Finally!
Now that we've temporarily put the VAG soap-opera to rest, check out the future of visual art practice in this city by taking in I Need All the Friends I Can Get, the SFU Visual Art BFA Graduating Show, on at the Audain Gallery at SFU Woodward's until April 27th.
Among other things, it features the work of six of my students from FPA 319W--all amazingly talented.
P.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Pat and Maggie
Amid all the theatricality and performances of protest attending news of Margaret Thatcher's death in the UK (favourite graffito courtesy of our London friend, Cathy: "The Iron Lady: May She Rust in Peace"), a reminder, via the adjacent photo and accompanying story in the Vancouver Sun, of an important local connection to the neoliberal legacy of Thatcher's neoconservative politics: real estate.
Just as, soon after taking power, Thatcher authorized the private sale of huge swathes of council housing in London, so did BC's Social Credit government, in the wake of Expo 86, eagerly offload much of Vancouver's False Creek North to LeeKa-Shing's Concord Pacific, paving the way (quite literally) for the city's downtown boom in luxury condo development.
In both cases, the short term effect may have been to encourage middle class families to stay in the city rather than flee to the suburbs, and to stimulate economic growth and population density in hitherto depressed or formerly industrial neighbourhoods (though the density issue is debatable in the case of Vancouver, given that so many condo units have off-shore owners who don't live in them); however, in the longer term, it has meant pricing that same class out of the market while at the same time shrinking the amount of available--and affordable--low-income and social housing to ever smaller levels.
Needless to say, that's a narrative we don't hear much about in Pat Carney's reminiscences of Maggie's stamina and their mutual admiration as determined female deregulators having to deal with weak and "wet" male colleagues. Nor, unsurprisingly, is there any discussion of their unfortunate fashion choices.
The 1980s were horrible in so many ways.
P.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Artful Art Song at SFU
Last night, amid the ongoing line-up of spring arts showcases featuring the work of our super-talented Contemporary Arts students at SFU Woodward's, it was the musicians' turn to shine.
As Professor David McIntyre (doing double duty as conductor for the evening) announced before the concert, at SFU the music program is focused exclusively on composition. There is no performance-training component. Instead, senior composition students benefit each year from collaborating with a stellar line-up of local guest artists, who are invited to interpret and offer feedback on the students' work. Additionally, students hone their skills by composing to a rotating set of instruments and forms, depending on who is teaching the course. This year the focus was on the art song tradition, with students invited to set existing text to music for piano (guest artist Tina Chang), viola (guest artist Marcus Takizawa), soprano voice (guest artist Heather Pawsey) and mezzo-soprano voice (guest artist Melanie Adams).
Six songs and one opera scene were presented and, with one exception, I was consistently amazed not just by the depth and intelligence of the compositions themselves, but also by the startlingly original choices in text. (The one exception, in this regard, was the rather cliched use of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as the text for Chris Lachowski's otherwise charming score.) Highlights included Maren Lisac's dramatic call and response setting of Shane Rhodes' found poem "as may have been grunted" (comprised of words taken from the transcript of Treaty 5 negotiated in 1875 between Queen Victoria and the First Nations of Northern Manitoba); JJ Hartmann's thematic explorations of temporal phrasing and duration in relation to Elee Gardiner's "Backstich," a poem about sewing; Clinton Ackerman's wise and witty staging of two arias based on a scene from Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets in which Joanne (Pawsey) asks Rhonda (Adams) to help her commit suicide like Ophelia (demonstrating, in the process, that Thompson is perhaps our most operatic of playwrights and that Lion in the Streets, her masterwork, is perhaps ripe for just such an adaptation); and Lee Cannon-Brown's gracefully spare and simple score for Robert Creeley's "Intervals," a poem that is itself about "identity singing."
Scott Jeffrey chose Canadian poet (and Globe and Mail reviewer) Fraser Sutherland's "In the Provinces" as the basis for his song, and in the dissonant play of the viola with the cascading harmonics of the piano brilliantly captured the mix of wit, irony, and social critique at work in the poem. Alex Mah, graduating this year, worked with Contemporary Arts film professor and award-winning poet Colin Browne, setting "Swan" (from Browne's recently published collection The Properties) in a way that not only evoked 1960s experiments in sound poetry, but that also highlighted the contemporary art song's debt to minimalism.
That specific artistic debt is something Alex and Scott have been educating me on in their final essays for my FPA 319W course ("Critical Writing in the Arts"), which, respectively, are on on the indie classical music label/collective Bedroom Community and its most famous art song composer, Nico Muhly. Both Alex and Scott write as crisply as they compose, and I wish them and all their colleagues much success in their future careers.
P.
As Professor David McIntyre (doing double duty as conductor for the evening) announced before the concert, at SFU the music program is focused exclusively on composition. There is no performance-training component. Instead, senior composition students benefit each year from collaborating with a stellar line-up of local guest artists, who are invited to interpret and offer feedback on the students' work. Additionally, students hone their skills by composing to a rotating set of instruments and forms, depending on who is teaching the course. This year the focus was on the art song tradition, with students invited to set existing text to music for piano (guest artist Tina Chang), viola (guest artist Marcus Takizawa), soprano voice (guest artist Heather Pawsey) and mezzo-soprano voice (guest artist Melanie Adams).
Six songs and one opera scene were presented and, with one exception, I was consistently amazed not just by the depth and intelligence of the compositions themselves, but also by the startlingly original choices in text. (The one exception, in this regard, was the rather cliched use of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as the text for Chris Lachowski's otherwise charming score.) Highlights included Maren Lisac's dramatic call and response setting of Shane Rhodes' found poem "as may have been grunted" (comprised of words taken from the transcript of Treaty 5 negotiated in 1875 between Queen Victoria and the First Nations of Northern Manitoba); JJ Hartmann's thematic explorations of temporal phrasing and duration in relation to Elee Gardiner's "Backstich," a poem about sewing; Clinton Ackerman's wise and witty staging of two arias based on a scene from Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets in which Joanne (Pawsey) asks Rhonda (Adams) to help her commit suicide like Ophelia (demonstrating, in the process, that Thompson is perhaps our most operatic of playwrights and that Lion in the Streets, her masterwork, is perhaps ripe for just such an adaptation); and Lee Cannon-Brown's gracefully spare and simple score for Robert Creeley's "Intervals," a poem that is itself about "identity singing."
Scott Jeffrey chose Canadian poet (and Globe and Mail reviewer) Fraser Sutherland's "In the Provinces" as the basis for his song, and in the dissonant play of the viola with the cascading harmonics of the piano brilliantly captured the mix of wit, irony, and social critique at work in the poem. Alex Mah, graduating this year, worked with Contemporary Arts film professor and award-winning poet Colin Browne, setting "Swan" (from Browne's recently published collection The Properties) in a way that not only evoked 1960s experiments in sound poetry, but that also highlighted the contemporary art song's debt to minimalism.
That specific artistic debt is something Alex and Scott have been educating me on in their final essays for my FPA 319W course ("Critical Writing in the Arts"), which, respectively, are on on the indie classical music label/collective Bedroom Community and its most famous art song composer, Nico Muhly. Both Alex and Scott write as crisply as they compose, and I wish them and all their colleagues much success in their future careers.
P.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
War: Requiem at SFU Woodward's
Things are bustling at SFU Woodward's, where several year-end shows highlight the immense talent and creativity of Contemporary Arts students across the disciplines. Last night I got a chance to see the senior repertory dance students shine in War: Requiem, an intense, athletic, and visually stunning show overseen and co-created by Rob Kitsos, and featuring additional choreography by the 605 Collective, Shauna Elton, and Vanessa Goodman.
The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.
Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).
It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.
Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.
War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.
P.
The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.
Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).
It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.
Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.
War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.
P.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Micro Voyages
I missed Boca del Lupo's The Voyage when it was first staged as part of their "micro-performance" series last fall. Given the buzz then, I made sure to see it this time around. And so yesterday I made my way to Granville Island, briefly bid adieu to the brilliant late afternoon sunshine, and submitted to being locked inside a shipping container for 20 minutes. The experience was underwhelming.
The Voyage is about human trafficking, Vancouver being a favoured port of entry for the smuggling of illegal migrants across the Pacific and into North America. All this we are told in advance of the show, as we gather at The Anderson Street Space (TASS) headquarters of the company. And this: that the show will place us "in the shoes" of someone being trafficked.
The experience starts with the assembled audience (there were about 15 of us in total) being loaded into a panel van waiting at the entrance to TASS. It's cramped and hot, and the van is prone to sudden starts and stops. But at least there's still light. And, oh yeah, an accompanying audio track. I knew that the whole premise of The Voyage was sensory: visual deprivation on the one hand, and acoustic immersion on the other. However, I didn't expect the latter to include the looped meta-commentary from media and political pundits that frames this simulation of being trafficked. It immediately took me outside my body--the ring of sweat forming around my neck, my awareness of how closely I was pressed up against the person squeezed in next to me--and reminded me not just that this was "a show," but also here's what you should think about it.
Ditto the chorus of voices that ends the audio while we are inside the actual container (located on the old loading dock between Emily Carr University and the Granville Island Hotel). The minute its door was bolted closed and we were plunged into a darkness unlike any other I've experienced in the theatre I was back inside my body. That sensory awareness only increased as the sound score (created by Jean Routhier and Carey Dodge) began, starting with the tell-tale bleats of the forklifts used to load heavy freight onto boats. When, half-way through, we hear the sounds of laboured breathing I had to briefly catch my own to determine it wasn't coming from me. And once the container "arrives" in Vancouver and there is a banging and cry for help, I was momentarily tricked into thinking it was coming from one of my fellow audience members.
But then, just before the doors of the container open and we are "released" back into the bright sunshine and our equally shiny Vancouver lives, we are returned to the meta realm, with a final loop of what I assumed were testimonials from trafficked individuals. In a piece that is otherwise brilliantly constructed around the conceit of "showing-by-not-showing," this insistence on telling at the beginning and end is perplexing and, it seems to me, fundamentally at odds with the experience of bodily empathy at the core of the work.
Kudos to Sherry and Jay and the whole Boca team for attempting to get us to see more feelingly in The Voyage. I just wish they trusted their audience to connect the social and political dots.
P.
The Voyage is about human trafficking, Vancouver being a favoured port of entry for the smuggling of illegal migrants across the Pacific and into North America. All this we are told in advance of the show, as we gather at The Anderson Street Space (TASS) headquarters of the company. And this: that the show will place us "in the shoes" of someone being trafficked.
The experience starts with the assembled audience (there were about 15 of us in total) being loaded into a panel van waiting at the entrance to TASS. It's cramped and hot, and the van is prone to sudden starts and stops. But at least there's still light. And, oh yeah, an accompanying audio track. I knew that the whole premise of The Voyage was sensory: visual deprivation on the one hand, and acoustic immersion on the other. However, I didn't expect the latter to include the looped meta-commentary from media and political pundits that frames this simulation of being trafficked. It immediately took me outside my body--the ring of sweat forming around my neck, my awareness of how closely I was pressed up against the person squeezed in next to me--and reminded me not just that this was "a show," but also here's what you should think about it.
Ditto the chorus of voices that ends the audio while we are inside the actual container (located on the old loading dock between Emily Carr University and the Granville Island Hotel). The minute its door was bolted closed and we were plunged into a darkness unlike any other I've experienced in the theatre I was back inside my body. That sensory awareness only increased as the sound score (created by Jean Routhier and Carey Dodge) began, starting with the tell-tale bleats of the forklifts used to load heavy freight onto boats. When, half-way through, we hear the sounds of laboured breathing I had to briefly catch my own to determine it wasn't coming from me. And once the container "arrives" in Vancouver and there is a banging and cry for help, I was momentarily tricked into thinking it was coming from one of my fellow audience members.
But then, just before the doors of the container open and we are "released" back into the bright sunshine and our equally shiny Vancouver lives, we are returned to the meta realm, with a final loop of what I assumed were testimonials from trafficked individuals. In a piece that is otherwise brilliantly constructed around the conceit of "showing-by-not-showing," this insistence on telling at the beginning and end is perplexing and, it seems to me, fundamentally at odds with the experience of bodily empathy at the core of the work.
Kudos to Sherry and Jay and the whole Boca team for attempting to get us to see more feelingly in The Voyage. I just wish they trusted their audience to connect the social and political dots.
P.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Ways of Walking
DanceHouse's fifth season ended last night with an energetic walk on the wild side of contemporary dance. Carte Blanche, the Bergen-based Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, presented Corps de Walk, by red-hot Israeli duo Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar (she is resident choreographer for Batsheva Dance Company and he is an in-demand video, music, and performance artist). Set to a driving electronic score by DJ Ori Lichtik, this relentless 60-minute pushing of the limits of unison is as high on concept as it is on technique.
Using a "system of walks" as the architectural basis for her movement vocabulary, Eyal is clearly referencing in the title of the piece the traditional corps de ballet, the army of anonymous dancers who don't get to electrify with their virtuosic jumps and pirouettes and lifts, but without whose expert execution of the "simpler" steps a work would be unrecognizable as classical ballet. Those steps require a strong inner body core (a grounded pelvic floor combined with an elongated spine), and from the opening tableau of the Carte Blanche ensemble standing in a circle, arms stretched above their heads like tree branches, to the patterned use of deep pliés throughout the work, Eyal is drawing our attention--almost in a Labanesque, eukinetic way--to the very bodily mechanics of walking, on or off the stage. Finally, in terms of puns on the word "corps," there's the ghosted "e" we are wont to append to the end, not least as Eyal and Behar send the Carte Blanche dancers out on stage clad uniformly in flesh-toned, skin-hugging lyotards, their hair likewise painted white, and, most eerily, sporting white contact lenses. Combined with the deliberately robotic movement patterns--the precise head turns, foot pivots, hip thrusts, finger splays, elbow bends, pelvic tilts--that keep repeating at a steady pace as the dancers move into and out of different group formations (often initiated by shouted commands by one or another of them), at times it's almost as if we're watching an episode of The Walking Dead.
And yet as much as the costumes and choreography emphasize sameness over difference (the hallmark of any great ballet dancer being the ability to perform flawlessly the same steps over and over again), for me the absolute indexicality of these dancing bodies (and pointing with index fingers becomes an important recurrent motif throughout the piece) broke down the longer the piece went on. All thirteen Carte Blanche dancers are on stage for almost the entire duration of the piece, and the longer we look at them moving together the more we are able to see how they likewise move apart. And I'm not just referring to the fact that the dancers are different shapes and sizes, that, for example, one of the male dancers is black, another bald, and one has a mustache. Rather, I refer to the fact that one of the things that remains so entrancing about a corps de ballet, like the ballet performed every day by hundreds of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, is that while we may all be moving with the same purpose and intention, even in something as habitual as walking one cannot help but distinguish personality in form.
P.
Using a "system of walks" as the architectural basis for her movement vocabulary, Eyal is clearly referencing in the title of the piece the traditional corps de ballet, the army of anonymous dancers who don't get to electrify with their virtuosic jumps and pirouettes and lifts, but without whose expert execution of the "simpler" steps a work would be unrecognizable as classical ballet. Those steps require a strong inner body core (a grounded pelvic floor combined with an elongated spine), and from the opening tableau of the Carte Blanche ensemble standing in a circle, arms stretched above their heads like tree branches, to the patterned use of deep pliés throughout the work, Eyal is drawing our attention--almost in a Labanesque, eukinetic way--to the very bodily mechanics of walking, on or off the stage. Finally, in terms of puns on the word "corps," there's the ghosted "e" we are wont to append to the end, not least as Eyal and Behar send the Carte Blanche dancers out on stage clad uniformly in flesh-toned, skin-hugging lyotards, their hair likewise painted white, and, most eerily, sporting white contact lenses. Combined with the deliberately robotic movement patterns--the precise head turns, foot pivots, hip thrusts, finger splays, elbow bends, pelvic tilts--that keep repeating at a steady pace as the dancers move into and out of different group formations (often initiated by shouted commands by one or another of them), at times it's almost as if we're watching an episode of The Walking Dead.
And yet as much as the costumes and choreography emphasize sameness over difference (the hallmark of any great ballet dancer being the ability to perform flawlessly the same steps over and over again), for me the absolute indexicality of these dancing bodies (and pointing with index fingers becomes an important recurrent motif throughout the piece) broke down the longer the piece went on. All thirteen Carte Blanche dancers are on stage for almost the entire duration of the piece, and the longer we look at them moving together the more we are able to see how they likewise move apart. And I'm not just referring to the fact that the dancers are different shapes and sizes, that, for example, one of the male dancers is black, another bald, and one has a mustache. Rather, I refer to the fact that one of the things that remains so entrancing about a corps de ballet, like the ballet performed every day by hundreds of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, is that while we may all be moving with the same purpose and intention, even in something as habitual as walking one cannot help but distinguish personality in form.
P.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Balm in Gilead at Studio 58
As I've written in a previous post, playwright Lanford Wilson and producer/cultural impresario/all-round force of nature Ellen Stewart (who died within months of each other in 2011) more or less invented Off-Off-Broadway. When Wilson's Balm in Gilead opened at Stewart's La Mama ETC in 1965 and became an instant hit, New Yorkers suddenly cottoned on to the Lower Eastside as a destination for cutting-edge theatre. Vancouver audiences can see what all the fuss was about by heading to Studio 58's current production of the play, on through April 7th.
Balm in Gilead is set in an all-night diner in New York City frequented by prostitutes, hustlers, junkies, pushers, and the generally destitute. It is famous for its overlapping dialogue; director Bob Frazer and set designer Naomi Sider have additionally emphasized the immersive qualities of the play by placing most of the audience within booths that form part of the stage space, and that at various moments might be occupied by different characters in the play. It is a most effective choice, as it gives us the opportunity, depending on where we look, to eavesdrop on the multiple mini-dramas that overlap, intersect, and divide the denizens of the diner, an acoustic roundelay that, together with the singing in the round that weaves throughout the two acts, highlights the cyclical structure of Wilson's play and the downward spirals of most of the characters' lives.
That's not to say that individual actors in the large ensemble cast don't get a chance to shine in the spotlight, and standout monologues include those by Stephaie Izsak as schoolteacher-turned-prostitute Ann, Patrick Mercado as a wise and observant Dopey, and especially Chirag Naik as the hopped-up junkie Fick. Even actors who have only a few lines of dialogue still dazzle with their physical presence: Julie Leung, for example, is mesmerizing as Babe, a heroin addict whom we watch shoot up at the top of the play and thereafter spend the rest of Act 1 trying not to fall off her counter stool.
There is a plot buried in all of this, one that concerns the doomed romance between Joe (Chris Cope), a small-time pusher who runs afoul of a bigger dealer, and Darlene (Masae Day), a naive young transplant from Chicago. Act 2 opens with a 20-minute monologue by Darlene describing her former boyfriend, an albino, and their planned marriage that somehow never came to pass. It made a star of Laurie Metcalf when the play was revived in 1984 in Circle Rep/Steppenwolf Theatre coproduction directed by John Malkovich. Unfortunately, it doesn't hit the right notes of wide-eyed humour and heart-breaking pathos in this production because Day's performance, here and elsewhere, is a bit too flat and affectless. This is a problem in an otherwise compelling production, as Darlene is meant to be the empathetic soul of the play.
P.
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