A Decade in the City
Placemaking
The philosopher Henri Lefebvre said that space becomes place through lived practice. We feel our way through built or natural spaces, spaces that are often populated with people and things. Some spaces have histories we’re aware of, some don’t. Everyone who moves through Vancouver’s urban landscape must navigate the same topography. It’s not a fixed thing. In moving through the landscape we create it. We meet people, do things, and recall past encounters. We change a space with our body and voice. It starts to mean something to us. We behave according to that meaning: dress a certain way (heading to work?), move at a particular tempo (in a hurry?), look (or return a look) with a given sense of our position in society. We perform the city. The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival also performs the city, as the writers who have contributed to this 10th anniversary broadsheet will attest. The Festival becomes a co-creator of the public life of Vancouver through the content of its performances as well as through the locations of its venues. Each writer reflects on this co-creation, often with a description of an intense performance of some kind. Each reflection is an act of place-making through the expression of memory. PuSh itself becomes a place, a date, a time. A texture. It has dimensions. Memories always do. They are immaterial lived spaces we map back on to actual spaces. And so we create place.
Ten Blocks: Small Notes on the Public Imaginary
Performance and Place: The Matter of PuSh
Vanessa Kwan
I remember the first public performance I saw in Vancouver: Back in 2001, I watched a work called Yellow Diablo vs. 1980 Camaro. Dressed only in a lucha libre mask and a pair of tight jeans, and armed with a ladder (to accommodate flying body slams) the performer beat the shit out of a vintage Camaro parked in the middle of the street at Carrall and Water. Audiences were mixed—frat boys heading out to the Blarney Stone and fans of performance art assembled to watch this, the Yellow Diablo’s most fearsome match up. Contact mics strapped to the performer’s body provided a fuzzy soundtrack. I remember feeling a sense of fear—for one man’s broken bones—and an uneasy sense of wonder: how could this be happening in the street? i Flash forward a few years and I’m watching other bodies in the streets on Granville, and other beleaguered cars. The Canucks lost and of course we had a riot. Burning trucks, beer bottles and massive LED screens, tension and broken glass. Déjà vu. And roll it back a couple years from there and I’m sitting in the Vancouver Public Library on a set of bleachers with some headphones on. There’s a performance that I’m watching across the atrium. There are 100 of us or so watching, a rapt audience, while others come and go on their way to the library. They don’t notice us, don’t notice the performers speaking quietly to each other and into hidden microphones. I am enthralled again and feel another kind of uneasiness.ii And (last one, I promise) it’s 2003 and I’m looking for this performance in Chinatown, and I can’t find it. An artist is touching a thousand people in the course of her day—small things like brushing her hand on someone’s sleeve while she chooses a lemon, a small tap on the shoulder as she passes a man on the street. A click counter in her hand, she roams around enacting her quiet gestures of physical connection. I’m angry because I can’t find her, and I miss the whole thing.iii All of these things and so much more in 10 square blocks. Variously the neighbourhoods are called Chinatown, the Downtown Eastside, Crosstown, Downtown. Some names are historical or generic, others seem more like real estate creations— something to distinguish a city’s aspirations from some of the poorest (and most culturally diverse) postal codes on the continent. We don’t always fight about sports. Sometimes we have bigger fish to fry, and my memory of Canucks riots bleeds into our collective knowledge of Occupy Vancouver, the Anti-Asian riots, the Gastown riots, APEC, Guns N’ Roses (fuck you, Axl), Idle No More, this year’s commemorations, last year’s protests and peaceful demonstrations. In these streets we gather to see art, to hurl post boxes, to cry in public. In the life of a city performance can be a violent act. It can be the equivalent of broken bones; a gathering up and exploding of our fear of what is possible in public space. Of what we already know is possible in public space. Watching Yellow Diablo, I wondered what might happen if the audience joined in, if we lost our sense of things and began to throw ourselves into cars, windows, one another. We did not, on that night, but the feelings of potential energy—invigorated and fearful—stayed in my limbs for days afterwards. Performance can be a tender thing. It’s not always about the sharp edges of spectacle. Once in a while there is integration, when the experience of a work oscillates between the ‘real’ and composed. In this there is another kind of uneasiness, and small metal objects presented by the PuSh Festival in 2008 was one of those works. It was an odd inhabitance of the public library—unmistakable for those who knew it was happening and unremarkable for those on their way to return a book. It existed alongside the regular goings-on of the library, in a burbling exchange with the flow of public life. To be honest I can’t remember the details of the narrative, but what remains is the intimate sensation of the performer’s voice in my ear in that soaring atrium, and a slow revelation: that the texture of public space can be shifted by a work’s tenderness (and here I define “tender” as a creative gesture that is sensitive, generous and open-ended; a porous addition to the spaces we share).
… the texture of public space can be shifted by a work’s tenderness … Performance can disappear into thin air. Sometimes we don’t even know when it happens. Sometimes we don’t really care. But the act of looking and sometimes coming up empty-handed is in itself an exercise in how to experience art in public space. Here there is no guarantee of money well spent or details to match the program notes. There is rather a true reflection of crowd-life (where the view is chronically bad): things are not experienced as clear images so much as ripples—a symptom of our connectivity, or just something that passes through. Having searched the streets for the artist who was touching a thousand people, and coming up wanting, I started to understand something that has served me well in the intervening years: there is creative power in a figment, or rather an after-image. It is an exercise in a public imaginary—artists sometimes create ghosts, on the verge of disappearing, and we must fill in the blurred ends; over time the picture appears, not so much fixed as evolving. Performance changes with the life of the city. We are violent, we are tender, we disappear in a crowd. We can’t control ourselves sometimes. These performances reflect our citizenship and connectivity, and speak diversely to how we inhabit our city. In a way they teach us to be more conscious citizens, to identify and absorb where the edges of our anger and our tenderness meet. More than this, they produce a sense of the imaginary in direct overlap with the real. That muscular potential energy, the bending of our expectations, the ghostly image of what might have been; all of these produce new possibilities for how we engage with and envision public space. In the street and in a crowd we use our fullest powers of imagination: we see what is, what could be and where we stand—or how we act—within it. —— i. Yellow Diablo vs. 1980 Camaro is a work by David Yonge. It was presented by the Live Biennial of Performance Art in conjunction with Access Gallery on November 2nd, 2001. ii. small metal objects by Back to Back Theatre (Australia) was presented by PuSh International Performing Arts Festival from January 30 – February 3, 2008. iii. Diane Borsato’s Touching 1000 People was curated by Kathleen Ritter for Artspeak Gallery. It took place from May 20 – 30, 2003.
Alex Lazaridis Ferguson Editor
300–640 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1G4 Canada Phone 604.605.8284 | info@pushfestival.ca | pushfestival.ca Placemaking: A Decade in the City was commissioned to commemorate the PuSh Festival’s 10 th anniversary in January 2014. All rights reserved. PuSh International Performing Arts Festival Society is a not-for-profit charitable organization. Registration number: 82954 9948 RT0001
Walks with Espresso
About Commemorations: Ideas Around a Civic Festival
The Slippery In-Between
Peter Dickinson
Alex Lazaridis Ferguson
Kris Nelson
Maiko Bae Yamamoto
There are any number of ways I contemplated approaching this reflection on the 10th anniversary of the PuSh Festival. In the end, I have chosen to bracket my current role as President of the Festival’s Board. Instead, I want to filter my remarks through my professional perspective as an academic, one whose specific critical focus is very often the matter of performance itself. By that I mean that in the courses I teach and the research I conduct I am concerned not just with the materiality of performance—the objects that comprise it, the labour that goes into it, the physical sites that give shape to it—but also its consequentiality: in short, what performance does. One extremely important thing that the PuSh Festival has done over the past decade is contribute to an ongoing conversation about place and place-making in Vancouver, insistently reminding us that live performance must be a fundamental part of discussions of livability. This has manifested itself in many ways. First, there is the geographical reach of the Festival, which has steadily “pushed” its way into Vancouverites’ consciousness in part by occupying so many of its city stages: from the Cultch on the east side to the Frederic Wood at UBC; from the Roundhouse and Granville Island on either side of False Creek to Capilano University on the north shore; from what has become its downtown anchor at SFU Woodward’s to any number of additional venues in the adjacent cultural precinct. Couple this with PuSh’s signature commitment to sited work—much of it explicitly focused on the ethics and politics of urban living—and one could say that every January PuSh produces the kind of roving public square that for the rest of the year is physically absent from our city. Consider, in this respect, the 2011 free outdoor production of Mariano Pensotti’s La Marea, which for four nights took over the 100-block of Water Street in Gastown and was seen by close to 7,000 people. The piece’s loosely connected vignettes and projected snippets of cryptic text form a narrative that is abstract enough to play in any city. However, despite the work’s movie-set vibe, the particularity of place cannot be overwritten. Indeed, lacking any other coherent context, we are forced to read the scenes in terms of their location: in storefronts, in apartment windows, and on paving stones that together tell a parallel story of settlement and displacement, commerce and community, unique to Vancouver. Such local/global interfaces between audience and event are what constitute the special place-making temporality of so many PuSh performances: in constituting ourselves as a temporary public within a particular time and space, we become witness to other worlds that can represent, contest, or invert some of the material sites of power and knowledge in our more immediate surroundings. Which brings me to perhaps the most important matter of all: the content of PuSh’s performances. Given the Festival’s location on the Pacific Rim—and the reconceptualization of the continental drift of programming this necessitates—it makes sense that place has become a thematic through-line, including in work by non-resident artists. At the same time, the fact that PuSh’s first decade has coincided with the social, cultural, and developmental imprint of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games means that PuSh’s programming has not just been a part of but has often led the critical discourse on the politics of place in Vancouver. For example, a show like 100% Vancouver gathers together on stage one hundred individuals who each represent one percent of the city’s total population, and who have been selected according to the following demographic criteria: gender, age, marital status, ethnicity/mother tongue, and neighbourhood. However, in the psychographic portrait of the city that follows (in which participants group themselves into various ME and NOT ME categories according to a series of prompts), and not least because of its staging at SFU Woodward’s, the piece arguably reveals the Downtown Eastside as the nexus from which all other civic relationships radiate in Vancouver. The same year, as part of the Festival’s mounting of Podplays, a quartet of outdoor audio dramas commissioned by Neworld Theatre and the Playwrights Theatre Centre, I experienced a mini-revelation regarding the layers of obligation and indebtedness that attend such relationships. It occurred during the work’s third segment, “Portside Walk,” which was written and performed by David McIntosh, and which took me west from CRAB Park towards Canada Place and the new Vancouver Convention Centre. At the same time as the text directed me to look at the flying buttresses of these monuments to the city’s global cosmopolitan progress, it also insistently dug deeper, to the buried indigenous roots and the much-trafficked migratory routes of that progress: a scenario of contact, conquest, and diaspora we continue to replay to this day in terms of those unseen under-classes who service our urban mega-projects and amenities. To this end, a singular achievement of McIntosh’s piece is that while listening to his narration one actually traverses the service road underneath the new Convention Centre, with a carpark elevator eventually disgorging participants onto the more salubrious outdoor plaza of the Centre, replete with Olympic cauldron. Cities are built spaces, but they are first and foremost embodied spaces. As Michel de Certeau has argued, walking is “an elementary form” of experiencing the city, a tactical procedure which produces new maps that don’t always correspond to the official criss-crossings of streets you find in guidebooks or A–Zs. De Certeau notes that we are not always able to read the maps we write with our bodies, but in the very fleeting moments of passing and being passed by we nevertheless open up cracks in the pavement, steal time, and breathe life into possible new intersections. Let me end this reflection by recounting one such intersection from last year’s PuSh Festival, an experience that in addressing the vexing matter of social intimacy in Vancouver placed my body not just in a new sensorial relationship to my city but, as a result, to a stranger to whom I will forever remain connected. The brainchild of Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, of France’s Projet in situ, Do You See What I Mean? was a blindfolded guided tour of downtown Vancouver that began at the Access Gallery on Georgia Street, just east of Main. My guide was Mariana. Over the course of three hours we chatted only briefly about ourselves; however, during that time we nevertheless experienced an incredibly intimate social and physical exchange. In my case, not only did this involve placing my life literally in Mariana’s hands, but, in taking hold of her right elbow and beginning to walk alongside her, shifting the whole kinespheric axis of my body in her direction. The experience was uncanny and disorienting and exhilarating all at once, as guided only by Mariana’s voice and the pace of her movements and subtle shifts in direction was I able to do what under any other circumstances I automatically take for granted: walk. And what a walk: so immersive, so sensual, so loud! Take away the visual sense, and suddenly you realize just how noisy your city is: car horns and engines accelerating; music from storefronts; the click-clickclick of heels on sidewalks. The snippets of overheard conversation provided an audio track all their own as I assembled different bits of information—and different languages— into a running narrative. Then there was the heightened haptic sense: the texture of the ground underneath my feet; the warmth of the sun on my face; always the nubbly fabric of Mariana’s sweater at my fingertips. In a thrift store I’d like to say was somewhere in Chinatown I was delighted to discover in my felt explorations of the wares a horse’s stirrup: so unexpected amid all of the clothes and knick-knacks, and such a joyful surprise for that. This was the first of several stops that Mariana and I made on our journey: a pastry shop where I got to taste an orange-blossom macaroon; an apartment where our host Stephen gave me a motorcycle helmet to hold and told us the story of his ill-fated purchase of a vintage Vespa; an indoor-outdoor pool where Jimmy, himself non-sighted, tested my sense of smell and touch; and finally what I would discover later was the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, where I got to dance in the dark with Ziyian Kwan. The whole event was one of the most stimulating of my life. A year later I’m still processing all the feelings it produced. But one thing I know for sure: as an experience, it mattered. Even if I never see Mariana again, I will always have—thanks to PuSh, and in keeping with all great performance—some other sense that between us an encounter of some consequence took place.
I love fine espresso. I love the cherry-red crema of a perfectly drawn cup and the fullbodied taste of a shot that has been pre-infused with water before being patiently drawn through the basket. I inhale the granular aroma as a taste as much as a scent. I also adore the scenography of espresso bars. Looking in from the street the window frames the interior. What does that interior promise the senses? What colour palette is on offer? Does the cafe have an earthy feel with rough wooden floors and exposed rafters, counterpoised by a red-enameled espresso machine? Or is the machine an embraceable yellow? Maybe the floor is of polished concrete and the machine a curving silver alloy that revives art deco-era visions of a chrome and plastic future that promising hygiene and progress. One of the first things I do when I visit a new city is take a long walk, sometimes up to 10 hours. I hope to discover the good espresso bars, unique boutiques, surprising architecture, and hidden alleys. I create a mental map. Alien space becomes personal place. Usually I’m in the city for a performance festival so I also stake out the venues and their distance to the closest cafe of quality. I want to be able to get to that cafe before or after a show. I imagine meeting friends and colleagues there, writing, thinking, or just getting a feel for the locals. A topography of espresso bars, venues, boutiques, and eateries takes shape. I create an urban scenography from these ‘found’ materials. The theatre venues offer performances but they also become part of a larger performance that includes the other locations on my map and all the people at them. This larger performance takes on a rhythm informed by my walking from one place to the next, and by the lighting conditions (morning, afternoon, evening), the general atmosphere (cloudy, clear, rainy), the spatial characteristics (crowded, sparse, intermittent), the acoustics (dense, tranquil, murmuring), and the smells (floral, fresh, pungent). I’ve lived and performed in Vancouver all my life, so my map of this city is very detailed. A visit to the Cultch, for example, is like an archeological dig into my personal history. At the deepest layers are my first experiences watching the Tamahnous Theatre collective and apprenticing with the company in the mid-1980s. This was long before the recent renovations so the venue’s past as a church was much more ‘tangible.’ You could feel the creaking bones of the building. Of course that feeling might be coloured, for me, by the night an older, very creaky actor I was performing with fell off the stage and broke her bones, never to return to the show or the Cultch (as far as I know). Each show I’ve done or seen at the Cultch since then has changed and deepened my relationship to the place. Performing in Rumble Productions’ Penelope last fall in nothing but sneakers, a wig, and a red speedo is an experience that was a little humiliating and a little empowering, one that will stay with me… as will the Internet images that never go away. Two blocks down Venebles Street and around the corner I can get one of the best espressos in the city at Bump n Grind. The cafe was so named by its original owner, a dark and scowly misanthrope who turned a lot of people off (I liked him). After him, a friendly couple that also had a dog-walking business bought it. The decor brightened up a bit but the place retains the feel of an artist’s loft, concrete all around. Behind the bar is a raised terrace where you can get some privacy, but out front it’s hard to avoid chatting with fellow patrons. I like to grab an espresso there before a show. I live about 10 blocks to the south so normally I walk or bike to the Cultch or Bump n Grind. I look in windows as I walk. My interest is in how people decorate their living rooms and kitchens, and the way they arrange space. Sometimes I’ll see people inside and get a sense of how a room accommodates movement. Maybe I’ll catch a moment of interaction between these ‘performers,’ a moment that is a small dance or a small drama. While watching the little worlds created in these homes I also take part in dances and dramas with passersby on the street. This act of watching domestic performance worlds and of taking part as both spectator and performer seems very much in keeping with the blurring of art and life that has been such a pronounced tendency in performance during the past hundred years or so. Whether I’m looking into windows, through a proscenium arch, or at a sited performance, it all becomes more interesting after an espresso. Espresso is my Skytrain. It gets me from one place on my mental map to the next faster. It makes colours more vivid, shapes more defined, performances more meaningful. Sometimes I feel as lost without it as I do when I imagine Vancouver without PuSh. PuSh is the highlight of my art year—whether I’m creating work for the Festival, writing about it, or just taking it in. In the 10 years PuSh has been around, Vancouver has gotten that much more expensive, become that much more a site of consumption for wealthy shoppers, and that much more hostile to low-income citizens, many of them artists. Vancouver is, and has been from its beginnings in the late 1800s, a real estate developer’s creation. And while PuSh expands the boundaries of what performance is, it also ‘pushes’ other values onto the civic agenda, values that have nothing to do with buying stuff and investing in your material future. The same houses I stare into, the detached homes with front and back yards that everyone feels they must have, represent something horrible. Actually, I don’t give a fuck about them or the people who live in them. Or I wish I could not give a fuck. But my rent is higher than many homeowners’ mortgages so I’m forced to think about trying to own a place one day (a scenario that isn’t all that likely for me). Which means I too might become a domestic performer acting out comfort and security inside a hardwood and drywall investment portfolio… with dreams of future material comfort… and worries about how my retirement savings are doing. I have no power in this. My fellow investor-citizens win and I lose. It’s too bad for me, but I’d rather spend my time thinking about art, visiting my favourite cafes, and having time to think and talk with friends and strangers there.
I’ve been thinking a lot these days about what a festival means to a city. In September I moved to Dublin to become director of Dublin Fringe Festival—it’s my first time being a festival director. Over the past few months I’ve been in deep research mode: learning as much as I can about my new city, seeing everything I can by its artists, spending time in the pubs and cafes, trying to guess if I’m hearing an accent from the north or south side of the Liffey. It’s all in order to gather enough context and knowledge to put my own program together for one of the world’s only curated fringes. Dublin Fringe Festival has become a defining moment on the Irish cultural calendar and a festival whose programming has earned distinction by hosting works that play with the notion of Dublin itself. Ideas of civic engagement are at the heart of the program. It’s a festival that has dared to speak for and to the city. I started my career in Vancouver at the PuSh Festival, and my experience working on the first three editions of the Festival and in the Vancouver indie-performance community shaped my practice as a producer and programmer. When I moved to Montreal in 2008, I took the Vancouver way of doing things with me. Now as I take the plunge and try to become as much of a Dubliner as I can, thinking about my first artistic home helps me understand this new one. I’ve also been thinking about anniversaries and commemorations, because in Dublin we’re having loads of them. 2013 marked the 100th anniversary of the Dublin Lockout, a massive labour struggle. In 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival will hold its 20th edition and in 2015, our 21st (the 21st being the traditional age of majority in Ireland). In 2016 Ireland will commemorate the anniversary of the Easter Rising, the first in a series of difficult and bloody conflicts that ended in the Irish Republic winning its independence from the United Kingdom. Festivals imprint something on a city’s mindscape. They begin to define a place. Many of the world’s great festivals began as post-WWII efforts to promote internationalism and tourism, and are anchored by their identities as city festivals. A few, like Avignon and Edinburgh, became so iconic they are synonymous with the city itself. If having a festival can define a city, observing a birthday or a commemoration— like what we’ll be doing in Dublin, or what PuSh did with the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, Vancouver’s 125th in 2011, and now with its 10th anniversary—can be used to define such a festival. So what does it mean that PuSh is 10 years old? PuSh is more a civic festival than a city festival. It gathers the momentum and desires of many in its festival-making. It contends with and redefines what Vancouver can be through the voices and interactions made between artists and audiences. A city festival consolidates the efforts of culture, tourism and business into one flagship endeavor. A civic festival supports artistic concepts, presents works that respond to the concerns of the civic sphere and builds recognition for local and international artists of import—all while questioning how their choices will fulfill their audiences, their city, and their home. What makes PuSh civic (and unusually so) is its multi-vocality. The Festival’s program is porous—we can project our ideas of what PuSh is and should be onto the organization. We can imagine what a ‘PuSh’ show might or might not be, and are sometimes surprised by how the definition shifts. PuSh and its various partners do this all the time, hosting projects that fly multiple banners, brought to you by many. In most instances there’d be a risk that all these differing ideas would dilute the curatorial rigour or that egos would get in the way. Not so for PuSh. I suppose this bold confidence around collaboration is the aspect of Vancouver that I want to draw upon most in my own work, no matter what city I’m in. That and the exposure to unforgettable performances and, in particular, a new trend in performancemaking. My first PuSh experience was in 2004 when PuSh was a curated series—at Mammalian Diving Reflex’s A Suicide Site Guide to the City. I’ve since heard it’s a work that lead-artist Darren O’Donnell regards as a complicated turning point (after this the company veered away from stage-based productions, creating Haircuts by Children and Children’s Choice Awards; touring in local contexts with local kids turned performers, instead of touring shows featuring trained actors in theatres). I remember loving it for how it dealt with ideas around civics and desperation. That it crossed barriers between audience and performer in ways I hadn’t seen. That the lights were mostly on. That the Firehall Theatre was the perfect place to watch it. That how these Toronto artists were dealing with ‘the city’ meant something to me in Vancouver. That I was seeing a new kind of work that I wanted to see more of and be a part of. It was a first for me, but not at all for the world, and only the beginning of Vancouver’s exposure to a defining ethos around performance creation in the past decade. Looking back at the past 10 years of PuSh, theatre-vérité—work that documents and performs personal politics and first-hand experiences, that places ‘expert’ non-actors on stage and actors as themselves, that uses verbatim texts or other elements that bring ‘real life’ on stage—has been the dominant genre internationally and a kind of artistic bread and butter for the Vancouver festival. Ireland is no different. Artists at Dublin Fringe Festival have reimagined Dublin’s history and present and have placed their histories at the centre of their art-making. Like the Fringe Festival, Dublin Theatre Festival has also has been part of this trend. Visiting artists at both festivals have engaged with documenting reality on stage. Dublin Theatre Festival commissioned a book called That Was Us, a series of reflections of landmark moments from the past six or seven years (the time period of Ireland’s crushing recession) where the festival’s history and transformations in Irish theatre intersected. The book identifies a time in the city scene, at both festivals, when creations by Irish artists working in theatre-vérité had an immensely powerful impact on audiences and shaped the art that got made next. These projects dealt with personal stories, broken neighbourhoods, institutionalised poverty, identity and class conflicts, and usually featured artists interacting with subjects via personal testimony of some kind. The genre has been an incredibly potent means for artists to explore the political, personal, and societal transformations of our era. But what is the next move for theatre‑vérité? Will the important work of the coming 10 years be more devoted to artists implicating us in political and civic transformation and getting our hands dirty, as some have argued? i Festivals may become events where performance and activism meet in front of an audience of participants. Or will artists change tactics entirely? Will they engage with the public in the coming years by moving back towards the ‘play’ instead of the ‘performance,’ and reviving theatricality, drama, and actors-as-characters—with not a local ‘expert’ or personal testimony in sight? The onus on a civic festival like PuSh will be to continue to address what is current, what is pressing, and what is artistically daring, because being engaged is part of the civic festival’s DNA. For years PuSh has attracted festival-goers who depend on it to present artists who question and illuminate contemporary and topical issues and experiences. As PuSh turns 10, celebrating this beloved festival asks us to reflect on how it has shaped Vancouver’s civic sphere, how it has advanced crucial artistic and political ideas and how it has introduced us to unforgettable performances. Maybe a bit of a complicated message to put on a birthday cake, but I’d be first in line to light the candles.
I guess I’ve always thought of myself as a person who lives in between. A hybrid, if you will. Hybrid: biologically speaking, an offspring resulting from crossbreeding. I seem to be most comfortable straddling things—worlds, opinions and everything in between. I think in my youth it was something I did as a kind of defence mechanism—a tactic that allowed me to avoid being categorized or pinned down. Or recognized in some way that could hurt. Nowadays, in my everyday life, this caginess around categorization manifests itself in being the black sheep of the family or, more commonly, the eccentric friend. “Oh, meet Maiko, you’ll like her, she’s an artist.” While it can lead to some awkward dinner conversations, as an artist I’ve preferred to reside in the slippery in-between places. So it should come as no surprise that I’ve always been quite comfortable with ambiguity, particularly in my art-making. This is what perhaps makes my work a little strange. Although communication (to an audience) is of the utmost importance to me, I am not necessarily anchored by words. Language, yes (accepting that there are all sorts of other languages humans use to communicate); making meaning, yes; but words, not entirely. Words, as we all know, can be boring. This has, of course, resulted in some serious growing pains—the in-between doesn’t always lend itself to being the most reachable, and this can be alienating—but it was also a good reason to hitch my wagon to a festival like PuSh. A self-proclaimed “PuSh baby” (my company, Theatre Replacement, has presented work in or partnered with PuSh most years since it began—and incidentally we are also turning 10 years old), I can say things really started to change for me around the first few years of the Festival. Of course there were other things that helped this along, but, significantly, the opportunity to see work from other places made me realize there was more work happening out there that looked like the work I wanted to make—also work that seemed to be OK with looking like a hybrid of some kind. Around this time PuSh helped me to get out of Dodge and travel across the pond to make and see art. I started to become more and more aware of work that called itself theatre but didn’t look like the theatre I was used to seeing back home, work that called itself performance art and didn’t seem as inaccessible as some of the performance art I had encountered, and work that called itself “live art,” which looked like a bunch of different things that were all pretty cool. In that unwieldy adolescence, I stopped calling my work theatre. I called it performance instead, although I blush a little to think of it now. I have since learned that performance is a thing unto itself. According to noted performance scholar RoseLee Goldberg, historically “performance has been considered as a way of bringing to life many of the formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based. Live gestures have constantly been used as a weapon against the conventions of established art.” i Turns out performance has done a great deal to further contemporary art practice. I, perhaps too naively, brandished the word on grant applications and manifestos. Turns out I still make theatre. But that’s not to say the theatre I make is not included in this definition of performance, and does not attempt to break with convention. I would like to think that it is included. And one of the reasons I find the hybrid form so full of potential is that it allows me to see where—in all my liminality—I fit in. As an artist and, to some extent, as a person. The in-between space is a completely acceptable place to be, and, for me far more interesting than the alternatives. And as PuSh brought more and more work of the like to our city, and more of our artists went out and brought back new ideas, suddenly there were others around me, and we were now creating contexts to make this hybridized work. I felt a little like Alice, new to the rabbit hole—there were massive toadstools and tea parties and we were all sitting at the table. And like art should, the work responded to this place. Location made the hybrid forms from elsewhere look like something new, something here. And something that, to me, seemed pretty damn exciting.
Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist and curator. Recent projects include a public artwork called
… I too might become a domestic performer acting out comfort and security inside a hardwood and drywall investment portfolio … And go to PuSh shows. From Bump n Grind I can choose a number of routes to another area of significance on my map: Revolver cafe on Cambie Street and SFU Woodward’s on Hastings. I put these two together because for me they are linked— brilliant espresso at Revolver and a history of brilliant PuSh shows at SFU. The area has changed a great deal in the past ten years. Lots more condos (I don’t care about those), some good bars, boutiques, and eateries (those are of interest), and most of all the significant upgrade in espresso and performance. Revolver doesn’t stay open late so I have to get there before the show. Looking out the window at Bump n Grind, I consider which route to take and whether to go on foot, bike, or transit. I decide on walking. It takes more time and therefore offers more space.
… suddenly there were others around me, and we were now creating contexts to make this hybridized work. I should clarify what I mean by hybrid, lest my ambiguous tendencies get the better of me. I guess I’m referring to the work I’ve seen that seems to draw upon different modes of performance to unfold a narrative, and not necessarily a linear one. This is the kind of work that I tend to choose to spend my money on. Generally it is more experiential, more interested in time in an immediate way, more (although I loathe to say it) “image-based” and less interested in portraying reality, although for me there is more realness to this work than in any Shakespeare I’ve seen. Works like Forced Entertainment’s Exquisite Pain (PuSh 2007), an adaptation of artist Sophie Calle’s book by the same name, which documented, in the artist’s prolific and signature way, a “heartbreak” in which a lover never came to meet Calle at a hotel in 1985. The very interest in basing a work on this book (filled with text and images) certainly illustrates Forced Entertainment’s affinity for conceptual art, and their desire to intermingle forms. Romeo Castellucci’s Hey Girl (PuSh 2008) is described in the program guide as a work that “takes place on the border where theatre, visual art, and self-awareness meet”—certainly evidence of performance that reveals itself through spectacular images and argues for the superiority of live theatre over other visual mediums. In Looking for a Missing Employee (PuSh 2012) theatre and visual artist Rabih Mroué combines newspaper clippings, notebooks, photos, live projection and drawing to unfold a “performance puzzle.” This piece illustrates another hybrid trait: the willingness to deconstruct traditional ideas around the space a performance takes place in. Mroué spends most of his time in the back row of the audience, as a live image of him and what he is looking at is projected on stage. A sketch artist who adds another dimension (projected live) to the timeline of the piece also sits in the audience. Each of these works is arguably the offspring of crossbreeding theatre and, most obviously, visual art, although there are clearly levels of other delicious ambiguities within. And although PuSh has done much of the heavy lifting to present these hybrid works, they are also being fostered locally by other organizations, too many to mention here. All this goes to show that there are many of us who believe our theatre to be more akin to conceptual art practices and experimental dance than to traditional theatre. And rather than rehash that tired argument of traditional versus experimental theatre or plays versus image-based work, I myself would rather just recognize that there continues to be a different category of work that has been emerging for some time in this country. And that we don’t need to be defensive or afraid that the rise of this kind of work means the death of the other kinds of work. It’s not so black and white. If anything it just confirms why I want to keep making theatre that sits in between.
—— i. See Florian Malzacher, Put the urinal back into the restroom: Toward a Useful but Disobedient Art. http://
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florianmalzacher.tumblr.com/post/68552652778.
i. From Performance Art From Futurism to the Present, third edition, RoseLee Goldberg.
Alex is a Vancouver-based theatre artist, writer, and teacher. In the past year he has devised work
Geyser for Hillcrest Park (with Erica Stocking), Sad Sack, a series of collaborations on the subject of
with MACHiNENOiSY Dance (Bamboozled), Leaky Heaven Circus (Der Wink), and Projet in situ at PuSh
melancholy, and Everything Between Open and Closed, a study of signs. As performance programmer
Peter Dickinson is professor of English at Simon Fraser University and the author, most recently, of
(Do You See What I Mean?). Last fall he performed in Rumble Productions’ Penelope at the Cultch
Kris Nelson is director of the Dublin Fringe Festival. Through his agency Antonym, Kris represented
Maiko Bae Yamamoto is an artistic director of the Vancouver-based performance company Theatre
for the Vancouver Art Gallery, she co-produced Guided Tour (Peter Reder, PuSh 2012) and Sometimes I
World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (Manchester University
and directed Nanay: A Testimonial Play at PETA Theater in Manila. Alex has devised or performed in
Canada’s leading touring theatre and dance artists and produced and curated the first three editions
Replacement. She also directs, writes, teaches and creates performance for a diverse range of
Think, I Can See You (Mariano Pensotti, PuSh 2013). She was curator of sad sack, by night for Club PuSh
Press, 2010). He currently serves as President of the Board of the PuSh Festival and blogs regularly
several works at PuSh over the years beginning with Neworld’s Crime and Punishment. He teaches
of PushOFF. He was Associate Producer for the PuSh Festival from 2005–2006, Assembly Associate
companies and venues. Maiko is a graduate of SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, and is
in 2013, and will be performing with Norma, an art collective active since 2003, at the 2014 Festival.
about Vancouver performance at performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.ca.
performance theory in the Bachelor of Performing Arts program at Capilano University.
Producer in 2007 and Curatorial Associate in 2012–2013.
currently a Masters candidate at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.