Gabrielle Martin chats with Arthur Amard Rémi Fortin about Le Beau Monde, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival!
Show Notes
Gabrielle, Arthur and Rémi discuss:
What questions does this show bring into focus for you, and how does that relate to your other projects?
What is the importance of memory in Le Beau Monde?
Is the interpretation of meaning a theme in your work, or something specific to this project?
How do we represent a thing we used to know?
How do you approach authorship within shared creation, and what anchors your collective language?
What is the importance of having the right people involved in the creative process, and why do you avoid stubbornness?
How do you handle music in the show?
What can you say about the creative process lab you are hosting at PuSh? What inspired this project and what do you hope will emerge from it?
The work feels like both archaeology and prophecy. What did your process reveal to you about why we make theatre?
Is memory the only true subject of theatre?
About Le Beau Monde
In the future, theatre no longer exists. Neither do elections, football, or kissing. Or, at least not as it used to be.
Three people stand before us—awkward, uncertain, sincere. They've heard rumours of these ancient rituals and are doing their best to recreate them. What emerges is both ridiculous and strangely touching: a ceremony of imitation, a eulogy for everyday life.
A collective creation initiated by actor Rémi Fortin, with polyphonic songs by Arthur Amard, Le Beau Monde resurrects our present as if it were already a ghost. Between laughter and melancholy, a contemplation: what will we leave behind for those who come next? What, if anything, is precious?
A sci-fi theatre of tenderness and absurdity, built from the debris of our daily lives.
About the Guests
The École Parallèle Imaginaire (ÉPI) is a nomadic space that invents experiences in theaters, museums, public spaces, and for territories. Playing on the boundary between reality and fiction, it works to expand our imagination and create contemporary rituals. It is directed by Simon Gauchet who is an actor, director and scenographer.
Le Beau Monde (The Beautiful World) has been initiated by Remi Fortin who has gathered Arthur Amard, Blanche Ripoche and Simon Gauchet to create this show.
Rémi Fortin trained with the 2013 promotion of the TNS (Théâtre National de Strasbourg) drama school. Since graduating in June 2016, he has performed under the direction of Mathieu Bauer, Simon Delétang, Adèle Gascuel, Thomas Jolly, Frédéric Sonntag, Christophe Laluque, Anne Théron, Cendre Chassanne, and Olivier Martin-Salvan. He also collaborates on the radio with Blandine Masson, Chris Hocké, Laure Egoroff, and Juliette Heynemann In cinema, he has worked under the direction of Loïc Barché, Clément Schneider, Anna Luif, Arnaud Khayadjanian, Clemy Clarke, and Arnaud Simon.
Alongside his acting career, he also enjoys creating his own projects in which he performs and crafts the original idea. Without being a director himself, he offers to fellow actors to embark on a theatrical experiment together, like his first solo project, Ratschweg, a walking performance inspired by Büchner's, Lenz, rehearsed in itinerancy with director Charlie Droesch-Du Cerceau and dramaturge Pierre Chevalier during a journey on foot through the Vosges from Strasbourg to the Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang.
From 2018 to 2021, he was an associated actor at the Théâtre Public de Montreuil. He is currently working on his next creation, La Peur (The Fear), for which Adèle Gasquel will write the script. It will be premiered in the autumn of 2025.
Arthur Amard graduated from the 27th class of La Comédie de Saint-Étienne, sponsored by Pierre Maillet. He has worked with Élise Vigier and Marcial Di Fonzo Bo on the creation of M comme Méliès, and more recently with Pierre Maillet on Le Bonheur (n'est pas toujours drôle) and Théorème(s). Since 2012, he has been a member of the Compagnons Butineurs, based in Eure. During the 2018/19 season, he was in a co-residency at La Cascade, Pôle des Arts du Cirque, where he joined the itinerant workshop, a collective interdisciplinary working group. There, he continued his research on circus performance.
In 2019, he co-founded the collective La Dernière Baleine, with which he created Tant qu'il y aura des brebis - portraits de tondeurs et de tondeuses at the Comédie de Caen, along with Léa Carton de Grammont and choreographer Cécile Laloy. Since 2020, he has been dancing under the direction of Mathilde Papin in Serein. As an accordionist and pianist, he regularly incorporates music into his work.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Rémi joined the conversation from Montreuil, near Paris, and Arthur joined from Strasbourg, France.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
Ep. 59 - Finding the Light (Orpheus)
Season 4 · Episode 59
Friday, November 21, 2025 • Duration 34:04
Gabrielle Martin chats with Alan Lake about his show, Orpheus, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival!
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Alan discuss:
What drew you to the myth of Orpheus?
Why do some old stories continue to return to the present?
How are your artistic interests evolving?
How does each element develop in conversation with the other?
How does your relationship to camera and frame differ from your relationship to the stage?
About Orpheus
Orpheus reimagines the myth of descent as a visceral dance through darkness toward connection and renewal. Choreographer Alan Lake constructs an immersive world of image and movement where body, matter, and light converge—oscillating between dream and reality. Within this charged landscape, the performers navigate rupture and transformation, their physicality both raw and transcendent.
Lake's choreography merges the mythic and the human, urging us to face the fractures of our humanity—division, conflict, isolation—and to reach for one another. Both intimate and monumental, Orpheus is dance as myth, as mirror, as act of faith—inviting us to drink from the fire and emerge changed.
About Alan Lake
Alan Lake approaches movement through the accumulation of experience and a multidisciplinary practice. His artistic approach lies at the intersection of dance, film, and visual art, with the goal of merging these disciplines into a common space in service of dance. An associate artist at La Maison pour la danse in Québec City, Alan Lake regularly presents his choreographic work in Québec, across Canada, as well as in Belgium, Mexico, and the United States. He is also an active teacher and guest choreographer in various institutions throughout Québec.
About Alan Lake Factori[e]
Founded in 2007 and based in Québec City, Alan Lake Factori[e] is dedicated to choreographic research and creation, as well as the production of both stage works and dance films. With its multidisciplinary approach, the company offers an expanded vision of choreographic art. Whether through in situ projects in unconventional spaces, stage productions, or cinematic works, the company embraces artistic hybridity to develop its own distinct aesthetic and physical language.
Ep. 50 - The Negotiation (L'Addition)
Season 3 · Episode 50
Thursday, January 2, 2025 • Duration 28:31
Gabrielle Martin chats with Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutas (Bert and Nasi) who are presenting L'Addition at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. L'Addition, directed by Tim Etchells, will be performed at the Alliance Française Vancouver on January 25 and 26 in association with Here & Now, and supported by the consulat général de France à Vancouver.
Show Notes
Gabrielle, Bert and Nasi discuss:
How did you come to know each other and begin your collaboration?
What were the shifts and evolution of your work over the period of creating six shows together?
What does it mean to work with a political message?
What does it mean to occupy space and be in this world?
In your "Less Workshop", you discuss using space for political and artistic negotiation. Do these ideas define your work?
What has it meant to create work in the UK over the past 12 years of austerity?
How do we prioritize simplicity when dealing with complex matters? How do we inject feelings into facts?
What did it mean to work with Tim Etchells?
What are the different ways to lead a creative process?
What can people expect from the show or from the next work of yours?
About Bert and Nasi
Bert and Nasi are a contemporary performance duo that met in 2015 and have since created an entire repertoire of shows in the midst of a period of national and international austerity. Their work, in turn, is stripped back and minimalist, whilst dealing with complex ideas and emotions. Their shows lie somewhere between performance, dance and theatre but if you had to pin them down on it, they'd probably say it's theatre.
Together they have performed their shows on the international stages of PuSh Festival (Canada), Festival de Otoño (Spain), Sarajevo Mess (Bosnia), Adelaide International Festival (Australia), InTeatro (Italy), Avignon Festival (France) as well as MiTsp (Brazil).
In 2020, Bert and Nasi received the Forced Entertainment Award in memory of Huw Chadbourn, which celebrates the work of contemporary artists reinventing theatre and performance in new ways and for new audiences.
Ep. 49 - The One to One Affair (Marie Chouinard)
Season 3 · Episode 49
Monday, December 30, 2024 • Duration 26:05
Gabrielle Martin chats with the legendary Marie Chouinard. Marie's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Rite of Spring will be presented at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on February 3 at the Chilliwack Cultural Centre.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Marie discuss:
Can you describe the evolution of your artistic inquiry, especially since you started professional practice in 1978 and founded your own company in 1990?
Are you still called to the solo form?
How is your work connected to something more profound or spiritual?
How has the impact of your work changed as the sociopolitical context has shifted over time?
What are the challenges of arts leadership and how have they changed over the years?
What are you currently researching?
About Marie Chouinard
Marie Chouinard was born in Quebec. At the age of 16, her life was transformed after spending 4 months alone in Percé. As a choreographer, she traveled the world over as soloist for 12 years before founding the COMPAGNIE MARIE CHOUINARD in 1990. Her works, radical and profound, with a unique signature are nonetheless enduring and appear in the repertoires of major international ballet companies.
Marie Chouinard is a director (films, applications, virtual reality works), an author (Zéro Douze, Chantiers des extases), a visual artist (photographs, drawings, installations), and she also creates choreographies for site-specific installations, for the screen, and in real-time for the web. Named Officière des Arts et des Lettre in France, recipient of a Bessie Award in New York, she has received some thirty of the most prestigious awards and honors. She founded the Prix de la Danse de Montréal in 2011 and was director of dance at the Venice Biennale from 2017 to 2020. Marie Chouinard is preparing a solo exhibition.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Ep. 48 - Seeing Double (A Wake of Vultures)
Season 3 · Episode 48
Thursday, December 26, 2024 • Duration 47:56
Gabrielle Martin chats with Nancy Tam, Daniel O'Shea, Conor Wylie of A Wake of Vultures. They are presenting two shows at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival: K Body and Mind and Walking at Night by Myself. Both will be at the Scotiabank Dance Centre as a double feature on February 1 and 2.
Show Notes
Gabrielle, Nancy, Daniel and Conor discuss:
What is the glue that keeps the company moving together and working?
Can that be explained with astrology?
How do you create devised work and is it similar or different from convention?
How do you play around with various layers of performance?
What is your shared interest in detachment and "trippiness"?
What rituals does your rehearsal practice have?
What's the role and benefits of shorthand?
What makes these two works "sister pieces" to be presented together?
What is the place of futurism and retro in your work?
How did form affect the work and how did video impact the performance?
About A Wake of Vultures
Formed in 2013, A Wake of Vultures (WOV) is a project-based interdisciplinary performance company. WOV is a research, development, and producing vehicle for the works of its three members: Nancy Tam (music, sound design, theatre), Daniel O'Shea (film, theatre), and Conor Wylie (theatre). Switching between individual and collective project leadership, we connect with local, national, and international communities through collaboration and touring.
We began collaborating and bonding as friends over our shared fascination in social rituals, science fiction, anime, and questions of reality and perception. We follow our idiosyncratic curiosities, blending low-brow inspirations with high-concept ideas, creating bizarre convergences that propose hybrid visions of the future. Our work is marked by formal detachment, ritual, unstable perspectives, and a blend of retro and new technologies, taking diverse forms like audio walks, performative installations, and plays. WOV has been presented in Canada, the US, Germany, and Hong Kong.
Ep. 47 - The Space Between Words (De glace / From Ice)
Season 3 · Episode 47
Thursday, December 19, 2024 • Duration 18:24
Gabrielle Martin chats with Anne-Marie Ouellet, whose work, De glace / From Ice, will be presented at the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. You can catch her show from January 31 to February 2 at the Roundhouse in Vancouver, in association with Théâtre la Seizième and the Vancouver International Children's Festival.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Anne-Marie discuss:
Why did you choose a Nordic tale as inspiration for De Glace?
What does it mean to allow the unspeakable to emerge? How do you create an environment that fosters this?
Can you describe the visual aesthetic of L'eau du bain
What about the various technology and design used for this work, especially audio?
What's exciting and interesting about the child's presence on stage?
About Anne-Marie Ouellet
Anne-Marie Ouellet lives and works in Montreal (Quebec), Canada. Her interdisciplinary practice explores matters pertaining to the standards that govern behaviors in the public and private space. Through the elaboration and experimentation of different types of behaviors, Anne-Marie Ouellet creates organizational structures in the form of interventions in collaboration with groups of participants who wear her clothes-uniforms in the urban space. Her work mainly gravitates around the notions of individualism and collectivity, standardization and regimentation.
With an MFA from Université du Quebec à Montréal (2011), Anne-Marie Ouellet has exhibited in Quebec at Musée d'art de Joliette (2022), Le lieu (Quebec, 2019), Verticale (Laval, 2017), Optica (Montreal, 2015), Maison des arts de Laval (2013), Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal (2011), Manif d'art 4, Quebec (2008), and at the Musée Régional de Rimouski (2005). She also participated in events and artist residencies in Quebec (Sagamie, Alma, (2020), Axenéo7, Gatineau (2016), PRAXIS, Ste-Thérèse (2012) and DARE-DARE, Montreal (2012)), France (FRAC/Alsace, Strasbourg (2006)), and Germany (B_Tour Festival, Berlin (2013) et Oberweilt e.V., Stuttgart (2007)).
Ep. 46 - Building from the Back Door (BOGOTÁ)
Season 3 · Episode 46
Monday, December 16, 2024 • Duration 33:23
Gabrielle Martin chats with Andrea Peña, whose work, BOGOTÁ, will be presented at the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. You can catch her show on January 31 and February 1 at the Vancouver Playhouse, in association with New Works.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Andrea discuss:
What does the choreographic practice require?
What is the future of choreography from today forward?
What does it mean to democratize the choreographic process and how is that different from the norm?
What are the sociopolitical questions in the work?
What does it mean to make a work about the anthropocene?
What do you mean by the container-state?
What does the word "queer" mean to you, your practice, and Bogotá?
What does it mean to queer the baroque, especially in the body?
How do you capture both past and future notions of the industrial and industrial society?
How does it feel to return to Vancouver with this work?
About Andrea Peña and Artists
Andrea Peña and Artists (AP&A) a millennial company that believes in the possibilities of crafting new imaginaries in choreographic and performing arts. Returning, individually and collectively, to our essence as humans. As an upcoming generation of artists, we feel we have the responsibility to reflect on the values that shape us, our decisions, reflections, work, to focus beyond our actions and return to our essence.
AP&A merges the universes of choreography and design; a multidisciplinary company that creates performative universes that challenge notions of a sensible humanity through political yet abstract creations which transform conceptual research into theatrical larger ensemble installations. The foundations of Peña's work is to create rich choreographic systems that reveal the point of view of the performers. Negotiations can take the form of frames, concepts, athletic constraints, to reveal the individual and collective point of view, as much as the choreographers.
Ep. 45 - Cultivating Disorientation (All That Remains)
Season 3 · Episode 45
Thursday, December 12, 2024 • Duration 43:58
Gabrielle Martin chats with Mirko Guio, whose work, All That Remains, will be presented at the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. You can catch All That Remains on January 23 and 24 at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Mirko discuss:
Where are you from and why is that important?
What does it mean for your show, All That Remains, to be an "urgent call to consciousness"?
How does being onstage affect people's internal responses?
How do you work in the devising process?
What does it mean to be in a state of "sensitive listening"?
What did your collaboration with a sculptor, Soren, entail?
What are the parameters you offer your students based on Soren's work?
What is your practice of local collaboration?
How does "All That Remains" fit into your larger practice?
How do you devise "systems of responsiveness"?
What is the place of your own body in your current artistic practice?
About Mirko Guido
Mirko Guido (b. Italy) works with dance and choreography between theatres, art galleries/museums, and public spaces - spanning over performances, installations, intra-disciplinary research projects, and publications. All works are a continual negotiation of boundaries — between body, space and materialities, between individual and collective experience, between certainty and ambiguity. Each project operates as a physical, material and intellectual inquiry into choreography as a system of responsiveness, guiding the attention towards the co-existence of multiple processes and materialities. As a dancer he worked in several dance companies, including the Cullberg Ballet, and with a great variety of choreographers, whom have provided him with a wide range of embodied perspectives on dance, from Mats Ek, Crystal Pite, Johan Inger to Deborah Hay, Benoît Lachambre, Cristina Caprioli and Tilman O'Donnel, passing by Paul Lighgoot & Sol Leon, Itzik Galili, Alexander Ekman, Rafael Bonachela, Jo Strømgren, Stephan Thoss among many others. As a choreographer Mirko he has toured his productions across Europe, including Athens dance festival (Greece), Festival La Becquée (France), Festival MAP/P E-motional (Portugal), Teatri di vita (Italy), Dance Station (Serbia), Weld and Dansens Hus (Sweden), Bora Bora and ARoS Art Museum (Denmark), SPEL - The State Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nicosia (Cyprus) among many others. His artistic processes have been supported by major choreographic centres such as Summer Studios Rosas, Work Space Brussels; Uferstudios Berlin; PACT Zollverein; MDT Stockholm to mention but a few. Mirko holds a master's degree in New Performative Practices from DOCH / Stockholm University of the Arts, and today he's based in Aarhus, Denmark, and is an in-house artist at Bora Bora – Dance and Visual Theater.
Ep. 44 - Seen On Our Terms (OUT and Thirst Trap)
Season 3 · Episode 44
Monday, December 9, 2024 • Duration 41:25
Gabrielle Martin chats with performance artist, experience maker and writer Ray Young. Ray is bringing two works to the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival: Thirst Trap, which will be presented throughout the festival in conjunction with the frank theatre company; and OUT, which will be presented on February 8 and 9 at Performance Works, in conjunction with the frank theatre company and Here & Now.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Ray discuss:
How did you create "Out" and what is the significance to your artistic trajectory?
What are the complexities of blackness, queerness, and age, and how can they be worked through the body on stage?
Why remount it for PuSh and how has the work evolved?
Why is important to be visible and seen on your own terms?
How are you exploring notions of care and rest in "Thirst Trap" and other works?
How do you create an immersive experience for 24 people in a swimming pool?
Does form always come after concept, or is it sometimes the other way around?
Where are you at in your career at this point? What are the challenges and opportunities?
About Ray Young
Ray Young is a transdisciplinary performance artist, experience maker, and writer, widely recognized for their groundbreaking work at the forefront of activism, queerness, race, and neurodiversity. Their practice is centered around creating a safe space for those who exist at the intersection of multiple realities, through collaboration and resistance to traditional forms.
In recent years, Ray's work has been focused on exploring and shedding light on notions of rest, care, and recovery in art, particularly as it pertains to the experiences of neurodivergent artists. Ray has been working towards creating a more holistic practice that draws together art, nature, and technology, as they seek to challenge traditional capitalist ideologies of production that prioritize speed and productivity over creativity, care, and wellness.
Ep. 43 - Reclaiming Language (Lasa ng Imperyo: A Taste of Empire)
Season 3 · Episode 43
Thursday, December 5, 2024 • Duration 23:45
Gabrielle Martin chats with Carmela Sison about Lasa ng Imperyo (A Taste of Empire), which will be presented during the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on January 30 - February 1 and February 4-8 at The NEST.
What is involved with your process of translation?
How does the show reflect your experience as a Filipina in this world?
How is translation and adaptation linked to language reclamation, specifically for Tagalog?
Is it healthy for audiences to have a destabilizing experience sometimes, especially when the world is catered to us?
What role will writing and adapting play in your practice to come?
About Carmela Sison
Carmela Sison is a Filipino-Canadian artist living and working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. She is a graduate of the University of Alberta's BFA in Acting program with additional training from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, the University of Victoria, and the FUEL Ensemble at Theatre Calgary. She continues to hone her craft with various teachers and mentors in Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, and New York.
Over the past few years, Carmela has been an instructor for theatre for young audience residency programs in elementary schools, mentored and coached youth in their pursuit of a career in acting, including coaching many young adults going into professional acting programs.
As an instructor, Carmela strives to build up young actors, giving them a solid foundation with voice, text, and movement. This serves as a springboard for further growth, seeking truth, and making authentic connection. She encourages her students to be curious actors, asking questions to better understand their work.
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This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Alan joined the conversation from Quebec City, on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, Innu, and Abenaki Peoples.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Bert joined the conversation from Paris, while Nasi was in Marseille.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:02
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's director of programming, and today's episode highlights doing less and injecting feelings into facts.
00:17
I'm speaking with Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutas, performers and two of the creators of La Disson. A seemingly commonplace interaction between two men in a restaurant fractures into an absurdist kaleidoscope of shifting angles that reflect the comically nonsensical nature of life.
00:35
La Disson will be presented at the Push Festival January 25 and 26, 2025. Bert and Nasi are a contemporary performance duo that met in 2015 and have since created an entire repertoire of shows in the midst of a period of national and international austerity.
00:52
Their work, in turn, is stripped back and minimalist, though it deals with complex ideas and emotions. Tim Echols is the director of La Disson and is an artist and writer based in the UK, whose work shifts between performance, visual art, and fiction.
01:06
Echols has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group, Forest Entertainment. Here's my conversation with Bert and Nasi. I do want to just start by acknowledging that I am joining this conversation from the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.
01:33
I'm a settler here, and part of my responsibility as a settler is to continue to educate myself on the state of reconciliation, the history of genocide and colonization, and to continue to engage in decolonization efforts.
01:54
There's always more we can do, but I really lean on the Yellowhead Institute here. which is an incredible resource of policies and reports, just tracking things like Canada's progress with regard to, for example, the truth and reconciliation calls to action.
02:12
So I'm just gonna reference one of the more recent reports, a decade of disappointment, reconciliation in the system of a crown. And again, really just kind of reflecting on the 10 years since the 94 calls to action.
02:28
And this report, I think it's really powerful. It talks about how reconciliation is not just about apologizing for past wrongs, at which Canada is quite adept. It's about ending current wrongs that are happening today and preventing future wrongs, both of which Canada fails to do, and that the legacy calls to action happen to be those with the least progress.
02:51
And these are these four calls to action that, basically provide annual funding comparison metrics between indigenous and non-indigenous populations on and off reserve populations. And the logic of these calls is to clearly identify Canada's unwillingness to adequately invest resources to support indigenous communities over whom it has exerted control for the last 160 plus years.
03:18
And I just really, this is a plug for Yellowhead and that's a report to check out. And it's just definitely frames things in such a powerful and honest way. Bert and Nasi, where are you joining the call today from?
03:34
So I'm actually in Paris because we went to see with Nasi, but Nasi is already in Marseille, but we went to see our friends, Forced Entertainment, perform in Paris, their latest show for their 40th anniversary called Signal to Noise.
03:55
I don't know if you already saw it. I haven't seen it, but I've been following. It's exciting. Yeah. Read about it. It's a great show and there's a lot of moments when you laugh, but there's also a hot moment when you kind of despair what's happening on stage as well, because it echoes brilliantly with a lot of foreign political contexts.
04:21
And yeah, it's pretty and sure it's really good. And are these, Forced Entertainment, have you been long time friends or is this really a relationship that's grown from the work on La Descien? We've known them for a while now, not 40 years.
04:41
We weren't there at the beginning. Actually, yeah, we're a bit younger, but we have been working with them since 2020 actually, because we won an award. that they gave out to people, and we were one of the people they gave an award to, and that started a kind of mentoring relationship.
05:07
They kind of fell during COVID. So it was kind of like a, yeah, kind of weird time. But also it was cool to like, we started meeting them online and kind of, they started mentoring us. We started working with Tim and Eileen, who is the company producer.
05:28
And yeah, it kind of started from there, really, like, we got to know them a bit more. And obviously beforehand, we were like big fans of their work. So it was super cool to like, chat to them about stuff, you know, stuff to do with making work.
05:47
Sorry, I'm in Marseille. And Bert, you're not usually based in Paris, are you? No, I'm also based in Marseille, same as we live five months. down from each other. Yeah, we live five minutes from each other, yeah.
05:58
Quite unusual that you're catching us at a moment when we're actually very far apart, which is not often the case, because we tour and do most of the things together, so. Push has had the pleasure of hosting you before.
06:13
Push presented Palmyra in 2019. And this is, Palmyra is an exploration of revenge, the politics of destruction, and what we consider to be barbaric, inviting people to step back from the news. It looks at what lies beneath and beyond civilization.
06:30
So since then you've created six shows. Can you talk about the evolution or shifts within your work over this period? When we came and we did Palmyra at Push, it was a really nice experience. And that show was, we loved doing that show.
06:49
But yeah, there's definitely been like, I think, yes, six shows later. I guess like with this show, with La Duchamp, I think we're kind of, we're playing with similar stuff. There's stuff that kind of relates to those two shows, but in terms of the dynamic, in terms of the kind of, sometimes the intensity of both those shows.
07:13
But I'd say that in our work, we kind of stepped back from overtly political material and using that as like a springboard into making. I think we kind of, I don't know, in the brushstrokes we started to do in making work, it became a bit like thicker and a bit like, you know, incorporating like lots of things.
07:40
Like we feel our work is still political, just like any person who like occupies a space with other people can be a political act and can be a political thing. But yeah, I suppose. like we we moved a little bit towards we started to explore different kind of ways of of occupying a space and making and making work.
08:07
That's fascinating to me and is that like that was just about needing more kind of uh points of reference or needing different research trajectories or you know wanting to move away from you know how sometimes work with a political message can be didactic or I'm just curious to hear you speak more about that shift and what like inspired that.
08:32
Yeah I think I think also like Palmyra like resonated very strongly so for us it was really a show about Palmyra and Syria and what was going on in the Middle East but actually a lot of because of its open-ended nature uh in the sense that we never spoke about you know We never said these words on stage, so it was all to do with actions and how people were kind of perceiving what we were doing to each other on stage and stuff.
09:00
People kind of projected a lot of meaning onto the show. And Amira, for example, we we ended up presenting in loads of different contexts in different festivals and different countries. And in the case of Canada, for example, it really kind of spoke about the indigenous indigenous experience.
09:19
And in Brazil, the same. And in Northern Ireland, it was also about that kind of colonized experience. So it was it kind of like started kind of like speaking louder than we'd anticipated. And I think that's that that was kind of the success of the show.
09:40
And then, like, the more we kind of like carried on, the more like, actually, like, maybe we don't have to say what the show is about. Maybe we don't need to kind of place it, even though, like, you know, the title is there and that's it.
09:54
But maybe actually just kind of putting two people on stage and and and considering other things about what those two people are doing on stage and their relationship and the nature of collaboration and working with one another and working with the audience and all of these things can kind of like lend itself to be political.
10:15
But it was more the question. It was more the kind of like, let's see where that that takes us and let's see where that takes people as well. And it kind of ended up being more of an exploration in the latest kind of like shows as well of like something that's a bit more existential as well and a bit more kind of metaphysical maybe and about what it is to kind of occupy a space with the audience.
10:39
Also, like, what is it to kind of like be in this world and think like this? I also think like in a very blunt sort of way, those first three shows, we made Eurohouse, Palmyra and one they were like intense we did like some pretty weird nasty shit to each other in those shows and then we toured them a lot and then but kind of like in a very simple way i think when we came to make the end which was like a dance movement piece that we made we kind of wanted to make something a bit like together and kind of really being together in exploring something a bit more metaphysical and also a bit more personal so that really contributed in terms of like moving away from these kind of like kind of very like head-to-head this conflict vibe that we kind of we still like kind of love but we kind of like just kind of stepped back a little bit from that from that vibe for a few years but this show I think we're very much back in that vibe and so it's and we're happy to be to be there as well.
11:58
I have a question about a workshop that you offer so and we're hoping that we'll be able to host it here while you're in Vancouver and the workshop's titled Less Workshop in which you explore ideas around disagreement, frustration, hatred and reconciliation, particularly as these to contemporary society and using the stage as a space for artistic and political negotiation.
12:23
And so we've already been speaking about this to some extent but my question tied to that was would you say that these ideas define your work and can you speak more to artistic and political negotiation?
12:36
I think it was a workshop that we started developing when we were making these kind of first of all it took us quite a lot of time to try and articulate those ideas in a space with the students and with other people so we still feel quite attached to these ideas and also we feel like actually we've got something to kind of offer in that sense that actually seeing how we can kind of portray the political just with kind of people and in relation to an audience this is something that we feel we can do.
13:16
In the later part of what we do it's a little bit more tricky because a lot of it rests on on us and our collaboration and us both and it's a bit more personal so this is something that in a way like we feel a little bit less inclined to kind of go down because it's like well this is kind of this is the road we're on as as makers and as collaborators but probably that those students that will be with us in the space will have a very different way of making work and will have a very different kind of road for their for their own work and their own collaboration.
13:51
So that's why we're kind of at the moment we're still sticking to this because we feel at least that that is something that Probably people can use and and and can understand Something maybe that's kind of like relatively new or something that they can use to create Yeah political work with a bit of with a bit of distance maybe there's from the beginning we've always had I Mean we don't have much set in our shows historically and Normally,
14:25
it's just like very much just two of us in a space Maybe with a laptop maybe with a table or some chairs and We just explore stuff through that. So I guess those were like the founding principles that we Started making work with kind of through necessity because in the UK for the past like 12 years I uh we had uh you know the Tory government uh arts funding was cut like which is so common nowadays like seems all across the world um and so we kind of found this form um sort of out of necessity and then and then kind of fell in love with this form like and and and actually enjoyed it and and kind of we were very passionate about about really bringing something into a room with not much means and like really creating an experience with an audience in a room yeah that's kind of carried on being a real like principle that we have when we think about work and when we think about what it means to perform live work to an audience um it's really great to hear examples of of what defines your work the aesthetics the form uh and also your practice you've shared that your practice revolves around questions such as how do we prioritize simplicity when talking about very complex matters and how do you inject feeling into facts and also how can we do less which you've spoken to but with regard to the first two can you can you offer us some more similar examples as to how you're answering or how you have answered these questions we just like the the the surprise that when you really prioritize simplicity in a space and you just focus on like like you being like the audience being in a room with you when you when you make and when you perform sometimes it unlocks something that is that is more impressive than if you kind of bring some sort of like high budget thing into into it or you kind of have this big image like the simplicity of just like this this moment that you're sharing with in a space with some people that's the thing that really like we we like that's the thing that gets us going sort of you know and that's no shade i'm like these big budget productions,
16:52
but we like that simplicity, we like that. Hopefully everybody can see La Decine because La Decine is an answer to that question as well. It's just like how riveting a work can be with such simple substance in terms of like, you know, text, set, all of these things.
17:20
And how the intensity that's created and also the references to, you know, bigger themes of, you know, the directionlessness of our modern world. Or there's many things that you can also like apply and relate to within it and read into it.
17:38
And it's, yeah, it's a great example of that extremely minimal form, yeah. But some people listening will not have seen the work. or they'll listen to this after having seen the work. So it's great to hear from you a little bit more.
17:52
I'm just thinking, I'm just going back to the how do you inject feeling into facts? And I imagine that when you're even working with more political work in the past, that bringing it to the personal or finding that emotional language on stage is key to make it relatable.
18:09
That's what I read into that question. Is that kind of some point? It really started also for us, again, from that very first show that we started developing together in Greece, which was about what was going on there and the whole austerity going on in there and the feelings that we could sense when we were there.
18:38
And we started opening the room to people who were following the process and initially it was kind of like we were using information about the debt and about what's going on with the European Union and stuff like this.
18:53
And it felt very actually quite cold. And it felt like also kind of basically saying what a lot of people knew or didn't know, but actually like it was like this kind of overload of information that didn't really create feelings.
19:10
And then we shifted and then we kind of like, we've got this, but we also have another version which was kind of without words, where basically we were playing games and I was humiliating Nasi on stage and asking him to do things that was very uncomfortable to see and to witness in a room.
19:32
And that was it, that was just like two kids basically just bullying each other on stage with the complicity of the audience watching it and having to kind of take part somehow. And that for them, the reaction.
19:48
reaction was like a very, very stark reaction compared to the first showing that we've done. Because it was, they said, that's it. That's what we're feeling. That's what we're experiencing when we're at the moment and you're showing it and you're making me see it, but not in kind of like in through information, but through feelings.
20:12
And that feels like quite different kind of show actually. And that's when we carried on. That's when we kind of stuck. So maybe there is something there that actually opens it for a lot of people. La Decion was directed by Tim Etchells, produced by Forest Entertainment and commissioned by Festival d'Avignon.
20:33
Usually you direct your own work. What was that collaboration like and how does it make La Decion similar to or different from the rest of your body of work? It was an amazing experience. It was super, super cool.
20:48
I'm working with Tim. I mean, he's been doing this for a long time and we've been such fans of Four Stents that it was just amazing to have the experience of him, of making a show with him. And seeing like his instincts in a room and how he kind of leads a process was really special for both of us.
21:13
There were many moments where we were like, this is really cool. We're going to remember this experience. And I think what was nice was that I think with us two and him, we really found each other on the same page very quickly and very easily.
21:34
And I think all of us were sort of surprised about that. Like the show felt like a real organic collaboration where like our worlds that are not too dissimilar anyway, like really kind of, there's a nice balance in the show.
21:52
And I think people are aware of our work and who saw Palmyra when we were last time in Vancouver and who are also aware of Four Stents and also his solo stuff. I think people have said that they can really see that kind of that balance between the two, between all of us and kind of making something that's quite new and quite fresh.
22:19
Yeah, it was great. It was cool. And we're very proud of the show that came out. There's something really magical about this experience of, like I said, the opening of the podcast is that we went to see them last night in Paris.
22:34
They're celebrating their 40th anniversary and they're showing work that is still kind of really pushing boundaries after 40 years. and then being able to kind of like be privy to this and learn from people who've done it for a really long time, have been touring for a really long time where we can share like the difficulties of it or the kind of experience of doing that sort of work or wanting to go towards that sort of work as well,
23:09
is a, yeah, is a really great experience for us, I think. And Nasi talked about how, you know, just how Tim leads a process, just being in the room with him and how that was different. Like, how is that different?
23:27
How is it different from how you lead a process? It wasn't like crazy, crazy different, but for sure, like he's, we're kind of like all in it together, but then you have someone who's just on the outside and not only just someone, you've got Tim Echols on the outside, so he's just directing you in, in a...
23:47
in the best possible way, like kind of guiding kind of like if he sees something working, he'll like tell you to lean into it a little bit more. And, and he's so deaf that like, kind of guiding an improvisation or sending it in a way if he sees like there might be a bit of joy somewhere in the room.
24:05
I'm talking about like when we're improvising and stuff, trying to find material. And it was just a it's just a real pleasure to have that. And normally, when we're by ourselves, it's, yeah, we, we, we're like, searching in the moment, but we don't have that person on the outside.
24:25
So normally, we stop and we chat a lot, which we also do with Tim. But but yeah, I guess it's just it's just a, it's a great thing to have, to have that. Also, the level of detail he goes into in terms of looking at stuff and looking at improvisations and re recreating kind of improvisations is something that was really new for us and something that yeah, we, we learned a lot from doing how to not only have things that are fluid and kind of live,
25:03
but then also really kind of like focusing on the minuscule details of a moment, which he and forced dense, forced entertainment, I really have a lot of experience and kind of like really kind of to the to the to the very small detail kind of like recreating these very funny, very cool moments.
25:24
And if people see La Decion, what could they expect? If they're then going to go see the next Bert and Nasi work, what could they expect to, to be a through line or something that they might see in that other work of yours, that next work of yours, both of you on stage, for one.
25:43
But no, no, I think it's also like the I think what people recognize in the show and the work is really this kind of direct address and direct way we have of addressing an audience and of looking at people in the eyes and really making them feel like they're part of this thing with us, part of this problem that we're kind of setting out for people in the room.
26:11
And so that's I think something that we're very keen to develop from the start, but that we're still really like passionate about is this sense of like, what is it to develop work where you make the audience feel like this is for me, like this is, like I'm here with them because they're looking at me and they want me to be part of this thing.
26:39
Whether I want it or not, because sometimes people don't want it, we're gonna kind of like really drag them to it. somehow, some way or another. Not through interaction, because we don't ask people to talk.
26:52
But the way that we deliver it, I think there's no way that you wouldn't feel included somehow. So that's the hope and that's the through line, I think, throughout everything we've done since the beginning.
27:11
Thank you so much. Thank you. I am thrilled to experience this work live here with our public and to have you back with us here. Yeah, thank you so much for your time. Thanks. Looking forward to being back.
27:26
Yeah, that's gonna be great. That was Gabriel Martin in conversation with Burt and Nasi. They will join Push for its 20th festival with their work La Decion being presented on January 25th and 26th at Alliance Française Vancouver in association with Here and Now.
27:45
My name is Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts.
27:59
For more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theatre, dance, music and multimedia performances visit pushfestival.ca and on the next Push Play. I'm kind of always been wary of artistic figures kind of emphasizing that this is the way to do this.
28:23
This is how. That to me makes absolutely no sense.
Marie joined the conversation from what is now known as Montreal, on the traditional territory of the Kanien'kehà:ka, a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst many First Nations including the Kanien'kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron/Wendat, Abenaki, and Anishinaabeg.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:02
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights play as a well source of energy.
00:16
I'm speaking with Mary Schwinard, choreographer of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and The Rite of Spring, which are being presented at the Push Festival February 3rd, 2025. Mary Schwinard presents two unorthodox performances inspired by Ballet Roos masterpieces and reimagined into viscerally provocative experiences.
00:38
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun interprets the lustful flirtations of a half goat creature with raw primal physicality, and The Rite of Spring captures the explosive energy of creation in a vivid celebration of dance as it bursts into modernity.
00:54
Mary Schwinard, a Quebec choreographer with a unique career path founded company Mary Schwinard in 1990 after an internationally acclaimed solo career. Her multidisciplinary works integrating dance, visual arts, and technology have earned her many prestigious awards and a prominent place in the world of contemporary dance.
01:14
Here's my conversation with Marie. You have been an iconic figure that I've been aware of and admired for a very long time, so it's just a real treat to be able to actually talk to you and get to hear more about you, these works that will be presented at the Push Festival and the Chilliwack Cultural Centre and to hear more about your wider practice.
01:38
So just before we dive into the conversation, I would just like to acknowledge that this conversation is happening. I am here on the traditional ancestral and stolen territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
01:55
And as a settler here, I continue to think about what it means to be on the these lands, and what it means to bring a land based approach into different fields of work. And so today I just wanted to share reflections upon reading work by Dr.
02:13
Lindsay Lachance, Lachance, who is a award winning dramaturge, and holds a Canada Research Chair position in land based and relational dramaturgies. And so I'll just share a little bit from her article, which is tiny sparks everywhere, birch bark biting as land based dramaturgies, which has been published by the Canadian Theatre Review, and translated to French and published in Le Curieu Manual de Dramaturgies pour la dans le tiâtre et autre mâtérieure de bonjour.
02:43
And she speaks to the Algonquin Anishinaabe practice of birch bark biting as a basis for her dramaturgical principles of intention, superposition, holding, profound listening, and resurfacing emergence.
02:59
and brings into question how our capacity to engage with intangible realities is possible without this attentive presence. So that attentive presence being a key practice of land-based dramaturgies that distinguishes it from other approaches.
03:15
And I think that it's so interesting to have the opportunity to hear these kind of concrete examples of what land-based approaches mean. And, you know, specifically it's relevant today as we talk about dramaturgy artistic process.
03:29
So I encourage you to check out Dr. Lindsay Lachance's work. Today we're going to jump right into getting a sense of your practice, your parkour. Marie, can you walk us through the evolution of your artistic inquiry since the founding of your company, which in 1990, you founded it in 1990, and you'd already been creating dance as a soloist for 12 years before that.
03:57
And what were you interested in doing on stage in 1990, compared to now? Actually, the history of my practice, like you said, starts in 1978. And it has always been a relationship with art as somehow a sacred practice that is putting us in contact with what is beyond, beyond our history, even beyond our society, beyond, really beyond.
04:37
And that's why it took me so many years before I could consider working with a group of people, because somehow in my way of approaching dance, it was a one-to-one affair, like with the woman divinity, if you want, whatever, but just a one-to-one one affair.
04:59
It's like me in front of life, me in front of cosmos, me in front of my ancestors that are even before human beings. I really feel that there is a link with even the material world which is imbued with the spirit even before life appeared on this planet.
05:21
So I was so much into this practice and then of course that work was going to be brought in front of people, bring in front of people. And of course I'm also creating for, of course, people. But the basis is this link with what is beyond and then bringing this as a celebration or something and offering to my brothers and sisters to share.
05:52
And then it took me years before I was in front of this. impossibility of creating a new work because I was seeing, because I was the only interpret of my work, I was a soloist performer, I needed to be two or three simultaneously in the space.
06:12
And then so I then I was like, wow, then pushing that idea besides and trying again to come back to create a solo. And it was really persistent for weeks that I could not start a creation because I needed to be more than one in the space.
06:29
So this is where I started to have a company in 1990. And I had to really fight against myself because I thought, oh, if I work with people that will be less sacred somehow, that was in my spirit at that time, you know.
06:46
And so I had to fight. So it took another few weeks to have this combat with my, this fight with my own perception of things. So then finally, I surrendered to the idea of actually then I discovered it has to be to share even in the process of creation, because for me, the process of creation was really so sacred and lonely.
07:12
And then I realized, well, it will be a shared process. So then in 1990, I started the creating with a group of seven people. And I chose the number seven, because it's really, you know, the brain of the human being is made so that when there is a group of seven, the brain says it's a group.
07:36
If you are six, the brain will say, oh, it's two, three euros, or three duets. The brain is made like that. But from seven, the brain says, okay, it's a bunch, it's a group, it's seven. So that's how I chose the number seven.
07:50
And then I started creating, and then it was really a work of transmission, transmission in the way of breathing, transmission in the way of standing, transmission of how can you feel the radiation from your cellular organism and all those things.
08:06
So it was really the first month was really I was not even somehow creating. I was more transmitting knowledge, information, intuition. And from there, interestingly, from this transmission, I could see how their body were reacting to my demands.
08:24
And then I could see the beginning of the new work there in their bodies at that moment. So it's a long story I made to answer you. That's great. And I wanted that was great because you're speaking a lot about solo form and the ensemble work and your relationship to that.
08:44
And the solo form, as you mentioned, it's been very central to your early work. You have a collection of solo repertoire created between 1978. in 1998 that still tours internationally, performed by dancers in your company.
08:58
And, you know, since then, a lot of your work has been ensemble, but do you still have ideas that call you to explore the solo form? Yes, yes, I've created a few solo forms since 1990 and also duets, yeah, but also many solo.
09:18
The last one I created for myself was a few years ago, I think it's five years ago. It's a solo, a three hour long solo. Last time I performed, it was in Japan. And this is a solo where I have interaction.
09:32
It's not on a stage, it was in a museum. It's a solo where I have interaction, intimate interaction with some member of the audience that will come to me and we will share a little very short talking, like 40 seconds, one minute, where they will transmit to me their innermost desire, appeal, or what they feel is next in their life and what they feel they will need some help for this next step to happen.
10:01
And then I create on the spot, I create a dance for them, but for all the audience that is around us and encircle around us. And the audience had no idea what that person told me, but it's very interesting how they get totally engaged, you know, into this dance.
10:19
It makes sense even for them somehow, but very much for the person or so who gave me a secret somehow. And so I went like that for three hours, going from one person to another one. So that's the last solo I created.
10:36
And what I like to do is also the time after I've created a solo for myself, I transmit it later to the dancers of my company. So for example, now I'm in the process of creating a new solo, and once it will be created.
10:53
but I'm not ready yet to perform it at all, what we see. And eventually it will be transmitted to the dancers in the company. Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like also this three hour durational solo that you created.
11:07
It's a solo and in a lot of ways a group work as well, because you're creating with so many members of the audience throughout these three hours. Yeah, I'm creating for them. I'm creating as a demand from them to help their process somehow.
11:26
Yeah, I'm creating right there in front of all those people. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, it really is clear how much that both the performance element and creative process is really linked towards connecting to something a little bit.
11:47
more profound and spiritual, is that's what I'm hearing when I hear you speak. Well, it's connected to someone specific in their demand. I must say that when they are talking to me, I'm also, we are very close, but somehow I'm scanning their energy and their bodies.
12:04
So I will answer not only their verbal demand, but also what I feel from the demand of their bodies and their way of holding themselves in the space and things like that. So it's multi-layered. And I want to talk about Prelude to the Afternoon of Afon and Right of Spring, which are the works I've presented here at Push 2025.
12:31
And these are works that you premiered in 1994 and 1993, respectively, and that still tour the world today, which is a remarkable longevity and relevance. And how has the impact of the work changed as the socio-aesthetic or political context have over the years?
12:51
Or if so, how? And if not, also, I'm curious about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me smile at question because actually the first version of the music on Debussy. And it's only many years later after an orchestra in Taiwan asked me to go and play with their orchestra on Right of Spring.
13:22
And they said, don't you have another piece? Because only one piece is not much for an orchestra. And I said, yes, but you know, I have an afternoon of a phone, but I never did it on the music of Debussy.
13:36
And they said, well, let's do it. I said, OK, great. So it's true that the version with the music of Debussy was premier. And I guess it's 1994 in Taiwan. But the original choreography without that music was in, I'm not sure of the date, 1988, I think.
13:55
So yes, so now it makes me smile today because in those days, you know, we're not so much speaking about French and everything, you know, but for me it was very important that it needed a woman for me to be dancing the afternoon of a fawn and the fawn, you have to remember that the fawn is this very, very erotic and very strongly physical young animal god male being alone in the nature and just feeling the appeal of the nymphias,
14:34
the woman. And for me it was obvious that I should dance that. And it was just like something that... I don't know, that is beyond you, beyond your own decision, you know. And actually, I realized that since then, when when each time I have transmitted that solo, I have to say that I was wearing horns, you know, like the phone, he has horns, and I was at one point breaking one horn from my head and putting it on my pubic bone as a phallus.
15:06
So this is still what we are doing. But I noticed that since then, each time I have transmitted that solo to a woman of the company, it is transforming them. There is something, it's like an initiation somehow, you know.
15:23
So yeah, and once, but you know, in 1988, we were not so much talking about gender, and well, a bit, you know, but not like today, you know, today is like the subject and with many other subject ecology, everything.
15:39
Native people, everything. So, but yeah, so this, but this piece is still of today. And I must say that I'm somehow, I must say that there is something of which I am, how could I say, happy with about my work is that it seems that it does not, it does not fall into out of, you know, it's relevant.
16:08
It's always actual somehow, even a piece I created in, you know, so many years ago, 50 years ago or something, is still of today somehow. So that, that's really a joy for me to realize that yes, I tell myself, yes, my dear, you are really creating outside of society and everything you are really creating from your relationship with what is beyond, because it's, it's traveling through time.
16:34
So I guess this is a sign. Well, now I'm just, you know, maybe because I'm 69, I can dare say things like that, you know. Yeah, I think you can. And you're one of the very few Canadian contemporary dance companies, choreographers.
16:51
Well, your company has been established for, you know, as you mentioned, since 1990, with, you know, currently full-time company members and your own studios. So beyond a choreographer, you've been a long time major arts leader in the country.
17:07
And I'm curious how the challenges of arts leadership have changed for you over the past 35 years. You know, have they changed? If so, how? If not, what stays the same? I don't really, you know, for me, it's a continuum somehow.
17:26
I feel I feel my life and my creation really as a continuum. I feel somehow that I'm, you know, the voice of myself in my mind when I think is the voice of myself when I was seven years old, you know, six years old, I don't know.
17:40
So I really feel it's... It's more, this life is more about the continuum. This is primarily the continuum. And I feel the same in creation. One creation is just being born somehow from the previous one and from the actual moment of the now where I feel, okay, now what is my next steps?
18:05
So it's always related to the now, but in a continuity without me wanting it, it's continuity of course of what was before me in myself or whatever. So I feel more, so for me, the challenge has always been the same.
18:24
The challenge has always been how to create something that is totally linked with a very deeply anchored urge to put something into the world. It's always that, and that story has not changed. And it is always finding the best, the most accurate or the most precise or the most organic at the same time, way to incarnate this intuition.
19:02
So it's always that. So, and I don't feel so much that there has been big moments or changes. Someone could say, oh, going from solo world to group work. Yes, maybe, but not so much. It's a total continuity somehow.
19:24
I think you were asking also the challenge as our director or as general manager of my company. It's always the same, the challenge you have to deal with your budget that are never enough somehow. And you have to be extremely creative, not only in your work.
19:43
but in your way of using the money that you have, very creative, very, very creative. So it's creation, it's happening not only in the art, but also in the managing of everything. You have to find solutions, find solutions all the time.
20:05
Like a problem is an occasion for a new solution, for a new exploration, you know? So sometimes when people in my company, sometimes they have a problem and they call me or they come to see me and say, yeah, give me, give me, give me your problem.
20:21
I love it. Because I like to be in this situation where I have to create instantaneously a solution. But I must say that some of the times, wow, it's a, wow. Yeah, I have to think for myself, I have to think two or three days to find a solution, you know?
20:42
But it's always a challenge to create. And it's always mostly a joy. For me, it's a game. Directing a company and creating works is a game. It's like playing, playing with the forces of life, playing with the forces of beauty, of truth, of revelation.
21:02
It's a game. It's a game where you are playing with elements, you know? So there is a joy for me in playing. Like a kid, I play. I play creation. I play organizing. I play, yeah. Yeah, and I still like it.
21:24
I must tell you, I still like it so much. It's like great joy for me to create and to embark dancers into this process. It's really an exciting joy. And I must say that sometimes, you know, I arrive just a few minutes before 1 o'clock because my creation time is from 1 o'clock to 5.30 in the morning.
21:47
The dancers, they warm up, they do their technique, everything. But you know, when it's one minute to one, I'm like, I'm like excited. And we're like, I'm like a kid, you know? It's going to start, you know?
21:58
And it's funny, you know? I'm always excited. And just because I'm very, you know, at the same time, I'm very precise, you know? So I wait for it to be very one o'clock before I start. I don't start two minutes before, you know?
22:11
So this excitement, I can tell you, I assure you, you can ask my dancers. I have it almost every time, you know, this excitement to start at one o'clock, you know? It's really clear listening to you how you have managed to continue to create work and be an arts creation to the playfulness.
22:38
It really is clear that, you know, at what point it's a book. And so I would love to just hear about what you are currently researching in your creative process. Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, now, you know, I'm not only creating things for the stage, or not only creating for events that are not happening on the stage, let's say outside, like I did this summer.
23:03
Summer I created a new piece that is only to be performed outside, going from village to village, like in a caravan. But I'm also creating works for video installation and VR and photography and sculpture.
23:20
So I'm also in those processes these days. This process is happening. And I'm also, I will have a work premiere next July in Stuttgart. And yeah, in this piece, I've already created the lights for it last week.
23:38
and I'm really excited. I really think, because I also create the lights and the costume and the stenography and everything, so I'm so happy because I really created wonderful lights. Like really myself, because I was having this idea before going in the theater, yeah, I mean do this like that and we'll see, you know, but it was beyond my expectation.
24:01
So beautiful. So I'm really excited with this new, new creation that will be coming up soon. Yeah, yeah. Great. Do we get to know the name of it? Does it have a name? Not yet, right? Yeah, okay. Just keep, you know, keep, maybe, maybe it's a name in progress, you know, and I'm, the name is, I will see, you know, just before I have to establish everything officially for the premiere in Institute Garden that the name will be there for now.
24:31
Not yet. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure and just hearing you speak about your practice like energizes me hearing your passion about it. So thank you so much for sharing, you know, this with me and for our listeners.
24:46
Gabrielle, thank you so much. It was a pleasure and having your smile in front of me during this time was great. Thank you so much. You just heard Gabrielle Martin in conversation with Marie Schwenard, whose works prelude to the afternoon of Fawn and Rite of Spring will be performed on February 3rd at the Chilliwack Cultural Center as part of the 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, supported by the Government of Quebec.
25:14
I'm Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts.
25:28
For more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca and on the next Push Play. Sometimes it unlocks something that is more impressive than if you kind of bring some sort of like high budget thing into it or you kind of have this big image like the simplicity of just like this moment that you're sharing with in a space with some people,
26:00
that's the thing that gets us going.
Individually, we are freelance artists thriving inside Vancouver's independent performance scene through fruitful and ongoing collaborations with Fight with a Stick, Theatre Replacement, Music on Main, Plastic Orchid Factory, MACHiNENOiSY, Radix Theatre, Justine Chambers, Rob Kitsos, Playwrights Theatre Centre, rice&beans theatre, Remy Siu, and many others. Each collaboration provides us with new methodologies, skills, and vocabularies to bring back to A Wake of Vultures.
In many ways, we three are hybrid people: we practice a variety of artistic disciplines; we come from a mix of settler backgrounds (Europe + Asia); we have differing relationships to gender and queerness. These notions of identity inform our work, but don't define it. We prefer to live in the margins. It is natural to us that many of our collaborators come from marginalized or underrepresented communities, with regards to race, queerness, gender, and disability; we value collaborations with artists who are critical, interdisciplinary, and intercultural in their mindsets.
WOV is an ongoing, evolving collaboration bonded by an intense friendship: we eat together, dance together, work together.
Conor Wylie
Conor Wylie is a performer, writer, and director creating experimental theatre. He lives and works in Vancouver, BC, located on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) nations. Conor regularly collaborates with Theatre Replacement, where he is an artistic associate, as well as with many members of Vancouver's esteemed Progress Lab consortium.
In recent years, science-fiction and videogame aesthetics have figured prominently in his works. He co-wrote and performed Visitors from Far Away to the State Machine with Hong Kong Exile, about two aliens on an erotic honeymoon to Earth, performed live on webcams and featuring animations inspired by several generations of videogame graphics. He also collaborated on Theatre Replacement's MINE, a cinematic performance investigating mythical, pop-culture, and personal stories of mothers and sons, performed in the sandbox videogame Minecraft. His works have played across Canada at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, The Cultch, Music on Main, Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), Uno Festival (Victoria), Summerworks (Toronto), and the Magnetic North Theatre Festival (Yukon), and toured around Iceland, the UK, and Hong Kong.
In 2017, he was selected for the Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for Emerging Theatre Artist by Marcus Youssef. In 2019, he was chosen as the Siminovitch Prize Protégé by his dear mentors James Long and Maiko Yamamoto. In 2022, he was named Best Director of a Canadian Feature by the Vancouver Asian Film Festival for his work on K BODY AND MIND.
Daniel O'Shea
Daniel O'Shea makes theatre, designs projections, and creates films, using technology and design as a keystone to support narrative and deepen dramaturgy. In his own works PKD Workshow (2013) and Are we not drawn onward to new era (2018), Daniel employs a low-fi DYI aesthetic, exposing the guts of the performance machinery in parallel to the convoluting the ideas spectating. In 2020 he completed his first feature length film collaboration centred around pre-extradition bill Hong Kong. His work focuses on states of presence, unbalancing audienceship and novel constructions of light through design and new media. Daniel's artistic research has explored the ephemeral nature of a 'self', interruptions of technology on human processes, and the results cognitive dissonance.
Daniel's work has been seen in Canada and internationally. Daniel is engaged with Vancouver's thriving contemporary performance scene and often engages in crossover with indie film and the digital arts.
Nancy Tam
Nancy is a sound artist who works and lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work fuses sound and performance as primary mediums for the collaborative devising of interdisciplinary performances. Nancy is a founding member of the interdisciplinary performance collective A Wake of Vultures as well as the Toronto-based Toy Piano Composers collective. As a performance maker, Nancy works closely with Fight With A Stick performance company, having devised and collaborated on the Critic's Choice Award winning show Revolutions in 2017. Her compositions, performances, and collaborations have toured in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, the U.S. and throughout Canada. An excerpt of her latest multi-media composition Walking at Night by Myself will be touring to Hong Kong in April 2019.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:01
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights old school magic, sci-fi prayers, hybridity, and more.
00:18
I'm speaking with Dan, Connor, and Nancy, the artists behind Seeing Double, which is being presented at the Push Festival, February 1st and 2nd, 2025. Seeing Double plays tribute to spooky late night double features with two performances that push pulpy cinematic genres into uncharted conceptual territories.
00:38
Stripping the psychological horror genre down to its bare bones, walking at night by myself undermines the reliability of perception in an audiovisual blitz of surround sound and vivid optical illusion.
00:51
K-Body and Mind is a cyberpunk odyssey channeled through a multimedia experience that reflects on tech-assisted immortality. Nancy Tam experiments with form and practices, dramaturgy to create immersive sonic designs and environmental performances for onstage and on-screen media.
01:09
Her research triangulates between sound, space, and body to examine the uncanny valley of haptics. She was a featured artist at Prague Quadrennial, 2023 for the Canadian Exhibition. Daniel O'Shea makes theater, designs projections, and creates films using technology and design as a keystone to support narrative and deepen dramaturgy.
01:32
Daniel employs a low-fi DIY aesthetic exposing the guts of the performance machinery in parallel to convoluting the idea of spectating. Connor Wiley performs, writes, and directs experimental plays, films, and video games, employing devised and collaborative processes to create fresh and unusual worlds.
01:50
He uses the science fiction genre to explore cultural and societal stories of grief, hope, and transformation. Here is my conversation with Dan, Connor, and Nancy. I just heard that this is the first time you've been in the same room in months.
02:07
It's true. We've just been kind of off in our own little avenues and projects, so getting back together is like a lot of energy, a lot of catching up, a lot of silliness that's working its way out. This is how vultures, the creatures are, right?
02:30
Like they fly off their solo and then they flock when there's something to eat. We're here for the ride of the reunion, the reunion special. Back together at last, now to Dan and Connor. I will just acknowledge that we are all in this conversation on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.
02:58
I'm a settler here and it's my responsibility to continue thinking and educating myself on the history and the ongoing effects of colonization. And that looks like different things, different days. And today it's a reflection on inspired by Malcolm Ferdinand's Decolonial Ecologies, where he talks about this colonial and environmental double fracture of modernity.
03:22
So referring to how humans have institutionalized hierarchies of white humans over non-whites and humans over nature, allowing the extractivism of colonization and nature and the exploitation of nature.
03:32
And that the climate crisis really can't be addressed without connecting the environmental movement with the anti-colonial movement. Great book, recommend it. And it's definitely some important thinking shared within it.
03:47
So I'm going to jump right into some questions about wake of vultures for people who don't know. So wake of vultures is a project based interdisciplinary performance company formed in 2013. It's a research development and producing vehicle for the three of you who began bonding over a shared fascination in social rituals, science fiction, anime, and questions of reality and perception.
04:13
So to be together for over 10 years beyond shared fascinations, what is the secret? What is the glue? Is it like this perfect balance of astrological signs or something more pragmatic? The glue is actually just friendship and pleasure in each other and deep, kind of profound interest in each other and how we think and how we engage with the world.
04:41
And yeah, I think that more than anything has kind of seen us through the space in between projects and the hard times inside of projects and yeah, all the kind of bumpiness that can come with. creative partnerships.
05:00
I totally agree with that. And I think like, you know, sometimes when you think about artistic partnerships or working partnerships that are built in friendships or like romantic relationships and stuff like that, like that can also be a bit combustible, right?
05:14
It's not always, you know, conducive to a professional environment. But I think what we have going also is that we have treated this as a long term relationship, you know, like we've helped each other to account.
05:28
We've been, you know, we've taken time to, you know, take a retreat and really talk things through and get on the same page and not kind of like coast through. So it's taken a lot of, you know, work that comes from that like loving friendship.
05:43
Yeah, I think also, like, the bond and the friendship that we share seeps into our working relationship in such a way that organizationally, we each will take leadership in various ways, in macro and micro ways.
06:03
So, and by that, I mean like, macroly speaking, for example, like I led Walking at Night by Myself, Connor led K Body and Mind, and then, you know, Dan will lead another project. And it's not like a schedule thing.
06:20
And in fact, we kind of watch out for one another and go like, hey man, like, it's been kind of, you know, two out of three, like we've been doing a lot of leadership. Like, let's, let's like how, it's not so much like, now it's your turn to do something.
06:34
It's more like, how do we help like bring something together that then someone else can lead? And that kind of generosity is driven by love and friendship. And then in micro ways, like I think the ways that we drive the design led process is very much reliant on the trust that we have in each other and the respect that we have for the expertise in the room, where, you know, it's not like everyone needs to chime in all the time to make a decision.
07:09
You know, it's like, oh, this, like whatever, you know, maybe it's like a filmic thing or setting up a shot. It's like, I don't, I don't really need to say anything. Like I do trust like Dan and his eye and what he's got going on, you know?
07:24
And so there's a lot of that where I think perhaps sets us apart from what traditional or conventional ideas of devised theater or devised organization work that like I've always seen it as like a rolling triangle of leadership and rolling triangle is really like admitting to that there is hierarchies, but it is always evolving and it is always emergent and it is held by each other.
07:55
and how by the trust and love that we are able to keep that rolling going on. And just, there perhaps is an astrological component. Oh. Because. Finally. I think the real heart here. A mutual friend of ours is very knowledgeable in this kind of stuff.
08:21
And when he learned about our birthdays, he was like, Oh yeah, that totally makes sense. Because apparently each of us is like the young element of our like element family. You can really see how much I know.
08:43
Go on. So as a, as a cancer, I'm like a young water sign. And as this is a real test. Yeah. As an Aries. Connor is a young fire sign. Yes. And as a. No, Jesus. When's my birthday, Dan? As a Gemini, Gemini.
09:08
Yeah, obviously. So Gemini of you right there. Nancy is a young air sign. And so even though we are all different in our elements, we are kind of connected in this whatever it means to be a young. Thing, you know, that resonates.
09:30
Beautiful. We're just three young things. I would love to actually just circle back to what you said, Nancy, about design led process. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. And like you'll chime in as well.
09:48
What I what I think is a design led process is informed by my experience with other companies as well. But within this constellation, my practice based in performance making with a huge component of it under the lens of sound design and and Daniel with his, you know, performance practice and composition practice like but under the lens of visual design and for Connor narrative design, it is really like thinking around like form and content working together rather than going like a straight route of like first we have a script and then we design for it.
10:37
So a lot of our processes will actually come from a different realized design elements such as sound design, such as projection design. And then we develop other elements around it, so that's what I mean by design-led process.
10:59
What are you guys? And sometimes it can be processes curious about a kind of effect in the audience or like a gag or a trick or some, yeah, some kind of phenomenon that we're interested in manifesting.
11:16
And then in exploring, okay, well, what are the ways that we can create this? Like, can we create this sonically? Can it happen through the staging? Can it happen through the narrative or the character or dialogue or something like that?
11:29
Finding all these ways to like, get at the same audience experience and then having, taking all of those and then forming a show and linking them together into, okay, how do we craft that experience?
11:43
So PKD work show function somewhere like that about, trying to structure the audience's perception of what layer of the show that they were engaging with, or walking definitely functions like that in terms of trying to activate a kind of perceptual landscape through all of these kind of tools and the design.
12:07
And the performance character of K-Body of Mine was very much like foundational before the narrative. And this kind of approach to take the structural elements and put them in first, and then trying to build a flesh around that kind of has led us to make, I don't know, what we think of it as like a different road to a show.
12:40
Dan, if you could give us just like a little synopsis or like a little background context on PKD Workshow since you mentioned it, like what is it? Oh, PKD Workshow was one of the first shows that we did together.
12:55
And the three of us, plus Sean. Yeah. Yeah. And that was interested in playing around with kind of layers of performance. So it had a kind of raw workshop layer put on top of it. And then as the workshop went on, it was revealed that actually a lot of things were rehearsed and a lot of things were prepared.
13:26
And so it played with, at what level am I really, at what level is the show being honest with me? And it was based around Philip K. Dick and his work, his science fiction work, and a lot of his like reality bending kind of pulpy DNA.
13:46
Yeah. I want to talk more about what, like, are there comments? So, your work is marked by formal detachment, ritual, and unstable perspectives, to name a few. Can you speak more to that? I think we all just have a kind of general aesthetic interest in trippiness, you know, in stuff that kind of bends your mind a bit.
14:10
And so, I guess that's the thing that I've been doing for many years in a lot of my projects, right? It's just like picking a kind of container that sort of maybe mischievously proposes that it's one thing, and then it inverts itself midway.
14:27
I think the unstable perspective, you know, that really speaks to PKD. I think it also speaks to K-body and mind, so does the formal detachment, in that the work itself is kind of a puzzle on the surface.
14:42
All the elements are kind of pulled apart. uh, you know, as you sort of like hear the sort of radio play, um, sound design and the voice acting, but then pair it with this kind of like disembodied robotic performance style.
14:59
Um, this detachment, um, causes you to kind of like fill in the blanks yourself, make a movie in your head. Um, and that was kind of inspired, you know, a long, a long time ago, the kind of formalism of Robert Wilson, um, or the minimalism of Richard Maxwell and the New York city players.
15:16
And I, and I know goes back further to, to Brecht and stuff like that too. So I think there's like some, some old school theater detachment that has always been interesting to me anyway. I don't know if there's more that you guys want to say about.
15:30
I think the, the ritual element in that, um, is often played out in how we exist in the rooms together when we're, we're making, um, there's, I don't know if it's a tendency or at this point, it's a conscious act, active, uh, drive, but we do tend to fall into rituals for any given project, whether it's, um, you know, arriving in a certain way or, um, you know, trying to manifest whatever values are feel appropriate for that project.
16:06
But, um, this, this sense of submitting to a kind of structure, a chosen, a chosen structure based on values and, and desired outcomes, it's like, um, yeah, I feel like we do become open to being what, what we need for to fulfill that, that ritual or that show, you know?
16:31
If I may elucidate a little bit though, like the ritual thing, right? Like this gets specific about it, right? Like there's all sorts of rituals that, you know, many, uh, rehearsal practices might have like a check-in or some kind of hunker at the end of the day to kind of let the day go and.
16:46
we kind of get interested in like making our own versions of that based on whatever thing we're working on. So in PKD work show, we had a little sci-fi prayer that we would do at the end of the day to kind of try to invoke the sort of spooky ghost of PKD in a way.
17:01
I'm remembering when we were making a short piece for Blink, which is an event that Leaky Heaven puts on every once in a while, you know, we had our notebooks full of like one minute performances that we were gonna do, you know, and we're like, okay, let's make a top five, you know, that would be a common ritual for people to do.
17:16
What's our top five here, you know? And then we were like, for fun, for ourselves. We were like, let's make a dark five also, you know? Like what are the five ones that would be really weird for us to do, you know, just as a thought experiment.
17:27
So, and then dark five has become like a, every once in a while and you're like, you need to get my bad ideas out. We'll just say it, move through it, find the next thing. So we kind of make these little custom rituals for ourselves and our processes, I think.
17:42
And I think like ritual too can be referred to in a philosophical like definition as well as like meaning making, right? Like you're imbuing a form with meaning. And I think like that word, you know, lends itself very well in theatrical practices and has been for a long, long, long, long, long time.
18:02
But I think for how it applies to us too is like, it's language making, it's vocabulary building, you know, we have all sorts of like having been friends and collaborators for like 10 plus years, like we just have so many short hands.
18:21
There have been like conversations where Dan and I will have by simply looking at each other. And we're like, okay, and like we don't realize and then people are like, well, but can you say it out loud?
18:33
Because we don't know what just happened. But like, you know, so the clarity of which are like, sometimes I'm that guy. And then sometimes this will happen. And then I'll be that guy, you know, and, and I think like the ritualizing of like, it can also be interpreted as, as just like building vocabulary and a language.
18:55
And I think that is probably experienced similarly with different groups that come together. And yeah, like, you know, trippiness or just like goofiness, I think there's also a lot of one upmanship of like, how do you like, spin a bit, you know, and usually those are the best, like gems that, you know, become part of or that, you know, has gone through so many iterations, then it loses goofiness,
19:28
but like, it be that little spark. And I think like, thinking around that, like, for, for walking, you know, one of those things, trying to break this, like, it's, in between of like a just like colored globes that are happening to like the rest of the show.
19:48
I'm like, okay, everybody, we're gonna, we're gonna just like make a joke in here. And then we found like a transition in between. So yeah, I think that like ritualizing or like meaning making slash like vocabulary building, it feels very much connected in the ways that we work.
20:09
Our work, I think looks like, will look pretty like, often looks pretty conceptually like serious, you know? Like, and we take it seriously, we build it seriously, but we also joke around and are really silly with each other.
20:24
Yeah, to make it. Walking at Night by Myself and Kay Body and Mind are two different company works that you have since realized are strange sisters and designed as a double feature. What makes these two works strange sisters?
20:38
Walking at Night by Myself as well as Kay Body and Mind feature. performers who are very similar in like the physical attributes, and then they are also dressed in like in the same uniform costumes. And this idea, this formal idea, as well as a design idea, actually came from K came from PKD workshop, which Daniel had brought up before.
21:10
And so I think like that has always been a through line. It feels like that's been like become like a company interest to to do like same, same, but different. Yeah, like some, some desire to have like a very dim room with people that look the same.
21:34
And you don't know who is who, or which is what, and, and how to like pin meaning or action or consequence on to either one that like the interchangeability of identity or something that I think works best on stage in person, because, you know, in film, you know, you can cut in between and you can have twins.
21:59
It's no, it's no problem, right? But there's just something trippy about seeing two people who look very similar and you can't quite pin down who's who it's like, oh, it's just an old school kind of magic trick.
22:10
And I mean, with K, that came from a place of like wanting to see if we can sort of separate your identity of who you are as a performer on stage from from who you're playing, which is like in a way an old clown kind of thing too.
22:26
But I think there's a certain trippiness that came out of the twinning in both of those shows that felt like they had resonance for each other. And then, you know, as is often the case for us, we like we because we love the long been and we love to like.
22:42
deep play and vocabulary building that like we've accrued like a great group of collaborators on this right and so um you know Jasmine Chen was in um because Walking Dead like multiple iterations of casts right you you Nancy was in it at one point and then Angie's always been in it and then once you wanted to step out of the work Jasmine stepped into the work so there was already a doubling of casting in between the two shows as well um and so it just felt like there's some interesting like identity conflation between the shows you know as you see Jasmine from one show to the next oh do you remember her as that last role into this new role um that feels like a resonance for me inside of those two works i think also like the all of these shows that we mentioned like really deal with like uh illusions as as a big part that drives the the work and um I think with walking,
23:42
I'm really, really trying to like go to the ends of that of like, okay, not only do you have like the two people who are dressed very similarly, now there is like illusions between or interactions of like the costumes and then also the projection, as well as you're in this, you know, immersive surround sound that also plays funny tricks on your ears as well and that whereas I think like, okay, it feels like you start off with like almost like two very different bodies or like two very different people because you also like see them both at the same time you see them like,
24:29
you know, like considering the rest of the show was like pretty bright light. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And then and then they start to come together, the identity starts to overlap, whereas like I think in walking is the opposite where you really propose, I really try to propose them as like one and the same and then through the length of the show that how do these characters or bodies individuate?
24:55
And so like, yeah, I just think like kind of the long game of asking these questions of like, who's who's who? When is this person themselves? When is it? When are they play? Are they playing? And when are they playing themselves?
25:14
Like those those questions become kind of eternally like fascinating in our work, just overall as our, you know, ongoing investigation. And there's like, there is, yeah, this duality, and this, the problematization of that duality, like walking at night by myself is the title.
25:35
And it features two, two people that look exactly the same. And so the question of like, which often comes up with people that see the show that they interpret like, okay, is this one person with two identity?
25:49
Is this two people walking together? Is one of them a shadow? Like all of these kind of questions in the way that Kay puts forward very straightforwardly that they're, you know, that sense of identity is split amongst all these bodies, and that one person can be another and that this, the whole collective project is about dispersing through the body and through these two bodies in this case.
26:21
So yeah, I think we just started to see all of the parallels and the casting and the thematic material and really thought something interesting could happen when both these play together and they start having a resonance with each other.
26:39
And we really wanted to find out like what is, was that kind of harmonic that these two create when they're back to back? Which will, and this scene double will premiere at Push 2025. That's right. Yeah, exciting.
26:54
I'm excited. Come experience the resonance. Let's also talk about the place of futurism and retro in your work, as terms that are referred to in how you describe key themes or aesthetic interests. This one, we're probably gonna be riffing quite a bit, but there's a big through line through all of our interests, which is like science fiction, speculative kind of fiction, a curiosity in the kind of near edge of what can be,
27:32
what is possible and kind of where things are going. In a way, it feels like we already live in the future with the kind of technological changes that we've kind of seen in our lifetime, but that kind of profound interest in what is possible.
27:54
As we work in that kind of like contemporary performance sphere and are incorporating technologies into our work, sometimes it feels like there's always a push to like use new software, use the newest tools, the like whatever's available to you.
28:07
And I definitely noticed with you, Dan, you're often like wiring things yourself, right? You're using old fluorescent tubes. We're doing a kind of like custom build thing that feels like there's so much interesting like design work that can be done using these old technologies in a different kind of way rather than always adopting the latest, which we do also, right?
28:31
We are using new technologies, but like just having this blend, I don't know, allows you to have like a certain. criticality or like allows you to like expose the machine as part of the work. Whereas sometimes, you know, it's just like a projector off stage is like meant to be kind of invisible.
28:48
And if you just, you know, viewing the product of what's happening, you know, like, I like that we often see the like, the guts of the machinery inside of it. It's another maybe detachment that happens, right?
28:58
When you see how it's made or whatever, that feels like, I don't know, at least distinctive about your visual aesthetic, your design aesthetic. This idea of futurism is like, it's so broad. And it also feels, I don't know, I've been just like, kind of thinking and reading Donna Haraway's work and thinking around like ideas like post humanist.
29:21
And like, obviously, we also encounter that and K body of mine. And yeah, I have like such complicated mixed meanings about the like, of the word because it feels like it's like, you know, some somewhere out there.
29:37
you know, whereas I think like the mix of like, as Connor said, like the technique and also the concept kind of like reveals like that all of our constructions conceptual and are practical or fallible and makes it more human actually and makes it more relatable and more of now.
29:56
And it's way more closely a reflection which, you know, sci-fi is a genre plays with anyhow. Like, you know, it puts a far off of the future. It puts it off world as a reflection of what is actually happening.
30:12
So I think in that way, both of these shows kind of do that and very abstracted maybe like somewhat distance ways. And then another thing that kind of I thought of is that for my own interests anyhow, I'm always really interested in like, or not, well, I don't know if it's interest, but this response to like, you know, everything has already been made, you know, this idea of like, there's nothing new anymore.
30:41
There's no originality anymore. Or like, you know, my response to it personally is just like, well, okay, well, if that is true, say if that is true, then like the newness is in the combination thereof.
30:56
And in the little Venn diagram piece where, you know, two old things are touching. So I think in the ways that we consider like the play between like retro or lo-fi or DIY and like, you know, heady concepts or futurism or post-modernism or post-humanism is actually just getting us to look at this like Venn diagram of different things that have already, that are existing.
31:29
Right, and I think that comes from, for myself anyway, it's like, have always, had to be this way, because I'm a sound artist, but I also am a theater maker. And I'm always borrowing grammar and methodologies and creation devices from both of these disciplines to making work.
31:56
So by just existing, it has to be a hybridity of these things. And to create, then, a new thing and a third, or a conceptual or philosophical third, which conceptually, walking at night by myself, really try to deal with that, but in a phenomenological way of how do you have one pattern and another pattern, just simply by existing together, create something new, something emergent and something spontaneous and almost,
32:34
yeah, like unrepeatable. That resonates for me inside of like, inside of K body and mind in that, you know, I don't think, yeah, I don't think I was trying to predict the future or, you know, or a future I'd it's a, you know, it's a very imagined world.
32:54
But, you know, it was a combination of it was the like excitement of trying to combine like, really, some of this like old school theatrical minimalism technique that I was like, I want to see if I could push that to the edge by like, doing it in a cyberpunk genre, right?
33:10
Like doing the matrix doing that ghost and ghost in the shell. These kinds of like super maximalist stories to really like push your imagination to the to the to the edge. Like that was the that was the jumping off point, right?
33:23
Was this like looking back. And I think, you know, as we went along, like, I remember a moment when we were working, we were, I was working with Leah Weinstein, who's the costume designer. And, you know, the first draft of the costumes, as I had kind of proposed, with these like sleek black costumes with these neon stripes had a real like Tron vibe, you know, and I was like, Oh, it like the show sounds cyberpunk,
33:54
and the story is cyberpunk. And now it looks cyberpunk. And somehow I was like, it's not, it's not right. It's not doing it because they're like, the sort of like neon cyberpunk aesthetic was already playing out in a super nostalgic way on Netflix or in you know, like altered carbon was had just sort of come out and like altered carbon is another show that I was like, Oh, you know, this is like actually a similar premise to what we have going on here,
34:18
except I really didn't like I really didn't like the approach of it. I didn't like the economics of it. I didn't like what it had to say about the future, you know, so that made me kind of go like, oh, I have to like actually disrupt the visuals and reach further back to imagine the future.
34:34
And so we ended up landing on a kind of kind of more Tarkovsky in. You're like a solaric. Exactly, yeah. Solaris vibe that was like cozier and softer. And I think that really played out in how it was filmed as well.
34:50
And the lighting and everything, the color palette that we chose, that there was like, yeah, a certain looking back. And what I guess felt like in those aesthetics, a kind of like optimism of the future that just felt so like lush and warm and we were going to be cozy, that ended up finding its way also into the story of the world as well too.
35:17
I didn't want to find this like, this cyberpunk dystopianism of living in these oppressive, realienating cities. It was like, and this, I mean, we live in, You know, some somewhat cyberpunk-y looking world now, you know, but it was like, oh, wait, no, what did these people who are living in this near future?
35:41
What do they actually dream of, you know, and can they actually try to actualize their ideal society? Not easily, you know, it's not it's not a utopia, you know, but like, what if we earnestly tried to make this better future?
36:01
Instead of, you know, creatively just, you know, saying, oh, yeah, no, corporations are going to control everything. And, you know, like, I had to pull myself, you know, out of the kind of nihilism or, you know, inevitability of.
36:18
Yeah. Yeah. Dream a little. Yeah, totally. And you referenced the film. So I wanted to chat about that a bit because cave body and mind had an iterative creation process created for the stage first, then turned into a film during the pandemic.
36:33
And now its final iteration integrates digital and live representation of the characters on the same stage. And so can you talk about what each layer of this development contributed with regard to or in terms of how form affected the dramaturgy of the work and what affect this integration of video and performance creates now?
36:53
Yeah, probably not succinctly. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we, you know, we theater replacement supported this project in the beginning through through their Collider program, which is the sort of project based residency.
37:07
And so we made a 20 minute version, which is effectively the like the bones of like chapter one. And the whole intention was to make it a live show. But there was a moment after we had finished performing that version where we, you know, we didn't make documentation of it.
37:26
And and so we shot it and very like we were instantly kind of like, oh, while the like, the kind of like glitch aesthetics of how the performers are performing and how all these layers come together actually lends itself really well to being on screen.
37:42
And so I put it in the back of my hand that I was like, okay, one day after we're finished this, maybe I'll make a web series or something like that. And then the pandemic came and we, you know, could no longer do the live premiere that we were slated for.
37:55
And so it just became very clear right away that, okay, now we gotta, we gotta shoot it. And, you know, we had discussed like live streams and stuff like that. And, you know, I knew that, you know, having, you know, witnessed live streams happening all the time, the kind of like video and audio compression of the internet and stream, you know, it was like, it was not the way to represent the kind of like intricate design work that,
38:20
you know, underpinned the show. So, and, you know, it just so happened that I had an amazing sound designer and a filmmaker. already on the team that understood the dramaturgy from, you know, the inside out.
38:33
And so it just became very clear that it was like, okay, no, we'll film it. And then we'll release it for streaming. And, you know, as you were saying Nan earlier about, you know, just turning over, you know, trust to each other.
38:49
Really it was like, Dan put the whole shot list together. Dan really like directed the filming of the project. And so we had that online release. And then when it finally came time to bring it back live, I think part of the iteration was like, man, we did so much work on that film and it's awesome.
39:13
And I don't want to throw that away. It doesn't make sense anymore in the iterative process of this thing to just like to throw that away and take it all the way back to the stage. And that's when we kind of, I think came up with the notion of the hybrid, the hybrid viewing.
39:31
And, you know, the work is already such a puzzle of layers. You know, the choreography is telling you one story. The lights are telling you another story that the voice and the text are telling you something.
39:42
The sound is telling you something. And then having that extra layer of film and having the performers doubled in front of the film is just one more opportunity for us to like make this show feel like it's calibrating itself.
39:57
It's trying to, you know, it's trying to give you the unified vision. It's working towards it, but the machine is falling apart because it's been invaded by this entity. And so it just became one extra layer inside of it that, you know, could, you know, just an extra level of the puzzle for you to figure out.
40:17
And an extra kind of layered towards the final manifestation not to spoil everything, but the emergence and the, and the, realization of the kind of the nascent entity, right? Slowly going through these mediated layers until arriving in a body that's doing what it's saying, how it's moving, and how it's being present, which is so much of the kind of emotional through line for that character.
40:54
And I think part of it too is like when, like from the very, very, very beginning, like even just the script itself, it's like written in such a way that's way more like a TV script, like the dialogue is like way more to like a TV or like a movie script than it is like a play script.
41:20
Yeah, that's true. So like that in itself lends so like it just lands so well when we saw it, it was like Well, yeah, that works. And knowing that it was this kind of like a radio play, wanted to make the sound design and the composition of it, the scoring, to be very much like a driver of action.
41:48
And narrative. And what is actually happening is contained in the sound. You can just kind of trust the sound more than you can trust what you're seeing on stage, I think. Right, right. And so when we see that combination on screen, you can kind of just sit back and follow.
42:09
And then it's not, I don't know, I've watched it like countless times. And I often will just kind of go like, whoa, but they're not actually moving. You can kind of just get into this ride. And then I think part of the company, I don't know, maybe aesthetic, maybe just like value is like, we like things to be very tight.
42:40
We like to be extremely precise. And we like to be really good at doing that. And when we were preparing for the live iteration and then for the filming, the two actors are acting live. I'm playing all of the sounds that you hear live.
43:05
And part of it was just like, well, I mean, yeah, we can show the film, but there is a kind of tightness that you only get when the stakes are higher, when you can see it happening. So that was kind of like part of the allure, I think, for us to go like, oh, how do we do that?
43:28
get it together. You know, um, and I don't know, I feel like with for us, it's like if there is a hard puzzle, it will probably try the ends of the earth to do it. I love what you said about this too, because I remember, you know, when we shot the when we shot the film, right, we shot runs of it, and then we shot took special individual shots of things, but like the bare bones of it are runs of the episodes,
43:54
you know. And it's like people don't know that when they watch the when they watch it on screen, right, they just assume that it's been shot like a TV show would usually be shot, right. And so you kind of like in the over the course of the performance, get to ask that question and have it answered, you know, you're like, is this how did they shoot this, you know, and then it's like, and then as they,
44:14
you know, as the farmers get more and more intricate into it, you're like, oh, oh, they can actually do it. Like they get really happens in front of you, you know, and it's a really interesting thing of like, watching these two people on the screen for as long as you do, and then seeing them in person, in front of you, there's just something kind of electric that happens about that, you know?
44:38
Yeah. Especially in that chapter two, where it is working with a kind of VHS logic. Yeah, right, right, right, yeah. Of the rewind and of the replay. And so, yeah, the logic of playing back a surveillance video on bodies actually moving through space in a forward in time, right?
45:03
Just makes that land even more about how they are subject to this kind of the force of the show or the pressure of the show to figure out what's going on and troubleshoot. And I think this relates to the earlier question of like, how is this like Strings Sisters or like, and why is it a double feature?
45:27
Because we like, we love cinema and we just love, we love watching TV and we love anime. And so both of these shows are kind of inspired by filmic genres and filmic tropes. Yeah, just like also another way that it lends itself to being a hybrid or like how, you know, something like kind of this mixing and muxing of on screen and on stage media.
45:57
Thank you. Well, I'm excited, obviously. Thanks, Gabriel. We're excited to be here too. But yeah, I really am grateful for you sharing and bringing us a little bit deeper into your process, your approach, how you work together and just, you know, dropping in some references that are really intriguing for those who haven't seen the work.
46:21
Get your popcorn in, come to the theater and get scared. Yeah, you're gonna get scared. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was Gabriel Martin's conversation with Nancy Tam, Daniel O'Shea, and Connor Wiley of Awake of Vultures.
46:43
Awake of Vultures will present a double feature at the PUSH International Performing Arts Festival supported by Do 604, K Body and Mind, and Walking at Night by Myself. You can take in both shows on the same night for a discount or purchase a single ticket to either work.
47:01
Both performances will be at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on February 1st and 2nd. I'm Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Trisha Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
47:14
New episodes of PUSH Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca.
47:32
And on the next push play... I needed to be two or three simultaneously in the space. And then so I then I was like, wow, then pushing that idea besides and trying again to come back to create a solo.
47:46
And it was really persistent for weeks that I could not start a creation because I needed to be more than one.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Anne-Marie joins the conversation from Ottawa, and recognizes the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation as the traditional owners of the land and honors their culture and history.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:01
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights opening up the space between words and the light of the Northern sun.
00:18
I'm speaking with Anne-Marie Ouellette, one of the lead artists behind a glass, or From Ice in English, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 31st to February 2nd, 2025, with both English and French presentations.
00:33
Step into a frozen otherworld where friendship transcends the mortal realm in this mesmerizing tale of two girls bound by an unbreakable connection. Inspired by a Nordic literary gem, From Ice weaves its enchantment through smoke, light, and dreamlike disorientation, as ethereal voices guide spectators through snowy obscurity.
00:53
Laudebin was founded by Nancy Boucier, Anne-Marie Ouellette, and Thomas Sineum. Together they have created seven theatrical and installation works featuring original stage designs. Anne-Marie is Professor of Theatre at the University of Ottawa, a researcher-creator.
01:10
She specializes in directing non-actors in avant-garde contemporary creations. Here is my conversation with Anne-Marie. And so, just before we dive into talking a bit more about Dick Glass and about Laudebin, I want to acknowledge that I am joining the conversation from the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.
01:38
I am a settler on these lands. Part of my ongoing education has been reading through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report summary, and also really utilizing the Yellowhead Institute as an educational resource.
01:54
We're coming towards the end of 2024, and at the beginning of the year, Yellowhead released their calls to action accountability a 2023 status update so just reviewing the year the year in review with regard to the calls to action and it really you know stood out to me that you know they shared within since eight years in the eight years since the release of the report and the 94 calls to action only 81 or rather 81 remain unfulfilled and zero were completed in 2023 and actually they stopped doing these annual reports because of that kind of dire outcome basically the lack of meaningful progress towards those calls to action and they identified for really key measurement calls to action you know and just identified that without basically meaningful instituted measurement the reality is that we don't have the data necessary to measure whether or not whether or not a lot of the remaining calls to action are complete,
03:02
there's no systems to measure it. And yeah, let alone whether Canada is making any meaningful progress towards the completion of these calls to action. So just reflecting on that as we come to the close of 2024.
03:16
Yeah. Anne-Marie, where are you joining the conversation from today? Today I'm from my office in Ottawa at Ottawa University. Ottawa is located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe nation.
03:34
Thank you. And so the glass is based on a Nordic tale. Can you talk about the source of inspiration, why you chose this tale, how you've adapted it or interpreted it for the glass? Yes, absolutely. So yes, the glass is an adaptation of a great classic from Norwegian literature called The Ice Palace and written by Thierry Vessas in 1962.
04:01
It's a very beautiful and mysterious novel that tells the story of two young girls called named Sis and Un. Sis and Un are both 11 years old and one day they're just suddenly struck by this intense and powerful connection.
04:19
Is it love? Is it friendship or friendship? That's not the point. It's something very stronger, something that changes them deeply and instantly. This age, 11, the age of the character is very important because at 11 you're right on the edge just between childhood and adulthood.
04:43
And every experience is very incredibly intense. Every experience feels incredibly intense. Actually, it's the first time with the domain that we're creating a show based on a story. Normally, as you, when you saw Whiteout, we built from different sources of inspiration to create a non-narrative experience.
05:08
But this novel, this Vézaz novel is so open and leaves so much to the reader's imagination. So we thought that left us enough room to create a multi-sensory experience. Yeah, and a multi-sensory experience, and you're referencing that the narrative is kind of like porous enough because it relates to your practice of generally working with non-linear narrative.
05:39
And in your artistic approach, you talk about opening up the space between words, allowing the unspeakable to emerge and the use of fragmented forms that privilege discontinuity so that meaning is not forcibly inoculated but emerges on its own.
05:56
Can you elaborate on how you create an environment that fosters this emergence of meaning for your audience? Yes, well, we try to create, as you said, the sensory experience to touch the senses of the spectator before speaking to their reason.
06:14
So for that, we try to bring the people inside the fictional space in the center of the fictional space so they can imagine the story in real time with us. We think that leaving room for everyone's imagination allows us to reach a wide audience.
06:34
The Last is not a show for children, neither a show for adults, it's a show for everyone, age eight and up. And everyone will manage their own experience. This novel, The High Palace, is not a show for children, but the main characters are children, children who are never patronized, always taken seriously.
07:00
The poetry is also very present in Vézaz's writing. Many things are suggested without being confirmed, and mystery covers from beginning to end. So during the process, we worked to magnify this mystery, to keep it alive.
07:19
So the stage is very misty. The light that spreads through the fog wrap the audience, bringing them with us onto a frozen lake at dawn. The sound of Iran Man is also very important for us. And for The Last, it is broadcast through headphones.
07:40
This offers a very intimate connection between the audience and the characters who are heard very closely without needing to project. That way, the sunscapes reach us in an absolutely enveloping way.
07:54
And so you're already speaking about your visual. aesthetic, which is so powerful and so iconic to your work. Can you describe the visual aesthetic of Laudubin, beyond the glass, even though obviously the glass is very much in this continuation of this approach?
08:17
And what influences your approach to incorporating these elements in your work? Laudubin was founded by three persons, so me, Thomas Cineau, the sun designer, and Nancy Bussière, the light designer. And we always work together from the beginning.
08:34
First meeting, we will ask everyone, what do you want to work on? And this is not me as a director coming with a project and an idea and a text and ask them to support it. So, it's three of us, so lying, so...
08:55
Soundlight and space are fundamental. We build everything together from the beginning. For the last, for example, I didn't adapt the text before the rehearsals, or people normally do. I worked on the text inside the teacher, responding to what we could create with sound, light, and sub-design.
09:17
There is that very important scene where the character of Umm disappears in that famous ice palace that we create just with light and fog. It was the first thing that we did in the process. So when we found this, we knew that we had a project there.
09:43
So just this example to tell you how the elements work together in a very fine interaction, interaction, and that need many phases of research and as you can imagine. In the novel, nature is central.
10:00
The characters' emotions aren't described directly. Instead, they are reflected through the transformation of the landscape. And our lighting designer, Nancy Bussire, is captivated by the light of northern countries and by the way the sun, which barely rises above the horizon, changes our perception of everything.
10:22
The last takes place over the course of a single winter from the first trees to the great top. And that was our first goal with this adaptation, recreating those landscapes and that northern climate.
10:38
So you've spoken about, yeah, the use of light, fog, sound, and their pivotal role in the design and the whole concept and development of this work. And they're so key to the overall experience. And I'd love to hear a bit more about the technology behind the immersive design elements.
11:00
Like you spoke about using audio on headphones, for example, whereas you could have had the audio just in the space without headphones. Yeah, whatever you want to share about the choices with regard to technology and design.
11:17
Well, the show that you saw in Montreal at Festival de France, called White Tout, staged a winter storm in the theater. So, a real white tout that starts on stage and reaches out into the audience space.
11:39
And for this, we developed a scenic device to let the light spread through fog, making the light almost feel touchable. So, with the last, we aim to continue exploring Nordic light. But we wanted to bring the audience closer to the action, placing them at the heart of the experience.
11:59
So we designed an immersive set and planned a song designed to be played through headphones. And this choice of headphones, made by Tomas, was tired of fighting against every sound in the space that we can control.
12:19
Also, the fun of the moving light and everything. So with headphones, it can offer you a very, very more precise sound conception. And when you have headphones, you feel inside the soundscape. You feel very close to the action.
12:43
And the other particularity of our work is something that we also developed for white art and that we keep refined or we keep refining. Refining, it's a device that help us to make the sound and light very interactive.
13:06
So sometimes it's the sound that triggers light effects. And sometimes it's the other way around, which helps us to make the people feel that everything, the elements are very interactive and related as it is in the real life.
13:25
When you feel a storm, this is not sun somewhere and light somewhere else. Everything works together. Thank you. That's a really clear explanation. When I hear you describing it, I just get goosebumps.
13:40
I'm so excited to experience the glass live because I haven't experienced it live. And as you're mentioning, it's so immersive that it's really the way it's designed to be experienced. Your work has featured children's tales and children themselves as performers.
13:59
What is interesting to you about the child's perspective and presence on stage? I believe that in life and on stage, children have a lot to teach us. And it's truly from this point of view that we work with them.
14:15
Their presence on stage is uncompromising. So we must therefore ensure that they have all the conditions to feel free on stage, that they have the space to keep playing as children do. We don't want to work with children and make them become small actors.
14:34
So as you said, many of our previous creation featured children and teenagers. But for the last, the technical aspects are too challenging to include children. It wouldn't be enjoyable. and just too limiting for them.
14:52
So we're working with actors, young actors actually, for some of them this is their first professional contract. But what we keep in that work, but what remains important is our desire to erase this artificial border between the adult world and the children's world.
15:17
When I was little, I thought that one day I would feel like an adult, but that day never came. I'm just, I'm still the same person. I just have a little bit more of responsibilities than when I was 11.
15:32
Fostering, playfulness, strange, strange, fostering playfulness, strangeness and imagination is also part of this responsibility today. Yes. Thank you so much for just giving some more context to your work, providing a little bit more of it.
15:54
So it's nice to hear it personalized through your voice to understand how the company works together. It makes so much sense that the three of you bring this sound lighting and theater, text-based narrative perspectives all into the process simultaneously to devise the work.
16:11
I think it's so clear in seeing the work and what makes it really stand out just with its completely unique perspective, artistic perspective. Thank you so much. I'm so looking forward to it. I know we're recording this interview in November and already half the shows are sold out, even actually before our launch because Seattle that says, yeah, I'm has already launched.
16:41
So hopefully there'll be tickets left by the time people hear this, if it's leading up to the festival. But it just goes to show that I think. people are very intrigued by what you're what you have to offer yeah yes thank you Gabriel it was very nice to talk to you and we're super excited to come to push we heard a lot of good things about the festival and it's it's it's also very exciting to be part of la caesium at the same time so gonna yeah I'm sure we're gonna meet a lot of beautiful people you just heard Gabriel Martin's conversation with Anne-Marie Ouellette of L'Ou De Bein.
17:23
Her show De Glasses or From Ice will be presented at the Push International Performing Arts Festival from January 31st to February 2nd 2025 at the Roundhouse in Vancouver. The festival will run from January 23rd to February 9th.
17:40
I'm Ben Charland and I produced this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.
17:54
And for more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca. And on the next Push Play...
18:09
Our work, I think, looks pretty conceptually serious, you know? And we take it seriously, we build it seriously, but we also joke around and are really silly with each other to make it.
As a bi-cultural artist, our works bring forward interwoven Latin American philosophies and inclusive values to carve space for the futuring of finding unity through our complexity and diversity, thus perpetually encouraging collisions between heterogeneous fields, disciplines and individuals. We aim to democratize the choreographic process as public sources for experimentation and collective knowledge creation.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Andrea joins the conversation from Pittsburgh, ancestral lands of the Seneca in Pittsburgh and Sharpsburg, Adena culture, Hopewell culture, and Monongahela peoples who were later joined by refugees of other tribes (including the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Haudenosaunee tribes, who were all forced off their original land and displaced by European colonists.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:02
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, director of programming at the Push Festival, and today's episode highlights grotesque liberation, death and resurrection, bodies of labor, and more.
00:21
I'm speaking with Andrea Pena, choreographer of Bogota, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 31st and February 1st, 2025. Visceral and transgressive Bogota constructs a brutalist landscape from choreography inspired by Colombia's political and spiritual heritage.
00:40
This raw physical experience of mutation and resurrection explores embodied origins, inherited mythologies and mortality, honing the rebellion of deviant bodies and paying tribute to resilience within the post-colonial era.
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Interested in the depth of human individuality that breaches from a personal disposition as a bi-cultural artist, Pena's approach is known for its difficult choreography as a highly intricate, vulnerable, and somatic raw physicality that engages in deep encounters between the physical body and a highly conceptual research approach.
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With a background in industrial design, her work borrows from visual art practices and spatial qualities of creative making, questioning the body as a material existing in relationship to space and time.
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Here is my conversation with Andrea. There is a JGB beside me, but I am actually on indigenous territories. I'm on the unceded traditional and ancestral territory of the Coast Salish peoples, so the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.
01:45
I am a settler, and I've been, you know, a part of the being a settler is a responsibility to learning and engaging with learning about indigeneity and engaging with contemporary indigenous. issues affecting Indigenous people today.
02:03
And one way that I've been doing that is through the Yellowhead Institute, which you'll hear me plug in quite a bit. And so I'm working through their red paper land back course, which is really encouraging settler folks to reflect on what it means to be living in accordance with Indigenous law and to enact land back by supporting front lines.
02:24
And one thing that really stood out in the lesson, one of the recent lessons from this course is they just put it so clearly that if we really want land back but do nothing about it, we are upholding the liberal fantasy, a belief that you can change the world by simply feeling a certain way.
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And I just think that's really to the point. Andrea, where are you joining the conversation from today? Hello. So I'm actually currently in Pittsburgh. So I'm a bit in transit, stepping out of Montreal for a few days.
02:58
I'm here on the ancestral lands of the people of Adena, Hopewell, Morengohala, and Seneca people here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. Thank you for that. And usually you're in Giorgia, Montreal. Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia, Montreal.
03:20
And so you describe AP&A or Andrea Pena and artists as a millennial company. What does that infer for you? Yeah, I think for me it was really important to situate, you know, AP&A in terms of the fact that it is millennial.
03:39
I mean, you know, I'm in my 30s. A lot of the artists that we work with are also within the same age range. And I think there's something that is social, politically cultural specific to our generation and to the sort of desire or lens or perspective.
03:55
And so I really wanted to kind of, you know, be frontal about that and kind of situate ourselves there. I think in the word millennial or in how I connect to the word, I think I, you know, see myself as a sort of new generation of artists, a new generation of thinkers, of creators, where for me it's really not just about the work, but the how.
04:17
So not just what are we creating? What is the work about? What is the art about? But like how is it being made? I think for me, you know, the choreographic practice is something that really requires a lot of reconsideration and deconstruction.
04:31
And I would go as far as saying like decolonializing the practice itself. I think it's a practice that has certain hierarchies embedded to it, certain ways of seeing. And I and what we're trying to do with APNA is sort of take the responsibility to reflect on what does it mean to do choreography today?
04:50
What does it mean to gather people, to lead people, to build these things? shows? What do the shows talk about? How do they talk about them? What is at stake inside of a work? And then, more importantly, like, how do these people come together in community to build these pieces?
05:08
I think what we're trying or what I've been trying to do with an AP&A and, you know, first it started as something utopic and a goal and little by little, it's reframed itself. But it was really important for me to kind of approach choreographic works from a different lens.
05:24
I mean, I used to be a professional dancer and I think it was important to both bring Bring my own values as somebody who's Latin American Colombian who has indigenous Latin American Backgrounds to bring some of those values into not just how we make her work, but what is a company today?
05:43
so everything from bylaws internal communication things that try to kind of make us reframe and rethink what does Company and leadership mean as well Obviously these things are not always easy because having a company There are certain structures framework systems that you operate under But I think for me that millennial aspect is sort of giving space for those internal tensions to exist and also to reflect on You know,
06:12
what is the future of choreography from today forward? What do we want to build as a community? what do we want to build as a practice for each other for Publix and Yeah, and and kind of what that looks like so it's it's really an amalgamation of a lot of those questions and reflections I think that are simply situated in that word Millennial is like it's today meaning we're looking at the past the history of Choreography in the past the history of companies in the past and trying to reimagine like what do we want this to look like?
06:43
In the future. Yeah, I get it. So excited hearing you speak about this and I remember in one of our first conversations Almost exactly a year ago at par cordonce in Montreal we we thought we had a conversation and you spoke a bit about this as well like how you're How your company is working and how you're thinking about?
06:59
democratizing the choreographic process and as you referenced you've danced with ballet BC and other Other high caliber technical Great. Thank you. Yes Company is with you know, like a more classic hierarchical environment It's quite, you know common as you're mentioning that These companies operate in a certain way.
07:27
So I would love to just hear a little bit more about democratizing the choreographic process like, how does that differ from the norm? And what is the impact on the work itself? So maybe like, what does that look like in the studio and a rehearsal process?
07:41
And is that translated into the finished work? Yeah, I mean, I think for us that kind of, it's a bit twofold. The notion of democratizing is kind of both internally for us as a team, but also externally in terms of community and our public.
07:58
For me, my kind of first goal is how do I de-center the choreographic role? There's a really amazing book that I forget her name. She's a Spanish author and she talked about everything that is the sort of tension between the periphery and the center.
08:14
So, embodiments of the peripheries versus embodiments of the center and the sort of boundaries that lie between the periphery and the center. And I think that's just always something that's kind of, you know, you know, as someone who's immigrated Latin American in Canada, it's tensions that I've always had.
08:31
And so, yeah, I think I became really curious about how do I de-center the choreographic role? I think the choreographer or choreography is sort of this like role that is often put on a pedestal as something that is mysterious and amazing.
08:47
It's like, no choreography is just a lot of trial and error and a lot of failure. And you happened to choose some ideas that you feel like works in community with your people and you put a show, you know?
08:57
But it's often, very often do we talk about the fact that it's just trial and error and that it's not that mystic, you know, or like genius. And so, yeah, I kind of was fascinated to like, how do we de-center that role?
09:12
And, you know, we're not a collective. AP&A is not a collective. There's companies that work as in a collective infrastructure. For us, we're not a collective, but I see myself sort of as like a facilitator, team leader.
09:26
For sure, I'm proposing a project or a concept or a research idea that I'm bringing to the table of my collaborators. But what we've realized that we've been doing kind of little by little through time, I would say is to de-center the choreographic process.
09:43
One of the things we've done is sort of democratize the dramaturgical practice. I've been working with the same sort of group of artists, both from designers to performers for many, many, many years.
09:56
And together, we've sort of been building these sort of hybrid practices that allow all of us to hold a dramaturgical key in what we do, meaning that it gives us like codes, information, angles to kind of each one of us, them, also to bring the sort of own agency to the work, questions, point of views, perspective.
10:20
A lot of the times, the dramaturgy, which is the sort of internal thread or like overstating. structuring intelligence or network of information of a piece is really between the choreographer and the dramaturge.
10:32
And we've sort of tried to sort of evenly, not evenly, but like spread that reflection across the team, meaning that we really prioritise like, you know, even if sometimes we're a team of 25 people, hour and a half conversations after rehearsal to make sure that this the sort of conceptual frameworks, ideas, political standings, questions, reflections are shared across everybody and that those conversations are,
10:57
yeah, like approached from a very collective point of view, even with our designers as well. So I think it allows, I call it like a sort of ecosystem. When we create works, it allows the sort of ecosystem to create a work together, specifically building Bogota.
11:16
I remember saying to the team, I really want to build a piece from the back door. And everyone's like, what the hell does that mean? I was like, I don't know. Just metaphorically, it feels right. Like, how do we build a piece from the back door?
11:28
How do we build a piece from the bottom up? What does that mean? What does that look like? And through two years of research, what we did was we realized that together we were sort of building tools, systems, language, putting words onto things we've done for years to help us understand the sort of tools that we've been co-building together.
11:49
And so in order to do that, you know, we, I mean, specifically for Bogota, we had about two years of research before we actually started Bogota or knew that that's what we were doing. It was about two years, year and a half of trying to research practices and methods that would allow us to be all equipped with tools that gave the team agency and the ability for everybody to kind of bring in their point of view.
12:17
I don't know if you heard me what I was saying about trying to create a piece from the back door, from the bottom up. And so it was how do we, what are those tools? What are those practices? What are those methods in order for us to build a piece from the back door or from the bottom up?
12:33
And, you know, intrinsically, some of that stuff may have looked like, you know, having like prioritizing time for conversation. That's something we do a lot, is that the dancers and the artists, performers are very much in tune in line with everything that's happening in the production side from conceptual choices, artistic choices, materials choices.
12:53
There's a lot of conversations that we have as a team where we share, you know, what is at stake in the work? What are the sort of social political questions of the work? How do people feel? I think for myself as well, I realized that if for me to build a work and be this facilitator as a team leader, I also had to get really comfortable with being vulnerable.
13:16
And I think that sometimes the choreographic role were expected to be the with the answers and it's often that I come to my team and I'm like guys I feel really overwhelmed we're making work about the Anthropocene what does that mean who are we to make a work about the Anthropocene like and to share those vulnerabilities um those discomforts those insecurities places where I don't have answers I have no idea so that together we can find answers and together we can build uh doesn't have to be a homogenous point of view but build a common language and a common understanding to have a direction together that holds a space for multiple points of view so yeah we've been building different practices um we work a lot on trying to use language it's strange but like we work a lot with Post-its a lot with like not just about the creation itself but trying to name how we work so that we're all aware of what are the tools we've been developing together can we put language on those tools so that um Yeah,
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people can feel empowered, like here's this random tool that we're using, but this tool means this to me, even if that means something else. But we have a common understanding. So trying to build ways that we can share, I think, choice making.
14:33
Can you give an example of a tool? For example, I think one thing that will help make sense of that is so I finished my master's last year. It's a master's in design and it's a master's that looks at how the choreographic practice is actually situated within the everyday built environment.
14:53
So like for me, a chair, a handle, a car, anything that is the built environment is the sort of choreographic proposition that our body has to interact with. And I realize that a lot of the times our bodies are interacting with the built environment, but they're not necessarily in a negotiation.
15:11
And so a lot of my work, choreographically, are these tools are about putting systems of negotiation in place, which for me means the position for two people, two things, two entities to propose their own point of view and actually have a sort of push and pull, meaning a negotiation or where we're not just interacting or interpreting or receiving or reacting, but there's actually a negotiation.
15:34
So, for example, some of those tools we call it like an example of a tool is like a container state that comes to mind. So where we use a lot of words in creation. So, for example, the container could be a word like.
15:53
I'm trying to find a reference like grotesque and the state is maybe liberation. And so the body is in a container of grotesque and the individual is trying to find a state of liberation. And so what we're trying to do is we kind of put these two words together and the artists are exploring what does it mean to be in a container of grotesque and in a state of liberation.
16:14
That doesn't for me or we play with these sort of tools because. creates a sort of language that we understand what we're playing with, but the interest is not the succession of that. It's not how well is it received, how well is it literal, it's just kind of being able to see a person in negotiation with these two elements and the point of view that is brought forward.
16:37
We also have things like we've named it like all supports one, one supports all and those are just like tools where we know okay whatever situation we're in choreographically, what does it mean to be in a situation where one is supporting all or all are supporting one.
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So trying to name sort of bigger picture tools where it's vague enough that there's room for interpretation and for a situation to guide what is happening in that moment, but clear enough I think in what we're just in our own comprehension together of these things so that we can move forward in a direction.
17:12
So a lot of the works are built with these sort of larger picture tools that were yeah trying to find language for. Thank you that's really fascinating to just get a little more clarity about what that means and it's like so rich already with imagery.
17:30
You describe Bogota as queering death or that one aspect of the work is queering death and when we met and had our conversation last year you also introduced me to Sarah Ahmed's queer phenomenology and I'm wondering if you can talk about what queer as a verb means to you, to your practice, to Bogota specifically.
17:55
So I think in that notion of you know both also millennial artists the APNA is the team is predominantly queer doesn't mean everybody has to be your is queer but there's a big part of from the people that work in production to designers to the performers to our grand writers are people who identify as queer which for me means without defining it because we always say like who are we to define what queer it is what is a queer aesthetic that's not the goal like it's queer it for us is more of a lens a point of view like glasses that you put on that that you see the world in a certain way so definitely we use a lot the term queering in APNA.
18:36
I was recently talking to Jonathan Sosier designer and he's like you know every time I'm thinking about the sonography I feel that the way I think about the materiality is how am I on the edge or how am I queering this materiality what does it mean to queer that materiality it's a very metaphorical metaphysical word but I think we try to approach from lighting to sonography to costumes to our writing like how do we queer and in Bogota specifically and in the notion of like looking at death I didn't know we were going to make a piece about death or I didn't know that was going to be what I was going to propose to the team but I started being fascinated with death as a notion of like cycles of transformation and deaths outside of maybe more western notions of death like the end of life,
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but rather looking at death as like the multiple deaths and rebirths that we have in our lifetime, like in a human lifetime here on this earth, and other alternative notions of what those cycles mean.
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So that was kind of a way of queering that question. And then specifically, somehow, this notion of death and life cycles brought me back to Bogota, my hometown, and I've never made a work that is super rooted in my culture in such a tangible way and my ancestors and the place where I was born.
20:06
But I realized that a lot of the history of Colombia is rooted in these notions of different cycles of life and from the colonial era, you know, like the colonization and taking a lot of our ancestral heritage to contemporary notions of life and death, to the way we mythologize life and death.
20:28
I don't know if you've heard of magical realism, but in Colombia, magical realism is both in literature, but it's like extremely rooted into everyday life stories and ways of living. And through this mythological research, I became fascinated with what I found out is the Latin American Baroque or the Andean Baroque.
20:55
And Baroque paintings are all about the Renaissance, death, rebirth, resurrection, all of these European perspectives on the notion of death. And in Latin America, when Latin America was colonized, a lot of churches and paintings, obviously all of this infrastructure came with, but a lot of the craftsmen and artisanal people of Colombia who were building these things, not just Colombia, but other countries in Latin America,
21:26
started to hybridize a lot of these Baroque architectures, paintings that were being imposed by infusing them with Latin American ancestral, I would say, aesthetics, qualities, and narratives. So for example, in Bogota, you have a small church that is super Baroque, extremely exaggerated, covered in gold, but all the paintings of these religious Catholic saints that the local people painted are actually painted in the backdrop of the Amazon.
21:59
So you have these religious saints that are coming from colonization, but they're being painted in the Amazon. And so you have these sort of tensions between what is local and what is being imposed and the subverting of the Baroque by the Latin American people.
22:15
So this was really fascinating for us. realize that the Baroque is not just something European but it was something that was subverted subverted many many years ago and in that we were thinking wow well what does it mean to queer the Baroque as well like a lot of the times the Baroque representation and everything that is religious is obviously has a long-standing history with queer bodies and notions of body so we also took a lot of these paintings and we tried to queer those paintings so find ways of representing hinting at playing with these hybrid Baroques but through the queer body what is it i mean we have a movement called the Double Gate Jesus and it's two men on top of each other like back to chest in a sort of Jesus position in this really beautiful tender embrace so trying to kind of subvert these notions through queering of image of like images that are so embedded in our social cultural history and I think Colombia in particular a country that is sort of highly influenced by Catholic culture,
23:25
Catholic religion and how that's intention in the country itself. To imagine this sort of queer landscape and when we talk about death you know you're asking me about queering death Bogota is also this sort of we call it a sort of post-human and post-colonial space where we're trying to imagine you know what does it mean what is the future of of a colonial I don't think we're in post-colonial times at all but like our role as artists is to imagine what this looks like and imagine these sort of places so we're using I always say Bogota is a piece about Bogota but it's not about Bogota Bogota I'm using it as a sort of trampoline that is very personal to me my culture my ancestry to talk about like post-colonial landscapes and what that looks like and how do we queer those imaginaries by how bodies inhabit each other in space and for us to queer some of that stuff was also like there's a lot of chaos and complexity in Bogota and it was important that we create visual aesthetic choreographic spaces that make space for complexity and non-uniformity and non-homogeneity so that we as people I think society is not really comfortable with complexity we really like order and we like to understand and so for us as artists like how do we make space for us to sit with complexity on stage as a way of building different visual landscapes that become part of social culture After Push Balibisi will be presenting choreography they've commissioned from you and I would love to hear you talk about the through lines of your choreographic inquiry so if people see Bogota and then your work with Balibisi what might they see as an ASIMS that carries through?
25:17
I think it's a really good question. I mean, you know, I'm really excited to work with Ballet BC. It's like coming back to like one, a place where I started working. So it's like a massive full cycle and we've never been to Vancouver and Vancouver was my home for such a long time.
25:30
So I'm so excited for all of this. I think it's wonderful that the artists of Ballet BC can come see APNA, you know, because we work on a piece for three years, we're able to build practices, methods, kinship and ecology that helps us dream of these other universes that are pluriversal and complex.
25:53
And that's like in the, it's in the ecritsir, like it's in the choreographic writing. Of course, bringing that to Ballet BC is a challenge in five, six weeks, but that's the goal is like, how much of that point of view can we bring to a company who does repertoire?
26:10
How much of those ways of working and seeing can... Can I transfer and bring into conversation with the artists of Bali, BC? I think in particular, one of the things that really excites me and we were talking with Mehdi about this the other day is I think this notion of negotiation for me really comes from my design background.
26:32
So we were trying to imagine how can I bring a sort of design, let's call it loosely intervention or a design situation that allows for the work that we'll do at Bali, BC to have some form of negotiation.
26:48
So that's kind of what we're thinking about is trying to imagine, I call it loosely a design intervention not to give too much away because it's there but I don't know if I'm gonna go in that direction but something that allows for the choreographic work at Bali, BC to be a negotiation between these people.
27:03
The goal is to make a piece on the full company so it's a lot of performers to transfer some of those ideas over. But yeah, I think that would be it. My goal is to sort of transfer these notions of negotiation and also the sort of hybrid practices between design and dance movement.
27:23
I always say for us, sonography is not, I never call it sonography. Usually I call it more like landscapes of interaction because it's important to see how the body is in dialogue with its environment.
27:36
So we're trying to find what's possible to do with Bali, BC in that regards. And with regard to design, because yeah, you've mentioned you're a design artist and that's a big part of your practice. And in Volkata, you reference Baroque which we've spoken about, brutalism.
27:56
Are these aesthetics thematic to your work or are those really specific to Volkata? No, actually they're really, it's interesting we were, there's currently actually a research group at UCAM, the University of Quebec Amor et al that is studying like AP&A practices.
28:16
So it's really interesting from like a ecological sonography from a decolonial dramaturgy with Angelie Rilke to two students in the theatre department. There's a sort of research group that is meeting for a year to understand the sort of decolonial and design practices of AP&A and what are like you asked me to name some tools it's like we're trying to name these things so that we can also democratize like the things we create to like build discourse around practice like what are artists making today in 2024 and what is choreography and how can we also make some of those thoughts tools trial and error available at large.
28:58
So there's a an interesting group working on that at UCAM at the moment and they asked me, they were like, what do you mean by industrial? And me, Ugo, the lighting designer in Jonathan, the sonography were like, whoa, we've never, we just take that word for granted, because we've been working for so long together.
29:16
And it was interesting, because I said, for me, the industrial refers to the past and the future. And it's a word why I'm trying to encompass both past and future notions of the industrial, where obviously the past is like the industrial revolution and the industrialization of humanity, where like, you know, we live in a very industrialized society, whether we're aware of it or not, you know, from everything from cars nine to five,
29:42
like the industrial revolution really affected the sort of mechanized lifestyle of humanity. And everything that is industrial, we call that also the body of labor. So in APNA, we name different bodies.
29:55
So we have bodies of mythology, bodies of labor, bodies of like bodies of anthropology, bodies of non-human, like we try to name different bodies. So those are also just to insert the tools. And this notion of bodies of labor for me really comes from Colombia, like a lot of the countries that exist in the peripheries, right, countries that are not the center like North America, but a lot of countries of the periphery,
30:21
you see a lot of bodies of labor, right, you have a lot of industries that are still active, even in Quebec or in Canada, like the moment you step out of Montreal and you go to Rimsky or like these outside cities, you see industry and you see these bodies who through industrialization, they become bodies of labor.
30:39
So for us, the word industrial hints at this sort of body of labor, and also the resilience and the humility of most of those bodies of labor that exist outside of the center or the city center. And at the same time, now for us, the word industrial also is sort of hinting at everything that is the artificial.
30:58
So let's call it like the post-human and thinking about the digital environment, the digital era, artificial. intelligence we just did a piece called replica that looks at the sort of notions of replication of body through time and because i was quite quite fascinated with like how we represent bodies in the digital sphere today with the metaverse and tiktok and all this stuff um so yeah the industrial sort of teeters between everything that is this body of labor that comes from the industrialization and things that are maybe most more post-human or artificial or artificial intelligence um in terms of digital digital culture thank you andrea we are very blessed to have you coming you and apna the artist you work with coming to share this work with us here i am so thrilled i'm so excited um and i imagine that our listeners are too after hearing you paint this rich picture of the kind of influences and tools that you're using to devise this work no we're super excited i mean i think for me coming back to vancouver like i mentioned is It's quite precious.
32:05
There's a community there that I still feel connected to. We haven't been to Vancouver yet. And I think, again, just to be in conversation through practice, I think is really, really interesting for all of us.
32:20
You just heard Gabriel Martin's conversation with Andrea Pena. Her show, Bogota, will be presented at the Push International Performing Arts Festival on January 31st and February 1st, 2025 at the Vancouver Playhouse.
32:34
The festival will run from January 23rd to February 9th. I'm Ben Charland, and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Trisha Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.
32:53
And for more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca. And on the next Push Play.
33:09
When I was little, I thought that one day I would feel like an adult, but that day never came. I'm just I'm still the same person. I just have a little bit more of responsibilities than when I was 11.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver. Mirko joins the conversation from Denmark.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:02
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's director of programming, and today's episode highlights spaces of liminality and devising systems of responsiveness.
00:18
I'm speaking with Mirko Guido, artist behind All That Remains, which is being presented at the Push Festival, January 23rd and 24th, 2025. This choreographic work unfolds across a stage scattered with industrial debris and organic matter, where performers engage with their sculptural surroundings in a corporeal topography that collapses the boundary between inner landscapes and external realities.
00:43
A richly textured work at the crossroads of dance, installation, and sound performance, this piece asks us how we, as a species fallen out of sync with our environment, can open up new potentialities of relation and becoming.
01:00
Mirko Guido is an in-house artist at Bora Bora Dance and Visual Theatre. He holds a master's degree in new performative practices from DOC, Stockholm University of the Arts, and is a former dancer with the Kalberg Ballet.
01:14
Mirko Guido's distinctive choreographic lens, shaped by a diverse history of working in theatres, galleries, and public spaces, brings to the fore a dynamic engagement with today's anthropocentric existential dilemmas.
01:27
Here's my conversation with Mirko. Just before we hit record, we were acknowledging that it's so easy to get caught up in discussions around all the logistical pieces, so it's nice to actually, in the lead-up to the festival, sit down and really get to talk about the work itself and your practice, which is a real treat for me, and I know it's a treat for our listeners as well.
01:50
I really appreciate it, because I think, as you were saying, we get so sometimes overwhelmed by the practicalities, and that you... and their organization of making this happen. So to give space and time for us to connect on another level and talk about the practices and the work and also give the possibility to people to have another entry to the work.
02:19
I think it's a great initiative. So thank you. Thank you. And we're going to get right into it shortly. I do want to acknowledge that I am in this conversation today on the stolen traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples.
02:34
So these are the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. I am a settler on these lands, and part of my responsibility as a settler is ongoing thinking about the implications of that. And those who've been listening to this podcast series will have heard me reference the Yellowhead Institute, which is an incredible resource for thinking indigenous perspective on policy and perspectives on policy that are affecting indigenous peoples today.
03:05
And they have a wonderful online course around Land Back and their red paper on the Land Back movement. And I think it's really important that just to talk about the roots of the Land Back movement, and this is something I'm educating myself on right now, and just really being clear that despite reconciliation rhetoric of contemporary politicians that Canada is still a colonial country.
03:34
And that over the years through policy, law, and interpretation, indigenous people and their authority have been attacked by land tenure and economic systems meant to benefit non-indigenous Canadians.
03:49
And each time indigenous people challenge the state of affairs, for example, with land defense actions, they are met with violence and criminalization in the name of public interest. And so I think that I'm just really appreciating the clarity with which this is articulated in the Yellowhead Institute's red paper.
04:13
Mirko, where are you joining the conversation from today? I am calling from, or I'm in this call from Denmark, which is in Europe, in the Scandinavian region. And I live here, I've been living here for the past three and a half years, more or less.
04:34
And Denmark is a land that has been mostly inhabited by various Germanic peoples since the ancient times. But I... I am Italian, before living in Denmark, I was living in Sweden for many years and also in Germany and Switzerland.
04:59
And yeah, but specifically I come from Lechke and I actually think, which is a small town in the South of Italy. I don't know if you see the boot Italy that looks like a boot then at the end of the hill in the South part facing, facing the East towards Greece, basically.
05:24
There is this small town called Lechke, which is in ancient times was called Terra d'Otranto or Salento, Salento or Terra d'Otranto. And so from that perspective, I'm actually, I'm routed to Mesape, which is the...
05:44
the first people, let's say, from the Terra d'Otranto and Salento. But I also have to acknowledge that we're also inextricably rooted to Greeks and Byzantines and many other populations that have passed by the Salento over the centuries.
06:11
And this is quite striking because it's something that you can notice in the language, in the culture, in the crafts, and even in the people's feature. So from that perspective, it's a very rich and diverse land.
06:30
And I wanted to acknowledge, because I was thinking about this, that among the various populations that have passed by, there are also the Normans, which the Normans were intermingling between Norse Viking settlers and locals from West France.
06:50
And so perhaps there is an older connection that runs through me with Scandinavia. And also, as you can see, people cannot see it, but you can see that I have red hair, which is not exactly a typical hair color in the Mediterranean area.
07:14
So yeah. So this is some funny anecdotes also that I'm sharing with you now. Yeah, thank you. I think it's always fascinating to think about the layered history of peoples. I mean, unfortunately, often in the context of conquest, sometimes just in trade.
07:37
But this is like the layers of cultural exchange and then sometimes cultural exchange. domination but like just how layered that history is in any one place if we go far enough back in time and in some places in the world more than others in terms of the different types of peoples who've come and settled over generations.
08:01
Thanks so much for sharing that. We're going to talk about all that remains. So you've described all that remains as not just a performance but an urgent call to consciousness. Can you elaborate on that?
08:14
Yeah, thank you. Well, we live in times in which the conditions around ourselves, environmental conditions, social and political conditions are changing very drastically and also at a very fast speed.
08:44
So I think we just need to pay attention. That's my idea, that's my thought. We need to pay attention to the changes that are happening and not only an attention towards that, but also an acknowledgement and awareness that we live in a mutual affect with our surrounding.
09:14
And these ideas of attention and presence and the knowledge in this mutual affect is exactly the principles upon which all the tremendous is built in the way that the performers work with their bodies in relation to the sculptures, in relation to sound, in relation to the lights and how they attend the moment and the present moment and how they are in the space of listening and fluctuating between how their internal landscapes and external realities,
10:01
they co-form one another. And in a way, I would say that that's also what the performance, what all that remains wants to do towards the public, towards the audience. It is asking also for the public to be present and to pay attention and to, not only to what's happening on stage, but also how that affects their internal, emotional and physical responses.
10:38
Yeah, you've spoken about your work being in dynamic engagement with today's Anthropocentre. existential dilemmas and I really feel that that's the call of this work for me how it speaks to this kind of anxiousness or tension you know you spoke about the wider context of the global upheavals that we're experiencing but this is through the body the fact that it's it speaks to this without words and so while there are bodies humans on stage as the main actors the fact that they're expressing in a way that feels very unmediated and for me interpreting the work so not heavily informed by a specific dance technique you know for my eye anyways that they're in relation to their environment in a way that kind of brings them into a more like animalistic context or like de-centering or the ways that humans have existed in nature that have created the Anthropocene as we know it feels like it is deconstructed in some way on stage.
11:49
So I'm really curious how you talk about the internal realities of the artist on stage, the bodies in conversation with the external environment. Can you talk a little bit about the devising process?
12:05
How do you get to that place with the artist? What was the creative process like when exploring that? There was a moment in the process when we started to work with all those objects and we had even more objects that we spent with the performers.
12:23
We spent a lot of time. So we were working on a very long open scores, we will call them, in which we would have some basic principles that were crucial for our research. But we would not know how we would structure the time and the events, we were calling them events inside of that score.
12:52
So basically what I'm talking about is that we would do like a two, two and a half hours open score in which we would work with some themes and some principles of relation with the objects, relation with the space, relation with one another.
13:08
And that formed very much for us a particular experience of time and a particular sensitivity to expectations of resisting the desire for certainty and for immediately producing a form and resolving something and rather stayed more into a state of...
13:44
of sensitive listening that is not only perceptual or somatic, it's also material, it's special, it has many, many layers. And that process formed very much a particular tone and attitude in the work.
14:06
So it wasn't pre-decided how we were going to, let's say, how we were going to look and how we were going to move, right? It emerged throughout this experience of staying in the space with those objects for a long time and then, of course, being driven by some themes and some choreographic ideas that we had, such as that of creating sanctuaries or diving in pooling into our internal landscapes, almost creating a small ritual of reconnecting with our ancestral forces,
14:49
and then bringing those forces back in the space, right? But we were doing this for like a space of two, two and a half hours without exactly knowing where something was gonna happen. And that was the devising process.
15:07
And then later on, then we started to have to make decisions because we had to bring it on stage within a certain amount of time and so forth. But that experience, I think it's very crucial for how the work came into being.
15:27
And I would like to add something important about this space of waiting and staying with the moment and staying with the listening. Because at that time, I had come across a fantastic lecture by Joakim Olafeh.
15:51
And he's a philosopher, a writer and activist. Yes, big inspiration. And actually, I'll just pipe in that last year, it was on one of our artists, Cherish Menza, who introduced and actually mentioned him on this podcast and introduced us to his work.
16:08
Yeah, amazing. It was a fantastic lecture, very inspiring. And like it really like it's not just inspiring, it really moved something for us in the work. Like it became a crux that turned and redirected many of our intentions.
16:25
And the lecture, I want to read the title because the title, I think it's beautiful in itself and is the spirituality of cracks and the gift of failure at world endings. And And in this lecture he proposes a notion of the wound not as something that is to be immediately repaired so that we can go back to what it was, right?
16:52
So that we can ignore that something drastic has happened, something violent in some way for the body, for the flesh has happened, right? And then we just close it and go back and we repair it. But in that moment he proposes the idea of the wound rather as a phenomenon that is trying to make us notice that something is not functioning.
17:19
And so perhaps we need to linger in there. We need to wait a little bit longer and try to sense what other directions we can take, what other possibilities are there, what is the space of the wound, right?
17:33
And... And so for me, in that moment, the space of the wound was physically the space in which we were, in which we were like, was the space in which we were working in with our bodies and with the objects.
17:51
Thank you. And you talk about objects. So you combine an advanced physical practice with meticulously curated visual, spatial, material, and intellectual context. In all that remains, you collaborated with sculptor Sorin Engsted.
18:08
Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, Sorin. And you also collaborated with Sorin on your piece once again, Sisyphus. Can you talk about that collaboration? How did you come to work together and what direction the research took specifically for all that remains, the evolution of the design of the sculptures?
18:28
Yeah, so actually, when Sorin and I worked together for once again, Sisyphus, we were already planning to work on all that remains. But at that moment, I was working at Aros Art Museum, which is a museum here in Aros.
18:48
And I was working on a durational performance called The Longest Gap. And at that time, I invited, so we were already talking with Sorin about all that remains, and I invited him to just hang around in the atelier there at the museum.
19:08
And so the once again, Sisyphus came about rather spontaneously. He made this giant inflatable ball covered with aluminum foliar. And I was carrying this, you know, I have to say that the Aros Art Museum is made like a many different floors that go, I don't know maybe it's like five or six floors and there is this like beautiful staircase, a spiral staircase that runs through the middle of the museum that it really gives this like sense of like a spine of the of the building and but also is made with a very typical Scandinavian Danish architecture where the space is very open you can see all this like the directions of the space are very visible a lot of crossing directions of each of different floors but it's also quite open so you can also see through different floors from balconies and so forth and then I was I was basically going from the bottom floor all the way up with this with this giant giant pole and I think that I was I was disrupting in some ways the flow of people moving.
20:41
And, you know, like when there is a lot of people at the museum, they're going, they go through the museum from one place to another in a very consumption driven way of seeing artworks, right? From one gallery to another.
20:56
And then all of a sudden there's this guy with this giant ball that has to pass. And so it's like kind of disrupting their flow and it's redirecting their attention. And it's also regathering attention in a different and unexpected way while I was in some ways like in Sisyphus being punished to repeat this action over and over and then bring up this aluminum board.
21:27
But Sorin and I, we knew each other already. We met earlier. By chance, because our daughters were going to the same school, in the same class. And then I first met his wife, Diana Baldon, which was the director at the time of the Ors constelles.
21:50
And then I met him and I came across his work. And at that moment, I was already working and researching for all that remains, but I was more in a phase in which I was more busy just with the idea, with the concept of the space of liminality.
22:13
I was very intrigued by this like being between the before and after. But then meeting his work, I was particularly struck by one of his installation work, which is, it's called if the future. isn't bright, at least it's colorful.
22:42
But what it did for me, meeting his work and talking with him about it, is that in that moment of the process, it really like situated in a different way, in a more concrete way, what that space in between was for me.
23:02
And in a very concrete terms, it was a space among remnants, rests between a world that was before and a world that is yet to come. And so, and that actually, before earlier we were talking about the lecture of Bayou Como Lafe, which happened in...
23:31
in almost in the same period. So those two elements, those two encounters, have really directed the work in a specific direction. Yeah, and Sorin, maybe I have to specify, because Sorin's sculptures, he's working with material coming from industrial waste, and he makes like hybrid assemblages that are like this kind of like a, I mean, it's not only industrial waste, it's also working with different kind of like a found objects.
24:08
And that then he transforms through craft interventions. And we have a really exciting collaboration taking place for these Vancouver performances of all that remains. So fourth year students of Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts production and design program will create artistic responses to Sorin's work re-imagining and producing the sculptures for these local performances.
24:37
So this experiment reflects your ecological and socio-cultural approach to sustainability, because it was, you know, you who kind of brought this idea forward as a possibility. Can you talk about, well, I would actually like to hear a couple things.
24:53
First, let's talk a little bit more about the parameters that you are offering these students. So based on Sorin's work, you know, you talked about hybridity, what are kind of the things that the, yeah, the fundamental parameters that you're offering these students.
25:10
And then afterwards, I want to talk a little bit more about your practice of local collaboration. One of the things that is very important is that the materials that they are going to work with. And yeah, I also have to mention that it's a very exciting a collaboration for me because it speaks to this notion and practice of responsiveness on another level.
25:44
And of course, it also brings some kind of like a level of uncertainty, but I think it's also a lot of potentiality. And that's what it is exactly to stay in that or to create even the conditions to experience that and to work with that.
26:06
And this is a very concrete situation. And I'm really enthusiastic about this. And so go back to the parameters. So there is something about, of course, the type of materials that they use. And this is also, again, exciting, because instead of coming with our objects from Denmark to Vancouver to perform, instead, what are the found objects there, the locally found objects, and what is the the perspective of industrial waste material combined with other synthetic and natural materials,
26:57
right? Like there is some elements that Soren worked with that are like, for instance, coming from the sea, like there is a piece of driftwood, which is fantastic, or there is like a sea sponge and other such elements.
27:14
But so this is one important thing. And then there is another aspect that it was, for me, very important in the way Soren approached the work. Soren is a visual artist, so he has a strong sense of the object, the object that is self-standing because it is exhibited and people are going to experience it, right?
27:40
And but this is like, there is something that is important for me in relation to that, because in the choreographic environment, for me, these objects, they need to be, they need to have their own integrity, so that so that we can activate the responsive level.
28:00
So they're not just objects that are there for us to be manipulated. Not at all, they have they have objects that they have, they need to have some kind of energy and they need to have to be self-standing and have particular textures, particular colors, shapes, weight, and different type of materialities, right?
28:19
And there is something that I always love to quote Sorin for this, that when we went around to find some of the objects that Ben was going to work with, he calls it going for cherry picking, which is a funny, funny term when we go in, in this like recycling, massive space for industrial waste, right, because you have all these materials, but he's going there and he's like picking his cherries.
28:46
And that basically means that within like he really finds these ready mains. So within like hundreds of pieces of the same type of material, he really picks the one that somehow has a form or as an energy that that it's it's it's speaking in some ways and then he carries it and and he works with them with craft intervention that can be from coloring to inserting other elements and to create this hybrid,
29:18
hybrid sculptures and and another element that that is important that I'm trying to communicate then with the with the student review of the universities that this concept of hybridity is for me it has to do with again this state of a state of a space in between right over in this case perhaps it's like it's formal but it's also temporal right it's like we can kind of understand and grasp what the object was or but but it is in a process of transformation it is becoming something else but we don't but that transformation is not completed yet and so I think there is something very beautiful and even poetic poetic about about that there is something about that in the process with with Sodom it was interesting how he himself was surprised by how those sculptures will transform in relation to the to the to the bodies of the performers or in the how that even later on how the whole space will transform and then also the experience of the sculptures will change and and he was surprised in a good in a good way but also it was challenging for him because he's he was not so used to have people handling the objects in that way so there was also a process of like securing and and figuring out what is too dangerous or what it needs to be a little bit more stable and so forth so these are these are notions that are also gonna be transmitted to that to them to the students and at the university and and also an invitation for them to experience them physically so to not only look at the sculpture for how it appears but also to how it feels in their hands and on their bodies because then that that can suggest something to the development of the objects.
31:24
Yeah, I'm so excited for this project. And the dance department students will have a chance to work with you and the objects as well to kind of understand your devising process. So super, I want to be in the room.
31:36
I'm going to sneak in. But so yeah, this also, you have a practice of working in collaboration with local communities in different ways, at least with your previous project Museum of Tellers. So I'm curious about, yeah, how this fits in with your your practice.
32:03
Yeah, I'm like, for me, my choreographic work, I, I became more and more aware of my needs through my own. I don't know if it's a need, it's a drive. probably, to move through different contexts. So I work in between theaters, but also art galleries and museums and public spaces.
32:30
And I have different practices that go from physical practices, but also interdisciplinary or interdisciplinary projects and even publications and participatory practices also sometimes. So I work with people, with local people or non-professionals in different ways.
32:59
And this drive for me to move through different contexts has to do with an interest that I have in understanding in every different space, how can I myself understand what can choreography be and what can choreography do in different contexts and in different situations.
33:26
So I'm always working on how to devise system of responsiveness. So that's my, let's say, bottom part of the work. So that preconceived notions and conventional structures, they are replaced or interrogated at least.
33:56
And my own view on the relation between the materials that exist within a choreographic environment, it's more of the coexistence of multiple processes. And how are these processes talking to one another?
34:14
When working with participatory practices, This is then you were mentioning the Museum of Tellers and that was a project that was very dear to me but it was also heavily affected by the COVID. It happened in times of COVID and the pandemic and later on by the fact that I was moving from Sweden to Denmark.
34:44
So initially that process was focused on a small city in the South of Stockholm and in Sweden. And the idea was to make an intergenerational work. So to bring into dialogue young kids with elderly people.
35:04
And the interest there for me was because Soderthali was one of these like small towns that exist outside of the capital are becoming everywhere what they call sort of a parking, a parking town. And that means that basically people are just like staying there for a little while and then they leave.
35:27
And it's becoming more and more something, places like that are growing. So there is like a kind of disconnection between the elderly and the youngs and then for me was an idea of bringing them together.
35:44
So the main practice that I was proposing there was through interviews, practices of interviews and conversation. But I also have to say that the work has transformed because to do an intergenerational work in times of COVID was really a bad timing.
36:04
So that over time it transformed into another type of form. But that even that transformation going from an intergenerational participatory work into other forms and finally becoming what we called a participatory audio poem, even that transformation is exactly this, it goes in line with this way of working of trying to understand and trying to relate to the circumstances, the conditions and how do we respond and reform under those situation and what can we affect and how do we become affected by.
36:57
Yeah and it's clear that social inquiry is such an important part of your work or the themes that you're working with are much bigger than yourself, looking at the anthropocene and existential questions and in the context of.
37:15
global crises and just to name a couple of the things that have come up and how you describe your own work. But your body is also sometimes part of your practice. So you're a dancer, you've been a member of renowned companies such as the Kalberg Ballet.
37:32
I worked with a variety of choreographers, Deborah Hay, Benoit Le Chambre, who has been informative for my own practice, having trained as a dancer in Montreal. Crystal Pite, of course, you know, everybody here knows Crystal's name, and we'll be excited to know that.
37:52
Alexander Ekman and many others. So, and you were part of the original cast of All That Remains. So I would love to hear about what is the place of your own body in your current artistic practice. Yeah, I mean, it's been really like a great, great variety of choreographers that have informed and provided with a wide range of embodied perspectives on dance.
38:24
And each one of them like a very specific angle and perspective. But part of the process for me in this, like, of this body that accumulates all this perspective, it's also being a space of disorientation, right?
38:44
Because they're so diverse. When we move, like when we talk from like crystal pie to the wallachamp, or from Debra Hei to your one in gear, or, or my check or even more classical forms and tense the author and experimental forms, right?
39:01
And it does create like a sense of disorientation in some ways. But then perhaps that's also what at some point I decided to embrace. And, and, and, and to rather, you know, Umberto, Umberto Eco, there is a passage in one of his one interview from Umberto Eco, where he calls disorientation, a cultural moment, in the sense that disorientation is the moment in which we have to rewire our directions,
39:38
right? So something else becomes understood. So we have to give up something and we have to, we acknowledge something else and we redirect ourselves, right? And, and I guess there is something that about that that's profoundly speaks to me, perhaps even on like, on a personal, on a personal level.
40:00
And, and so that's, I guess, what I embraced in my own physical practice that of like, what I was mentioning before, resisting the compulsion for certainty, and cultivate spaces of temporary disorientation and reorientation.
40:19
And so that has allowed me to bring the given forms and formats and the known formats and their scrutiny. So I think whatever I do right now, I still dance sometimes, a bit less. And as you said, I was, you know, I was part of the, I was on stage for, with all the females.
40:48
And now I'm not, but Even though I'm more dedicated to the development of choreographic practices and the position I take right now is that to think out on fault, this choreographic devices. For me, I'm still working from a movement perspective, right?
41:19
And not that of a pure designer perspective. And so for me, it's still very embodied the way, I think, the systems of responsiveness within the mechanism of the choreographic practice and also the working with the very physical practice, of course.
41:41
But it is more of a position of facilitation, you know, like of a listener, because when I work with so many different mediums and also collaborators, it does become a space of listening and finding ways to calibrate that dialogue, but also to accept that I would like to calibrate also what I can control and with what I cannot control.
42:10
And that's kind of the basic mantra also of my practice. But I think it's still like a very embodied and sensible space that I work from. Thank you so much, Mirko. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you today.
42:30
Thank you, Gabrielle, for giving me the opportunity. It's also been such a pleasure for me. And I look so much forward. You just heard Gabriel Martin's conversation with Mirko Guido. All that remains will be presented at the PUSH International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, B.C.
42:50
The festival will run from January 23rd to February 9th. and you can catch the show on January 23rd and 24th at the SFU Gold Corp Center for the Arts. I'm Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Trisha Knowles.
43:08
Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca.
43:29
And on the next Push Play. Specifically building Bogota, I remember saying to the team, I really want to build a piece from the back door. And everyone was like, what the hell does that mean? I was like, I don't know, just metaphorically, it feels right.
43:42
Like, what do we how do we build a piece from the back door? How do we build a piece from the bottom up? What does that mean? What does that look like? And through two years of research, what we did was we realized that together, we were sort of building tools.
For 2024 Ray is bringing back OUT, an interdisciplinary performance that defiantly challenges homophobia and transphobia across our communities. OUT is a duet – a conversation between two bodies, inspired by ongoing global struggles for LGBTQIA+ rights. It is a defiant challenge to the status quo, bravely embracing personal, political and cultural dissonance.
Ray's other works include BODIES, an immersive water, light, and soundscape installation that investigates the embodied experiences of our relationship to water. Through this work, Ray seeks to explore and understand the complex and multifaceted nature of our relationship with water, and to engage viewers in a transformative sensory experience that encourages reflection and introspection.
Another recent work, THIRST TRAP, is a meditative sound piece that explores the correlation between social and climate justice, and how our actions and choices impact the world around us. Through this work, Ray invites viewers to reflect on the interconnectivity of our lives and the world we live in, and to recognize the importance of taking collective action towards building a more just and equitable future.
Ray's work has been presented widely across the UK, including in London, Cambridge, Brighton, Leeds, and Edinburgh, as well as internationally including Portland, Mexico City, and Venezuela. Their groundbreaking contributions to the field of performance art have earned them numerous awards and accolades, and their work continues to push boundaries and challenge conventional notions of what art can be and do.
Ray also works as a lecturer, mentor, and outside eye for other artists.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver. Ray joins the conversation from Nottingham, UK.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:01
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights stepping into one's power and immersive design.
00:16
I'm speaking with Rae Young, the artist behind Out, which is being presented at the Push Festival February 8th and 9th, 2025, and Thirst Trap, which is available throughout the festival. A luscious, fierce, and defiant dialogue through space, through struggles, through communities, this performance doesn't simply stand in solidarity with global 2SL GPT QIA Plus movements, it dances alongside them,
00:42
breaking down violent histories to imagine something new in a succulent celebration of desire. That's Out. And Thirst Trap is part narrative and part meditation, a 30-minute sound piece for audiences to experience in the bath along with a specially designed pack of multi-sensory resources to transform their physical environment.
01:03
It invites audiences to consider the correlation between climate and social justice, and to recognize the importance of taking collective action towards building a more just and equitable future. Rae Young is a transdisciplinary performance artist, experience maker, and writer, widely recognized for their work at the forefront of activism, queerness, race, and neurodiversity.
01:25
Their practice is centered on creating a safe space for those who exist at the intersection of multiple realities through collaboration and resistance to traditional forms. Here's my conversation with Rae.
01:39
When I started here in 2021, and I was thinking, okay, what are the projects I've seen in the last years that I would love to bring to push, Out came to mind, so I'd seen it at Impulse Dance in 2017, and it just had stuck with me.
01:55
It's such a powerful and just brilliant thing. performance that really like moved me and then we've been in conversations since then pretty much about making this happen it's been a long path but it's finally happening I'm so thrilled so yeah just to say a long time in the making and I'm really thrilled to sit down and chat with you a bit more about your process where you're at in your career yeah so before we jump into it I will acknowledge the land that I'm joining this call from this conversation so I'm among the stolen traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh I'm settler here and I have a responsibility to continual learning and self-education and I owe a lot of that education to the Yellowhead Institute which you'll hear me regularly give a shout out to And I'm just going to share a little bit on today's kind of reflections,
02:58
which are on with regard to indigenous alternatives to climate risk assessment in Canada and What has really stood out to me is this comment on how Western silence science silos society and the environment.
03:14
And so often we see nature as a place to visit on the weekends. Rather than a dynamic and interrelated part of our daily lives and this contributes to this paradigm of progress and the capitalist model of extractive economic growth, which has resulted in the failure of the last 30 years of climate policy and so This report is Really Thought provoking and well researched and also ties in how Western policymakers neglect indigenous understandings of time,
03:49
space and scale. So that, you know, while climate change is a problem for all of us. We often only focus on start and it's inevitable end and we view it as a linear Process or trajectory with unavoidable effects and then forget that our present role.
04:07
We have responsibilities and shaping what will come next. So Those are kind of some of today's learnings and Ray, I know that we'll probably talk about some of this with regard to Neo colonialism and relationship to land and in some of your projects.
04:30
But first, I'd love you to share where you're joining the conversation from today. Well, I am in Lots of kind of gray, not raining Nottingham. Which for those of you don't know somewhere in the east Midlands of the UK, not far from Birmingham.
04:51
Yeah. Thank you. Can you talk about the impulse to create out and its significance in your trajectory as an artist? Yeah, um, oh shit, so funny when I hear you talk about impulse dance because it feels like a lifetime ago.
05:08
Sometimes those pictures flash up in my phone and I'm like, oh my god, look at me so baby faced. But I was, because I didn't actually know anything about, uh, I didn't know very much about impulse dance at all before I went there.
05:20
It was Dwayne that knew a lot about it and was like super gassed and I was like, oh wow, okay. I was just super excited to be invited somewhere to kind of, yeah, to perform the work. Um, I think one of the significant things about out is that I, I set out to make a piece of work through the body because Dwayne and I at the time had been having like lots of conversations about blackness and about awareness.
05:47
And, um, I guess like Yeah, the complexities between those two sides of our identities being of like a certain age. We'd have these conversations all the time. And I guess like I was really interested in working through the body some way and felt like this particular project would be like really fertile ground to kind of do that.
06:15
I feel like often when I start to make a new project, yeah, I'm seeking to like challenge myself in some way. And so yeah, this time was like, okay, so what does it mean for me to kind of do a piece that's like purely physical when that is not, yeah, kind of not my training, isn't there?
06:38
I think the other thing was it felt like some of those conversations would be really, really hard or had been hard with experts and being hard with our families. So it just felt like, okay, well, let's kind of like, yeah.
06:51
Physicalize the things that we want to say to our families and like more broadly. A lot of that was thinking about like, what is like a culturally traditional like dance forms, like the stuff that, you know, social dancing felt really, really important to us.
07:10
Because these things aren't usually seen in like highbrow dance studios or dance spaces. And we want it to kind of like translate that feeling into the performance space. I can remember being younger and going to like a dance or a rave and being probably dressed in something that I didn't necessarily feel comfortable in.
07:34
And then having like this bright light, this kind of video light, like frost into your face, like all up close and personal, but also just like the vibe of being in that place and it being like really, yeah, really community focused and like kind of everybody kind of like, moving as as as one and also obviously also that base kind of like ricocheting through all of your your bones and kind of like vibrating all the way through your body feels like sort of like I don't know like ritualistic in some ways or like a shedding of something so yeah kind of wanting to take that to a performance space and then also I guess there was conversations around like the music and dancehall that hasn't in the past been very favorable to towards kind of like queerness and yeah and kind of like wanting to kind of like subvert that somehow or just reclaim reclaim the music yeah and I was reminded of I went to a club night in London.
08:44
I think it was called Boo's Delicious. I've been there sometimes and it was like the first time I've been to like a queer like a bashment night and everyone was queer and I was just like wow this is amazing.
08:54
So yeah all of these things kind of like went into the work and we tried work with an amazing dramaturg and had like yeah some really amazing conversations and yeah and then I guess the yeah the work was kind of born although there was like a really early iteration and the first time we actually did the work we went all the way to Glasgow to Buscott Festival to do it because it was the furthest away that we could be from Nottingham.
09:26
We were like oh yeah we're not ready for family to see the work yet so let's go do it somewhere else and it was a really amazing experience. I think that's you know you don't know often you know you can be into a thing but you don't really know how it's going to land until all the power of it until you put it in a space of people and that was a really really stripped back piece of performance.
09:52
I mean I feel like the work is anyways mostly about the connection between the two bodies and then there are a few objects in the space but the people are kind of like it's very emotive and that's just like through the sheer power of the performers in the work.
10:06
Yeah and then I guess it kind of just grew from there really and we just like carried on to developing the work and brought yeah there was more people involved and yeah I think by the time you saw the work at Impulse Tampa, it's gone through that it's a really rigorous kind of like process of refining and distilling down and yeah and I you know I actually just really really enjoyed the process of making that piece of work.
10:38
I feel like yeah there's I think and also bringing it back now. It's really interesting being where I am now and knowing the journey of that work and kind of just like seeing the evolution of the work but also the evolution of like myself and the way I feel about it.
10:58
And also it's crazy how I think some of the things that we're fighting for, standing up for are still really as important and prevalent today. I think that part feels a little bit sad but all the more reason why as many people as possible should kind of like get to experience the work here.
11:24
And so this is the remount that's coming to push and yeah, why remount it? How has the work evolved with through the remount? And you've spoken to your feelings towards the work or yourself as an artist evolving over this period, can you just talk a bit more about that?
11:46
It was when I started to be unapologetic. When I started, when I made out, there was a piece of work that I was making at the time. And again, that went through low, I think it was this really point of like transition, where I kind of knew where I wanted to get to, and I was maybe a little bit afraid and I wanted to kind of push myself in ways that hadn't before.
12:04
And, and, and so I remember doing this piece of work, the one that came before that, and everything had to happen in the way it did in order for me to be like, okay, I have the courage to kind of make this piece of work now.
12:14
But it was kind of where I threw, I kind of threw away the blueprint a little bit and just decided to kind of like, do something else. And I suppose actually, this is the journey where I start to kind of, oh, this is the point at which I'm starting to kind of switch form a little bit and think about, I used to use comedy quite a lot to talk about really sensitive subjects.
12:35
And that was really great, because we all love, we all love a laugh. But this time I felt like, no, it's not funny. And also, it's not funny. And also maybe there's space for us to be able to hold, hold this and, and also kind of using the body as activism or using this idea of like, the show feels relentless at times, but so does kind of going out into the world in the UK, sometimes it feels relentless.
12:59
So I think there's kind of like a feeling of that in the world that we've in the world that we've created. There was something about standing in my power and standing in my authenticity that I really like.
13:13
I don't think that I will be the artist I am or the person I am now without that show. That's like literally how important it is to me. So maybe when people view the work and they speak of its power, maybe that's what they're seeing.
13:27
That's what they're experiencing, you know, that like real time evolution. I think like, this is one moment in the show where it is, I call it kind of this machine moment where there's kind of, you know, this is movement that happens for a long period of time.
13:41
and each time I approach that it never I don't suppose it never feels easier it's just but it is this this this is always for me there was always a sense of achievement of kind of like getting to the end of of that moment um and I suppose then when I fast forward to kind of like remounting the work this time um it was like well how do you how do you put that work on other bodies when it has been when it comes from such a personal personal place space and so a lot of what first of all it was like finding it was I guess it was like remembering what the essence was about the work and how that might need to shift for kind of the audiences of today or shift for where we are at politically making sure that the casting the representation was really really right in terms of the bodies I felt like I wanted,
14:40
you know, there's only two performers in the work, but I wanted those bodies to be equally celebrated and to be different from maybe what we see usually in a piece of work. And then it was trying to go through that process of, you know, finding the right performers with the right chemistry, and then also taking them through the journey of, well, look, this is how we started to make the work.
15:01
These were the conversations we were having. Let's have some of those conversations first, and then let's try on the work and let's not try to, and I think it's difficult, right, because there's an expectation.
15:13
If you've seen the work, there's an expectation from, I guess, like a programmer that's experienced it for it to be as is. And I suppose also for me, because we've kind of reached that iteration, a new kind of had really spent time finessing it, it kind of felt like shape-wise it needed to kind of, the journey of it needed to kind of remain the same, but we also kind of needed to kind of be generous in there to kind of like play around with the movement language that we had and elaborate on that a little bit more so that the new performers felt like they had a place in it.
15:55
Right. So diving back into both the movement language and the conversations that had inspired the work and those conversations were really about like the intersection of queerness and Caribbean identity.
16:10
It was a bit of a crash course, I guess, for them, because obviously, you know, I had so much time to kind of get to grips with it and they were being asked to perform this very emotive work and put their selves in it and also come up against some of those frictions and some of those feelings that I, the challenges that I'd also felt when I was performing in the work.
16:32
It's no mean feat, but they've done an amazing, amazing job. Because of these sections, like the machine section, that is, is like a bit, you kind of like trance-like and grueling or how both in terms of the content that it's addressing and also in the physical demand.
16:51
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we danced in heels in the work. I can't tell you how many times I thought to myself, even when I was in it, why, why did you, why did you make this choice? I was naivety, but there was something about like teetering on the edge and the fragility of that kind of finding your footing always and just them asking that as someone else and also asking them to trust you, trust you,
17:16
trust the process of the work, trust that I know what it is, it will be on the other side. And if, you know, I think that, you know, there will be this kind of element of like transformation. It has the power to do that once you get to kind of the other side.
17:31
But yeah, they, you know, they've really embraced the work and it's changed because they are different. and they have a different experience and actually in some of the conversations that we're having you know those performers are quite a lot younger than Dwayne and myself and so their experience of being black and queer and growing up in London which is a very different experience from growing up in Nottingham you know it was very that was it was different and so yeah I think because there's less I mean you spoke to how the work is still so relevant because there hasn't been as much shift with regard to the society homophobia these things and in since you created the work but then working with the younger cast from a more like a larger more metropolitan international city was there was there a disconnect there in terms of like the intensity of the the experience of the that intersectionality yeah I mean they you know they go put it yeah they go up in a city where there were lots more people that looked like that and were also queer and they had it that that club night I talked about you know that was my first opportunity to go there and that was when I was can't remember what age but they were able to experience that from a really really young age and feel that uh like feeling that places as as as a safe space for not only queer bodies but for trans bodies as well and talk about that as being like I guess the foregrounding in terms of becoming who they were seeing other people like them and then knowing that that is okay to you know to kind of live in their authenticity and then we're in a time I think last year felt like have we moved forward at all because it feels like we're in a time where governments are pitting people against each other and so last year particularly for like there was a focus on really tearing down trans people in a way that I found utterly disgusting and so transparent as kind of like what you know what you know what the agenda was and I still think and and I you know obviously I think that I mean yeah I just find it disgusting actually it felt really really really the right time to kind of be bringing this work back into the world yeah to be like we're not going to be quiet we're not going to go away you know we're here we deserve to be here we deserve to take your space it's about being invisible being really really seen I think I didn't speak about that but it was about being seen on our terms and about strength and fragility because I don't think that people get to be fragile a lot of the time you know and so the softness that's kind of like yeah there's all of it.
20:40
Yeah and in your recent work you focused on exploring notions of rest, care, recovery in your in your art. What it means to both create and receive art while centering care and intentionality. Can you talk about what that looks like in relation to your projects, thirst trap, bodies and plow?
21:00
Yeah I think that um I think I was tired. I think I was tired. I'm a neurodivergent artist and maybe because of that and because of kind of sitting on these different uh sit in the midst of these kind of different identities or whatever.
21:27
I'm also living in this world, this world that is I think I was talking to before about like empathy. Like where has that gone? Um I I guess like I needed a rest and so therefore I created a work that would allow people to experience it in a restful state and often actually the first trap in private.
21:53
Um and I wanted people to be able to uh have space and time to think. To uh to see each other, to um you know these these works of thinking about uh like climate and like our part in that and I feel like they're all interlinked because you can't have private justice without having social justice.
22:20
Like those two things you know um it's impossible and and so yeah I I needed to slow down. I kept saying maybe lots of people said a lot that I'm not going to go back to working how I did before and I in some parts did do that as much as much as I could.
22:44
But also I suppose for me in that moment in time, I took myself, the key thing is that I decided to take in order to do that restful thing, I took myself out of the work. Because when your body is a site of trauma, and it's also the thing, and then it's also the material in the work.
23:04
And it's also the thing that people want to talk about when they want to like critique the work and your lived experience, which is personal to me, but also I know through having friends and family, it's not that personal to me, because these are the things that we talk about often.
23:26
I still wanted to be able to give, but not in a way where it took from me, and it was taken a lot from me. you So yeah, I created these two pieces where I ask the audience to be the performer in the work, I guess, you know, I asked them to do the work.
23:48
It doesn't exist actually, unless the work isn't, yeah, it doesn't exist really, isn't alive until there are people in the work performing for being the stand-ins of those things. Because in Thirstrap it's the audience, an audience of one in a private space is led by prompts, it's following a narrative, it's experiencing something that they are also helping, they're an actor in that experience as they're following along.
24:17
And then was bodies, did bodies come out of Thirstrap? Are they, or is it really its own project? Yeah, so bodies were supposed to be first, it was always supposed to be that swimming pool piece, and then lockdown happened.
24:32
So we're like, ah, we can't be in community together in a pool anymore, so what can we do for this time that feels like it is hitting some of the same things that I wanted to do with Thirstrap? So Thirstrap was really an experiment, you know, and it was really an experiment in like, how do I make a piece of work when I'm not, that I'm not in?
24:53
Because I think maybe if you get me as a performer, you kind of know what to expect if you've seen my work before, but if I take myself out of that, then how do I still, how does it still do the things that I would normally, that I would be trying to do in the space, and the relationship with the audience, how do we still kind of have that thing happen without me kind of like being there, and you know,
25:15
all of my shows I feel like are about like world building. And so yeah, it was a test really to see if that could, if it could do, if you could get this box delivered to your house with a few simple things in it, and have kind of quite simple setup, you know, you're using your mobile phone and some headphones.
25:36
And then you've got some objects that you kind of take into the bath, which is a place that you, you know, many people always go and how do we kind of like make that, how do we make that theatrical experience in that kind of small space in your bathroom for one.
25:53
And again, process, the process of making that was always nice to have the finished piece. But obviously with that piece, I'm never going to know, I never see, I never see it. I've never seen somebody's bathroom like, oh, why don't you go in?
26:08
I never see it, I kind of hear about it afterwards, but yeah, it was just exciting to be able to kind of make work in that way, to really have the opportunity to take a risk and do something different.
26:22
So then when we're allowed to be together in this space again, I could kind of go back to like, okay, so what is bodies, then how does that differ? What are the similarities? which is an immersive experience in like, in a swimming pool.
26:42
In a swimming pool, yeah, for 24 people at a time. Yes, yes. An instructional as well and uses kind of lights and sound as kind of like an immersive experience to kind of guide people on a journey. Yeah, of recovery, discovery and the rest, I guess, does both of those things.
27:03
It kind of takes you out. What a really nice way to experience something. I suppose because also, you know, the things that I'm talking about are quite heavy. But I want people to be in this like restful space to be able to kind of receive the information because I think you turn on the TV or you look on Instagram or anything like that and it's you're, you're, you're exposed to things really, yeah,
27:30
things all the time. And maybe just something in me felt like, okay, but if I can make, if I can make, if I can get the heart rate calm, if we can calm the nervous system, then maybe we could take this in better.
27:45
Maybe we can experience it better. Maybe we can see each other, you know. Yeah, I really find that very powerful about your work, how you use how you transmute this kind of subject matter through the body in a really visceral way, or through these tools of immersive, like states of recovery, or, and, you know, this is the first time I'm learning about your use of comedy in the past, but this like,
28:13
how do you treat this subject matter and your creative risk and experimentation is in form is really exciting and stands out from project to project. So yes, clearly, you're a transdisciplinary artist who's worked in dance, film, installation, performance, art, song cycle concert, more, I'm sure.
28:35
And does form always come after the concept for you? Or do you sometimes take on the challenge of a form first? So for example, Plow, your new project of film, was that like, you really wanted to work in film?
28:48
And you'd been waiting for the right project? Or? Yeah, I can talk about that to work in film for a minute. And actually, at this point, I'm like, okay, I'm ready to be in the work again. And so I not live or maybe live.
29:08
Because I think when the piece of work kind of is finished, it will be kind of this interaction with the screens, maybe this kind of the live space as well. And usually, I think that what I do is I think about what I want to say.
29:25
And then I think about maybe what form that's best said in. And then I find a way to kind of make the two things work together. And obviously, when I said I'm going to make this piece of work. It's going to be in a swimming pool and it's going to do this.
29:40
And people look at me like, okay. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. If you experience it for yourself, if you experience the water, if you, you know, the cool temperature, if you kind of like, yeah, bodily, it kind of like, I hope that it kind of does something different from just seeing something with your eyes, kind of really like feeding it.
30:07
And yeah, how kind of represents an opportunity, like I said, for me to step back into work, it represents me an opportunity for me to work in the medium that I haven't worked with before. Although I did really make, it's very funny, actually, I made a comedic video very recently, a student project about eugenics.
30:28
And I made this video, I've gone back to comedy a little bit. But it was really, really fun. I kind of really like the way what I like about film is the way that you can like, draw, draw focus into specific moments and tell somebody that something's going to be important a little bit later on or kind of be expansive.
30:58
And again, just really interesting to see how like my interest in like world building and emotive, I don't know, yeah. And trying to draw out certain feelings from people. And your work has everything I've seen has a really strong aesthetic perspective.
31:26
And already in your kind of treatment, the visual storyboard, or I don't know, it's not called a storyboard, it's called a... The inspiration board for the film looks incredible. I'm so excited to see how Eurosthetic will translate to that medium, where often a lot more is possible than like not large budget theater.
31:53
I think it's great to hear about how you're finding fun in creative process these days, and also sustainability for yourself. So I do have a question about where you're at in your career now. So, you know, out premiered in 2017.
32:13
Since then, your work has toured internationally, been critically acclaimed. When I was at Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, your works out and nightclubbing were festival top picks. They were everywhere, you know, receiving great press, which is not easy in a festival of almost 4,000 shows.
32:30
And then, so I'm curious about the transition to becoming a mid-career artist and just how you perceive the challenges and opportunities at this stage of your career. I think opportunities are that people trust you a little bit more, right?
32:47
You know, they're willing to back you because they're like, oh yeah, this person can do it. So when I do go to them and be like, well, I want to do this crazy thing, I want to just deliver you a parcel, or I want to make this thing in the swimming pool.
33:00
I want to do this thing. They're like, okay, yeah, we think that you can do it. You know, they believe that you can. So that is really, really great. And also the fact that like, you know, my networks are so much bigger.
33:13
The fact that my work can travel internationally now and is meeting so many new audiences. And I feel like that's the great thing about being an artist, that I get to have conversations. I get to use my work to have conversations with people that I would probably never be able to meet and have conversations with.
33:28
That I might be able to change their perspective just a little bit. That I might anger them just a little bit. And we can have a talk about why that is as well, you know? Like, what's coming up for you in this work?
33:38
And I feel like I'm trying to change the world a little bit. And I was talking to say to Francis, who's one of my access support assistants, that I was like, you know, I'm just such an emo. I often call myself like, I'm like Mary J.
33:52
Blige in that could Mary J. Blige, doesn't really like, she can't really do a, it's all about sad songs, right? Because if she does a happy song, we're not feeling it quite as much, won't we? Because she has this way of like, or she did, you know, she has this way of tacking into being like, oh, it's my song, and I certainly feel like that, you know?
34:12
So I think that, yeah, that I've had the opportunity to like really hone that. And that's been really, really beautiful. I guess like, some of the challenges of being a mid-career artist is that, and I heard this from mid-career artists before I became one.
34:31
You know, when you're starting out and you're emerging, there's all of these opportunities. They're not big pots of money, but there are opportunities for you to receive support, whether that's cash support or mentoring support and all those things.
34:51
And then, and that's really, really great. And also, I think the biggest thing is you can fail more. Or it feels like you can fail more when you're new. When you start to make a name for yourself, I feel like it feels less like you can fail.
35:03
And I think failure is really, really important because there's also something that can be learnt from that. You know, it's the biggest kind of learning thing, and it kind of provides growth. And you can see, okay, so that didn't quite work.
35:15
What can I do to kind of change that and make it better for next time? But I think the key thing that is really difficult as being a mid-year, career artist at this point in time where we've, you know, there's so many cuts to funding and everything's so expensive.
35:30
And it's, it's, is that sustainability is like, for all intents and purposes, I run in a small company with a few people that kind of work together. And I'm often the last person to be paid or don't get paid.
35:46
I'm still doing so much work, so much work for free. And I suppose that is challenging because, because personally, if that were my friend or someone else, I'd be like, you definitely shouldn't be doing that.
36:01
You're worth more than that. And I know that, but it feels like there is no, I don't know what the alternative is. I haven't yet managed to find a way to, I mean, maybe it's, maybe I'm too ambitious because maybe I have too many projects.
36:25
I guess, you know, Gabrielle, I thought that the other reason why I made these pieces of work that I wasn't in was because I was like, well, that gives an opportunity for there to be a canon of work that can talk that I'm not in.
36:38
So that can be out in the world, making some money, not loads, because, you know, art is art, like in our art world anyway, we've got kind of like selling paintings for millions of pounds, but anyway, and then I can be, and that'll mean that that's kind of income generating, and then I can work on a new thing.
36:58
It hasn't quite worked, it hasn't quite worked like that. And I'm not really sure, I don't know what the answer is actually. I was, had a conversation with the Arts Council of England today and would have a little laugh about how these Arts Council grants used to be like under £15,000.
37:16
And then I was like, how is anybody making any work for under £15,000? She said to me, to me, your project smells like... No, it's not enough money to make the project. However, with timeframes being what they are when you put your funding bids in, you kind of just have to, it feels like you have to make it work for the money and for the time that you have available because if I, you know, I'm often thinking,
37:48
should I go and get a full-time job? I'm like doing what? I don't know. And also then what's gonna happen to the art? Cause is it possible to be able to do, I mean, I did it before. I've worked part-time.
38:00
But also it's a question of like, is that sustainable as you become an older artist and just maybe have different values or, you know, value rest more or just like self-care. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a real, It's going to be a really hard time to keep our mid-career artists working in the next decade.
38:29
I know so many people already that have like stopped. They're just like, no, I'm going to do something else. They have gone and taken the full-time job. You know, we're losing so many great people in the canon.
38:42
Like it's going to be really, really sad. But I guess like, yeah, as you say, priorities change. So you should probably like, you can check in with me like next year and be like, how's it going? Yeah, absolutely.
38:59
Well, you know, for better or worse, considering the self sacrifice, super glad that you're staying ambitious. So it is a very selfish way so that our audiences can also experience the remount of your work.
39:13
I'm so looking forward to seeing Plow when it comes to fruition when it's realized. It's so exciting to have two works by you here, both out and thirst trap. So people can really like, just get to know you a little bit.
39:27
And that you'll be here. That you'll be here. Oh, and I think we might have another, I'm not going to announce yet, because we're still in the details of it as we record this in mid-October, but I think there'll be another special appearance of Ray in the festival.
39:41
So keep your eyes open. Are you all Ray Dow? Yeah, no, it's great. We've waited so long. So let's like, just fully connect. Thanks so much for this conversation, Ray. Oh, thank you so much for having me.
39:59
It's really lovely to talk to you otherwise. You just heard Gabriel Martin's conversation with Ray Young, whose two works, Out and Thirst Trap, will be presented at the Push International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, BC.
40:17
Thirst Trap will be presented throughout the festival from January, 23rd to February 9th, and Out will be presented on February 8th and 9th at Performance Works. I'm Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles.
40:33
Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the 2025 Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca.
40:56
And on the next Push Play... They need to have their own integrity so that we can activate the responsive level. So they're not just objects that are there for us to be manipulated. Not at all. They have objects that they need to have some kind of energy and they need to be self-standing and have participation.
41:17
particular textures, particular colors, shapes, weight, and different type of materialities, right?
Carmela has been working closely in Beatrice King's Youth classes since March of 2020, shaping young actor's careers, coaching auditions, self tapes, and providing mentorship.
As an actor, Carmela has had recurring roles on The Mysterious Benedict Society and iZombie, has appeared in many shows such as Riverdale, Altered Carbon, The Flash, and Bates Motel and can be seen in a supporting role on Lifetime's The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez this Fall. She has also graced many of Western Canada's most prestigious stages, most recently in Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley at The Arts Club Theatre, Bard on the Beach, Western Canada Theatre, The Belfry Theatre, Concrete Theatre, and Theatre Calgary.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
00:01
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, Push's director of programming, and today's episode highlights adventures in cooking as performance and laughing with one's ancestors.
00:18
I'm speaking with Carmela Cisan, the lead artist behind Lassa Nong in Perio, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 30th to February 8th, 2025. In a surprising fusion of theatre and gastronomy, this adaptation of A Taste of Empire guides audiences across the layered history of Philippine cultural heritage through a live cooking demonstration.
00:41
As a dish of stuffed milkfish comes to life, so do the stories within its ingredients prompting reflections on how colonial legacies shape today's global food market. Carmela Cisan is a Filipina-Canadian artist who has been on a journey of language reclamation with her show, Lassa Nong in Perio.
01:00
Here's my conversation with Carmela. Hi, Carmela. Hi, how are you? I'm great. I mentioned I just had a little bit too much coffee, but that means that I'm really excited for this conversation with you.
01:16
I didn't need coffee to be excited about this, so, you know, just looking for I've been looking forward to it. So thanks for having me. Yeah, I am thrilled. And I have to also give the context that we started talking about this work three years ago, our first conversation, and I was super excited about the project then.
01:35
And I'm super excited to see how it's developing and to host the premiere in 2025. Yes, I'm so excited. It's finally happening. I don't even know if I was finished yet or, you know, had seen the light at the end of the tunnel when we were first talking about it.
01:49
So I'm really, really excited that we're here. We're finally here. Yeah, a few months out. I'll just offer some context for where we're having this conversation today. So we are on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.
02:10
I'll add that I'm a settler here, and that part of my commitment as a settler is to continue to educate myself on land-back issues, on sovereignty and ongoing colonization. And that looks like different things each day, and today that looks like learning about resource development and Indigenous rights.
02:34
And this learning is largely in thanks to the Yellowhead Institute and their briefs, which is an incredible source of education for me. And with regard to resource development, specifically looking at how Canadian political officials co-opt and distort the aims of Indigenous people from restitution towards economic reconciliation.
02:59
you know, engaging in a questioning of this concept that economic growth is the only right that matters in a quote unquote, reconciliation, Reconciliatory Canada. So those are some of the things I'm reflecting on today.
03:16
We're going to shift into talking about your work, Lassa Nang Emperio. Am I pronouncing it correctly? Good job, Lassa Nang Emperio. Thank you. Great job. Lassa Nang Emperio. So this is a Tagalog re-imagination of Giovanni C's A Taste of Empire, an award-winning theater cooking show, live theater cooking show.
03:44
And you've completed a two-year translation and adaptation of this work with Giovanni C and Nina Lia Kino, in addition to development through the workshop theater Montreal's Glasgow Translation Residency, Boca del Lupo's SLAM program, and Rice and Bean Theater's Double Speak program.
04:03
So my first question to you is why adapt and translate Taste of Empire? And what is your history with adapting work? So truthfully, this has been like my first journey into adaptation and translation.
04:18
Historically, I've been more of a traditional actor, seeing other people's words. But then I actually saw Giovanni do this show a few years ago, directed by Sherry Yoon at Boca del Lupo, and was just so inspired by it.
04:34
Not only was the show so like charming and really took on some subjects like head-on, but just the concept of like live cooking. And it's almost like a clown show really, a live clown show really intrigued me.
04:50
And I was just kind of like mentioning, oh, I'd love to do that one day, love to do the show one day. And then I think the word... got back to Giovanni. And at that time, I think Derek Chan was just finishing his translation.
05:08
He had done a Cantonese translation a few years ago. And so I remember seeing Giovanni and he was like, do you want to translate it into Tagalog? And that kind of was number one, super intimidating, but was also really exciting.
05:27
I'd never done that before. So it was something that was new to me. And I was really kind of at that stage of my career when I was looking for different challenges and just something to kind of own as an artist.
05:44
And Giovanni being an artist that I truly respect and admire and really look up to. It was really just a mix of trusting his instinct. to even ask me and gathering all the courage to just to to say yes.
06:04
And I think like within three weeks we had sent in our application to the Glasgow residency because the deadline was coming up. So we like kind of like worked really hard on that that application and got in right away.
06:19
So it was like, you know, a very short time period between when he had asked me and getting into the into the residency. So it was really fantastic. And, you know, it's been it's been a long process.
06:34
And also we had the pandemic there. So that definitely halted a few things. But I think this adaptation not only updates some of the references and not that it was super dated before, but it's adapting it into a more femme femme perspective and specifically my lived experience as a Filipina human being in this world and dealing with a lot of the, you know, everything that comes along with colonialism and imperialism.
07:08
So, yeah, I think most of the adaptation is making it into a a very culturally Filipino show and through a female lens. Yeah. Great. And have you been in ongoing dialogue with Giovanni about the adaptation or have from that beginning kind of consent and agreement to, you know, that that blessing to have you adapt it to the dialogue, adapt it and translate it?
07:38
Have you kind of been on your own or how has that worked? He's really been a part of the process throughout. And he's not a micromanager at all. I think there was a lot of trust there, but we were at the translation residency together and we got to spend a lot of time together.
07:54
And I think that's it. the tone that he was like, I trust what you're doing. And also because he doesn't speak. I think he understands a few Tagalog words, but he doesn't speak it fluently. So there was a lot of trust there.
08:11
But I also just knowing I need to honor his work would ask for, ask for clarification of like what he meant with his version of it. And just so that I can honor his words properly in this adaptation, in this translation.
08:31
It also became kind of a bit of a trio work with myself, Nina and Giovanni, because Nina knows the work really well. And it speaks Tagalog. So it kind of became like deciding how best to adapt and translate.
08:52
and stay true to what Giovanni meant it to be. So yeah, it was really like my dream team, Giovanni and Nina, just making this happen, so. It is a dream team, yeah. Super lucky. And you speak about the process of translation and adaptation as being linked to a journey of language reclamation.
09:12
Can you speak more to that and the implications of the choice to perform the work in Tagalog? Oh, yeah. You know, it's been a bit of an emotional roller coaster ever since I started it. Oh, man, I'm trying not to get too emotional.
09:33
Growing up as an immigrant in the 90s, I didn't want to sound different. I didn't want to stand out in the wrong ways. So there was so much about my culture that I shut down and really like put away, you know, like never wanted to really be too Filipino.
09:54
So working on this has really been a journey of reclamation, not only of language, but of culture. And having moved here when I was seven years old, I really didn't have a sense of like what a superpower it is to come from a different culture and to know a different language.
10:23
So it really wasn't until, you know, the end of theater school really where a director let me just be as Filipino as I could be in a show that really kind of woke up that sense in me. And it's still definitely a journey of defining and redefining what it is to be Filipina-Canadian in this climate.
10:50
And it's different for everybody as well. and anytime, whenever I'm learning and relearning things it adds to that process as well, especially as a settler on these lands, you know, and really kind of dealing with the colonialism that the Filipino people also went through and don't very often talk about.
11:14
So, you know, I think those that my work with that cultural colonization and being a settler on these lands are very much intertwined with each other. And only when I kind of started really traveling on my own did I really discover what a superpower speaking Tagalog is.
11:36
I literally, you know, I remember losing my credit card at the Louvre in France and in Paris and couldn't find help, but it was one Filipino worker who was able to guide me and she didn't speak English.
11:51
She spoke Tagalog and French, so we spoke in Tagalog. So it really is, I think of it as a superpower now. And I think in terms of this play and being at Push, I'm so excited for the community to come out and see the show here, Tagalog, here, Filipino, and show them that theater is a place where they belong, where their culture can be shown and be proud of.
12:22
And with this adaptation, also just framing the topics that it tackles through a very culturally specific sense. Like there are just some things that the humor is very different with Filipinos. And so I think it'll be a little bit of an inside, you know what I mean?
12:47
Like it'll be an inside joke for them that doesn't quite translate to English, but they'll understand it more culturally for sure. Yeah, I really do appreciate, in a work that's also talking about histories of imperialism, colonialism, that the work destabilizes the dominant culture here.
13:14
I think there's, I think in general in Vancouver, folks are still a bit uncomfortable with subtitles or not across the board, but a lot of people would prefer not have that experience, right? But I think it's a really healthy experience to be destabilized in that way, rather than everything.
13:36
As an English speaker, so much of the world and culture is catered to us. Yeah, I really applaud the kind of bold move it is. is to keep, to have the work be in Tagalog. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I don't ever claim to be like a perfect Tagalog or Filipino speaker because I didn't move here when I was way too young.
14:04
And again, didn't practice enough when I was younger, but for someone who moved here that young, I think I'm really good. So, and also culturally because it is a colonized culture, there's a lot of taglish in it as well.
14:19
And there are just some words that Filipinos no longer translate. Like I know some of my Cantonese speaker speaking friends, they say that when there's like a new thing, they usually get like a Cantonese word for that.
14:32
But I think in Filipino culture, we don't do that as much. They just use the English word or a Spanish word, whatever is like seems apt at the time, but yeah. So, but yeah, I'm super excited for, to kind of challenge the Vancouver audience.
14:50
in terms of that. Just be in this space and be in our little world for a little while. Super exciting. And Marcus Yousuf is directing this work. Can you speak about the process of having a non-Galog speaker direct the work?
15:07
What is that like? Yes. So our goal actually is to have our surtitles ready while we are rehearsing. So he has both scripts. So in my work with the adaptation and translator, I've kind of made these two parallel scripts just so he can best follow it with the two scripts.
15:40
But I think what we're going to try to have is have the surtitles that he's able to just watch and be kind of that outside eye for the play. I think he also knows the English play quite well. Like he's had a relationship with Giovanni and the original director for a while.
16:08
So they're friends. So there's a lot of trust there. I just feel like there's a lot of trust reciprocally there. Great. And you've been performing as an actor in film and theater since 2010. Do you have a sense of what role writing and adapting will play in your practice to come?
16:30
I don't have a specific project in mind, but it's interesting actually because I realized during this process that ever since I started acting, I'd always say things like, oh, wouldn't it be cool to set this classical play in this time period and then like this war was happening so how would it work you know so I'd always imagined those worlds so not uh it's only been recently that I've really kind of like it dawned on me like oh I've always had an interest in adapting classical work um to either modernize them or make them um a bit more uh yeah like up to date um and this is just I feel like just this the my tiny introduction into that um and it's been already like such a such a great experience so um I don't have a specific project but I'm sure that it'll have a lasting impact on my career and it's also given me a lot of um uh it's been easier to imagine a career where I have agency over my work um and that that I can influence the trajectory of my career.
17:51
And for sure, it given me a lot more confidence that my particular voice is worthy and it's been a very validating experience as an artist for sure. That makes me think, I'm curious what, as a performer in this work, what the UC is the biggest challenges and opportunities?
18:13
As a performer in this work, well, like technically the cooking, I think I've made this dish before. So for those who don't know, I make a Relyanong Bongos, which is a stuffed fish live from start to finish.
18:33
And I've made the dish before, but in my own time following a recipe, making all the mistakes that I need to. So doing that, timing that to the script, making sure that I turn on the heat for the oil, making sure everything goes right, that's kind of like technically daunting.
18:55
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a challenge, but a fun challenge. Yeah, exactly, for sure. And I know, I mean, this is what I've set myself up for, but a one person show in a language that I don't speak every day because of the place I live in, right?
19:16
Like, I just don't, I can't speak Tagalog 24 seven. That's going to be a massive challenge for sure. And just kind of technically warming up my voice to a different language will be a new experience for me.
19:34
I've done plays where I speak a little bit of Tagalog, but not the whole thing. So yeah, and I'm lots of curiosities. This question is like very much sparking a lot. different things, but also keeping the audience engaged, especially those who don't actually understand it, making sure that they're still with me.
19:56
Again, that playing with the audience is going to be, yeah, just new and very exciting. Is it correct that you were part of our industry series conversation on the dramaturgy of multilingual creation in 2022?
20:14
Were you part of that conversation? Yes. Yeah. That was moderated by Pedro. Yes. Oh my gosh. I forgot I did that. That was online. We were still I believe. Yeah. And listeners, that is available on our website.
20:34
That's still, it's a great conversation with a number of multilingual creators like yourself, like Johnny Wu, the artist behind Alapi, which was a project we had that year. But I bring it up because I remember Johnny Wu was talking about how different languages sit in his body differently or make him inhabit his body differently.
20:56
Have you had an experience like that when you switch between languages? Is that something that you think about? Definitely. I think it's actually like deeper in my heart. Like there are just so many things that I feel like I can feel more when I say it in Tagalog rather than English.
21:17
And also the way I even kind of like my humor is so different in Tagalog or even when I'm with other Filipinos, I think all of those things come out so differently because it's rooted in my heart and my gut.
21:41
Do you know what I mean? I think sometimes when I make jokes in English, it still feels very like, this is just for a laugh. But when I'm truly making a joke in Tagalog or making other Filipinos laugh, it's this like, yeah, it's like making my ancestors laugh.
21:59
I know that sounds like super airy-fairy, but it's just so true. And I see it in my family too when there's a big Filipino gathering, it's just a different vibe altogether. Wow, thanks. Very much looking forward to experiencing this work and connecting others to this incredible premiere that will happen in Bush 2025.
22:23
Thank you for sharing about your process. Thanks, Carmela. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. You just heard Gabriel Martin's conversation with Carmela Sison. Lassa Nong-Imperio, A Taste of Empire, will be presented at the Push International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, B.C.
22:45
The festival will run from January 23rd to February 9th, 2025, and you can catch the show at The Nest on January 30th and 31st, as well as February 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th. I'm Ben Charland, and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles, original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
23:07
New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the 2025 festival, and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theatre, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca.
23:26
Coming up on the next Push Play... often, you know, you can be into a thing, but you don't really know how it's going to land until all the power of it until you put it in a space of people. And that was a really, really stripped back piece of performance.
