Missing at the York Theatre

Last night at the York Theatre was the world premiere of Missing, an opera co-commissioned and co-produced by City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria, and presented in partnership with Vancouver Moving Theatre and the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival. The libretto is by the award-winning playwright, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Marie Clements, and complements previous work she has done on the subject of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in The Unnatural and Accidental Women and, most recently, The Road Forward (both the live musical performance and the hybrid documentary film). Settler composer Brian Current was chosen to write the music after a blind jury process, and his very contemporary score is surprisingly spare: for example, there is one haunting section, a nightmare scene of attack upon the Native Girl, that is sung almost completely a cappella, with only the occasional rat-a-tat-tat of some kind of drum or woodblock conjuring the terrifying sounds of approaching and retreating footsteps in the woods. Current's score also makes interesting use of percussion and wind instruments, particularly to ring out lighter, more hopeful notes from the triangle and the flute, in keeping with a thematic focus on Clements' symbol of sparrows taking flight. Another important aspect of this production is that much of Clements' libretto is sung in Gitxsan, and while surtitles are used throughout (including, somewhat unnecessarily, for the English lyrics), one does not have to spend much time looking at the screens bracketing either side of the stage to understand the story of inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma that Clements is trying to tell.

For one of the more interesting choices that Clements takes to telling the story of BC and Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women--along with abstracting and deliberately depersonalizing the violence none of us really wants to confront (we never see the attack upon Native Girl, who is also never named)--is to filter it through the perspective of a white settler woman. Following a car crash on the Highway of Tears, Ava (Caitlin Wood) locks eyes with Native Girl (Melody Courage), who is lying on the ground. Returning to law school at UBC, Ava cannot shake the image from her head, and thanks to her Indigenous professor, Dr. Wilson (Marion Newman), she becomes newly schooled in the epidemic of violence against First Nations women in this country--which also means cutting ties to her racist friend, Jess (Heather Malloy). Ava's increasing politicization around Indigenous issues leads her to begin studying the Gitxsan language and she eventually marries her classmate, Devon (Kaden Forsberg), in a traditional Gitxsan ceremony. In the hands of any other writer, the charges of cultural appropriation would likely fly fast and furious, but having established Native Girl's haunting of Ava in the first scene, Clements explores the idea of shared trauma and reciprocal empathy as a bodily process of incorporation--and also, as interestingly, excorporation. That is, the opera culminates in a moving duet between Ava and Native Girl in which, both naming and then touching different hurt parts of their bodies, they physicalize what feeling the pain of another actually means. At the same time, Native Girl's trapped soul can only be freed once she takes Ava and Devon's baby--whom we are told cries often and seems to be wracked by some sort of spirit--in her arms and soothes her.

Parallel to this story of inter-cultural connection we also witness the effects of Native Girl's absence upon her mother (Rose-Ellen Nichols) and her brother, Angus (Clarence Logan). Crucially, the only interaction between the family is shown in a brief flashback scene, in which Angus and Native Girl frolic and play across time and space, while in the present their mother keens her relentless and bottomless grief. In this we are witness to one of the other major issues connected to this national tragedy: that without these cases being solved and the bodies of the missing and murdered women being recovered, there can be no closure for their families, only an endless void. As effective as this is, I have to admit that as with Corey Payette's Children of God (which played the York earlier this year, and which I blogged about here) I did feel at times like the Indigenous characters at the heart of this story appeared peripheral to it. Nichols (who played Pauline in City Opera's original opera about the life of E. Pauline Johnson a few years ago) is such a commanding stage presence, and on some levels she seems under-used. To be sure, Clements is far too intelligent and savvy a writer not to understand what she is doing on this front. Just as this story would not have been ignored for so long had the women who were going missing been white, so is Clements forcing us to ask ourselves, in our focus on Ava, why are we only paying attention now? And to the issue of settler self-positioning in relation to this tragedy, it's important to note that Native Mother does indeed get the last word. And it is very much a challenge: what are you missing?

Assuredly directed by Peter Hinton, and with expert conducting by Timothy Long (subbing for an ailing Charles Barber), this production also features amazing projections by Andy Moro (who also designed the set) and a terrific lighting design by John Webber. With the troubled inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada having just released its interim report (asking for, among other things, more time and money), and with the recent discovery and identification of the remains of Traci Genereaux on a farm in Salmon Arm, this opera couldn't be more timely. But it also deserves to have a much longer life, and will ideally tour across the country, and also enter into Canadian operatic canon.

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Children of God at the York Theatre

Corey Payette's ambitious and urgently important new musical, Children of God, had its world premiere last night at the York Theatre on Commercial Drive, in a co-presentation between Urban Ink, Raven Theatre, The Cultch, and the National Arts Centre, to which the work will tour later in June. The polymathic Payette is the book writer, composer, lyricist and director of the work, which has been seven years in development, and which aims to tell through the popular and often insistently sunny form of musical theatre a story about one of the darkest chapters of Canadian history, namely the lives, cultural identity and sense of family connection stolen from a generation of Indigenous children in this country as a result of the residential school system, as well as the intergenerational trauma that continues to resound from these events.

The work is structurally complex, adopting a split timeframe in which present day Tom (an excellent Herbie Barnes), recently separated from his wife and back living at home on the reserve with his mother, Rita (Cathy Elliott, in a shattering performance), is trying to get back on his feet by hopefully landing a new job with Wilson (Kevin Loring), a former classmate at a Catholic residential school. The meeting with Wilson stirs up painful memories, which unfold in flashbacks, and in which we learn that little Tommy's sister Julia (Cheyenne Scott, who has a beautifully soaring voice) has attempted more than once to run away from the school--not least, as we eventually discover, to flee the sexual predation of the school's main priest, Father Christopher (Michael Torontow). When Sister Bernadette (Trish Lindstrom, very affecting in an emotionally demanding and complex role) discovers this abuse, and also the pregnancy that results, the impasse of inaction that results from the conflict between her obedience to her faith's chain of command and what she knows in her heart to be wrong leads to a series of tragic events that will mark all of the students at the school, including Wilson's younger brother Vincent (Aaron M. Wells) and Julia's friends Joanna (Kim Harvey) and Elizabeth (Kaitlyn Yott).

Payette compresses all of this action into a tight two acts, and the actor-driven transitions between scenes and timeframes are handled smoothly and efficiently, with old-style iron dormitory beds and a row of wooden desks, among other material signifiers, enough to sketch the enforced erasure of the children's Indigenous identities through sameness and spatial enclosure from their communities. Likewise, the songs and musical score are excellent, advancing both the narrative and emotional journeys of the characters in compelling ways, alternating deftly between rousing ensemble numbers and intimate solos, and also providing numerous transcendent moments of audience identification and empathy that we crave from the musical theatre form. Payette is an incredibly gifted composer and lyricist, though I was a bit surprised at how much of this work hued to classic western musical idioms (the musicians include Brian Chan on cello, Allen Cole on piano, Martin Reisle on guitar, and Elliot Vaughan on viola). The exception comes in two numbers accompanied by traditional drumming and sung in Ojibwe: Gimikwenden Ina (Do You Remember?) is a joyous ode to the survival of cultural memory sung by the residential school students near the end of the first act that is accompanied by a simple yet absolutely stunning bit of choreography that transforms a bedsheet into the surface of a drum, and that I thought should have closed the first act rather than the darker number that followed; and Baamaapii Ka Wab Migo (Until We See You Again) is at once a lament and a celebration of Julia's spirit led by Rita at the end of the musical that insistently rises in pitch and rhythm and emotional intensity until it envelopes not just the rest of the cast and musicians, all of whom join Rita and Tom on stage, but sweeps across the entire audience, with everyone standing, clasping hands and joining in the chorus as a resurrected Julia appears in a bright red dress and wafts up the aisle as she is sent on her journey to the other side.

That ending is one of the more memorable I have seen in the theatre, musical or otherwise, in a long time. However, dramaturgically, the work is not perfect. Having the male residential school children played by adult actors, while understandable in terms of the work's structure and the inevitable limited resources accompanying such a production, was somewhat jarring given that the women playing the female children were much closer in age to their characters. The vexed relationship between Tom and Rita, the ultimate repairing of which over the course of the musical speaks to the heart of the issue of intergenerational trauma that is one of the most damaging legacies of the residential school system, gets somewhat buried among the many strands of Children's plot. We understand that Tom partly blames his mother for abandoning him and his sister when they needed her most; but we only witness Rita being rebuffed in her efforts to visit her children in one brief scene in the first act, and the tortuous guilt that she carries within her is only fully revealed at the end of the musical. An ironic consequence of consigning this story of fractured Indigenous kinship structures to the margins of the story is that the relationship between Father Christopher and Sister Bernadette comes all the more to the fore. To be sure, in taking pains to sketch out the various hierarchical and patriarchal structures propping up the Catholic residential school system, Payette is seeking to complexify a story in which it would be easy to condemn all teachers and white authority figures as part of the system and thus worthy of condemnation. At the same time, I found myself wondering on more than one occasion last night why it was that I found my sympathies gravitating as much toward Sister Bernadette as towards Tom and Julia and Rita.

No doubt such a response says as much about me, as a settler theatregoer, as it does about this amazing exploration through performance of what meaningful truth and reconciliation might look like in this country. Caveats aside, Children of God is a powerful work of living history and it should be seen by audiences across Canada.

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Elbow Room Café: The Musical at the York Theatre

Two years ago Zee Zee Theatre presented a workshop version of Elbow Room Café: The Musical at Studio 58. Written by Zee Zee playwright-in-residence Dave Deveau, who also serves as co-lyricist with composer Anton Lipovetsky, the workshop was directed by Zee Zee’s Managing Artistic Director, Cameron Mackenzie. It was such a hit that the creative team decided to move towards a full production, which is of course never a sure thing given the expense and risk of any musical without a proven pedigree or the imprimatur of Disney. That Elbow Room honours the owners of a quirky local landmark in Vancouver’s gay village would only seem to further segment its potential audience. However, none of this deterred the Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s Executive Director, Heather Redfern, who came on board as a co-presenter, and who together with Deveau and Mackenzie presided over last night’s world premiere of the full musical at The Cultch’s York Theatre, where the work runs until March 12. Get your tickets now, as this baby is going to be a hit (and I’m not just saying that because I’m on Zee Zee’s board).

For anyone not in the know (and, honey, that really is a pity), The Elbow Room Café is a legendary breakfast spot opened by life and business partners Patrice (Patrick) Savoie and Bryan Searle in its original cramped quarters on Jervis Street in 1983. It moved to its current location on Davie Street in 1996. The Elbow Room is renowned for the caustic verbal abuse served up by Savoie, Searle and their employees alongside orders of pancakes, eggs and toast. Savoie, in particular, treats all customers with equal disdain, and many Hollywood stars have lined up for a chance to be on the receiving end of his rebarbative wit. But the Elbow Room has also long been a driving charitable force in the community, with a strictly enforced donation policy for every plate upon which food remains—monies that are passed on to A Loving Spoonful, the volunteer-driven, non-profit society that has provided free meals to people living with HIV/AIDS in Greater Vancouver since 1989. More quietly, Savoie and Searle worked behind the scenes in the early days of the pandemic to ease the burden of those living with the disease, which included retaining on staff several employees who were HIV-positive.

All of this is referenced in the musical, a contemporary day in the life of the café that coalesces around several parallel storylines. Tim (Steven Greenfield) and Tabby (a terrifically brassy Emma Slipp) are married tourists from Tennessee who stop into the café on their way to Stanley Park, and whose initially wide-eyed and then increasingly participatory observations of staff and patrons’ camp antics mimics the fish-out-water scenario of Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Show. Jackie (the immensely talented Christine Quintana) is a regular waiting to meet her former girlfriend, Jill (Olivia Hutt, also a stand-out), who arrives late, as expected, but also carrying (quite literally) some very unexpected news. Finally, Stephen (a queerly acerbic Nathan Kay), Beth (Stephanie Wong) and Amanda (Stephanie Yusuf) are part of a bachelorette party that’s gone off the rails; the trio comes into the Elbow Room ostensibly to sober Amanda up before she hops a plane to Mexico to marry her fiancé, but Stephen and Beth seem to have very different ideas about how best to go about this, or whether this is even what their friend really wants. All of this is set against the central drama of the musical, with the habitual bickering of Patrick and Bryan (an expertly matched Allan Zinyk and Bryan D. Adams) threatening to lead to a breaking point as a result of Patrick’s desire to get married and retire, leaving the café in the hands of their capable and long-suffering employee, Nelson (the hard-working Justin Lapeña, who also doubles as Chiffon, a drag fairy only Tim can see, and a Mountie stripper who gives the uptight Beth a much-needed lap dance late in the musical).

Amanda’s ambivalence about marriage and Patrick’s belief in the institution is just one of the queer/straight binaries that Deveau and Lipovetsky play with. There’s also the queerness within straight marriage that we gradually discover through the unfolding relationship between Tim and Tabby, with the former eventually embracing his glittery inner drag diva, and with the latter showing who in fact wears the pants in this family via the show-stopping number “A Girl’s Gotta Eat!” Indeed, part of the immense charm of Elbow Room Café: The Musical is that it knowingly traffics in the stereotypes and sentimentality of the musical genre at the same time as it exuberantly subverts and deconstructs them. Some of the jokes and one-liners in the book are groan-inducingly obvious and hammy (especially as delivered by Zinyk’s chief buffon, Patrick, who at one point wades into the audience looking for his next mark); but in every collective laugh or sigh of recognition we also experience a community in formation. That’s what we see in the camp aesthetic onstage in this work, and also in the legendary social gathering place upon which it is based. Like Tim and Tabby, if you’re not initially in on the joke then it’s up to you to find out why—and to find your own way in.

Not everything about Elbow Room Café: The Musical is perfect. In its current state it actually feels a bit book-heavy, with the exposition especially weighty in the overly long first act. One consequence of this is that before they come together, the structural shifts between each storyline sometimes mean that the bulk of the performers on stage are for long stretches left with very little to do except mime some bits of business at their respective tables. Overall, however, this is clearly a labour of love on everyone’s part, a musical that despite the relative intimacy of its scale (including a crackerjack all-female band of Sally Zori, Clare Wyatt and Molly MacKinnon) is so very big in its heart.

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BigMouth at The Cultch

Just back from a matinee performance of Valentijn Dhaenens and SKaGeN Theatre's BigMouth at The Cultch's York Theatre, for which I was also privileged to lead the post-show talkback. A virtuosic tour through the history of oration, Dhaenens's piece is a mash-up of some of the most famous--and infamous--of public speeches to have been recorded for posterity: from Pericles' funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War to Ann Coulter's post-9/11 screed against Muslims. Moving between five sets of microphones anchored to a long, waist-high trestle table, and bridging the different spoken movements with songs looped through a delay unit, Dhaenens has created a complex vocal score that attests to the power of the human voice to move us physically and affectively.

Dhaenens revealed that in preparation for the piece he set himself the task of reading at least one speech a day, eventually making his way through more than a thousand over the course of the year. Working intuitively rather than instrumentally, he began forming different piles based less on immediate temporal connections than on thematic juxtapositions. Thus, for example, following an opening prologue in which Dhaenens channels the voice of the Grand Inquisitor speaking to those about to be burned at the stake, we get two speeches from men condemned unjustly to die: Niccolo Sacco and Socrates. In the first case, as Dhaenens noted post-show, Sacco did not have access to the rhetorical skills (nor even fluency in the language in which he was being tried) that might have saved his life; in the second case, Socrates most assuredly did, but he harnessed rhetoric in this case to indict the system that accused him rather than plead for mercy from it. Likewise, Dhaenens creates a fascinating duet by counterpointing two late WW II speeches by Hermann Goebbels and George S. Patton, deliberately toning down the verbal vituperation of the former and ramping up the cowboy jingoism of the latter in order to focus on the contrast in their sentence structures: long and seductively paratactical for Goebbels; short, sharp and full of declarative machismo for Patton.

Originally created from and for Dhaenens's own Belgian context, another striking pairing concerns King Boudewijn of Belgium--who we hear explaining why he will not sign a 1990 abortion law--and Patrice Lumumba--who presided over Congolese independence from Belgium in the 1960s, and whose subsequent murder was almost surely known of, if not abetted by, Belgian authorities. It's these kinds of intricate orchestrations that elevate this very smart show beyond mere gimmicky spectacle and into a fascinating symphony in which persuasion and exculpation emerge as two sides of the same coin.

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PuSh 2015: The Road Forward

When Marie Clements' The Road Forward played Club PuSh for one night only as part of the 2013 PuSh Festival I ended my blog post on that performance by noting that the show needed to come back and be seen by a larger audience. Mercifully, PuSh AED Norman Armour got the message and at this year's Festival the work returns for a three night run at the York Theatre on Commercial Drive, in a co-presentation with The Cultch and Touchstone Theatre.

First presented as a ten-minute multi-media installation at the Aboriginal Pavilion during the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, the work has developed over the past five years into a full-length theatrical concert. Or is it a rock musical? An illustrated song cycle? As Clements noted earlier in the day in conversation with me on the Cultch's Historic Theatre stage, she doesn't worry too much about generic categories. What's most important is the story that needs to be told; it's the story that dictates the form.

In the case of The Road Forward, the story is based on Clements' research into the archives of the Native Brotherhood (and Sisterhood) of British Columbia (NBCC), formed in 1931 and Canada's oldest active advocacy group on First Nations issues. In particular, Clements was astounded to discover and read through back issues of the NBCC's newspaper, The Native Voice, which became a powerful mouthpiece for and documentary record of Indigenous social justice activism--and not just along the coast of BC, but across Canada and the Americas. Video projections of scanned pages from The Native Voice appear throughout the evening and it is both astounding to see what the NBCC was fighting for 50 years ago and dispiriting to see what battles have yet to be fully won today.

Working with lead composer and musical director Jennifer Kreisberg, Clements, as writer, director and producer, has turned this history into a series of nineteen songs that marry celebration and lament, resistance and requiem, all with a driving drum beat that announces unambiguously Indigenous presence, sovereignty and futurity. This is also represented for us generationally on stage, with the cast of seventeen comprised of elders (for example, Latash Maurice Nahanee and Delhia Nahanee, of the Squamish and Nisga'a nations), their direct descendants (Amanda Nahaneee and Marissa Nahanee), and a wider network of relations. (Regrettably, Kreisberg's son Wakinyan RedShirt was ill with a fever and could not perform alongside his mother.)

The size of the cast, though a challenge logistically (they are squeezed even on the larger York Theatre stage), reflects Clements' commitment to marshalling and presenting to audiences the wealth of Indigenous performance talent from across the Americas. The heart and soul of this particular group are the three magnificent divas--Kreisberg, Cheri Maracle, and Michelle St. John (Clements' co-artistic director of red diva projects)--whose combined fierceness and vocal power quite literally "take [our] words away" (to paraphrase the song, sung by Russell Wallace, that introduces them). Harkening back to the classic African-American girl groups of the Motown era, this trio likewise sings a blues- and gospel-inflected repertoire of survival in spite of suffering, with each woman being given a thumping solo (Maracle on "This is How it Goes," Kreisberg on "1965" and the tiny St. John bringing down the house on "Thunderstruck") that showcases not just her extraordinary pipes, but also her indomitability of spirit. Kreisberg and Maracle also harmonize in haunting fashion on "My Girl's Song," a mournful lament for the Aboriginal girls and women who have been murdered or gone missing along BC's Highway of Tears. I would be remiss if I did not mention the groovy vocalizations of the trio on the classic Patti Labelle anthem "Lady Marmalade," which had me bopping my head and tapping my feet in absolute delight. A shout out as well to bassist Shakti Hayes, who takes a turn at the microphone for "Good God," a bitterly ironic ode to the religious indoctrination generations of Indigenous children were subjected to as part of the Residential School system in Canada.

Not to be outdone, the men of The Road Forward also shine. Special mention must go to co-composer,  lead guitarist, and band leader Wayne Lavallee, who has a classic rock star voice in the vein of Robert Plant (plus the hair to match). Drummer Richard Brown kept a low profile visually at the back of the stage, but we registered his beats aurally throughout the performance. Keyboardist Murray Porter rocks out on the classic tune "Come and Get Your Love," by the legendary Native American and Mexican American rock band Redbone; later Porter is also compelling in inviting us to come aboard the "Constitution Express." That song references an important cross-Canada consciousness-raising event led by George Manuel in advance of the repatriation of the Canadian constitution. Another important speech by Manuel, "If You Really Believe," serves as the basis of a riveting spoken word performance by Ostwelve, who also contributes the rap "All My Relations" to the final title song of the evening, which brings the full company together.

Seeing and hearing this show at the York was a powerful experience--we even got to don 3D glasses at the end to witness Native masks and and other iconic images pop out at us. But it needs an even bigger stage, a venue where we can not only listen, but also dance. It needs, in short, a cross-Canada stadium tour, complete with a red diva projects booth selling T-shirts and CDs. Clements was necessarily sanguine about the show's prospects following this revival when I asked her the what next question earlier in the day, citing the energy and the timing and especially the money to make something like a multi-city tour happen. But if there's anybody who can do it, it's Marie Clements.

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Previewing Pauline

Yesterday Richard and I were lucky enough to be able to draw on some connections to sit in on a dress rehearsal of the new opera Pauline, about the Mohawk-Canadian poet and performance artist Pauline Johnson, who died in Vancouver in 1913 and is buried in Stanley Park. Commissioned by City Opera Vancouver, the intimate chamber opera features a libretto by CanLit icon Margaret Atwood and a beautiful score by Tobin Stokes. The work is being directed by PuSh Festival AD Norman Armour, assisted by Club PuSh Manager Cameron Mackenzie--hence our in.

Respecting the fact that what we saw was a working dress (in fact it was the first time the performers had tried on their costumes), I won't reveal any of the production or plot details here--except to say that the personal, professional and cultural conflicts between Pauline (the commanding mezzo Rose Ellen Nichols) and her sister Eva (Sarah Vardy, who has a stunning soprano) provide the work with much of its dramatic through-line, leading to a climactic coup-de-théâtre. And also that John Webber's lighting design is simply spectacular.

Johnson's story certainly makes for great tragic opera: an "Indian Princess" who channels her bi-cultural heritage into verse and stage stardom in Victorian-era Canada, but who is preyed upon by various "pale-faced men" (including a shiftless would-be lover and unscrupulous manager, both played by the tenor Adam Fisher), and who eventually dies in poverty and ravaged by cancer. Atwood's libretto both plays up and undermines these clichés, and the wider applications of her story to the consumption of First Nations culture are brought out (sorry, another production revelation) in Tim Matheson's projections. Ironically (or not), the libretto is at its strongest when it incorporates Johnson's own verse, its lyrical romanticism strangely well-suited to Stokes' atonal music.

And while we're on the subject of sound, I should mention that the York Theatre's acoustics are pretty bloody amazing. Richard and I were sitting in the second row of the balcony and when music director and conductor Charles Barber occasionally halted the proceedings in the first act to ask about the balance between the orchestra and the voices, we and our confrères were able to give him the thumbs up. Indeed, it was almost like we were down there in the pit with him.

It was a tremendous privilege to have been able to sit in on this run-through of such an important new work before leaving town. As we were exiting the theatre staff were working on the logistics of how to get Ms. Atwood in and out of the York's tiny lobby in advance of Friday's gala opening--which has the makings of an opera in and of itself.

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PuSh 2014: Nanook of the North/Tanya Tagak

Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (19222) is perhaps the most famous, or infamous, documentary ever made. Technically, as one of the film's first intertitles boasts, it set a representational standard against which almost all non-fiction films since have been measured. Working with only a single camera and a skeleton crew in an unforgiving landscape, Flaherty captured some truly stunning shots. At the same time--the making of the igloo, for example--many of those shots were clearly staged. (Flaherty's camera was too big and too hot to get inside a completed igloo, and so the interior shots of Nanook and his sleeping family were taken within a three-sided structure.)

As an "ethnographic film," the work is even more controversial in its portrait of the primitive, yet "happy-go-lucky Eskimo" battling the elements. Nanook wasn't even the real name of the film's protagonist; nor was Nyla his actual wife. Moreover, the "frozen in time" ideology Flaherty conveys with his successive images of Inuit hunting traditions is, to say the least, a misprision. By the time Flaherty made the film, the Inuit were hunting with rifles rather than harpoons. And I daresay that a phonograph had likely made its way to the top of Hudson Bay by then.

So how to salvage--politically and aesthetically--such a controversial artifact of salvage ethnography? That's where the amazing throat singer Tanya Tagak comes in. Accompanied by violinist Jesse Zubot and percussionist Jean Martin, Tagak creates a live soundscore to the film, literally breathing new life into it.

In the second of two PuSh Festival performances last night at the York Theatre on Commercial Drive, Tagak announced that she and her bandmates were in a good mood. That spirit of fun informed my reception of the performance that followed, which I read as neither an outright indictment of Flaherty's colonialist impulses (though Tagak does intone, in rhythmically propulsive blasts, the word "colonizer" in more than one scene) nor as a melancholic requiem for a lost way of life and lost generations of Indigenous peoples. Rather, in the spirit of the Idle No More movement (at whose heart, from the very beginning, have been music and dance), Tagak adopts a cheekily ironic pose that is at once defiant and dialectical. Wholly appropriate, then, that I couldn't stop shifting my gaze back and forth between Tagak and the film, a constant and conscious perceptual adjustment that forced me to re-calibrate, in the moment, my reading of each.

A powerful way to end this year's 10th anniversary festival.

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Jack and the Beanstalk at the York Theatre

Last night Richard and I had the privilege to be among the first audiences to see a production in the restored York Theatre, on Commercial Drive at East Georgia. Theatre Replacement's Jack and the Beanstalk: An East Van Panto officially inaugurated the newly renovated space last night, just over a century after it first opened in 1912, and more than 30 years after Tom Durrie founded the Save the York Theatre Society in 1981 following the Vancouver Little Theatre Association's vacating of the building and its conversion to a cinema.

Durrie was in attendance last night, as were a host of civic and provincial dignitaries, prominent local arts producers and administrators, the generally excited public, and a gaggle of even more excited kids. As with the equally important renovation of the Stanley Theatre on South Granville, the architectural challenge for the York was clearly to fit a fully functioning 400-seat theatre (complete with flies and wings) within the existing footprint while also creating a visually interesting street facade. From what I was able to see and explore last night (which didn't include the stage, as Richard and opted not to stay for the after-party), this has been accomplished--the sole expense being, as again with the Stanley, significant lobby space. Indeed, the York's downstairs and upstairs lobbies are even smaller than the Stanley's, just a long thin wedge between the box office and the bar in the case of the former, and into which several hundred bodies were crammed last night to listen to Vancouver East Cultural Centre Executive Director Heather Redfern's opening remarks at a pre-reception. The Cultch, now a thriving arts juggernaut on the east side, will oversee the York Theatre, mostly renting it out to outside presenters, but also, as in this case, partnering with local companies and organizations to premiere new work or host important touring productions (as will be the case during the PuSh Festival, when Tanya Tagak's take on Nanook of the North opens there).

Richard and I had tickets for the last row of the balcony (GG), but there was nothing wrong with our seats. The sight lines were perfect, the acoustics impeccable, and the show itself a total gas. Charlie Demers' script, in adapting the venerable fairy tale to its local setting, does not spare the satire (even when directed at several members of the audience) and also doesn't talk down to its pint-sized viewers, whose wonder and energy must inevitably sustain the piece. Veda Hille's score is another marvel of offbeat syncopation and humour, and I was thrilled to see she'd incorporated into it another version of Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" (complete with trademark headband). Amiel Gladstone's direction was snappy in tempo and filled with wonderfully visual bits of stage magic. The actors, all except for lead Maiko Bae Yamamoto (who should perform--and sing--more often) in multiple roles, filled their outsized panto peronas (quite literally in the case of Allan Zinyk, who played both the Giant and Jack's mom) with charismatic aplomb.

In short, it was a wonderful way to open an important new cultural space in the city. Congratulations to all involved in getting us to this moment.

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