February 2012
18 posts
8 tags
Monger (BODYTRAFFIC and Barak Marshall) and Thank...
Image credit. “Monger” Performance by BODYTRAFFIC. Choreography by Barak Marshall. Photo credit: Gadi Dagon
I was trying to find a narrative thread between “Monger” choreographed by Los Angeles/Tel Aviv-based Barak Marshall and “Thank You, You’re Not Welcome” by Vancouver-based Noam Gagnon, as they shared the same bill this past weekend during...
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Making Sense of Things Together, February 25,...
Premise:
As a response to IC’s (unofficial?) motto “Get Social or Get Lost,” I am proposing an event-based afternoon where the primary activity is completing a jigsaw puzzle with me. Open to any members of the public to join in or watch for as long or short as they want, the proposal, “Making Sense of Things Together” will be an endurance performance/lecture whilst...
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Why Glenn Alteen's letter to Vancouver's City...
Image credit: “Marge vs. The Monorail” The Simpsons, Season 4, First aired, January 14, 1993
The letter is here along with an introductory blurb by Stop BC Arts Cuts that highlights how Vancouver is now the second most unaffordable city in the world to live in right behind Hong Kong. More on that in a future post, but first: Alteen’s letter is eloquently said, and he makes his...
15 tags
Hunchback, Catalyst Theatre, Playhouse
Photo credit: Scott Walters and Jeremy Baumung by David Cooper
The architecture, location, and significance of Notre Dame as an emblem of Paris, if not of France, was everything to Victor Hugo’s novel, but the various translations and adaptations over the centuries have often chosen to focus on the human characters, especially Quasimodo and Esmeralda. With Catalyst Theatre taking their...
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Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry,...
Image credit: Installation view from Survey ‘69, exhibition at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in May-June 1969. Michael Morris, New York Letter, c. 1968, gelatin silver print, mirror, Plexiglas. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Purchase, Saidye and Samuel Bronfman Collection of Canadian Art. Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Henry Koro.
Things I was thinking about as I walked...
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WatchInstant Coffee is what you make it.
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For their 12th anniversary, Instant Coffee is celebrating their existence with Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little. Transforming The Western Front into a social hub with lectures, workshops, gatherings, whittlings, and general reasonings for getting together, the exhibition is anything but an exhibition, as all that is being exhibited is your engagement.
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16 tags
The Silicone Diaries, Nina Arsenault, The Cultch
In between starting and finishing Sarah Schulman’s newest book, The Gentrification of the Mind, I went to see Nina Arsenault’s The Silicone Diaries. The two works are now intertwined in my mind, as it is through Schulman’s devastatingly honest analysis of the gentrification of cities and culture from where I experience Arsenault’s one-woman play.
Schulman’s...
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New Work, Christian Kliegel, Ed Pien, and Alison...
Image credit: Alison MacTaggart You and I: Methods and Embodiments for One Tuning-Fork-Like Apparatus or More, 2010
Like a high school reunion of sorts, Access Gallery has selected three of their past achievers to return and respond for the organization’s 20th anniversary.
Featuring past Access artists Christian Kliegel, Ed Pien, and Alison MacTaggart in a series of one and two week...
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C. 1983 Part I, Presentation House
Image credit: Marian Penner Bancroft, “spiritland/Octopus Books, Fourth Avenue”, 1987 (detail), collage of 5 gelatin silver prints, with text 50 x 180 inches (127 cm x 457.2 cm)
Vancouver is obsessed with its own history. This is a fact rather than a judgement. Lineage casts a long shadow here.
C. 1983 Part I is just one example. The exhibition curated by Helga Pakasaar...
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SAFN, Andrea Pinheiro, Republic Gallery
Image credit: Andrea Pinheiro, Over Roth, Inkjet, 40 x 60”, 2010
I lose track of how many years have passed since I last saw Andrea Pinheiro’s work, just as I now lose track of how many layers envelop her newest body of work. It doesn’t really matter though, as through it all Pinheiro’s ability to render an integrity in content and process has continued to be...
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New Animal, 605 Collective choreographed by Dana...
I wonder if M.I.A. is getting enough residuals. The maniacal pulse of “Born Free” seems to be popular with dancers and choreographers who are looking for a little something to rile up a vortex on stage. I feel like I’ve heard and seen this moment over and over again in the past year, when suddenly the entire room is thrown under the track of this song and the lights throb and the...
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My first PuSh
And just like that PuSh Festival 2012 comes to an end, but not without making some dramatic impacts during its three week run.
I still recall only first hearing about the festival in November before I had moved to Vancouver. I was in town for a couple of conferences and to find an apartment, and while standing in the perpetual loo line at the Grey Church Space, I started flipping through a copy...
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Do like Roy Ayers and Don't Stop the Feeling.
I wrote this informal note on Facebook last summer in what felt like a peak of threats to my profession and the professions of my peers near and dear.
Looking back at it today, the sense of outrage has waned into a dulled burn barely seething below or at the surface.
The trigger for me then was watching in horror as Sun News’ Krista Erickson lured in and then ferociously attacked the...
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El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a...
Image: from El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco, 2012
Dazed and Confused could also have been a working title for Mariano Pensotti’s El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco. Focused on the emotional turmoil of four jaded characters in their 20s, the narrative spans Argentina’s economic turmoil between 1999 and 2009. The stage also rotates, and that alone left me feeling dazed if not out right...
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Frances Stark, Artist Talk, Vancouver 2012
“Reading is so demanding” and “Writing takes a long time.” Simple sentences shared by Frances Stark, but they hold everything between them.
Because what is writing, but to communicate with words. Whose words are less essential, maybe referential, depending on who you’re talking to.
Her latest work, yet to be titled and premiering this March at Gavin Brown’s...
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Dances for a Small Stage 25
Probably the most exciting dance presentation happening anywhere in Canada, Movent’s Dances For A Small Stage reached its 25th presentation with a theme on the Fairy Tale Fable in collaboration with PuSh Festival.
Described as the pulse of the dance scene, I would wager to say these showcases by Movent is the blood of the dance scene, coursing through every vein and genre and supporting the...
12 tags
Eat the Street, Mammalian Diving Reflex
The premise is simple and the premise is social: go to a designated restaurant and dine with grade school children who have been empowered to critique. Illuminating questionnaires are provided as social ice breakers between strangers, and conversations are sparked between people who would never have a reason otherwise to interact.
The result: I can honestly say I’ve never had a dinner...
