Stan Douglas' Circa 1948 and SCA House Party at SFU Woodward's

Yesterday, on my way to the School for the Contemporary Arts' 50th anniversary House Party at SFU Woodward's, I had thought I would hustle down to Granville Island to take in a quick 1 pm Fringe show. Timing is everything at the Fringe, and those precious minutes between the end of one show and the start of another can require major distance and speed calculations on the part of audience members. For me, all I needed to do was get out of the house in a mildly alacritous manner. So far this year my teaching schedule and other beginning-of-semester commitments have wreaked major havoc on my Fringeing. Likewise yesterday. I was ready and able, but Translink wasn't. Knowing I was going to miss the start of Brendan McLeod's Brain by more than 10 minutes, I opted to stay on the bus and head downtown. I walked through the main floor of the new Nordstrom's instead--which provided its own kind of neurological dissonance. Watching what looked liked hundreds of folks waiting to file onto escalators in an American brand-name store that used to be Sears, and before that Eaton's (two Canadian retail giants felled by successive recessions), reminded me--in this globalized age of the metropolitan "non-places"--of the need, in Frederic Jameson's famous take on blandified commodity culture in late capitalism, for place-specific cognitive maps of one's city.

Such is what celebrated Vancouver-based visual artist Stan Douglas attempts to give us in Circa 1948, an app, website and immersive installation project co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada. The installation is up in the Cordova Street concourse of SFU Woodward's as part of the "Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures" festival of immersive arts that SFUW's Cultural Unit has programmed as part of the university's 50th anniversary celebrations. The installation combines computer-generated technology and kinaesthetic navigation to provide participants with a 3D-like, immersive experience of two Vancouver landmarks no longer in existence: the original Hotel Vancouver and Hogan's Alley. A docent with an iPad invites you into a square wooden room. On the floor is what looks like a painted archery target: a solid black inner circle enclosed within a grey one of larger diameter. The black circle is your stop button; walking along the grey one moves you into and through the projections.

I chose to explore the Hotel Vancouver and was plopped into the middle of the ballroom, the interior of which is recreated based on Douglas' meticulous historical research. Frankly, it looked rather empty, and when I went to the edge of the grey circle on each side of the installation walls I wasn't lead through the projected sets of doors or windows into another area of the hotel, as I'd expected; instead, the projections just came to a stop. Eventually, I did make it through one doorway and into an office. Snippets of voice-over reminiscent of the film noir dialogue of Douglas' recent Helen Lawrence informed me that a woman wished to pawn some jewelry. And then the walls went blank. The whole thing lasted less than five minutes and was rather underwhelming in terms of both its interactivity and what, on the display text outside, we are told is Douglas' interest in historically-based diachronic/recombitant storytelling. The docent told me I could come back and explore other rooms in the Hotel Vancouver, as well as multiple views of Hogan's Alley, but I'm pretty sure I won't.

From there, it was inside the SFU Woodward's building for SCA's big celebration of its own past, present and future. The work of alumni, current students and faculty was on display throughout the building: the current MFA Visual Art Graduating Exhibition in the Audain Gallery on the main floor (featuring work by Lucien Durey, Curtis Granhauer, and Jamie Williams); audio and video installations by MFA student Lara Amelie Abadir and my faculty colleague Henry Daniel in Studios D and T on the second floor; and open rehearsals in the fourth floor studios by recent dance and theatre alumni (including Billy Marchenski and Nneka Croal, and the companies Hong Kong Exile, New to Town Collective, Raven Spirit Dance, and Warehaus Dance Collective). At 4 pm, my colleague Ker Wells presented a site-specific performance co-created with graduate students Robert Leveroos and Ashley Aron, and featuring students in his undergraduate playmaking classes; it took place outdoors in the concourse in the pouring rain, and we watched from the second floor World Art Centre patio as two rival groups of students squared off Sharks and Jets style, before being scattered in all directions by a gold lamé and stilt-wearing fairy--played by Kerr himself. Finally, following a reception, music alums Stefan Smulovitz and Bill Clark joined faculty members Martin Gotfrit and Albert St. Albert in improvising a live score to a screening of the animated NFB/Radio-Canada short film The Man Who Planted Trees--which was amazing (the film and the improvised music). There was also a screening of award-winning short films by SCA film alums, but I was already so over-stimulated (and also in need of some dinner) that I ducked out and headed home.

Still, what I saw confirmed to me that, with my official new cross-appointment to SCA, I've definitely found my own institutional place at SFU.

P.

In Toronto

I'm in Toronto for a conference, though I confess I haven't been attending much of it. Instead, I've been braving the unseasonably cold and damp weather to take in some visual art and theatre. On the former front, I went to see the Francis Bacon and Henry Moore show at the AGO today. Not the very best works by Bacon, which is perhaps to be expected (though the Crucifixion triptych from the 1980s was on display, as well as several studies for his pope series). And I think the curators rely a little too much on the visual correlation between the twisted human figures in each artist's works, without accounting for differences in medium. Still, it does allow the AGO to take advantage of their vast Moore collection in a new (and, of course, ideally blockbuster) way. And it was very instructive to learn of Moore's experience of the Blitz as an official war artist, and to see the sketches he made of the sleeping bodies massed so tightly together in the Tube stations--prototypes for several of his later reclining sculptures. Interspersed amongst these sketches are several amazing photographs by Bill Brandt taken of London (both above ground and underground), so many in fact that one almost feels he should be included as the third master in the title of the show.

On the fifth floor, while taking in the Elevated show, I ran into Geoffrey Farmer, in town for a site visit relating to a show that he will install in July in the AGO's dedicated Moore rooms--and that, from what I understood, will recreate how those rooms originally looked. We also had a brief chat about Herzog and de Meuron being named the design team for the proposed new VAG. Geoffrey was pleased with the announcement, made just as I was leaving Vancouver.

My visit coincides with the opening of the Contact Photography Festival, and on Thursday morning I ambled down to Ryerson University's Image Centre. The big draw there is the work of another Vancouver artist, Stan Douglas having won the 2013 Scotiabank Photography Award, and thus getting one of main presentation shows from the sponsors of the Festival. And while it was certainly a treat to see Douglas's impeccably composed and historically sourced large-scale photos on display, including the wonderful panorama "Every Building on 100 East Hastings," I was more taken by a small show conceived by students in Ryerson's MA program in film and photography preservation and collections management. Called Curious Anarchy, it features a selection of "photographic objects" (from photos of/as objects to an assortment of postcards, curios, and jewelry, including a 19th-century mourning bracelet with a tiny black and white daguerreotype of the deceased). The displayed works all come from the private collection of Maia-Mari Sutnik, longtime curator of photography at the AGO, and an adjunct instructor in Ryerson's program. The exquisite show was at once a fascinating glimpse into the history of photography, the catholic and conceptually astute tastes of Sutnik, and the curatorial acumen of the Ryerson students.

Last night I also managed to crash the official Contact opening party at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Well, truth be told, it was free and open to the public--but I still felt like an outsider sipping my wine and moving invisibly among all the arty hipsters of Queen Streeet West. The two shows on view, Material Self and In Character, were well worth the effort and were linked via the twin themes of identity and performance.

Then I scooted further west along Queen to the new digs of the Theatre Centre to take in Death Married My Daughter, one of three new one-acts running in rep as part of TC's Independent Creators Cooperative, in which they have matched up two seasoned companies with three emerging ones to create original works of physical theatre for their new Incubator space. Sidebar on recent Toronto theatrical pairings: I had been scheduled to see Michael Hollingsworth's critically lauded Trudeau and the FLQ at Soulpepper's Tank Theatre (they're co-producing with Hollingsworth and Deanne Taylor's VideoCabaret) on Wednesday night; but the ride into the city from the airport proved to be almost as epic as the flight from Vancouver, so that by the time I got to my hotel I had no way of making curtain. I mention this only because the non-naturalist style and revisionist satire of Hollingsworth's Small Huts plays (of which Trudeau is the 19th installment) is something it has in common with Death. Conceived and performed by Play It Again Productions' Nina Gilmour and Danya Buonastella, in collaboration with Theatre Smith-Gilmour's Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour, the play unfolds in classic bouffon style (Buonastella and Nina Gilmour are recent graduates of the Ecole Philippe Gaulier, whereas Smith and Dean Gilmour trained more than thirty years ago with Gaulier's compatriot in clowning, Jacques Lecoq). In this case, our menacing jesters are none other than Desdemona and Ophelia, back from the dead and out for some feminist revenge.

Nothing is off limits for these two furies, from roasting their own babies to skewering (quite literally) a patriarchal culture in which misogyny and militarism are of a piece. And, in true bouffon style, the performers and their co-directors have great fun burlesquing the equally male high art canon. This is most effective when Desedemoma (Gilmour) and Ophelia (Buonastella) reenact their death scenes. The former's is delivered as a virtuosic lipsynch to Verdi's Otello, which has the effect, via its concentration of the acoustic register on the dominance of the male voice in the scene, of reflecting back to us how our pity for these characters is divided disproportionately between the victim and the perpetrator of patriarchal violence. Likewise, Ophelia's drowning, played to wonderful physical effect by Buonastella, becomes the occasion for yet more violence to be done to her body, with Gilmour using a male Ken doll to deliver Hamlet's "What a piece of work is man" speech from atop Ophelia's corpse.

As trained clowns, Gilmour and Buonastella are wonderful vocal mimics and fearlessly adept physical perfomers (the scene where Gilmour manipulates Buonastella's limbs like a puppet while delivering Ophelia's "Willow" speech from behind her body as Buonastella mouths the words was a wonder to behold); however, they and their dramaturgical mentors are also expert social critics, daring to take on in the ongoing backlash against feminism any and all taboos relating to the marginalization of women. In a town where the biggest clown of them all, Rob Ford (whose latest ignominy has coincided with my trip), continues to get away with his insultingly masculinist bigotry, that is even more fearless.

Concluding side note: also attending last night's show was my colleague and longtime Leaky Heaven dramaturg, Michele Valiquette, in town to visit her daughter, and thus the second Vancouverite I ran into in Hogtown in one day. The traffic between the two cities emanating from the Theatre Centre extends even further if one considers that not only is PuSh planning to present Smith and Dean Gilmour's adaptation of As I Lay Dying at next year's festival, but that we've also recently poached the TC's managing director, Roxanne Duncan.

P.

Helen Lawrence at the Stanley

Richard and I weren't planning to go to the Arts Club production of Helen Lawrence, on at the Stanley through mid-April. However, a pair of free tickets came our way and so we made a night of it. The experience confirmed my initial misgivings.

Conceived and created by Vancouver-based conceptual artist Stan Douglas, in collaboration with television writer Chris Haddock (Da Vinci's Inquest), the work combines live theatrical performance with real-time video projection and pre-recorded 3D imaging. Whereas the earlier Arts Club co-production at the Stanley, the Electric Company's Tear the Curtain!, had mostly cut between its live and mediated mise-en-scènes, Helen Lawrence attempts to superimpose them. On a mostly bare stage, behind a floor-to-ceiling scrim stretching across the proscenium, the actors perform a series of live action scenes. These are captured by three cameras we see being operated downstage, with the images simultaneously projected on the scrim, which via those pre-recorded 3D sequences fills in the details of the missing set. It's a neat trick, to be sure, but what's on the scrim so commands our attention--because so often in close-up--I don't know why Douglas and Haddock didn't just make a film. Indeed, liveness and the theatre seem completely ancillary to the whole ethos of the project. There isn't even a debate about the complementarity or the competition between the two media (as in Tear the Curtain!): not least because we are so insistently drawn to both the images on the scrim and the apparatus of their projection behind it, film completely dominates theatre in this equation.

To the point where the piece's film noir conceit seems completely foreign to the stage. Haddock squeezes virtually every cliché of the genre into his script and the hard-boiled dialogue, while handled deftly by the entire company, often sounds tinny and recycled. More problematic are the larger structural problems with the story. The ostensible main plot, about the eponymous wronged femme fatale (Lisa Ryder) traveling from LA to Vancouver to track down her no-good lover, Percy Wallace/Walker (The X-Files' Nicholas Lea), feels (thematically and politically) secondary to the sub-plot about brothers Buddy Black (Allan Louis) and Henry Williams (Sterling Jarvis) battling each other and the corrupt Vancouver constabulary in Hogan's Alley. Neither story is satisfactorily resolved, to say nothing of the confusing narrative MacGuffin we are thrown in the form of small-time grifter Edward Banks (Adam Kenneth Wilson), who holds up with apparent impunity Chief of Police James Muldoon (Gerard Plunkett) near the end of the play; meanwhile Banks' long-suffering German wife Eva (Ava Markus) may or may not be on her way to Hogan's Alley to have an abortion.

A noticeable hiccup in Helen Lawrence's development was the departure of original director Kim Collier (ex of The Electric Company). In press leading up to the premiere last week, she cited concerns with the story as one of the reasons for her parting ways with Haddock and Douglas, who assumed directing duties (assisted by the National Arts Centre's Sarah Stanley). I now understand what she means.

However, an even more serious concern for me is the aesthetic ideology behind the piece. The performance theorist Patrice Pavis has written that intermedial interdisciplinarity doesn't just mean taking the technologies of one medium and plunking them down in another (e.g. screens in the theatre); rather, it means remediating those technologies within an aesthetic idiom specific to the mode of presentation of the work (e.g. finding a way to represent montage on stage through blackouts, or within the body of a performer). I think, in this regard, of how "cinematic" Crystal Pite's choreography often seems to me; now, she is not one to stint on additional technological effects (including projections). But in a work like Grace Engine, for example, she also gives one the kinesthetic "feel" of film noir with nary a camera in sight.

There is a lot of creative and financial muscle behind this production of Helen Lawrence, and it is on its way to some pretty prestigious presentation venues. It remains to be seen what kind of critical reception it will receive from national and international theatre audiences. For now, I remain convinced that the project would have been much more successful--and easier to make--as a narrative film. Given Stan Douglas' career to date (Suspiria, Journey into Fear, etc.), one would have thought that to be the logical next step (though, to be fair, in works like Monodramas, he has also shown previous interest in the theatre--particularly the work of Samuel Beckett). One wonders if the likely comparisons to Steve McQueen are an impediment.

P.

PuSh 2013: Cinema Musica

In addition to their always brilliant playing, what I most admire about The Turning Point Ensemble is the thoughtfulness and adventurousness of their programming, which frequently involves crossing disciplines and commissioning bold new work. Both of these elements were on display yesterday in Cinema Musica, a "live conversation" between music and film that unfolded at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, as part of the PuSh Festival.

As conductor and Co-Artistic Director Owen Underhill announced in his curtain speech, the program involved some "epic" technical demands. That said, the afternoon opened simply, with the only work not involving live musicians. Stan Brakhage's "..." Reel 5 (1998) is a hand-painted 16 mm film edited to composer James Tenney's Flocking, a work for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. While Brakhage's films are often silent, in this case the slightly dissonant call-and-response between the pianos enriches the dialogue between the two dominant visual styles of the film, which moves between images that alternately put me in mind of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Mark Rothko's multiforms.

By contrast, it was Paul Klee who came to mind in watching the piece that followed. Chromo Concerto (2007), a collaboration between composer Michael Oesterle and animator Chris Hinton, brought Underhill and a chamber-size portion of his musicians on stage, and featured a gorgeous piano solo by Chris Morano that added a different kind of tonal colour to the simple circle and line drawings by Hinton. This portion of the program concluded with Regen (1929), an early silent "city symphony" film by Joris Ivens for which Hans Eisler wrote a live score some 12 years later. Turning Point has been "instrumental" in researching the correct synchronization of sound and image, and yesterday the results were truly beguiling.

Following the first intermission was the world premiere of Good Night Vision (2013), a collaboration between visual artist Judy Radul and Turning Point that featured live and prerecorded video and performance. The piece begins with actor Aryo Khakpour commenting on a series of YouTube clips featuring thermal cameras (which operate on heat rather than light to produce their images), before noting the coincidence that the composer Ferruccio Busoni and the filmmaker Billy Wilder happened to live in the same Berlin apartment complex (though not at the same time). This, then, is the jumping off point for Radul's theoretical ruminations on film and death, music and elegy, turning two thermal cameras of her own on the Turning Point musicians as they play Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque, the ensemble's heat producing the equivalent of a negative film image.

Next up was Stan Douglas's Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C. (1993), a video installation that was originally accompanied by a computer-controlled piano playing an adaptation of Arnold Schönberg's Begleitmusik. For this screening of the film, a mash-up of early silent and film noir aesthetics that also serves as an oblique commentary on racial and environmental politics, Turning Point performed a chamber version of the score by Schönberg, who for many years tried and failed to write music for Hollywood cinema.

Finally, the afternoon concluded with another world premiere, François Houle's Suspense (2013), a rumination on the great symphonic film scores from the 1940s that was counterpointed--visually and sonically--with stop-motion images of various members of the Turning Point Ensemble projected onto a rear projection screen. Additionally, projected onto a white scrim at the front of the stage were images of gymnasts flying through the air captured with high-speed cameras by American video artists David and Hin-Jin Hodge. Visually this was all very stunning, but I'm not sure in this case the suspense created by the images went with that evoked by the music.

P.

The Show Went On!

According to my sources at PuSh and SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, it was touch and go, with chairs for the audience to sit on being assembled and installed up until 5:30 pm. But last evening's launch of the 6th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival at the new Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's went off without a hitch.

In fact, the buzz was amazing. It started in the courtyard, where people assembled to gaze upon Stan Douglas's stunning new photographic mural, a massive reversible C-print that looks like stained glass, and that lends the revivifying project that is the entire Woodward's complex a distinctly sacred air. The buzz continued into the atrium of the theatre, where a line-up snaked around the room to collect tickets, and where le tout Vancouver arts scene was in attendance giving each other spontaneous hugs and shout-outs. The theatre itself is a stunning space, like no other in the city in terms of size and design, and I look forward to seeing many many more shows there over the years to come.

As for the show itself, Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On, what can I say? Not much, as it turns out, or else I will spoil the surprise for future attendees. What I can say is that as a concept piece, it was the perfect show to launch this year's PuSh Festival--in that space, in the heart of that community. Because the whole show is about producing an audience.

And last night's audience responded with enthusiasm and generosity and lots and lots of love to that call.

On with the rest of the Festival shows--starting with Nevermore tonight at the Arts Club on Granville Island. Hope to see you there.

P.

Nowhen

A little video offering that came about as my contribution to a class exercise over at Performing Vancouver that asked students to use Michel de Certeau's famous essay as the impetus for their own walkings of the city.

In my case I used my mini-DV camera to retrace two partial routes I took back in February 2009 and September 2008 as part of separate site-specific performance works in the DTES, and about which I have previously blogged here and here.

As de Certeau suggests, my attempts at capturing and recording a "nowhen" that has long since passed me by, was an interesting exercise in forgetting.

"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here, well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or 'window shopping,' that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten." (Michel de Certeau, "Walking the City," 97)

P.