February 2012
18 posts
22 tags
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...
13 tags
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...
10 tags
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...
14 tags
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...
17 tags
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...
14 tags
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...
20 tags
WatchWith frequent visual collaborator Julia Willms, choreographer Andrea Božić’s After Trio A and Beginning (2009) reside in that realm of the third reality, the place between performance and spectacle.
Photo credit: Marlon Barrios Solano for Andrea Bozic, After Trio A
With an austere positivity, Božić revisits Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto (1965) and Trio A (1966), exemplars of...
12 tags
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...
14 tags
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...
20 tags
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...
January 2012
13 posts
16 tags
The Space of Observation, 221A
Image credit: Ibghy & Lemmens, vtls 004518389-79-1 (Fred Carpenter), by permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales.
With Intangible Economies still very fresh on my brain as I finish off the edits for an upcoming review in FUSE Magazine, the questioning of cultural value in an economic framework reared its head again as I met up with some people at the...
12 tags
Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech
Image credit: “Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech” presented by Chelfistch (Photo: Toru Yokota)
The unstoppable laughter coming from the gentlemen next to me throughout Toshiki Okada’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech couldn’t help but imbue my perception of the play. Because my neighbor was laughing so hysterically, I didn’t have...
22 tags
Beat Nation Live
Image courtesy of RPM. Read their coverage by Christa Couture here.
As the kick off to PuSh Festival’s Aboriginal Performance Series, Beat Nation Live was the result of a three day residency between artists Kinnie Starr, Ostwelve, Cris Derksen, Jackson 2Bears, Corey Bulpitt, Gurl 23, and JB The First Lady. Stemming from this larger project (Beat Nation) by Grunt Gallery that...
13 tags
The Pixelated Revolution, Rabih Mroué
Image credit: Rabih Mroué, The Pixelated Revolution, 14 January 2012, lecture-performance. Walker Art Center. Photograph by Cameron Wittig.
Taking the performance-lecture format to an unnerving height of paradoxical implosion, Beirut-based Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution begins from the point of how we record the image, or more specifically, how we perceive the image.
Giving a...
15 tags
Not Sent Letters Cabaret
Like most post-it notes around my desk, the collection of ideas, dates, and numbers on them are barely legible at best, and more often than not, they are missing key information to unlock their relevance when found. Such was a post-it that gave an address, a date, and a time that’s been pasted to my calendar for sometime. I no longer recall the source from where I got the information,...
11 tags
I found myself on West 4th buying a terracotta pot from the excess wonder that is Kitchen Corner Store. The clerk made a remark about how don’t I know it’s suppose to be the coldest winter and did I think buying a flower pot would mean it was Spring?
I said I just moved here from Alberta and he said no more. But while I can recall past winters and hating every single second of...
17 tags
Amarillo, Teatro Línea de Sombra, PuSh Festival
Image credit: Blenda from Andre Gintzburger
The historical backdrop to Amarillo has several different narratives, depending on who you ask, but America’s deterrent strategy in 1994 to shift migrant crossings from urban locations to isolated regions casts a long shadow over the play’s central theme.
The consequence of this policy change (which remains “successful”...
30 tags
Mid January Report 2012
This past week, a slew of new art exhibitions opened from the depths of UBC to the nearby city of Surrey, and while I have never been fond of seeing work during an opening or even writing about it based on this haphazard encounter, I will record the going ons as the following post:
Going backwards, I ventured out to The Surrey Art Gallery on Saturday to visit the opening of Beyond Vague...
16 tags
I have just watched Phyllidia Lloyd’s The Iron Lady (2011) and I am left with two heavy disturbances converging into one.
The first disturbance came in the opening moments of the new biopic of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as portrayed by Meryl Streep. As all the funding bodies did their obligatory flash across the screen, prominently displayed was the UK Film...
