Embryotrophic Cavatina, Part 1 at SFU Woodward's and Vines Art Festival at Trout Lake

I couldn't attend yesterday's counter-demonstration protesting the gathering organized by the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam at City Hall because I had committed to previous plans. However, it seemed appropriate, given the WCAI organizers' base dissembling that their quarrels with Islam were cultural and not racist, that my plans involved an engagement with different forms of free cultural expression that were in direct dialogue with their environments.

My first stop was the atrium at SFU Woodward's. There, starting at 2 pm (and then again at 3 pm), Kokoro Dance presented a free showing of the first half of their reworked Embryotrophic Cavatina, which will have its full-length premiere at the Roundhouse September 20-29. The genesis of the piece dates back to 1998, when Kokoro founders Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi created the first iteration of the work for themselves and dancers Ziyian Kwan and Michael Whitfield. They then reworked it a year later into a shorter 30-minute piece that was performed at Dancing on the Edge with the same company; this version featured as a musical score the first half of Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for My Friend, written as a tribute to the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, with whom Preisner had collaborated on the Three Colours trilogy. Last year, Barbara and Jay remounted this second version of EC on twenty dancers from Danza Teatro Retazos in Havana. It was at that time that they got the idea to revisit the piece a fourth time, choreographing a new second half that would accompany the remainder of Preisner's album.

We'll have to wait until September to see what that looks like. But yesterday interested audience members were offered a glimpse of the original 1999 version of EC, with dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski joining Bourget and Hirabayashi to round out the quartet. Performed in the circle of the basketball court between London Drugs and Nester's Market, and with Preisner's music issuing clearly and pristinely from two speakers, the piece seemed expressly designed for this space. Likewise the match between choreography and music. In its elegiac tempo, simple harmonies and showcasing of the soprano voice, Preisner's Requiem put me in mind of fellow Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Except whereas Górecki's work is a slow and steady build to a haunting emotional lament, Preisner's work features more tonal peaks and valleys. Bourget and Hirabayashi play with this in terms of the way they contrast bodies crumpling in on themselves (splayed knees and twisted lower legs; bent backs; hands thrust backwards between thighs) with movement that extends horizontally and vertically into space (a simple reach outward from the torso of one arm and the tracing of the other up the length of this proffered limb; or the joyous leap into and catching of air that comes with Kokoro's trademark ecstasy jumps). The intervals between the Requiem's movements, and especially the soprano parts (e.g. from the Kyrie Eleison to the Dies Irae), also give the dancers ample opportunity to explore that quintessential butoh element of ma, the gap or pause or negative space between different structural parts. Kokoro is expert at expanding our sense of time: by sustaining our interest in a held pose (the opening butoh-at-rest position: bent knees, shoulders soft, eyes staring off into the distance); by forcing a perceptual recalibration through a barely registered shift in our attention (when, in the course of said pose, four heads slowly start to turn to the left); by isolating our focus on the seemingly smallest part of a dancer's body (for me it was a wagging index finger near the end of this showing). All of these actions that look like inaction, these doings that simultaneously undo our expectations about what should happen next, or what even constitutes movement, encourages even greater contemplation in the audience. To the point that despite all the to-ing and fro-ing happening all around me in the Woodward's atrium, my attention was never less than riveted on the dancers in front of me.

After the Kokoro performance I hopped on my bike and cycled over to Trout Lake to take in some of the main "earthstage" shows at this year's Vines Art Festival. The festival was started by Artistic Director Heather Lamoureux in 2015 with two aims: to make contemporary performance more accessible by siting it in a public park (and making it free); and to promote environmental awareness by showcasing work that responds to its natural setting and that is engaged with themes of climate activism and sustainability. The 2015 festival, a one-day event in Trout Lake, mounted with a budget raised solely through door-to-door fundraising by Heather, was a huge success. In 2016 the festival not only attracted major corporate and government sponsors, but it also expanded to four days and multiple sites, with events taking place at Hadden Park in Kits Beach, Pandora Park on the East Side, Maclean Park in Strathcona, and its mainstage site of Trout Lake. This year Heather has grown the festival even further, expanding events to ten days and spreading them across seven Vancouver parks.

However, the main event continues to be the culminating day-long series of performances, workshops and installations at Trout Lake Park. Unfortunately, this year my timing was not so great. I arrived too late to take in Robert Leveroos and Isabelle Kirouac's Alien Forms, and only caught the tail end of Meegin Pye's Boxed In (which seemed to be about homelessness and housing affordability). I did catch the Blue Cedar Stage set of the Son Bohemio trio, who were back again this year with their mix of Argentinian folk songs. And I stuck around long enough to see and hear A Complicated Intelligence, a collaborative sound installation-cum-interactive performance by Stefan Smulovitz, Lara Amelie Abadir, Dave Biddle and beekeeper Andrew Scott. Learning about how bees communicate with each other (by vomiting into each other's mouths) and deal with genetic diversity (by cannibalizing eggs deemed insufficiently heterogeneous) was all I needed as a capstone to how art can trump the rhetoric of white supremacy.

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Vines Art Festival at Trout Lake

Last year SFU Contemporary Arts alum Heather Lamoureux created the Vines Arts Festival, an event designed to make contemporary performance more accessible by siting it in a public park (and making it free), and also to promote environmental awareness by showcasing work engaged with themes of climate activism and sustainability and/or responding to its natural setting--in this case, the south end of Trout Lake. That one-day event, put on with a budget raised solely through door-to-door fundraising by Heather, was a huge success. This year, the festival not only attracted major corporate and government sponsors, but it also expanded to four days and multiple sites, with events taking place over the past few days at Hadden Park in Kits Beach, Pandora Park on the East Side, and Maclean Park in Strathcona. However, the main event continues to be located at Trout Lake, and yesterday I cycled over just past noon to take in as much of the action as possible.

Combining installations with roaming pieces, workshops and individually timed performances on five separate "stages," the festival featured an abundance of work to stimulate one's senses, both physiologically and politically. I arrived in time to catch the last half of Ariel Martz-Oberlander's Grief + Dignity; a devised theatre piece loosely constructed around five women's attempts to blockade the Site C Dam project, the work is essentially a conversation about the relationship between intersectional feminism and attempts to raise awareness about the negative social and climatological effects of resource extraction. Next, there was Alex Mah and Arash Khakpour's Hold My Beer, a deconstructed "bromance" in the form of an alternately affectionate and aggressive danced duet that provided something of a gendered corollary to the Martz-Oberlander piece, suggesting that a reciprocal ethic of care between men might actually start with care for the environment.

Meegin Pye's Integral Elimination is a solo work of physical theatre that uses a quintessential rite of fitting oneself into a box--the job interview--to both materially and metaphorically take on how contemporary urbanites have increasingly boxed their horizons in by literally walling themselves up. While I found the text a bit jejune in parts, and the hopping from side to side to indicate different sides of a conversation somewhat of a too-easy dramaturgical choice, Pye was thoroughly engaging as a performer, and much of her piece reads as a caustic commentary on Vancouver's current crisis of accelerated development.

With the PuSh Festival's Joyce Rosario and Bonnie Sun by this point having joined me (graciously sharing their blanket), we then roamed to a succession of dance and movement-based performances. Sophie Brassard and Carly Penner's Pseudo-Flora-Commorancy, a piece for nine women dancers, captivated with its clever use of a net of tied-together plastic bags. Initially the women get caught in this net like so much discarded flotsam, but though a combination of working together (cue some ingenious unison) and discovering, successively, their individual relationships with the space around them, the women are able to free themselves from the artificial tentacles of this ur-symbol of consumerism. Sarah Gallos' Follow is a duet with Hailey McCloskey that uses a succession of slow falls and rises from the ground as a motif for co-animacy of and in space, both in terms of the dancers' awareness of each other and their responsiveness to their surroundings (which included some initial choreographing of the audience). In Archaea, dancer Molly McDermott develops an improvised score of micro-moves as a way of physicalizing the micro-biology of park ecosystems that remain invisible to us, her every neck twitch and foot flex accompanied by Stefan Smulovitz on the violin. Even standing stalk still McDermott is interesting to watch, but with her body wrapped upside down around a tree you can only gape in awe. Finally, in Toothpaste Carolina Bergonzoni enacts the story of her year-long quest to make an all-natural cleaning agent for the teeth and gums from household products through the slow accretion of a simple yet effective gestural vocabulary that mimics the trial and error methodology of her dentifrical experiments. All while wearing a skirt made of used toothpaste tubes and boxes!

Borgonzoni also collaborated with my fellow Wreck Beach Butoh colleague Bronwyn Preece (who, in addition to Molly and her mom Irene, Dana Marquis, and Henry Wong made up quite a strong WBB contingent at this year's Vines) on a unique sartorial painting project that greeted me upon arrival. Together with the music of Son Bohemio, a unique and meditative installation by Elissa Hanson and Claris Figuera called At House, At Home, and an inspiring talk by the Coast Salish ethno-botanist Cease Wyss these were just some of the many Vines offerings I was able to take in. It was a lovely way to spend the afternoon and I hope this new addition to our local festival landscape continues to grow.

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