFA from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, and with the collective Dance Troupe Practice currently has a three-year artist residency with the Vancouver Parks Board, based out of the fieldhouse at Pandora Park, on the east side.

As part of the first phase of this residency, D'Anunciacao has collaborated with Carolina Bergonzoni to create a site-specific movement piece that takes place within the confined space of the fieldhouse, a kind of caretaker's cottage attached to the park. Actually, the work begins in an even more constricted and spatially delimited manner, with audience members clustered around the door to the cottage, watching as D'Anunciacao, standing upright, and Bergonzoni, squished horizontally along a low shelf, shift their limbs and redistribute their weight within the very shallow and narrow interior of the front closet. Restricting their movements even further are the large plastic pillows filled with air that the performers--both wearing matching pajama tops and bottoms--must work with and around. 

The air bags are intriguingly paradoxical props. On the one hand, they function as a further impediment to the mobility and presumed desire for extrication of the performers. At the same time, they serve as a protective buffer between their bodies and the hard surfaces and sharp edges of the space they are moving within. And it must be said, on this front, that D'Anunciacao and Bergonzoni are by no means cautious and delicate movers in this part of the piece, despite the physical restrictions placed upon them; I offered several empathetic winces for battered elbows and hips as both women flung themselves about with abandon. And yet, as much as the performers' costumes conjure the image of the air bags as comforting and pliably soft pillows, witnessing D'Anunciacao bury her face more than once within a well of plastic also brought to mind all those warnings one received as a kid about not putting plastic bags over your head. Here, another aspect of the air bags bears mentioning: the sound they make when the performers move with or against them. This reverberating acoustic echo was something that, from my own restricted viewing position, I came to anticipate and listen for as a reassurance that the performers were still in fact moving.

Eventually D'Anunciacao and Bergonzoni extricate themselves from the closet and bolt, along with their air bags, to two separate rooms at the back of the cottage. This is our cue to enter the performance space and take our seats within its tiny open kitchen. After a duet of opening and closing doors set to a bit of adapted text from a Brazilian writer, the final portion of the performance takes place in the kitchen. Retrieving two new air bags--one from the oven, the other from the fridge--D'Anunciacao and Bergonzoni roll with them across virtually every surface and into almost every nook and cranny in the room. This includes not just some inventive partnering on the floor, but also a sequence of amazing bodily juxtapositions involving the surfaces of appliances and countertops and the interiors of cabinets. Indeed, it was a compelling visual contrast to see D'Anunciacao, the taller of the two performers, maneuver her body along stove and counter tops, dipping her head into the sink while Bergonzoni, who is physically more compact, folded her limbs into the inside of the cabinet underneath. I wouldn't have been surprised, at that point, if they had gone on to change places by squeezing each of their bodies through the drain.

All of which speaks to how organically this piece was in tune with its site. I look forward to what else D'Aunciacao and her collective creates over the next three years.

P. 

Lossless at SFU Woodward's

So I didn't get to my Fringe show yesterday afternoon owing to the usual time suck that always overtakes one at the start of a new term. However, I did make it to the opening of the MFA Graduating Exhibition at SFU Woodward's. Called Lossless, it features works by Luciana D'Anunciação, Deborah Edmeades, Jeffrey Langille, Avery Nabata, and Nathaniel Wong; together they have produced one of the strongest graduating shows in recent memory.

D'Anunciação's piece, When will my hands become roots?, actually takes place in Studio T, on the second floor. A performative installation that combines video projections, music and sound, hung cloth, and natural objects, the work explores questions of place and displacement, home and exile within a total sensory environment that, starting this evening at 8 pm and continuing through Saturday, will be animated by D'Anunciação's own body.

The rest of the works have been installed in the Audain Gallery, and three of them are video-based. Edmeades' complex and hilarious On the Validity of Illusion asks, among other things, how subjects can become objects and objects subjects "through the invisible co-ordinating 'now' of the camera lens."
Jeffrey Langille's How is it that there is always something new? adapts the conventions of landscape painting and photography to the durational space of the screen in order to explore the eventness (geological, meteorological, auditory) within stillness. And Nathaniel Wong's Thus Spoke Death and Transfiguration is a multi-channel installation that sets up a dialectic between the "aestheticization of the banal" and the "trivialization of the everyday," in part by re-performing a lecture on "Being Happy" by the French philosopher Alain Badiou (a clip of which you can find on YouTube here).

The show is rounded out by Nabata's Growth, Endlessness, Blocks. A series of deceptively simple wood sculptures, Nabata's focus on how distinct units fit into each other in order to make a foundation and build a bigger structure evokes questions of architectural scale that one cannot help but read against the crane-dotted skyline of Vancouver.

The show runs until September 27, and it is definitely worth checking out.

P.

Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's

The MFA students at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts are staging a year-end festival of new work called Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's through this Sunday. Last night I caught a double bill of very intriguing dance pieces.

Stroking the Unknown Dog is a structured improvisation for five dancers and a musician conceived by choreographer Emmalena Fredriksson. Responding to a set of instructions from Fredriksson, to the music (by Alex Mah), to each other, and no doubt to the audience (who sit in the round), the dancers make real-time movement choices of shape, proximity, massing, etc. that, in the words of Fredriksson, reveal "notions of individuality, community and the animals within."

Aril is a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Yves Candau and lighting designer Kyla Gardiner (who was also responsible for the illumination in Stroking the Unknown Dog). Exploring "the interplay between form and function in ... emergent patterns of human locomotion," Candau isolates the drive toward mobility in individual limbs and joints, crafting out of everyday activities like reaching and bending a mesmerizing tapestry of movement. Embroidering and overlaying this tapestry with live lighting projections, Gardiner adds rich visual texture as she alternates her washes of colour from inky pools of blue and black to vibrant splashes of red and wispy swirls of white.

The festival kicked off on Wednesday with a durational five-hour performance installation by Luciana D'Anunciacao called The door is open, please come in. While I could only stay for a brief half hour, it was enough time to take in a gorgeous ritual cleansing sequence involving water, herbs, flower petals and a length of white muslin--into which D'Anunciacao first wrapped and then extricated her body. Additional installation elements included a large looping video projection at one end of the studio (wrapped around the corner of the wall and showcasing D'Anunciacao's trademark play with perspective), a hammock in another corner, ripe mangos laid out on the floor, and an immersive sound score by Alex Mah. The installation was certainly a feast for the senses. I only wished I could have stayed longer.

P.