PuSh Festival celebrates Vancouver’s 125 years

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PuSh Festival celebrates Vancouver’s 125 years

MARSHA LEDERMAN

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Jan. 17, 2011 11:09AM EST

Last updated Monday, Jan. 17, 2011 11:43AM EST

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PuSh Festival celebrates Vancouver’s 125 years

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Vancouver marks its 125th birthday in 2011, and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, which begins on Tuesday, is celebrating. Or at least contemplating.

To mark the occasion, nine of the festival’s avant-garde offerings address the issue of “cityness,” or aim to reflect Vancouver back to itself. Many also showcase the potential of international-local collaborations, suggesting that a city is transformed – and most certainly improved – by such exchanges. Artistically or otherwise, it’s a point that resonates in a diverse city like Vancouver.

Click on to read about the nine "cityness" events.

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival runs Jan. 18-Feb. 6. Venues and show times at pushfestival.ca.
La Marea (The Tide)

Audiences encounter nine vignettes in real time they stroll down a Gastown street

Buenos Aires writer/director Mariano Pensotti teams with Vancouver theatre company Boca del Lupo to present a site-specific work that reflects the urban experience. La Marea has been performed elsewhere (including Montreal, Quebec City, Dublin and Buenos Aires), but it’s a transformed work in each city, taking on the characteristics and tenor of each setting. Vancouverites, regularly exposed to film shoots, may be reminded of their city’s Hollywood North status with this film-like work.
Iqaluit

Headphone-wearing visitors enter a skeletal metal igloo framework containing seven screens, each playing a scene portraying a different aspect of the northern city

For its series Holocene – named after our current geological period – the Antwerp-based collective Berlin immerses itself in various cities (Jerusalem, Moscow) to create a multidisciplinary portrait of the place. For Iqaluit, the artists spent two months in the Nunavut city and created a documentary-like installation which captures the essence of Canada’s most sparsely populated provincial or territorial capital.
Podplays – The Quartet

Site-specific radio plays take participants on walking tours of the city. Think museum audio guide as theatre

These plays – created by Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre and Playwrights Theatre Centre – reflect the urban obsessions of four people, and unveil a Vancouver that might surprise even lifetime residents. The accompanying sounds and texts are meditations on urban life, revealing stories that shape a city. The experience of walking around with an iPod, an audience of one surrounded by unwitting extras, creates a tension between the public and intimate experience – much like life in a city itself.
100% Vancouver

100 Vancouverites representing the demographic make-up of the city based on the 2006 census enter the stage one by one, and sort themselves according to their opinions and lifestyles

Based on the Berlin collective Rimini Protokoll’s ongoing project (100% Berlin, 100% Vienna), Theatre Replacement’s 100% Vancouver creates a living, breathing portrait of Vancouver on stage. The participants – everyday people, not actors – answer questions about their lives (Do you drive to work? Do you prefer smooth or crunchy peanut butter?) and re-arrange themselves on stage to create a shifting snapshot of city life.
City of Dreams

A poetic map of Vancouver is created from hundreds of found objects that are slowly and methodically assembled while street sounds, music and oral testimonies provide the soundtrack

London artist Peter Reder is spending two weeks exploring Vancouver with local artists, accumulating objects, sounds and stories with which they’ll create a representation of the city. They are looking not for the obvious, but the evocative. Audiences will be encouraged to think about the things that really mean “Vancouver” for them. Is it the ocean, the mountainous skyline? Or is it something less expansive and iconic? The kind of house known as a Vancouver Special, perhaps? A Canucks jersey? The smell of pot?
Bonanza

Another Holocene work by Berlin evokes the tiny town of Bonanza, Colorado, using a suspended scale model and five film screens

More than 100 years ago, Bonanza was a thriving mining town with about 6,000 inhabitants. Today it boasts a population of 14. What happens when a one-note town loses its only economic driver – and most of its residents? Does the town disappear for all intents and purposes, or does it remain a microcosm of the world?
Happy Birthday Teenage City

Veda Hille and the Vancouver Complaints Choir throw a party for their city at Club PuSh, with guests including Geoffrey Farmer, Meryn Cadell and Geoff Berner

Like any teenager (the idea being that 125 is teenaged in city years), Vancouver is in transition, and that can mean wildly swinging moods and opinions. Sometimes the city is beloved by its residents (“we can ski and kayak on the same day!”), sometimes detested (see Housing Costs). Complaints – and accolades – will get a musical airing.
Portraits in Motion

Berlin-based artist Volker Gerling flips through portraits under a video camera lens, projecting images onto a screen. He accompanies his cinematic flipbook with stories about his subjects

Just arrived in Vancouver, Gerling is spending two weeks walking through the city, taking sequential portraits of people he meets. The process and performance are a reflection on how fleeting our interactions can be in an urban environment. How many people do we encounter each day? How often do we stop and consider who they are, what their stories might be? Under Gerling’s treatment, the transitory is captured and becomes profound.
Cartographic Exploits: Marking Territory in the Contemporary City

A symposium explores the spatial poetics of Vancouver, involving artists, writers, cartographers, architects and designers

Mapping has become a buzz word in contemporary cultural circles. It’s a way, perhaps, to make sense of the place we live in an increasingly globalized world. Long after the Vancouver area was first mapped by European explorers, the practise is in vogue again, but this time it’s more about sensibilities than streets. Contemporary mapping can reflect the experience of a city in a variety of ways, and ultimately influence people’s read on the place. It’s one way to keep track – and make sense – of a city undergoing great transformation, like Vancouver.