Convergence x 2 at EDAM

EDAM's annual spring choreographic series featured new work from guest artists Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Shauna Elton, alongside a revival of a work EDAM Artistic Director Peter Bingham first presented a year ago.

Gan's Level 10 Life is billed as a "dance in sound and vibration." It features three performers in softly lit individual spots in three distinct areas of the stage. Alanna Ho squats in front of a laptop spinning music stage right, one leg sexily extended. Michelle Lui is downstage centre, astride a chair, a microphone positioned in front of her. An unrecognizable Aryo Khakpour (in part because, as we later discover, he's wearing giant bug eyes) lounges downstage left. As Ho continues to play music, Lui eventually leans into the microphone, quietly telling us the date and time of the performance, before calling out names of folks she recognizes in the audience. The contract between performers and audience thus having been breached, we are thus primed for anything to happen. But nothing much else does. Khakpour eventually sits and then stands up, brandishing a crop of some sort and advancing a bit downstage. Lui, meanwhile, retreats upstage and bops a little up and down to the music Ho is playing. Everything unfolds as if in a dream, or some futuristic space bar to which we have been lured on the promise of adventure, but for which we do not know the proper conventions or social codes.

Elton's Amae is a trio for Kate Franklin, Emmalena Fredriksson and the choreographer. It's a big-hearted, wide-limbed, joyous ode to bodily connection, mutual support, and psychic interdependence. The dancers run on stage in similar grey and red dresses, throw down various dance accessories (knee pads, socks, etc.), and then launch into a robust sequence of pushes and pulls and small lifts and jumps and limb-to-limb touching that combines some of the principles of contact with Elton's own contemporary vocabulary. There is, for example, a terrific moment in which Elton is carrying Franklin (or maybe it was the other way around), and Fredriksson, crouched on the floor, slides her hands between Elton's legs and beside her feet, as if giving her fellow dancer, now burdened with the weight of another body, directional guidance. Not that we don't also witness moments of tension and conflict in this piece. At one point Elton is lying on her side downstage while Franklin and Fredriksson work through who is leading and who is following whom in a series of toreador-like advances and retreats. The work concludes with the three dancers, having donned the accessories that had previously lain on the floor and simultaneously shed their outer grey frocks, in some senses becoming one single, hydra-headed body--an appropriate image for the gathering force of feminine energy and love that is at the heart of this dance.

Bingham's Pillars concluded the evening. While it has a new name, the work appears to follow the same structure as last year's Convergence, which I first blogged about here, and whose original title Bingham has now transposed to this entire evening's worth of presentations. That is, the work begins with the seven dancers (Delia Brett, Anne Cooper, Elissa Hanson, Arash Khakpour, Walter Kubanek, Diego Romero, and Olivia Shaffer) facing either side of the studio's east and west walls. At a certain point Brett peels off and begins to improvise a solo, shimmying liquidly through space, extending first one limb then another, descending to and then rolling about the floor. Eventually making contact with Kubanek on the other side of the studio, Brett drags him into her orbit, their duo expanding to a trio with the addition of Cooper, and then to a quartet when Romero feels the group's adhesive pull, and so on until all seven dancers have peeled themselves from the walls and are improvising with each other on stage. This time around, however, it seems like Bingham has removed some of the work's previous restrictions: there is no returning to the side walls for any of the dancers, and it feels like none of them is required to hew to a specific individual line in space. As such, the performers are freer to seek out another body or bodies with which to improvise a specific contact sequence. They can also do their own thing, and there was a moment last night when Shaffer, who is such a gorgeously fluid dancer, found herself separated from the group and contrived a wonderful sitting solo for herself that I could have watched all night. As she is doing this, the other six dancers have paired off and are cycling through different gravity-defying lifts and poses against the upstage wall. Which makes me think that not all the structuring principles from the previous iteration of this piece have been jettisoned. They've just morphed into something new. Above all, what made the performance so fun to watch is that the dancers themselves were clearly having fun.

An additional surprise on last night's program was the newly renovated lobby of the Western Front. I guess it's been a while since I've last been inside the building. So I was unprepared for what I encountered when I opened the doors: a bright, airy, open and modern entryway, with the box office now to the right, two loos adjacent it, and the rest a wide open space in which to linger and mingle with fellow patrons and artists. It makes the whole EDAM experience that much more enjoyable.

P

PuSh 2016: Eternal

For two hours yesterday afternoon, on Vancouver's first sunny day in quite a while, I huddled with a dozen or so other brave spectators in the darkness of the Western Front's upstairs great hall to watch two actors (the absolutely amazing Christina Rouner and Thomas Jay Ryan) perform the final scene from Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind over and over again. It was not a live event; the actors appeared to us on video, each framed in close-up on separate screens. Still, Daniel Fish's Eternal, which exists somewhere between the realms of theatre, film and installation, and which has been programmed as part of this year's PuSh Festival, retains the feeling of liveness, not least in its unedited durationality. The actors, sitting across from each other in a white rehearsal hall, are responding to each other, and to variations in line readings, in the moment, and they have to keep going no matter what. Additionally, we as spectators can't easily give ourselves over to passive absorption of their screen images. Yes, we might feel bored (and there was a steady attrition of audience members over the course of the two hours), maybe at times even alienated; but at least we're feeling something. And there are enough subtle nuances and new emotional discoveries in the various iterations of the looped scene to keep us surprised and on our toes and invested in how things will turn out this time around.

While on some levels a master class in acting, in terms of what I was experiencing bi-focally on each screen of the performers' face-to-face interactions, I was especially fascinated by the idea of control. In some senses Ryan, who plays the Jim Carrey character (and who, according to imdb.com, actually appeared in the original movie as "Frank"), would seem always to be dictating the pace and tone of the scene, as he has the first spoken dialogue. On the other hand, Rouner, as Kate Winslet's Clementine, gets the last word, her final "okay" being the signal for Ryan to launch once again into the in medias res excerpt from the voiceover tape of Joel's erased memories with which the scene begins. Depending on how long she decides to take with that "okay" (sometimes it is uttered quickly, at other times its delivery is held back for what feels like forever), and depending in what manner she chooses to enunciate it (softly, bitterly, hopefully, resignedly), she is to a certain extent framing when and in what manner Ryan starts the next version of the loop.

By the fourth or fifth go-through of the roundelay I felt like I had internalized more or less all of the dialogue, and so it became a bit of a game to play with myself to anticipate where a different inflection would be given, a pause added, a reaction given more or less emotional emphasis. In this regard, one could say that Eternal, as a temporally mediated work of performance, actually deepens the experience of a cherished principle of the time-specificity of live performance: that it can never be repeated the same way twice. We accept this as a given in the theatre, but unless we go to a show multiple times over the course of its run, most of us as spectators retain a singular version of a particular staged event. However, with apologies to Walter Benjamin, in the case of Eternal technological reproduction somehow works in service of rather than against the auratic experience of the here and now--and precisely because we get to encounter them again and again.

P.

Dense Vancouver and Other Sights

Mayor Robertson had an op-ed in today's Vancouver Sun responding to the community push back against the city's development and densification plans for Marpole (lane-way housing), Commercial Drive (high-rise towers), and the Downtown Eastside (finding the right mix of social and market housing).

The precedent for such civic action was established in Mount Pleasant last year in response to the controversial Rize development plans at the nexus of East Broadway, Kingsway and Main Streets, which originally included a 22-storey residential tower (the plans have since been revamped, although still not to the satisfaction of most in the neighbourhood). This week the non-profit artist project management and curatorial collective Other Sights is partnering with The Western Front and the artist-run centre 221A to present an open research studio at Kingsgate Mall on possible futures for this iconic triangle of the city. Among other things, folks are invited to drop by between 11 am and 7 pm (5 pm on Sunday) to comment on and contribute to an evolving aerial model of the area.

Would that the mayor find time to visit the mall. But perhaps he's too busy packing up house in preparation for his move to Kits, where very soon he can likely enjoy a leisurely and largely car-free bike ride to Chip Wilson's palazzo.

P.

West Coast Mammals

Above is the rather lopsided origami paper airplane that I made with the help of Melissa Tsang yesterday at the Instant Coffee workshop at the Western Front that the West Coast Mammals attended.

WCM is the Vancouver/Surrey culture vulture offshoot of Darren O'Donnell and the Toronto-based Mammalian Diving Reflex's ongoing collaborations with the students of Bridgeview Elementary in Surrey on different projects that have appeared at past PuSh festivals (see my previous post on this year's Eat the Street). Led by Donna Soares, Melissa, and Amy Fung, the idea is to keep engaging interested students in arts and culture in the Lower Mainland by taking them to different monthly events. In February it was Winterruption on Granville Island, which I was unable to attend.

But I was free yesterday, and after meeting at the Commercial Skytrain stop at 11 am, Donna, Melissa, Tanille Geib (like me, a new WCM member) and I hauled it out to Scott Road to meet up with Ramen, Carmen, and Jordan. It was a small turnout (Spring Break starts tomorrow after all), but the interest and enthusiasm were high, stoked initially by a visit to the rehearsal space and administrative offices of the Vancouver Opera, where Melissa oversees the company's Opera in Schools division. In addition to getting a tour of the props and costumes departments, we also sat in on the first 45 minutes of the sitzprobe for the company's upcoming production of The Barber of Seville. Sitzprobe, the kids and I learned from Melissa, is the German term for the first "seated" rehearsal when the orchestra and the singers (who up until then would have been preparing separately) get together to go through the opera together. It was fascinating to get this glimpse behind the scenes, and to see the remarks made by the conductor. Best of all, we stayed long enough to hear the lead baritone sing the famous "Figaro" aria that I of course remembered from Bugs Bunny, but that the kids recognized from Spongebob.

After that it was off to the Front for some paper-folding and joke-telling, then nachos on Main Street. A whole lot of fun, and I look forward to the next event.

P.

Dance Follies and False Fronts

At EDAM’s studios at the Western Front last night Richard and I took in a mixed program of new choreography.

First up was Struck, by Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers Artistic Director Brett Lott. Featuring a quartet of female dancers elegantly sheathed in costume designer Norma Lachance’s see-through black dresses, simple yet effective lighting by Dean Cowieson and Kyla Gardiner, and an original score by Christine Fellows, the piece begins with the dancers, aligned horizontally and staggered according to height (short, tall, short, tall), slowly emerging out of shadow. What at first appears to be a coincidence of the performers’ body types takes on added structural resonance, however, as the piece slowly unfolds as a succession of solos and duos in which the shorter and—it appeared to me—more emotionally intense of the dancers successively attempt to woo their taller, more aloof sisters. All of this takes place within a single square of light, with the dancers taking turns entering it to sculpt the spaces between—at times painfully proximate, at other times as painfully distant—themselves and the bodies of their would-be others, who are watching silently from the shadows.

Next up was EDAM Artistic Director Peter Bingham’s X pollination, his latest contact improv-inspired work, this time for two male dancers, James Gnam and Chengxin Wei. James and Chengxin are both former Ballet BC dancers (now each with his own company, the plastic orchid factory and Moving Dragon, respectively), and here Bingham is clearly having some fun putting the two through their shared weight-transfer and floor-based movement paces, while retaining various balletic traces in the classic arm movements and foot positions that are interpolated near the end of the piece, and in the final double tours en l’air that punctuate the piece’s witty close. The dancers are also clearly having fun discovering how their classic technique can be adapted and expanded via this new form, and in response to each other’s bodies. The highlight of the evening for me.

Finally, the program ended with Joe Laughlin’s Dusk. The first part of a work-in-progress “on experiences surrounding darkness, shadows, limited visibility, and declining light,” the piece—also for four female dancers—was in many respects quietly terrifying, despite being performed under more-or-less full house lights. This is because what begins as a seemingly benign solo for lead dancer Caroline Farquhar (with fellow company members Michelle Cheung, Tara Dyberg, and Samantha-Jane Gray languishing in various poses along the back wall of the studio) eventually turns into something far more menacing, as Cheung’s gradual shadowing of Farquhar’s movements becomes part of a larger monitory process in which Farquhar is first coerced into moving according to the others’ desires, and then constrained from movement altogether.

All in all, a fine evening of dance, made all the more enjoyable by Reece Terris’s witty “Western Front Front—Another False Front,” his addition of a new, larger, and more ornamented façade to the exterior of the venerable building. Part of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, this architectural folly remains on view through to the end of March; however, the dance follies described above have only two more shows—this Friday and Saturday.

P.

PPP: A Brief Introduction

Welcome to my blog, which emerges out of a book I am currently finishing that has the same subtitle. In both book and blog my aim is to connect my ongoing academic interests in theatre, film, literature, and the performing arts (I teach in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, in a suburb of Vancouver) with the material realities of life as a political being in an era when the local and the global have never been more dynamically interconnected (as the current world financial meltdown so dramatically reveals). My goal is to explore what, if anything going to a play in Vancouver (or a concert in Rio, or a soccer match in Seoul, or a political rally in Johannesburg) can teach us about becoming better citizens of the world--how the performance of place, and the place of performance, can lead to a progressive political engagement with issues of larger global concern.

In other words, in the posts that follow I am interested in exploring how the local aesthetic experience of, or participation in, performance (be it a theatrical production, a sporting event, a religious ceremony, or a political demonstration) relates to, and even provides a model for, how one lives in the world socially. As the parenthesis in the last sentence suggests, I define performance very broadly. In the weeks and months ahead expect to find analyses and interpretations of works of theatre, visual art, and social and religious ritual; comparisons of competing performances of promotion and protest that accompany global sporting events like the Olympics (just concluded in Beijing and coming to my hometown of Vancouver in 2010); perorations on unfolding social, political, historical, and environmental dramas like elections, wars, and natural disasters; discussions of local organizing around urban development and sustainability; and so on. To borrow a distinction from the influential performance studies theorist Richard Schechner, in this blog I give equal attention to "make-believe" performances, those pretend acts of dress-up and role-playing that we associate, for example, with the fictional world of the stage, and performances that are aimed more at "making belief," "real world" dramas that, in their unfolding, enact a particular vision of that world (see his Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2002). To the extent that belief in that vision might be more or less acceptable to different audiences depending on their place in the world, accounts for the competing social and political perspectives that will inevitably emerge in response to or alongside such performances.

Performance, or live art, is uniquely situated to engage with the political because its "unfolding-in-the-moment" quality forces audiences to consider carefully--and often to confront viscerally--the role of context, nor just the "what" or "how" of performance, but the "where," "when," and ideally "why" of performance, of what it means to come together as an audience in the first place, and what other as-yet imagined social relationships might emerge from this otherwise random connection to the work being performed. To put this another way, the very ephemerality and contingency of performance (one never knows who exactly one will be sitting or standing beside, or what precisely will happen) asks us to ponder, at some level, the ways we are obliged to each other as fellow human beings. In this way, the local spaces of performance, and the persons within whom it is embodied, constitute sites where broader political engagements and movements might be initiated. In turn, localness gets transposed back into a concept of worldness, of being in and of the world, by virtue of performance's double structure of address: that is, the particular place of its production, and the multiple spaces of its reception, recognition, and redistribution (including on the Internet--hence this blog).

Let me be clear: I don't wish to overstate the role that a work of local community theatre might play in helping to remedy complex world conflicts and crises. But I do believe that the structures of performance can help theatricalize and make newly compelling for local audiences various scenarios of present-day global political urgency. So, for example, that locally produced piece of community theatre might inspire its neighbourhood audience to connect their place-based behaviour to an issue like global climate change (as was the case with David Diamond and Headlines Theatre's series of forum theatre workshops, 2 degrees of fear and desire, in Vancouver last fall). At the same time, I want to suggest that events played out on the world stage (wars, acts of terror, religious gatherings, natural disasters, sporting contests, human rights protests) can never be interpreted apart from the local constituencies to whom they are being mediated, even if only electronically. In other words, to the extent that I am making a case in this blog for the way performance practice overlaps with political praxis as a project aimed at re-making the world, I am likewise arguing that we must never lose sight of the place of that overlap.

Which brings me to the role of Vancouver in this blog. I've lived in the city for close to two decades now, and while it still ain't no London or New York, in that time the local performing arts scene has improved exponentially. While there are heaps of individuals, companies, and artist collectives responsible for this--the majority of whom I hope eventually to write about in some form or another in future posts--let me single out initially some folks and institutions that are especially dear to my heart:

1. The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (held here every January) and its tireless impresario, Norman Armour: although the acts might not always be as big or famous, I think that in terms of the boldness of the work presented, PuSh rivals BAM's Next Wave Festival for cutting-edge experimental theatre and performance. The image above is of me getting my haircut by children at last year's festival, as part of Darren O'Donnell and Mammalian Diving Reflex's presentation of Haircuts by Children.

2. The Scotiabank Dance Centre; the Dancing on the Edge Festival; the annual Dances for Small Stages event on Commercial Drive; Dance All Sorts; companies like battery opera, Edam, Judith Marcuse Projects (who recently co-founded the Centre for Art and Social Change at my university), kidd pivot (Crystal Pite is a goddess), and the 605 Collective: Vancouver has a happening dance scene, let me tell you.

3. The LIVE Performance Art Biennale, which will have its 6th iteration in the fall of 2009, and which in 2007 was organized around the theme of the "public." I quote from their website, as it bears on what I'm trying to get at in introducing this blog: "Public is always local--yet defines global. Who and where are we? Who and where are others? How are we similar? How are we different? What do we have in common? In interpreting 'Public,' performative art might manifest as: an action presented in public, an intervention into public, the participation of public, or a descriptive reference to public. Intent, form and expression can shift and change. The theme of 'Public' affords us occasion to examine performance art both locally and globally. A new generation of artists is reinventing boundaries through an exploding world-wide network of organizations, venues, symposia, and festivals."

4. The Vancouver International Film Festival, the 27th annual version of which is just winding down this week, and which in its intimacy and intellectualism is the antithesis of Toronto: i.e., it's about the films, not about the stars. (Two recommendations from this year from opposite generic poles: Terrence Davies' latest experimental documentary, Of Time and the City, at once a paean to and a pastiche of his birthplace, Liverpool; and the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, which is actually a complex allegory of adolescent outsiderness and the bullying that frequently accompanies it.)

5. Two experimental theatre companies, Boca del Lupo and the Electric Company, that grew out of productively synergistic relationships forged by their founders at Simon Fraser's School for the Contemporary Arts and Langara College's Studio 58, respectively.

6. Artist-run centres like the venerable Western Front and Artspeak Gallery: the latter, in recently going "off-site," has begin to generate some very interesting site-specific work, including Althea Thauberger's Carrall Street. At the September 30th event, Thauberger used the streetscape on which Artspeak fronts as her one-night stage (or, perhaps more accurately, film set), mixing hired "actors" performing scripted/improvised scenes with random interactions between local denizens and passers-by to actively blur the roles between performer and spectator, and in the process to show some of the historical connections between the street's past (as a tavern-lined, working-class byway connecting Vancouver's old port to Chinatown), present (as a thoroughfare traversed on one end by visiting tourists and local hipsters negotiating both the tack and trend of Gastown, and, on the other, by the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill citizens of the Downtown Eastside [DTES], the poorest postal zone in Canada), and future (as a showcase street ripe for civic greening and Olympic redevelopment).

Despite some reservations I have about the overall success and politics of Thauberger's work, it does get at what I see as a crucial connection between live art and what it only seems right to call an urban ethics of livability. In the 20 years since the sale of the former Expo lands in Vancouver's False Creek North neighbourhood to Li Ka-shing's Concord Pacific, the area has been transformed into one of the most densely populated downtown neighbourhoods in North America, and has become a model, in terms of urban planning, for similar developments targeted at the globe-trotting super-rich around the world. And yet this global performance of place has come at a local price--quite literally--with an increasing lack of affordable housing in Vancouver's urban core resulting in a form of enclosure that sees companies like Concord Pacific at once encroaching on and seeking to contain the social blight of the DTES, for example, through a phalanx of luxury condominium towers, most of whose units are owned internationally. As the city now looks across the water, to South False Creek, site of the Athletes' Village for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and earmarked for major redevelopment thereafter, it would do well to seek alternative models of place promotion, ones that better reconcile local integration with global destination.

Indeed, let me lay all my cards on the table and state that one of the main reasons I am starting this blog at this particular moment--after forswearing numerous times ever joining this particular electronic revolution--is to monitor the pace and progress of change in Vancouver (in all its forms) in the lead-up to the Olympics, and to connect these changes to larger patterns of urban and political transformation around the world. I am proposing to do so through the particular lens of performance because I believe, along with the curators of LIVE 5 cited above, that the publics and counter-publics formed as a result of us coming together--however temporarily or fragmentarily--as an audience tell us in turn something about how we participate in the world, and about the concrete material conditions of the local as it both produces and is produced by that world.

On that note, I think I'll sign off on this first post. I promise future ones won't be quite so earnest and dryly academic in tone (though I can't promise with what frequency they will appear--this one was supposed to make its debut last month and took three separate tries to finally get posted). A few performance-related thoughts on several upcoming elections (local, national, and international) should produce much occasion for satire. I promise not to go on about Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin (though we could have used her last night on a rather weak Thursday night version of SNL's Weekend Update). But taking swipes at Stephen Harper and his supercilious grin is, I think, fair game. The backlash around the Conservatives' cuts to the arts in this country has already forced their hand regarding Bill C-10, it seems; now let's use the momentum from Harper's stumbling performance in response to the economic panic to boot his party out of office altogether, or at the very least sizably reduce their existing minority. A shout-out, in this regard, to Michael Byers, NDP candidate for my riding of Vancouver Centre. And, looking ahead to November's municipal elections in Vancouver, consider this my endorsement for Gregor Robertson and the Vision Vancouver slate.

But before all that, and before I can regale you with further descriptions and analyses of performances specific to Vancouver, there's a trip to the UK and Europe in the offing. Richard and I are making the most of our respective leave years by fitting in lots of travel--work-related, of course. (More on Richard, my partner in the theatre of life, in future posts.) Expect a report on the art and theatre we see.

P