PuSh Play

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Wet Mess about TESTO, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 7 and 8 at Performance Works. Show Notes Gabrielle and Wet Mess discuss:  The origins of TESTO, particularly in what it meant to take hormones like testosterone Drag as a tool to discover oneself onstage Drag as a devising tool to generate choreography, narrative, etc. The historical aspects of drag Making gender explorations joyful The different personas that Wet Mess explores The oscillation between comedy and vulnerability The origin of the name "Wet Mess" What did the process of making this work reveal to you? What is next for Wet Mess? About TESTO TESTO celebrates transitions, testosterone and the edges of drag–a chaotic, heartfelt, and hilariously unhinged deep dive into the mess of becoming. Here, performance and reality blur until what's made-up somehow feels truer than truth. Expect moustache meals, dykey desires, and a choreography of guttural sexuality that pinches at the dull flesh of everyday life until it sparkles. At once absurd and sincere, TESTO finds the magical in the mundane—the moment when laughter curdles into revelation, and fantasy becomes flesh. It's awkward, erotic, disarming, and deeply human: a love letter to transition, embodiment, and all our leaking edges. About Wet Mess Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her homen with the dogs. 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. Wet Mess joined the conversation from London, 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  

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Mother Bee Gvasalia, Savannah Sutherland, Ihomehe ("Legs"), and Menace Gvasalia about The Motha' Kiki Ball, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 7 at the Birdhouse. Show Notes Gabrielle and her guests discuss:  How did Blackout Collective begin and what was that specific moment that compelled it? The significance and meaning of ballroom as gathering and performance Balancing competitive fire with fierce tenderness with honouring roots How chosen families show up, especially in ballroom How ballroom judges work and what they are looking for  The stories that ballroom tells Waves of new talent entering the scene The challenge of learning technique vs. competing The Ballroom 101 Rapid Fire Round! About The Motha' Kiki Ball From vogue to runway, The Motha' Kiki Ball crowns motherhood as the origin story, legacy, and creative force behind Ballroom. Black Out, a collective centering Blackness in the local Kiki scene, leads this year's winter ball co-presented by PuSh and Van Vogue Jam. This Black History Month spectacular celebrates the power that gives life to cultures and movements. Expect looks that radiate iconic energy and a runway filled with matriarch moments. About BlackOUT Collective BlackOUT is a Vancouver-based Collective that centers Blackness within the Vancouver Kiki Ballroom scene. Our mission is to make Ballroom accessible to Black folks in Vancouver by creating entry points, fostering belonging  and celebrating  community. Since our inception in 2024, we've hosted several open sessions and produced "The Cookout Mini Kiki Ball", Vancouver's first Ball featuring an all Black production team and judging panel. 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. Savannah Sutherland joined the conversation from Accra, also called Ga, Ghana. 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  

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Vanessa Goodman about WAIL, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 26 and 27 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Show Notes Gabrielle and Vanessa discuss:  Vanessa's current work and process on tour across the continent with BLOT The original impulses and images that inspired WAIL How the complexity becoming a parent today requires one to find joy in work What does it mean to navigate joy within community? How can joy be a regenerative force? The power of physiological change from performance How compression can be used in choreography The auditory and visual world of the piece The body as site between the individual and collective The meaning of collaboration and how to hold space for many voices About WAIL WAIL is a choreographic poem for our fractured moment.  Six performers move through a shifting landscape of sound, light, and breath, their bodies echoing the patterns and distortions of the natural world. Drawing from botanical forms and auditory illusion, the work becomes a living ecosystem where motion and vibration feed each other—fragile, unruly, and alive. WAIL immerses audiences in a multi-sensory meditation on coexistence. Amid contrast and chaos, the work finds its rhythm in the act of collective joy: a wail that is both grief and celebration, a sound that gathers us back into the body of the world. About Action at a Distance and Vanessa Goodman Action at a Distance is based on the West Coast on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. The company is led by Artistic Director Vanessa Goodman and Artistic Producer Hilary Maxwell. Their work carries meaning beyond aesthetics, using choreography as a means to explore liminality within humanity. This exploration questions the boundaries of the human experience, emphasizing the interconnectedness of bodies, technology, and the natural world. Their choreographic practice weaves together generative movement and sonic embodiment, creating immersive performative environments that aim to expand notions of identity, post-humanism and agency. Through their work, they seek to cultivate intimacy between the body and its surroundings, examining how these relationships redefine what it means to be an individual in a rapidly changing world. The company challenges conventional forms of performative hierarchy through collaborative approaches, inviting varied voices to reshape narratives around corporeality and Existence. Goodman has received several awards and honours for the Company's works, including The Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award (2013), The Yulanda M. Faris Scholarship (2017/18), The Chrystal Dance Prize (2019 & 2024), the Schultz Endowment from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2019), The Isadora Award (2025) and participation in the "Space to Fail" program (2019/20) through Hyde Productions (NZ), Critical Path (AU), and The Dance Centre (CA). Longstanding collaborations include Graveyards and Gardens with Caroline Shaw, BLOT with Simona Deaconsecu, and multiple works with Loscil (Scott Morgan), Brady Marks, and James Proudfoot. Their works have toured Canada, the United States, Europe, and South America.  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. Vanessa joined the conversation from Calgary, in the traditional territories of the peoples of Treaty 7, which include the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprised of the Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut'ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First Nations). 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  

PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Rainbow Chan about Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 4 at 7:30pm at the Chinese Canadian Museum. Show Notes Gabrielle and Rainbow discuss:  The unique collaboration and context of Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory The influence of Cantonese pop on Rainbow's work Voice as both instrument and archive Processing grief through song as an individual and collective The original sparks of interest to perform these particular songs The category of ritual song and music The fusion of folk with pop and electronica, and how tradition and futurity animate the process How theatre, as opposed to other artforms, affects the way in which an audience reads what is onstage What's next for Rainbow Chan? About Rainbow Chan Live at the Dream Factory Rainbow Chan is a Hong Kong-Australian vocalist, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist celebrated for her inventive blend of heartfelt melodies, textured electronic production, and culturally rich storytelling. Her sound—both tender and experimental—reflects on migration, identity, and the intimate politics of love and loss. Presented for one night only inside the Chinese Canadian Museum's Dream Factory: Cantopop Mandopop 1980s-2000 exhibition, this special live performance unfolds on Ming Wong's Vast Ocean, Boundless Skies stage—an installation that reimagines the legacy of Cantopop through diasporic lenses. Fusing Cantopop, electronic music, Chinese folk laments, and experimental sound, Chan uses live looping, electronics, saxophone, and voice to explore resilience, identity, and connection across generations. Through this convergence of sound, space, and story, Chan creates a distinctive and contemporary musical experience—an evening where cultural memory, sonic experimentation, and performance meet. The performance will be followed by an open mic karaoke party hosted by Rainbow Chan. About Rainbow Chan Rainbow Chan is an award-winning vocalist, producer and multi-disciplinary artist. Her practice bridges popular music and contemporary visual arts, exploring themes of cultural representation, (mis)translation, matrilineal histories and diasporic heritage. Central to her work is the research and reimagining of women's oral traditions, particularly the fading bridal laments of Weitou women, Hong Kong's first settlers, to whom she has deep ancestral ties. Through pop music, performance and immersive installations, she translates these endangered songs into contemporary art forms, preserving their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity. She is particularly interested in the power of ritual, song and performance as both a means of reclaiming agency and a living archive. 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. Rainbow joined the conversation from the unceded territories of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, in what is today called Australia. 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  

Am Johal, Executive Artistic Director of the Indian Summer Festival, guest hosts this episode! He chats with Rakesh Sukesh about Invisibles, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 26 at the Vancity Culture Lab (the Cultch). Show Notes Am and Rakesh discuss:  The trajectory and transitions of Rakesh's artistic and professional life Rakesh's Bollywood background How Rakesh dealt with his early social anxiety through dance and performance The challenges of creating art after strict Bollywood training The various traditions woven into Rakesh's work, including yoga How Rakesh situates his work globally, and how it received differently Influence of martial arts on Rakesh's dance practices The origins of Invisibles and its formation How to make work in this very troubled time in the world The concept that all people can be diamonds or demons About Invisibles In residency with his new creation Invisibles, Rakesh Sukesh—the artist behind because i love the diversity, this micro-attitude we all have it (PuSh 2024)—confronts the brutal realities of the Kafala system, which has enabled modern-day slavery across parts of the Middle East. Drawing from his own family's history, he interlaces visceral movement, stark statistics, and documentary theatre to reveal the human cost of economic migration and to ask urgent questions about whose lives and suffering we choose to value. Sukesh weaves ritual dance and funeral song from the Tamil-Nadu region in India into a powerful meditation on grief, dignity, and remembrance. Rakesh Sukesh's work emerges from a life deeply shaped by movement—across borders, traditions, and generations. With a career spanning over 25 years, he has captivated audiences worldwide as a performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer. His journey began in Bollywood dance and South Indian cinema before evolving toward contemporary movement infused with his family's lineage of yoga and embodied disciplines such as Kalarippayattu and other Indian dance forms. His international career has cultivated a language of physicality that bridges precision and spiritual depth. About Am Johal Am Johal has previously been Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Co-Director of SFU's Community Engaged Research Initiative and host of the podcast, Below the Radar. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015), co-author with Matt Hern of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024). He is currently Chair of the Vancouver International Film Festival, Vice Chair of Greenpeace Canada and a board member with the BC Alliance for Arts and Culture. He has presented his work internationally, including the Oxford Literature Festival. About Rakesh Sukesh With a career spanning over 25 years, Rakesh has captivated audiences worldwide as a versatile performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer. His journey through the realms of artistry began in Bollywood dance, where he lent his talents to numerous films in South India. Evolving his craft, Rakesh found a new passion in Contemporary movement art, drawing inspiration from his family's lineage of yoga and disciplines like Kalarippayattu and other Indian dance forms. For the past 15 years, he has traversed the globe, immersing himself in diverse cultures and artistic landscapes, shaping his unique perspective and vision. Experience the culmination of Rakesh's passion, dedication, and global influences in every performance and 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. 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  

PuSh Artistic Director Gabrielle Martin chats with Luanda Casella & Pablo Casella about Trouble Score, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 7 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Show Notes Gabrielle, Luanda and Pablo discuss:  Discussion of Indigenous peoples and their struggles in North and South America Returning to the storytelling concert form, and how the project began The importance of experiencing everything that occurs on the stage Incorporating ritual into practice and performance Research threads of misleading discourse, cult of story, the unreliable narrator and how they evolved through Trouble Score Exploring trauma through ritual and archetype The fully-realized mythology built into the text The musical compositions in the piece and how music can carry narrative and organize elements Using sounds as triggers of memory Working with text, sound and light to construct a world How the character of the Healer evolved into a provocative voice The shadow self created via one's experience About Trouble Score Part ritual, part pop concert, Trouble Score is a hallucinatory portrait of family myth refracted through the lens of magic realism. Weaving multi-layered text, vocals, sound samples, and live music within an otherworldly lighting composition that turns each scene into a luminous portal, this one-night-only performance is a storytelling séance that's as witty as it is disruptive. Trouble Score revisits an old family scandal—a web of fragmented criminal stories that unravels into an impossible plot, where childhood innocence collides with the distorted reality of trauma, set against the backdrop of racial segregation and a military dictatorship. Blending humour and complicity, Trouble Score captures the fantastic, mysterious, and often surreal nature of family dynamics. Luanda Casella, known for her incisive deconstruction of language and fascination with the unreliable narrator, crafts text that is both razor-sharp and darkly funny. Pablo Casella composes intricate landscapes of melodic intimacy and rhythmic resonance. Nick Verstand, whose work explores the edges of light, space, and human perception, sculpts immersive architectures that breathe with the performers. Together, they turn family legend into a ritual of reinvention—a storytelling alchemy of music, language, and light. About the Guests Luanda Casella is a writer, performing artist, and theatre director from São Paulo, based in Ghent, Belgium. A resident artist at NTGent, her work is internationally acclaimed and known for its ingenious storytelling and incisive deconstruction of language. She is currently a teacher at the drama department at the KASK Conservatory, Ghent, and a PhD candidate examining "deceptive discourse" in communication processes and "unreliable narrators" in classic and contemporary works of fiction. Casella has also been a guest lecturer at leading institutions, including DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam), KABK (The Hague), P.A.R.T.S, School for Contemporary Dance (Brussels), Toneelacademie Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin, Cité Universitaire de Paris, and Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. Pablo Casella is a composer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His ear for harmonies is unique in contemporary music. With his skills and virtuosity, he knows how to paint landscapes with sound, emotions with melody and power with rhythm. In the theatre world, he is active as a composer of soundtracks, producer and live musician; he has collaborated on Antigone in the Amazon (Milo Rau/NTGent/MST), Ferox Tempus, KillJoy Quiz and Elektra Unbound (Luanda Casella & NTGent), and BAM!, Saperlipopette and LOS (Ultima Thule). Casella is currently touring internationally with Antigone in the Amazon and has already performed the show in ten different countries and at renowned performing arts festivals such as Wiener Festwochen and Festival D'Avignon. Casella has has played at prestigious festivals such as Dour, Les Ardentes, Dranouter, Gent Jazz and Jazz Middelheim. With his own band, Little Dots, he has released two albums on V2 Records (2014 and 2018), for which he was responsible for the compositions, arrangements and co-production. Little Dots was artist in residence at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. The band toured as the opening act for Gabriel Rios and Hooverphonic in venues such as AB (Brussels), De Roma (Antwerp) and Paradiso (Amsterdam), and at festivals such as Gent Jazz and Eurosonic. 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. Luanda joined the conversation from Belgium, and Pablo joined from the countryside of São Paulo, Brazil, home to the Tupinambás, Tupiniquins and Carijós, with Macro-Jê speakers in the interior. 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  

Guest host Chipo Chipaziwa chats with Cherish Menzo about JEZEBEL, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 22 and 23 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver, BC. Show Notes Chipo and Cherish discuss:  How Jezebel was developed Representation and presentation of black women in western culture, including tendencies of visual hypersexualization Use of various elements to highlight juxtaposition of beauty and the grotesque Negotiation between performance and how it is consumed by the audience How to be careful not to misrepresent anyone in performance work through stories or images How has the work changed from its first performance to today? Jezebel's position in a trilogy of work The use of distortion and its cultural significance Navigating between caricature and authenticity What references did you call upon in creating the work? About JEZEBEL Through a collision of physical performance, hip hop visual language, and the slowed, distorted flow of chopped-and-screwed sound, JEZEBEL reclaims the hyper-sexualized image of the "video vixen" that defined hip hop's golden age. Once framed through a male gaze that fetishized and vilified Black femininity, the vixen now steps into her own frame—stretching the image until its artifice becomes her authorship. Drawing from the glossy aesthetics of MTV-era music videos and the syrupy deceleration of Southern hip hop remix culture, this electrifying solo work deconstructs the myths of the "hip hop honey," refracting her through feminist, racial, and cultural awakenings. What emerges is a portrait of a woman both muse and maker: unapologetic and self-possessed. With a bass-heavy soundscape and arresting physicality, JEZEBEL asks—who gets to look, and who gets to define what they see? About Cherish Menzo Cherish Menzo (°1988, The Netherlands) is a choreographer and dancer, who works from Brussels and Amsterdam. In 2013 she graduated from The Urban Contemporary (JMD) at the 'Hogeschool voor de Kunsten' in Amsterdam. Cherish has appeared in the work of Lisbeth Gruwez (THE SEA WITHIN), Jan Martens (THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER, any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones), Nicole Beutler (6: THE SQUARE), as well as collaborations with the likes of Akram Khan, Ula Sickle, Olivier Dubois and Eszter Salamon. Her powerful movement language also comes into its own in her own work, which tours internationally. In 2016, she and Nicole Geertruida made EFES, an exhausting duet in which perfection and fallibility raise intriguing questions about how we like to see human beings. Sorry, But I Feel Slightly Disidentified... (2018), a solo made by Benjamin Kahn for (and with input from) Cherish, was an attempt to create a cartography of how we experience and meet the other. The seeds for this production were laid within the framework of Fraslab, after which an artistic dialogue between Cherish and Frascati Producties was initiated. Hereafter, Cherish made LIVE (2018), a cross between dance performance and pop/rock concert in collaboration with musician Müşfik Can Müftüoğlu. In 2019 Cherish worked at Frascati Producties on JEZEBEL, a dance performance inspired by the phenomenon Video Vixen from the hip-hop clips of the 90s. Jezebel, a contemporary hip-hop honey, refuses to be defined by others and shakes off her image by deconstructing and redefining it. In May 2022, during Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER premiered, a duet in which she and Camilo Mejía Cortés, with the help of the distorted rap choir, search for ways to detach their bodies and the daily reality in which they move from a forced perception. In the context of D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER , Cherish also gives workshops on the chopped & screwed technique, a process from hip-hop music that Cherish applies to the moving and performing body in the performance. As part of Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam's research programme Welcome To Our Guesthouse, Cherish made KILLED AND EXTENDED DARLINGS: SUBTLE WHINE in autumn 2023, an audiovisual performative landscape that embraces the subtle nuances and mechanics of gyration. Cherish is currently touring with FRANK (premiere May 2025, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels). In continuation of JEZEBEL and D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, in FRANK, distortion is once again one of the main ingredients to generate material. In addition, Cherish looked into the action of decay and discovered how something gradually breaking down and getting less or worse can be another attempt to distort a form or information. Cherish received the Amsterdam FRINGE and FRINGE International Bursary Awards 2019 with JEZEBEL. JEZEBEL was selected in 2020 for both the Dutch and Flemish Theaterfestival, which presented a jury selection of the best performances of the season and received the prestigious Charlotte Köhler award by the Prins Bernhard Foundation (Amsterdam) in 2022. D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER was selected for both the Belgian Theater Festival and its Dutch counterpart. With D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, Cherish received the BNG Bank Theater Prize (2023) and the Dutch Drama Jury prize for best direction (2023). For her artistic work, she is interested in the transformation of the body on stage and in the "embodiment" of different physical images. Implementing distortion, decay, and dissonance, Cherish attempts to detach bodies from forced perceptions and their daily corporeal realities, underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of images that seem recognizable at first glance. Glitching the ''common'' lexical, the lexical of the speaking being, she seeks the Uncanny, the Enigmatic, and the Monstrous to give shape to – and materialize speculative forms and fictions. 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. Cherish joined the conversation from the Netherlands. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Cecilia Kuska about her work as a producer as well as Wayqeycuna, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival and co-presented by Latincouver: February 6 and 7 at the Roundhouse in Vancouver, BC. Show Notes Gabrielle and Cecilia discuss:  The work of Tiziano Cruz and how Cecilia's understanding has been shaped by his process and artistry How performance can be political without losing its complexity of creativity What it means to hold the space with theatrical work How community engagement is realized and makes sense of each locality Previous times at PuSh Cecelia's own practice to find what is on the margins Different barriers and cultural policies within other countries The approaches that guide your own model and curatorial thinking How curation is about asking and listening How to support new producers and artists The wider landscape and artistic futures of contemporary Latin American performance About Wayqeycuna Like a quipu—the intricate system of knotted cords used by Andean peoples to record memory and knowledge—Wayqeycuna traces Argentinean artist Tiziano Cruz's path back to his childhood in the Andean north. Through a poetic layering of testimony, ritual, and performance, Cruz reassembles fragments of collective and personal history, each knot an invocation of ancestry, each gesture a measured rebellion against erasure. Drawing from archival research and community memory, the work reflects on the violent devastation of cultural and communal life under neoliberalism and enduring racial hierarchies.  As the final piece in Cruz's trilogy Tres Maneras de Cantarle a una Montaña (Three Ways of Singing to a Mountain), which includes Soliloquio (I woke up and hit my head against the wall) presented at the 2023 PuSh Festival, Wayqeycuna unfolds as an act of return and repair: a lament for what has been taken, and a celebration of what persists. About Cecilia Cecilia began her career in the arts as an independent photographer, cinematographer, and combined arts student, producing exhibitions and short films. This personal exploration soon expanded into a collaborative impulse: she found herself increasingly drawn to supporting others in bringing their artistic visions to life, always guided by a sensitive and creative eye for detail. Over the past 15 years, she has developed and produced cultural projects across the globe, working at the intersection of disciplines and identities, with a strong commitment to international collaboration, contemporary creation, and institutional transformation. 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. Cecilia joined the conversation from Brussels, Belgium. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam of Plastic Orchid Factory about Catching Up to the Future of Our Past, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 30 and 31 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver, BC. Show Notes Gabrielle and Renae discuss:  The ways in which interdisciplinary fluidity shapes choreography How trust and dialogue forms the core of collaboration The power of "dancer magic" and its ability to pull together a performance The development of Catching Up with the Future of Our Past The use of the physiology of memory as a choreographic tool How do we remember and embody future dances? The continuous tending to of small things that is present in mid-life and in the work itself Creating work together at the same time as being life partners and parents How do you know that you're doing it right? The tension between memory, desire and the fantasy of progress Capturing the possibility and optimism of the 60s, especially the space race The emotional and scenographic landscape, and how that changed when the piece grew from a solo piece? Learnings from other collaborators and artists The Slow Social coming up at PuSh 2026! About Catching Up to the Future of Our Past Two bodies meet, orbiting between what was and what might be. Catching Up to the Future of Our Past invites audiences into the strange terrain of midlife—where time gathers, stretches, and folds back on itself. Inside a Mary Quant–inspired, retro-futurist astral bubble, their movements trace the pull of time: measurable yet fluid, finite yet elastic. Through intimacy, repetition, and reflection, the dancers chart midlife not as a pause or checkpoint, but as a living exchange between memory and possibility. The work unfolds as a meditation on the place where nostalgia and anticipation coexist, where every choice carries echoes of what was and what could be. This work summons us to witness not only the passage of time, but its elastic potential—to feel how memory propels possibility, and how possibility reshapes what we remember. About the Artists Plastic Orchid Factory (POF) is an interdisciplinary organization led by dance artists James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). For over twenty years, POF has created work that dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, installation and digital media. By inviting audiences to reconsider how movement, space and technology intersect, the company cultivates experiences that are both site-responsive and immersive. Committed to risk-taking, POF embraces experimental rigour while foregrounding collaboration with local and international partners to build bridges between artists, communities and contexts. POF has created more than twenty original works presented in galleries, theatres, studios and community halls across Turtle Island and beyond. Recent highlights include Entre Chien et Loup, presented at The Citadel (Tkaronto/Toronto), MAI | Montréal, arts interculturels (Tio'tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal) and The Fluid Festival (Mohkínstsis/Calgary); Digital Folk, shown at Omineca Arts Centre (Lheidli T'enneh/Prince George), Mile Zero Dance (Amiskwaciy Waskahikan/Edmonton), Swallow-a-Bicycle (Mohkínstsis/Calgary) and Crimson Coast (Snuneymuxw/Nanaimo); and The Door Project at Left of Main (MST Territories/Vancouver). plasticorchidfactory.ca James Gnam (he/him) is a Vancouver-based dancer and choreographer whose work  explores the reciprocal tensions between embodiment, technology and social exchange. A graduate of Canada's National Ballet School, he has interpreted repertoire for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Ballet BC, EDAM Dance and 10 Gates Dancing, performing landmark creations by Crystal Pite, Twyla Tharp, Jiří Kylián, Mark Morris, Kurt Jooss, Peter Bingham and Tedd Robinson. Gnam is Artistic Director of Plastic Orchid Factory, a founding member of Left of Main, and an associate artist with Mélanie Demers' MAYDAY and Jacques Poulin-Denis' Grand Poney. James' choreography positions the body as both subject and analytic instrument, extending dance into gaming environments, gallery contexts and civic spaces. Across more than twenty works with Plastic Orchid Factory, he has cultivated a practice that oscillates between meticulous introspection and architecturally scaled spectacle, consistently interrogating the conditions under which meaning—and community—are produced. His research and productions have been supported by Opera Estate (Bassano, Italy); Circuit-Est (Montréal); Centre Q and the National Arts Centre (Ottawa); and, in Vancouver, The Dance Centre, Electric Company Theatre, The New Forms Festival, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Burrard Arts Foundation/Facade Festival, The Belkin Gallery and SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. In 2010, the late Lola Maclaughlin nominated Gnam and his partner and collaborator Natalie LeFebvre Gnam for the City of Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for Dance. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Renae Shadler about SKIN, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: February 4-6 at the Annex in Vancouver, BC. Show Notes Gabrielle and Renae discuss:  How did this project first begin? What did you discover about your own assumptions and movement in this process? How did the presence of caregiving and support structures change your thinking and development of the show? How did this project deepen or challenge the framework of modern life, including the textures of the anthropocene? How did the image of sea amoeba influence the show, and allow for merging without suppressing difference? How do you craft a dramaturgy that resists normative readings of the body on stage? What is your wider practice beyond SKIN? What questions continue to animate your work? About SKIN Every body tells its story through the skin.  Constantly shifting through contact, the skin transforms—between bodies, and in its exchange with the earth, whose surface we are changing ever faster in the Anthropocene. Performed by Roland Walter, a dancer with full-body spastic paralysis, and Renae Shadler, a non-disabled choreographer, SKIN creates a universe where their distinctly different bodies move toward one another. Through touch, habitat, and imagination, they develop a shared movement language inspired by sea anemones, liquid states, and the shifting textures of the earth. This duet is not about access, but excess—a space where multiple lived experiences coexist. Between contraction and expansion, Walter and Shadler explore new ways of relating, dissolving the idea of "more" or "less" able bodies. SKIN becomes a meditation on contact and transformation—on how our environment both shapes us and is shaped by us. About Renae Renae Shadler is an Australian choreographer, performer and researcher based in Berlin who experiences her life and work as a web of interrelations. Since 2015, she has been developing her Worlding choreographic practice, which seeks to dissolve the perceived border between internal and external processes, between bodies and worlds. Her work spans diverse contexts: from dance on stage and major festivals, to museums and outdoor public engagement projects. Alongside performances, she has created lectures, the Worlding podcast series, and the ongoing knowledge lab Moving across Thresholds, which hosts online/live gatherings and festival events. As founder of Renae Shadler & Collaborators, she has presented and developed work at venues such as Dancehouse (Australia), Palais de Tokyo (France), Tanzhaus Zürich (Switzerland), Radialsystem and HELLERAU (Germany), among others. She is a recipient of the George Fairfax Memorial Award and the Marten Bequest Theater Fellowship. SKIN — her duet with Roland Walter, a performer with spastic paralysis — was selected for Perform Europe 2024/25, Tanzplattform Deutschland 2022, and Aerowaves 2021. Roland Walter was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1963 with a lack of oxygen, which caused his spastic paralysis. Walter lives with full-time assistance in Berlin. In 2010 Roland started working as an artist. As a performer he experiments with his body and works with artists worldwide, showing the audience a change of perspective. Roland also holds lectures and workshops in schools. So far Roland has worked and researched in Berlin at Theaterhaus Mitte and in the Sophiensaele, among others. With his paralysed body he fascinates the audience. 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. Renae joined the conversation from Berlin, Germany. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Bilal Alkhatib about Khalil Khalil, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival: January 23-25 at the Nest in Vancouver, BC. Show Notes Gabrielle and Bilal discuss:  How did you translate the story into movement and performance? How did the project start, as your first theatre project coming from film? What kind of conversations or tensions shaped the balance between personal and formal approaches? How did the interplay between mediums shape the audience's understanding of grief and becoming? What responsibilities did you feel as an outsider to Khalil's interior experience, but also in relationship to his political reality? What is the difference between the film and the play, and why have both? What's next for you? About Khalil Khalil How does a name shape a destiny? Khalil Albatran was named for his brother, a martyr of the First Palestinian Intifada. In a family where the name carries both honour and grief, he has lived as a continuation of another life—one that ended before his began. Through movement and music, Khalil Khalil becomes a dialogue between presence and absence. The artist places his body in direct conversation with memory, confronting what it means to live as both an echo and an original. Each movement negotiates the distance between what is remembered and what is alive now. Beyond one man's story, the work opens a window onto a shared experience for many who bear the names of the fallen. A performance in which the artist confronts an existential question: can a body exist beyond the history it inherits? About Bilal Bilal Alkhatib is a Palestinian filmmaker. He holds a bachelor's degree in media and television and began his career in film as a cinematographer. Bilal has written and directed several documentary and short films, including Palestine 87 (2022), which was selected for the International Competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and received the Audience Award. His latest documentary project, My Name is Khalil, received grants from the Qattan Foundation and the British Consulate. He is currently developing his first feature film while pursuing a master's degree in cinema. 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. Bilal Alkhatib joined the conversation from Ramallah, in the West Bank of occupied Palestine. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Justine A. Chambers about The Brutal Joy, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle and Justine discuss:  How did you develop this work? What is the significance of and approach to the presentation of the black body? How is this work an anticolonial imagining? What kinds of knowing and being become possible through the act of dance? What is bodily sovereignty and why is it important around the figure of the black dandy? What is the importance of style and the expression of the self through fashion and clothing? How does the call-and-response structure of the show affect collaboration and its meaning? About The Brutal Joy Dance as archive. Style as philosophy. The Brutal Joy slides between ritual and rebellion—part groove, part revelation, all liberation. An improvisational act of devotion to Black-living, The Brutal Joy merges Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture, transforming social dance and self-styling into an embodied living library of self-determination. Within its scored improvisation for dance, light, and sound, performers riff, vamp, and break—tracing the syncopations between individuality and collectivity, ritual and rebellion. As light carves the body and shadows echo back, The Brutal Joy unfolds as both performance and inquiry: a living counter-archive where gesture becomes knowledge and attire holds history. At once reverent and radical, it embodies the bodily sovereignty of the Black dandy and the communal vitality of the Electric Slide. What emerges is a choreography of becoming—radiant, self-determined, and alive to the possibilities of another future. About Justine Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator.  Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. Her research attends to embodied archives, social choreographies, and choreography and dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Tyson Houseman about askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle and Tyson discuss:  Where does askîwan sit in your recent work? How does bringing in live image-making evolve your experimentation with form? What made you start working in film after studying theatre and visual arts? What was the initial concept of askîwan? How have you translated the scale of ancestral and deep time into this performance? Is there a connection between the intergenerational teachings in Caustics and the current explorations of askîwan? What are the resonances between the different ecologies of relation in your work? What was it like to collaborate on the music, and how did sound become a vessel for cosmology in this piece? How do you subvert the colonial instrument of the voice? What have the technologies you have used revealed to you about artistic creation? About askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ Part live cinema, part ecological opera, askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ conjures a cosmology of land, memory, and time. This operatic multimedia performance transforms a miniature film set—complete with cameras, mylar, mirrors, and bowls of water—into vast dreamlike mountainscapes that unfold in real time. Through live video projection, electroacoustic sound, and baritone vocals sung in nehiyawewin (Plains Cree), creator and director Tyson Houseman (nêhiyaw) invites audiences into an Indigenous vision of deep, cyclical time: where rivers breathe, fire regenerates, and childhood memories ripple through vibrating water. Viola da gamba and electronics entwine ancient and digital frequencies as landscapes shift from winter ice to aurora skies. At once cinematic and ceremonial, askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ reveals how land remembers—and how, even amid ecological crisis, the earth continues to sing through us. About Tyson Tyson Houseman is a nêhiyaw video artist, performer, and filmmaker from Paul First Nation. Tyson's practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings – speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies. He has exhibited at various galleries, screenings, and festivals worldwide. Most recently he participated in artist residencies at MacDowell, Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, and Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University. Tyson is a recipient of the 2025 "Open Call" commission at The Shed in NYC, a 2025 Forge Project Fellow, a COUSIN Collective Cycle IV Fellow, and a 2025 MacDowell Fellow. Along with producing his own works, Tyson is a touring performer on various live cinema performances created by DJ Kid Koala. Tyson has an MFA in Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts in NYC and a BFA in Theatre Performance from Concordia University in Montreal. 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. Tyson joined the conversation from Toronto, also known as Tkaronto, on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger about SLUGS, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle S.E. and Sam discuss:  How did this piece start and develop into what it is today? What is your creation process like? How did you incorporate a dramaturg? How did you "make it punk enough"? What was the origin of Creepy Boys? How have your interests, creative approach and themes evolved? Your influences are wide and wild; what do these forms mean to you and how do they coexist in your world? How has your practice developed by touring your work around the world? What is the Fringe model and what draws you to it? About SLUGS It's about nothing. We promise. From the award-winning performance/comedy duo Creepy Boys (S.E. Grummett & Sam Kruger), this anarchic fever dream is a techno-punk concert, a play, a clown show, and a basement puppet nightmare all rolled into one. In a neon haze of chaos and charm, two performers attempt to make a show about nothing—until meaning starts leaking in through the cracks. SLUGS spirals from DIY absurdity into something strangely profound, fusing electronic comedy songs, trash puppetry and live camera magic into a meltdown of meaning. It's "brilliantly smart and beautifully stupid" (The Guardian), and it might be the most fun you'll have while the planet burns. For tonight, at least, we are free. About the Artists S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger proudly make joyful, deliciously funny, big-hearted, queer comedy and theatre for the intrigued. Real-life lovers, the pair perform under the duo name CREEPY BOYS, recently nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy Award.  As CREEPY BOYS and with their own solo works, they have toured extensively around the world including across Canada (Buddies in Bad Times, Summerworks Festival), US (Twin Cities Horror Festival), UK (Soho Theatre, Latitude Festival, Edinburgh Fringe), Europe (Prague Quadrennial, LiteraturHaus Copenhagen) and Australia (Midsumma Festival, Adelaide Fringe, Fringe World). Their work has also been featured on the BBC Radio 4 and CBC Radio.  S.E. Grummett (they/them) is a queer, transgender theatre artist from Treaty 6 Territory. Over the past 5 years, Grumms has created a body of original queer work and toured it around the world, including Canada, US, UK, Europe and Australia. Their solo-show, "Something in the Water", which won Best Theatre at the Adelaide Fringe, has toured around the world to queer audiences young and old. Recently they created, "The Adventures of Young Turtle", a puppet musical for queer and trans youth created with indie music icon, Rae Spoon, which won 2 Sterling Awards in Edmonton for Outstanding TYA Production. Grumms is the recipient of the inaugural 2SLGBTQIA+ Multidisciplinary Artist Award presented by the Sask Foundation for the Arts and the 2022 RBC Outstanding Award in recognition for their contribution to the queer and trans community across Saskatchewan. Outside of self-creation, Grumms also works as a director, puppeteer & video artist.  Sam Kruger (he/him) is a performer, sound designer, and recent immigrant to Canada. His solo works "Fool Muun Komming! [BeBgWunderful/YEsyes/ 4sure.Hi5/TruLuv;Spank Spank:SOfun_Grate_Times", "Bat Brains or (let's explore mental illness with vampires)", and duo comedy Creepy Boys, have toured throughout Canada, the US, the UK, Europe, and Australia since 2018 to acclaim and various awards. Kruger's emphasis is in the creation of original theatre that draws on Lecoq-style physical theatre, Gaulier-esqe clown, performance art, and surrealism. Often exploring themes of isolation, loneliness, and the performativity of everyday life, Kruger's work is funny, physical, stupid, sincere, wiggly and proudly weird. He holds a BA from the University of Minnesota, and is a graduate of the Ecole Philippe Gaulier, in Étampes, France. 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. S.E. and Sam joined the conversation from Copenhagen, 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Hazel Venzon about Everything Has Disappeared, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle and Hazel discuss:  The Lapu Lapu tragedy in Vancouver, April 2025 What is the special impact of Philipinos in the world? How do we cope with tragedy and violence? Can visibilization be a form of celebration? How did values of intercultural exchange shape this work? About Everything Has Disappeared Through digital interactive technology (and a touch of magic), Everything Has Disappeared exposes the hidden architecture of the global economy: a system sustained by the labour, care, and migration of Filipino workers. From ships and oil fields to hospitals, factories, and care homes, Filipino hands keep the world turning—often without acknowledgment or visibility. In a blend of illusion, narrative, wit, and exploration, erasure transforms into revelation, confronting how our socioeconomic construct renders some lives essential yet unseen. Equal parts conjuring act and quiet celebration, Everything Has Disappeared illuminates the dignity and cultural spirit that persist within globalized structures, inviting us to contemplate how intricately necessary each and every one of us is, in order for the whole to fully exist.  About the Artists Based in Germany and Canada, Mammalian Diving Reflex is dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences. They create site and social-specific performance events, theatre productions, participatory gallery installations, videos, film, art objects and theoretical texts, collaborating with non-artists to create work that recognises the social responsibility of art, fosters a dialogue and dismantles barriers between individuals of all ages, cultural, economic and social backgrounds. Mammalian brings people together in new and unusual ways around the world, to create work that is engaging, challenging, and gets people talking, thinking and feeling. They make ideal entertainment for the end of the world. U  N  I  Together  (UNIT) Productions is a multi-media producing company for theatre, film, television and the web. Combining the producing, directing, writing, dramaturgy and artistic design talents of duo Hazel Venzon and David Oro, UNIT produces culturally bending content that brings new stories to the forefront. UNIT is passionate about amplifying POC stories and voices and are especially interested in narratives that illuminate Filipino-Canadian experience and diaspora. The Chop is a company that brings together artists to create new Canadian theatre. It was founded in 2006 in Vancouver, BC by Emelia Symington Fedy and Anita Rochon. The Chop is recognized for work that is sophisticatedly "simple" – that is, the artistic propositions are spare and clear so that complexities come from the depth of the investigation. Productions are characterized by an intentionally live and direct connection with the audience. Now led by Emelia Symington Fedy, The Chop has moved our creation hub to the Shuswap BC. The touring of new works starts from our office space in Vancouver, but all creation, mentorship, residencies and community involvement happens rurally. With 19 new works toured nationally and a strong international profile for our "carbon lite" programming, we're enjoying this additional role as rural artistic support system 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Dr. Reneltta Arluk, Alon Nashman and Rawdna Carita Eira about Kiuryaq, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle, Reneltta, Alon and Rawdna discuss:  What brought you together around the aurora borealis? How did the conversations and collaborations begin? Why should you never whistle at the northern lights? How does technology intertwine with theatre, concert and immersive projection as well as land-based knowledge? What is our relationship with the digital world? How does elemental, personal relationships form the core of this work? What thoughts of belonging surfaced in directing the key relationship? Across indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, this is both a creative and a political act. How did the process shape your understanding of shared sovereignty, reciprocity and kinship in the north? Did your relationship to the northern lights change during this process? About Kiuryaq The Northern Lights have always carried stories—frightening, spiritual, epic, and playful. Kiuryaq is a circumpolar performance exploring our relationship with the Northern Lights—"kiuryaq" in Inuvialuktun—created through collaboration among Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from Canada, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and Sápmi (Norway). At its centre are two siblings born in the North: one raised beneath the Aurora with their grandparents, the other adopted south and unaware of their origins. Through ancestral connection, choices are made that alter both their worlds. Blending theatre, live music, and video design, Kiuryaq weaves northern stories into a landscape of light, memory, and cosmology. A performance of transformation and return, Kiuryaq is an invitation into the wisdom, warnings, and humour of the circumpolar region. This one-night-only performance is preceded by an artist talk with co-creators Reneltta Arluk and Rawdna Carita Eira, and a reception hosted by the Royal Norwegian Embassy. Come early for complimentary refreshments and a conversation about the artistic practice and cultural worldviews informing this landmark circumpolar collaboration. About Dr. Reneltta Arluk Writer/Director/Producer. Reneltta is an Inuvialuk, Denesuline, Gwich'in, Cree mom from the Northwest Territories. She is founder of Akpik Theatre. Raised by her grandparents on the trap-line until school age, this nomadic environment gave Reneltta the skills to become the multi-disciplined artist she is now. For nearly two decades, Reneltta has taken part in or initiated the creation of Indigenous Theatre across Canada and overseas. Under Akpik Theatre, Reneltta has written, produced, and performed various works creating space for Indigenous led voices. Reneltta is the first Inuk and first Indigenous woman to graduate from the University of Alberta's BFA Acting program and is the first Inuk and first Indigenous woman to direct at The Stratford Festival. There she was awarded the Tyrone Guthrie – Derek F. Mitchell Artistic Director's Award for her direction of Governor Award winning playwright, Colleen Murphy's The Breathing Hole. She also directed The Breathing Hole at Canada's National Arts Centre. She co-directed award winning Messiah/Complex with Against the Grain Theatre, with soloists from every region of Canada, including many Indigenous performers singing in their language. In 2024, Reneltta received an Honourary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Alberta for her commitment to decolonial change. About Alon Nashman Writer/Producer. Alon is a performer, director, creator, and producer of theatre. Selected acting credits include: The Breathing Hole (National Arts Centre), Birds of a Kind, Hirsch (Stratford Festival), I send you this cadmium red (Art of Time Ensemble), Much Ado About Nothing, Forests, Scorched, Democracy, Remnants, Alias Godot (Tarragon Theatre), Hamlet, All's Well That Ends Well, Botticelli in the Fire/Sunday in Sodom, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, THIS (Canadian Stage), The Wild Duck (Soulpepper), Hedda Gabler (Volcano/Buddies in Bad Times), If Jesus Met Nanabush (De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre), and Tales of Two Cities (Tafelmusik). Alon established Theaturtle in 1999 to create essential, ecstatic theatre that touches the earth and agitates the soul. With Theaturtle, Alon has been involved with the creation and touring of numerous theatre pieces, such as Adam Nashman's The Song, Wajdi Mouawad's Alphonse, Kafka and Son developed with Mark Cassidy of Threshold Theatre, and The Snow Queen, scored for string quartet and narrator by Patrick Cardy. Alon wrote the libretto for Charlotte: A Tri-coloured Play with Music which premiered at Toronto's Luminato Festival and has toured to Taiwan, Israel and Europe, including the Czech National Opera. About Rawdna Carita Eira Writer/Cultural Envoy. Rawdna is a Sami/Norwegian writer and playwright, born in Elverum and raised in Brønnøysund. She writes in Norwegian and Northern Sami. As a playwright, Eira debuted with the monologue Elle muitalus / Elens historie in 2003, where she played the lead role. She has since written several plays for the Sami National Theater Beaivváš. In 2012, her play Guohcanuori šuvva / Sangen fra Rotsundet, was staged at Beaivváš Theater. The play was nominated for the Ibsen Prize. Eira now lives in Guovdageaidnu and works as a director at Beaivváš Sami National Theater. Eira is also a lyricist and vocalist in the band Circus Polaria with musicians Roger Ludvigsen and Kjetil Dalland. Eira has written the text in the Sami part of the opera Two Odysseys: Pimooteewin / Gállabártnit. In 2020, the opera was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for "Outstanding Opera Production" and was awarded the prize for "Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble". 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. Reneltta joined the conversation from Ottawa, which is on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation whose presence reaches back to time immemorial. Alon joined from Toronto, also known as Tkaronto, on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. Rawdna joined from Stockholm, Sweden, but usually resides in Sápmi, Sweden. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Lara Kramer about Remember that time we met in the future?, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle and Lara discuss:  What are the starting seeds and core concepts of this particular work? How does intergenerational knowledge fit into your work? How do you navigate between remembrance and futurity? How are generational connections present in the work? What is the "hollowing feeling in the gut"? How is creating your work like a living canvas? How do ideas arise through collaboration with other artists with diverse points of entry into the arts? What compelled you to make this leap in scale and collaboration? About Remember that time we met in the future? Remember that time we met in the future? moves through a world in transformation—where land, light, sound, and memory converge. Within a shifting terrain of salvaged materials and spectral landscapes, four Indigenous artists journey through nonlinear time, where body and land, spirit and matter are inseparable. Each movement is a trace of ancestral memory, of futures unfolding, of a pulse shared between beings and worlds. Through intimate physicality, layered imagery, and atmospheric force, the performers navigate a landscape of story, ritual, and resonance. This is not dance as spectacle, but as invocation where stillness holds weight, sound becomes breath, and tenderness meets storm. In this durational dreamscape, the dancers walk with more-than-human kin, carrying the gravity of lived experience and the glow of emergent futures. Remember that time we met in the future? invites audiences into a present stretched by memory, a space of becoming, of heartbeats carried forward. About Lara Kramer Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-cree and settler heritage, raised in London, Ontario. She lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/ Montreal. Her choreographic work, research and field work over the last fifteen years has been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. She is the first generation in her family to not attend the Residential schools. Kramer's relationship to experiential practice and the creative process of performance, sonic development and visual design is anchored in the embodiment of experiences such as dreams, memories, knowledge, and reclamation. Her creations in the form of dance, performance and installation have been presented across Canada and Australia, New Zealand, Martinique, Norway, the US and the UK. 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. Lara 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

Gabrielle Martin chats with SoKo Jena about Kamwe Kamwe ("One by One"), coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle and SoKo discuss:  What does Kamwe Kamwe mean and why is it important to the show? What are the origins of this production? How does the political factor into your work, and how do you navigate the space between the body, voice and spiritual? How do you approach the political significance of the black body on stage? Why do you define your work as being a spiritual practice? What is the Soko totem? What is your process of incorporating all the various aspects into the visual world of the piece? How does Kamwe Kamwe connect or depart from your other work? What is your company's role in cultivating contemporary dance in Zimbabwe? About Kamwe Kamwe Kamwe Kamwe (One by One) is a force of movement and song—a meeting of ancestral rhythm and contemporary resistance. On a sand-covered stage, four Zimbabwean dancers move through a terrain of poles, elastics, and projected images, their bodies speaking what history has silenced. Echoes of those disappeared through colonial and ongoing violence are carried in the haunting truths revealed through body and voice. Choreography that transforms dance into testimony, this is a reckoning on racism and human rights—a body-to-body reminder that liberation is built in motion, and that no one moves forward alone. Kamwe Kamwe (One by One) is both protest and prayer: a dance of solidarity rising from the dust. About SoKo Jena SoKo Jena is a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, and founder of jena_practice, a platform bridging traditional Zimbabwean performance with contemporary artistic expression. A graduate of the University of the Arts (Philadelphia, USA) and the Dance Trust of Zimbabwe, Jerahuni has collaborated with influential mentors such as Peter John Sabbagha, Nora Chipaumire, Ja Willa Jo Zollar, Boyzie Cekwana, and Mamela Nyamza. His work investigates identity, resilience, and spirituality through movement, sound, and ritual, often combining live singing with contemporary dance. His creations, including Kamwe Kamwe / One by One and The Architecture of Blackness, have been presented internationally at festivals and venues such as SPIELART Theatre Festival (Germany), In2IT International Dance Festival (Norway), Atelier Automatique (Germany), and Festival de Dança Itacaré Danse (Brazil). Through his practice, Jerahuni continues to expand Zimbabwean cultural heritage into a global dialogue, offering audiences powerful performances that merge tradition, innovation, and political urgency. 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. SoKo joined the conversation from Brazil. 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  

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

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. 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. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Ondřej Hrab, Anastasiia Kosodii and Jana Svobodová about their show, Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival! Show Notes Gabrielle, Ondřej, Anastasiia and Jana discuss:  What makes your location so important to your work? What drew you to the non-musical form, and how does silence become part of the work's meaning? How do you approach staging texts so that they speak across borders without diluting their intimacy or specificity? What is documentary theatre and what is your particular approach with this new work? What questions are raised about authorship and collective responsibility? What did the title "for western audiences" mean and how did it impact the work? What is the importance of language and how do you deal with multiple languages in a performance? About Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience In Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience, the political becomes profoundly personal.  Drawn from the words of Ukrainian playwright Anastasiia Kosodii, this delicate yet piercing work meditates on the ordinary moments that fracture under the weight of war—boiling water, harvesting fruit, sleeping in one's own bed. Across languages and borders, five performers gather to honour the small acts of living that survive in the shadow of war. Through text projection, music, movement, and light, they weave a collective reflection on distance, empathy, and responsibility—how to stand beside those whose lives are under siege. In its quiet sincerity, the piece invites us to listen: to the grain of a voice, the tremor of solidarity, the fragile beauty of life persisting against the noise of devastation. About the Guests Archa – Centre for Documentary Theatre continues the work its founders Ondřej Hrab and Jana Svobodová carried out for over 30 years at the renowned Archa Theatre in Prague. The Centre operates both locally and internationally. It actively collaborates with international theatres and artists, as well as with the rural community in the village of Dvakačovice, where it now focuses much of its activity. The Centre produces theatre performances, organizes the International Summer School of Documentary Theatre, hosts artistic residencies and workshops both in the Czech Republic and abroad. Its work focuses on documentary and socially specific theatre projects that emphasize collaboration between professional artists and representatives of diverse social groups. 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. Jana and Ondřej joined the conversation from Dvakačovice, Czechia, and Anastasia joined from Broumov, Czechia. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Cole Lewis, Patrick Blenkarn and Sam Ferguson about their show, 2021, coming up at the 2026 PuSh Festival!  Show Notes Gabrielle, Cole, Patrick and Sam discuss:  How does the form of the game highlight and confront the deep personal stories on which the piece is based? How is the video game form related to the practice of acting? How do the technical aspects, including data and AI, affect the piece? How did you come together as a team and what are your different roles in creating the piece? How does the audience member play or embody the central character, and what is the difference between becoming and influencing? Where does witnessing end and participation begin? How do personal artifacts influence the game, and the choices within it? How do you navigate the line between technological wonder and moral discomfort? What does consent mean for someone who has passed on? About 2021 Under the glow of a flickering screen, a daughter reconstructs her deceased father. Pixel by pixel, contradiction by contradiction. 2021 is a live performance where theatre, AI, and video-game storytelling converge, blurring the boundary between human remembrance and machine logic. An audience member steps into the role of Brian, an unhoused veteran reliving his final weeks inside a looping digital hospital: a labyrinth of corridors, bureaucratic dead ends, and fleeting human contact. Guided by his daughter's narration, fragments of data become playable memory. Each decision glitches reality a little more. How do we provide dignity in death to those we fundamentally disagree with? Part elegy, part experiment, 2021 exposes the tenderness and terror of digital resurrection. It asks not whether machines can think, but whether memory itself is a kind of simulation. About the Guests Guilty by Association (GbA) is an interdisciplinary performance collective that shifts its process with each new project. Led by Co-Artistic Directors, Cole Lewis + Patrick Blenkarn, they seek to expand what theatre can do, devising work from design ideas, exploring modes of storytelling, and scheming to fuse media to the stage. The Elbow Theatre dissects the human condition. We develop shows that question accepted truths. Our productions engage our audiences with the realities of our world. Through process and production, The Elbow presents theatre that promotes caring for, and understanding of, each other. The Elbow was founded in 2012 by Itai Erdal and is based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Cole Lewis (she/her) is a mom and mad theatre artist from St. Catharines, Ontario. She specializes in creating live performance from design ideas, exploring new modes of storytelling, and fusing technologies to the stage. Her practice includes directing, playwriting, and the design of moving image works. Twice nominated for Dora-Awards, Cole's practice uses humour, design, and technology to explore notions of class and violence, expose questions of bias, and unsettle standard conceptions of 'truth' to explore alternative futures. She has an MFA in Directing from Yale and her thoughts on performance have been shared at LMDA, Howlround, FOLDA, Yale CCAM, and Canadian Theatre Review. Patrick Blenkarn (he/him) is an artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. His research-based practice revolves around the themes of language, labour, and democracy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books, with subjects as diverse as the labour of donkeys to the valuation of art to historical date farming practices in Iraq. He is a polyglot, programmer, animator, musician, and stage director. He is also the co-creator of asses.masses and co-founder of videocan, the national video archive of performance documentation. Sam Ferguson (he/him) is an award-winning sound designer/composer from Toronto. After moving to Vancouver to study under acclaimed electroacoustic music composer Berry Truax he returned to Toronto where he became involved with theatre. This experience led him to enroll in the Yale School of Drama where he received an MFA for sound design. Since graduating he has returned to Toronto and has been working in the industry ever since. 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. Cole, Patrick and Sam joined the conversation from Münster, Germany. 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  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Andréane Leclerc of Nadére arts vivants for the Season 3 Finale of PuSh Play! Throughout the Festival, Andréane will be sharing her practice through a variety of workshops and consultations for students and professionals as part of a PuSh Festival Artist Residency. Show Notes Gabrielle and Andréane discuss:  How do you integrate difficult contortion movements with somatic practices? What is the relationship between your practices 20 years ago and those you have today? How do you write circus? What does it mean to deconstruct and body and language of contortion? What is dramaturgy in this context? How are you working in the community? How does contortion inform non-contortionist bodies? What does relational ecology look like in the rehearsal process and onstage? What are you currently researching? About Andréane Leclerc A conceptual and performance artist, Andréane Leclerc is interested in human encounters that guide her towards interdisciplinary and interartistic processes. Trained as a contortionist (National Circus School of Montreal, 2001), she draws inspiration from her 20 years of circus practice to reflect on contortion as a philosophical posture and to develop her scenic language. Her approach, focused on listening, relational ecology and perceptive attention, is part of new body practices emerging from the somatic and performance fields. In 2013, she completed a master's degree on the dramaturgy of prowess at the UQAM theater department. That same year, with her partner Geoffroy Faribault, she founded the company Nadère arts vivants in order to pursue her exploration of a body/matter evolving in sensation rather than in sensationalism. She created the conceptual pieces Di(x)parue 2009; Bath House 2013; Mange-Moi 2013; Cherepaka 2014; The Whore of Babylon Featuring The Tiger Lillies 2015; Sang Bleu 2018; À l'Est de Nod 2022 and (X) currently in creation. Her pieces have been presented in Tokyo, Florence, Cairo, Tenerife, Sao Paolo, Guadalajara, Chicago, Rouyn-Noranda and Montreal, on contemporary stages, as well as in museums and galleries. In parallel to her artistic career, Andréane Leclerc is a teacher and offers contortion classes to physical artists since 2015. She also develops interdisciplinary dramaturgy workshops for circus, dance, theater and performance artists (Studio 303, En Piste, Playwrights workshop Montreal in Montreal, La Gata Cirko in Bogota, La Grainerie in Toulouse, Fabbrica Europa in Florence). In 2017, she participated in the creation of Cirque OFF, a living manifesto for the biodiversity of circus arts in Montreal (Studio 303).  She also occasionally act as a dramaturgy and movement consultant (Dialogue of Disobedience & Black light, white noise by and with Dana Dugan, 2018 & 2022) and performs for various international projects (Variations pour une déchéance annoncée by Angela Konrad, 2012; The Tiger Lillies Perform Hamlet since 2016).  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. Majula 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 Artistic Director, and today's episode highlights the dramaturgy of the circus body and relational ecology. I'm speaking with Andréa Leclerc of Nadir Arvivant, a performer, director, researcher and pedagogue. Andréa Leclerc has developed a somatic practice inspired by contortion for over 25 years. She creates transdisciplinary scenic works based on cooperation, listening and relational ecology. She's also a 2025 Push Artist in Residence, and will be sharing her practice through a variety of workshops and consultations for students and professionals throughout the festival.Find out more at our Push in the Community page. Here is my conversation with Andréa. I am thrilled to be in this conversation with you today. We're going to be talking about your practice and what you'll be up to at Push and what brings you here, what's brought you to this point in your career and what you're thinking about next. And just as we are about to get into that, I really just want to take a moment and acknowledge the land I'm on today. And, you know, this morning I was reading an article about PFAS or forever chemicals in our water, and I know we're all really aware of the signs of our extractive dynamic with the earth. And these signs are all around us and they seem to be pressing in daily. And I just I'm really incredibly grateful to live in this rich nature of so-called Vancouver, these unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Coast Salish peoples. And to reflect on what it means to be a citizen of these lands and to live in reciprocity, which, you know, a totally different posturing than this extractive dynamic that's got us here today.And again, where are you where are you calling from? And I would love you just to I would love to hear you share your relationship to the land you're on. Yes, thank you, Gabrielle. I would like to acknowledge that the dramaturgy called Spirit, which runs through another of the event creation, has been shaped by contact with various unceded indigenous territories where beings and their memories coexist. So I'm joining this conversation from Jojagi Mounia in Montreal, which has long been a meeting place for diplomatic activities between indigenous nations. You started practicing contortion over 25 years ago, and this has evolved into your own unique somatic practice and pedagogy. And many many people would not associate contortion with its references to circus, virtuosity, the extreme, you know, painful looking positions with somatic practice, which tends to refer to more internal mind body methodologies. I would love it if you can describe how you made the connection between contortion, the contortion you were practicing, you know, when you started 25 years ago and the contortion you practiced today.     03:13 Yes, that's a very good question, because it's actually at the core of my problematic that has been leading my research from all that disconnection between what I perceived and live and embody my contortion body and all the perceived from and the perception from the audience that they were projecting upon my body when I was doing more classical circus forms. So since I was very young, contortion always have been for me a place for breath and accessing imaginary landscape and other sphere that were for me very fertile in terms of creation. And I always wanted and so new narratives and so on. So I was really traveling throughout my body and it was a way to resonate with the world and a way to be and live, experience the world. And so that always have been something I wanted to share with the audience.But then I'm starting from a very classical approach of contortion. So I was I did my education at the National Circus School in Montreal and I graduated in 2001. So a few years ago now, I've been really, fun, highly skilled, like contortion practice. So sitting on the head on handstand with very precise code and codification from spectacular, I would say, marketing law, when I'm understanding that. And so by, but that was just a way to do. And so by traveling the world working as a contortionist, at some point, even though, like, I was also formed as a contemporary circus artist, I always felt so unsatisfied by the impossibility to reach the audience with what I wanted to express.So then I was like, okay, so then how can I do that? And at some point, I did one creation in Germany. And we it was the first time I was doing like, proper, I would say, research on quantum physics. And it was a show inspired by quantum physics. And we had talks with researchers and scientific and scientists. And there was like an opening on new possibilities. And so there was very clear dramaturgical choices that has been made in matter to be linked with the subject. And so for me, there was a before and an after, because with that creation, there was a possibility to question the codification of how to write circus.And so art did not add to happen in between the circus technique. But the technique and the body and the circus body could talk itself out. Then there was some limitation of my research by was I opening door to actually come back to the university in theaters studying dramaturgy of the body, where I really passed few years to deconstruct the language of spectacular deconstruct the language of contortion deconstruct the body of contortion to try to make this body a matter for scenic representation.And how does that body through contortion, of course, because that is my first entrance door, how does that body can generate imagination and stimulate the true sensation and kinetic kinesthetic, and also composition of the stage, stimulate the imaginary role of the audience? So how can it become a language that audience can read? And that is really dramaturgy, right? Like just for our listeners who may not be as familiar with that term, or when you talk about dramaturgy of the body or dramaturgy of the circus body.     08:00 I can also reflect on how I interpret that. But can you kind of outline that a little bit more? Actually, yeah, I think it's a, I can go further, it was more about then after that to deconstruct and enter this somatic practice, so a language. So I was not any more into like a circus language, but I was in an embodied practice of amplitudes. So that was how I could actually get out from the spectacular aspect from the contortion to enter like a more sensation tools of writing. But then after that, from And then I can develop more about what is made that somatic practice, of course, but then the idea was really to enter about into interrelation of the body and how like composition of the body can generate new ideas or new meaning through sensation.So basically, I've been working a lot upon Francis Bacon and logic of sensation of Gilles Deleuze in order to get out of a way to represent in a narrative way or in an illustrative way, but to really work around the figure and the dramaturgy of the sensation. And with the painting of Francis Bacon, it's also about how the body relate to the space and how the body relate to oneself and how the body relate to the overall and the triptych, so the whole composition of the painting together. So for me, that really became true, like an abstract body made of flesh, bones, sensation and finding new relation within the body, a place for new composition and rethinking all our perceptive idea upon the body and finding new possibility of adjustment to generate new meanings and new mental representation. And so new dramaturgy. Yeah. And I think that term or that word you used reading is really important, like how the audience reads that body.And so often in circus, you know, the acrobatic vocabulary of circus has been expressed in a really until very recently, like a kind of narrow piece, a narrow context with a lot of this projected narrative of, you know, the cabaret or, you know, certain often it's used in theatrical interdisciplinary context in the contemporary world where, you know, there's a there's a text narrative, but what is the what is what does the body say? And I think that you've kind of distilled, you know, hearing you talk about amplitude, distilled kind of the truth of the body through this vocabulary. And then it's like how to dive into that. And to really explore like, what is the truth of that language through the body, which I mean, I think it's obvious to say through the body when we're thinking, okay, circus is clearly usually such a physical practice, but also the the the research development has often physical research has often been a quite operated in a quite a different sphere from say, contemporary dance. And so I've felt that often, when we talk about dramaturgy in the circus realm, it's more like a theatrical dramaturgy in terms of, you know, there's a text or there's like, a storyline, and that is the the physical vocabulary inserts into that, rather than digging into the like, yeah, what is when you really dive into amplitude, or these things that you're referring to, what is that?     12:17 Where does that take you in terms of an experience for the audience and for the artist? I'm really excited by your work.And I guess I think you were already talking about what's been revealed, you know, yeah, you did your master's degree on dramaturgy, the circus body at the University of Quebec at Montreal. And do you have anything further to share about what that revealed has revealed to you? Yeah, but to answer what you just said, or to rebound on what you just expressed around circus, I think, yeah, there's a there was an idea in content in modern circus in mother to wish to tell a story that to break out the traditional circus was to add dance and theater to circus where in a more multidisciplinary approach and in the we're calling it more like a mosaic type of writing of following each of the act and the prowess, and then inserting some theater and dance. And so for me, I was more thinking about if if circus is an art form, it needs to be talking on its be capable to talk on its own and express itself on its own. So more about how to dig into the language not only of the circus, but of the prowess, which is normally a vocabulary, sorry, in the circus world. But now to see it really as a complex organization, to unfold that and see how we can recreate now new way of writing in matter to get out of a certain type of tendency and circus not to generalize, because there is very beautiful and extreme, complex works happening. But to I'm still talking about more like the new circus, maybe ideas was still in the cabaret and those more like popular format, I am interested into searching beyond the self and the eye and the meep to enter into something that the artists can talk about something that transcends the personal point of view. Of course, the la pajole, so what they want to talk comes from them, it's their fire. But then after that, through the art piece that they're creating, it goes beyond the eye and they can talk about other subjects and only what they are living inside their body to become something more an encountering between different people, a place to meet. Yeah, which is also unique, because often circus discipline, the whole discipline practice formation is often very, well, I was gonna say individual, yes and no, because interestingly, like I think circus training spaces or where circus artists practice day to day, often tend to be very communal spaces, sometimes more so than dance or community spaces, but clearly it depends where you are. But for example, in Montreal, that was my experience. But also so much of it is solo work, whereas the dance, often a dance student will be focused on developing their skill and their technique in the ensemble context. And obviously, this is a big generalization and it's discipline specific, but within circus, but that often there is such a it's such a self focused practice. So I'm really also interested in your work for how you're working in community through your pedagogical practice and in the how you've designed your creative process and the presentation of your work.     16:25 Yes, it's very interesting what you're saying because it's true that circus has a very solitude aspect to the development of their own discipline. The work of a circus artist is very personal.But then it's interesting how collectivity also organizes itself in a way of living in a type of nomadism or circus nomadism that is still happening and how all like how the circus is traveling as a ladean of that discipline. And so with what you're saying in terms of contortion, I think what I wanted to do is that even from within the circus world, contortion is the only practice that has its own body in terms of an apparatus. So all circus discipline is always in relation to an object. Contortion, its object is its own body. And so I felt really isolated within even the circus world. And so I think that need my personal need to build bridges, my need to be in relation to be in dialogue and to share my practice to find a way that through my practice and all what my practice have been giving me in terms of knowledge, because I really believe that the body's own knowledge are way beyond our mind that can produce.And so it was about how can I build those bridges to enter in dialogue to create new possibilities through that entrance door. And there's a question, how does contortion inform non-contortionist bodies that you've shared as a starting point for your creative approach, or at least in the recent years? So why does that question draw you in and what have you discovered so far? Um, yeah, I mean, in parallel to my studies, I've been asked to give contortion classes to non contortionist people, because people are very interested to do a contortion and explore. And that has been for me, a huge school, I learned so much from all those encounters. And it's a huge drive in my artistic process.Because contortion for me became, with that question became a philosophy, because it was not anymore about what one self can do, because we did a workshop of like 15 hours, I'm not going to show someone to sit on their own head. And so it was more about how to defocus from the goal oriented, and then to really enter a process. That's one thing. Also, because when we didn't 15 hours, or if we're goal oriented, and with contortion, it doesn't goes with the rhythm of the body. And so it's, and especially as we're getting older, because now I were more with professional artists, so we're not six years old anymore, or nine years old, where the body is all very soft and virgin to the life, we hold history, we hold trauma, we hold time that sits within our body has been forming, we hold also belief that has been also forming our body. So with time, by focusing on the process, I realize how the limits and the zone of resistance that we can feel that one that our construction of life has been forming us that we feel that is blocking us to access contortion is actually places of protection. And so we have to find gratitude towards those resistance. They are very important because they're talking to us and they have things to reveal us. So we cannot like avoid what our body is telling us.     21:06 So then, about how does contortion inform non contortionist bodies about how to get in dialogue with your body, and to listen to what your body has to say throughout the process, to dig into those limits that are constructions of oneself, to enter places of amplitudes and opening, because without that without passing those face it phases, then you the body will keep protecting you. So you need to acknowledge that and you need to work with those sensations.And so that's how I am shifting focuses and the mind and to enter in a place, a posture of listening. So now for me, contortion is a is a posture of listening is a posture to enter in relation is a place to receive information and then see how we can re transform them in movement. I love I love hearing you discuss your process and I think and your philosophy and I think it's especially exciting because it is so truly unique. I think also with circus being such a relatively young discipline, the number of practitioners locally internationally, who are really like teasing out or expanding upon a foundation of circus languages, it's really rare and it's really interesting.And so you create transdisciplinary scenic works, based on cooperation, listening, and you've spoken about relational ecology. So what does relational ecology look like in the rehearsal process and on stage? And I would love it if you want to talk about your piece, Alestinod, because I know that that's really an example of this transdisciplinary work, where you're really developing a relational ecology. The question how does contortion from non contortionist body and what I just kind of explained are is really the foundation about the piece of Alestinod.And so this whole philosophy and this idea how to embrace one's voice and one's history and how each individual are fundamentally essential for the survival of a group. And so as contortion is my, again, disciplinary entrance door, I am focusing on the experience of each of the artists within the performance and I am embracing their voice within the piece.And so with Alice the Nerd, I developed all based on the contortion systemic organization to access amplitude and ecosystem in a complex choreographical partition, which we are activating within very precise law of movement and interrelation. So it's not a choreographical piece with a beginning and an end and a very formal writing.The choice all the performers within Alice the Nerd engage their agency within the piece to get in relation. And so that's how I also reverse our idea about performance and it's performative piece, but not a performance piece because we are not producing movement. It's about how we're not producing and as it's a piece that question limits at structure, as I just explained about contortion, my idea about contortion, we're not pushing boundaries and we're not activating or we're not engaging a language, which is a colonial way of thinking.     25:39 It's really just a system of law and organization within the group with a very precise, like I said, writing of organizing the movement where each of the participant performers receive information and transform them with their agency and so contribute. So somehow being in that piece is an action verb. So it's not just a state. So you are and so you take action in full consciousness.And so with this, then there's like very complex composition that are happening through just living time and space throughout the body. And so that's how I would explain more the relational ecology. And with this also, I'm rethinking my posture as a choreographer. So I've been developing this complex, um, scenic writing, uh, with the dramaturge, um, Miriam Stefani Peraton Lambert. And I work with local performer, uh, every time I remount or even recreate, um, locally, the piece, Aleister Donaud. So with this approach comes from an ecological statement also to first to create big scale piece, because there's between 13 and 30 people on stage. and but without traveling, first of all. Secondly, it takes a lot of time. So I'm not just like passing on a formal piece. It is a practice that is being shared. And so that the local artists are learning and engaging in. And so this takes time and time is resources, but times allow that regenerating nation of also resources and creates meaning. And then we did this as the piece has been already created as I see my posture as a choreographer in those places as a facilitator. And so I have a role, but it's not a dominated role. I have a role, of course, to hold the space, guide the performer, show and share the practice and so on. But there's a kind of, I try to reverse or rethink what is an ethical posture of a choreographer in the relation with the performer, especially contortion that cannot push boundaries, but how we can create together and turn in dialogue together through the piece that is that place of encountering and doing together. So how can we find how can we do together? And so at a question, also the model of creation and so the performance, of course, a question, also the model of production and touring, especially, but locally and also internationally. And so all those places of resistance become a place about dialogue and how we can do together. So it's about also facing realities and different realities and how you can acknowledge them. And so not to blend everyone in one way and diminutive way about who has more resources is more about, okay, how can we make that out, how we can find solution. And so we have to rethink the model. So it's really a place, I think, Alison, that is really a piece that demand to apply very at the core, or the idea and new idea about the situation and the ecological crisis we're facing on now. Getting out of theory and let's get it into practice. So it's not perfect. There's a lot of places, but I really wish that I'm contributing for evolving and it's a place of learning and it's a place of mutual growing and a place to stimulate critical thinking through practice.     30:22 And as you're speaking, I'm hearing about the relational ecology on the micro level, on the macro, or maybe not the micro, but like the different layers of how you are creating the work and sharing the work with the public and the relational ecology between the bodies in the space, the composition, the process of formation and the philosophical process that I'm sure is woven through that or the philosophy that's woven through that process with the artists. And then there's the relationship between how your work intersects with the world in terms of embedding for a longer term process, a more durational process, not touring with a large cast and really thinking about how your work actually connects and relates to the local culture and the local bodies.It's really fascinating. And having experienced an excerpt of this work, it's also, even though you say it's performative and not as much a performance, and I think that's a really interesting and differentiation to make, and I can see the truth in that, it was incredibly captivating. So the depth of the work in terms of the the action of being that you've created and how you've worked out that with the artist is really, really fascinating and compelling to watch. And we hope that we will be lucky enough to host this piece in the future here so that people can experience it from the inside and from the out.I would just love to hear about what you are currently researching, where you're going, what direction you're going with all this wealth of practice and research behind you. Many things. No. I think in the continuity, Alice did not open in 2022, so directly while right in the middle of a pandemic. We've been touring that piece, but first of all, we've been touring that piece in Armenia, Mexico, Buenos Aires, so Argentina and France, and also in Quebec in different regions here. As I just said, Alice did not, it's an ongoing recreation process. So I feel I have so much to learn from Alice did not still. So that's kind of, you know, you know, let's see what is the life of Alice did not will be. But of course, like that's a big, big trend that will live within me for still, I think many years because I still have a lot to learn from it. But in parallel, I have I'm also developing a solo, so another traditional performance. But I have probably for another four years maybe to do research for it because I, as I said, like I am returning to my own body right now, I am facing a place of rupture in my life in terms of like, I think with all the change of context in the world, I am questioning a lot about what is the meaning and role of art into the society.And I want to be really aligned with that. And I am with all Alice did not the master degree, the workshop I've been giving. I am just seeing how much all the bodies knows way more that we do human beings that are inhabiting our body. And so I really want to put myself as an artist to listen what nature has to say, and what my body has to say, and what are the new contemporary mythologies that are that are going to be born from what exists already.     34:51 So see differently. So a big shift in my posture, my way to read, my way to listen, my way to receive, and trying to listen what is happening and what are the shifts right now.And so encounters with other artists, people, culture, be in contact with different realities, learning, listening, and see where this will form itself into the new project. I love that term new contemporary mythologies. That's really beautiful. Thank you so much, Andrean. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. I have been following your work for a very long time coming from the circus world myself. I've just been so inspired about your practice from afar, and I'm really so pleased that we've been able to welcome you, that we will be hosting you very shortly in residence here, so that other people have the opportunity to get to know your practice in a variety of ways. Thank you so much, Gabrielle. I'm so looking forward to being in Vancouver and meet everyone over there, the land and the people.     36:12 That was Gabrielle Martin and André-Anne Leclerc from Nader Arvivant. Throughout the festival, André-Anne will be sharing her practice through a variety of workshops and consultations for students and professionals as part of the Push Festival Artist Residency.The Push Play podcast is produced by myself, Ben Jarland, and me, Trisha Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. This is the final episode of Season 3 of Push Play.We hope you'll have a chance to get out to see some of the works being presented in Vancouver and online January 23rd to February 9th. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the past 20 years, please look at our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play Season where Gabrielle Martin talks with an artist from one of the shows in each of the past years of Push. And to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theatre, dance,    37:06 music and multimedia performances at the     37:09 25 Push Festival, visit pushfestival.ca and follow us on social media.   

Gabrielle Martin chats with Majula Drammeh and Joseph K Kasua. They are presenting a special studio showing and discussion of What is already here? at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show on February 7 at the VIVO Media Arts Centre.  Show Notes Gabrielle, Majulah and Joseph discuss:  For your show, What is Already Here, which stemmed from a 2022 installation, what was the evolution of the project and what were the themes explored? How did it start? How did the pandemic influence the creation process? How have themes of extraction, colonialism and digital technology weave into the work? Why did you choose to call this a "futuristic afro-play" and what do you mean to achieve with this form? What is your collaboration like, given your different points of departure? What drew you to work together, and how do your practices complement one another? About Majula Drammeh I am a performer, dancer, dramaturg and performance maker based in Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden. My main focus is on interactive, participatory immersive work within the fields of dance and performance as well as somatic practices. I am looking to explore how these can act as a bridge for people to participate and discover themselves in an open, permissive and inclusive way. In the interpersonal. I am interested in giving space for both audience/ participants and performers to deal with their own bodily identity and the political baggage it carries. And I strive to present interactive performing arts where the body of the minority is the norm, and hopefully contribute to the decline of history-less of which the non-white body is consigned too. As a performer and dancer my focus is on using somatic practices and experiences to create a focus that is vulnerable, present and invites the participant to be present with themselves too. I use my choreographic and improvisational experiences to find methods of meeting the room, space and objects to create a relational bridge to them. These are also methods I communicate in my teaching. I work as a dramaturg for mainly dance artists and I am intrigued with processes and the path they lead the work on. How, with close attention, the process reveals the very core of an artist's work and clarifies what decisions need to be made when we listen closely. I grew up in Hjulsta/Tensta suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I studied at the Dance and Circus School in Stockholm in 2006 and received my bachelor's degree in dance from Laban Center London (2009) and in 2021.I received a master's degree in performing arts from Stockholm University of the Arts. I have been teaching at Stockholm University of Arts and The Royal Danish Art Academy amongst others. About Joseph K. Kasua Born in Lubumbashi in 1995, Joseph K. Kasau Wa Mambwe is a visual artist, filmmaker and author based in Lubumbashi. He holds a degree in Information and Communication Sciences from the University of Lubumbashi, specialising in Performing Arts (Audiovisual, Cinema and Theatre).His passion for art started very early in Lubumbashi's cinemas, and was nourished by multiple visual influences that later formalised in his artistic practice, which is situated at the intersection of cinema, video art, photography, creative writing and addresses in his work the complexity of memory and identity in a postcolonial urban context. He is a fellow of the Trame 2022 residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, of the Delfina Foundation residency programme in England on food politics, of the Tri-continental Quilombo project (DRC - SWITZERLAND - BRAZIL) from 2021 to 2023. Kasau Wa Mambwe also works as a Fixer, Assistant Director, Editorial Assistant and as a Communication Officer for African and Western structures and collectives, among others Les Films de la Passerelle (Belgium), the Lubumbashi Biennale (2019), Museum of Tervuren (Belgium), PODIUM Esslingen (Germany) and GROUP50:50 (DRC - SWITZERLAND - Germany). 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. Majula joined the conversation from Stockholm, Sweden, and Joseph joined from Lubumbashi in the DR Congo. 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 interpersonal processes and works that give birth to themselves. I'm speaking with Majula Drammeh and Joseph K. Casao-Wamambue, Push artists in residence who will be developing their work, what is already here, in residency during the festival and sharing the studio showing and conversation on February 7th, 2025.  In a world fixated on unyielding technological progress, this interactive theater installation in development urges audiences to reconnect with the tangible through a resounding affirmation of collective belonging. Set in a subterranean laboratory built from discarded electronic waste, the work in development draws on ancestral wisdom and Afro-futurist divisions, inviting participants to challenge their digital dependencies and rediscover what it means to be human in a time of digital alienation. Born and based in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph K. Casao-Wamambue holds a degree in information and communication sciences from the University of Lubumbashi with a specialization in performing arts. From theater and cinema to photography, installation and creative writing, Joseph's work addresses the complexity of memory and identity in a post-colonial urban context. Rooted in dance and choreography, Majula Drammeh's artistic practice explores how the performing arts can provide spaces for interpersonal relationships, addressing vulnerability and challenging societal norms. Her work often exists in non-traditional theater spaces and asks the participants to fully emerge themselves in topics such as time consumerism in a capitalist age.  Here's my conversation with Joseph and Majula. It's really nice to be in conversation with you today. I'm really looking forward to chatting with you more about this project, about your practice. Thank you for joining me. I know it's evening where you are, it's morning where I am. I'm going to start by just acknowledging where I am joining this conversation from. So I am on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh. And as a settler here, it's important. I'm responsible to continue my thinking and education on what the history of colonization looks like here and its implications and ongoing effects today. And I think something that's really interesting is thinking and learning I've done around the different types of colonialism and their impacts today and how that affects what colonization looks like today or neocolonialism based on where we are.    03:01 With my own background, my father coming from Zimbabwe, colonization now looks much different than it has here in Canada. And so, you know, I think that's important in framing the difference specifically between settler colonialism, where large numbers of settlers claim land, become a majority, and often employ a logic of elimination, engineering the disappearance of the original inhabitants versus an extractive colonialism where colonizers, you know, destroy or push away indigenous inhabitants to access resources, but more typically depend on mediation and the labor of the indigenous peoples.  And and then other forms like planter or trade colonialism, and this is there's one kind of very simple and nice reference, a typology of colonialism by Nancy Shoemaker. That's a great reference. And so that's kind of some of my thinking today that I wanted to share. And Joseph and Majula, could you please share where you are joining the conversation from?    04:11 So I'm joining the conversation from Lumbashi. Lumbashi is, I can say, the second biggest city in the Republic Democratic of Congo. It's a city full of mining and exploitation, so it's really related to the colonialism history that you were talking about.  And I was born here, and I've always acknowledged that Lumbashi, as a qualification, they say that it's a copper city. And for all my life, I haven't really been in touch with the copper, so that's symbolized the fact that our land don't really belong to us. So there are so many people, so many countries that are under us, and taking all the decisions that belong to us. So yeah, I'm joining from this territory.    05:24 and I am joining from Stockholm, Sweden, and actually I have no roots to this country because my mother is from Finland and my father is from Gambia and they ended up here because of work in the 70s. So in Sweden we call people that have a parent of colour and a parent from another country people of in betweenesship. So we're in between wherever we are basically.  So yeah and I think this has coloured my experience as a human throughout my entire life and I mean Sweden is a very rich and very social democratic country or it has been until quite recently it's more right-wing now and I mean it's not dealt so much with its past in terms of I mean it actually still has in one sense a colony in the far north with the Sami people who are the Swedish indigenous people and it's still a very very hot topic here and it's just recently passed maybe I would say eight to ten years that Sweden has actually also acknowledged the fact that they were dealing with slave trade and owned a colony in St. Bartelemy. So yeah I'm in all of that mess with my in betweeness ship.    07:16 Thank you for sharing that. I want to dive right into talking about what is already here.  So this is a project born from thinking on the pandemic's impact on the way we socialize and the wider dematerialization of social and human relations. So it stemmed from a 2022 interactive installation of Joseph's Terre toi rue men or human territories. And what is already here, your collaborative project is a futuristic Afro play in which you explore a number of conspiracy theories about surveillance and talk about Africa as the place from which all the resources and green energies destined to save the world from its climate crisis are drawn. Can you talk about the evolution of the project both in its form and in the research trajectories or themes explored?    08:05 I think, of course, the project started out as a personal reflection, as you said, but now Modula is here. And for me, I think it's changed everything.  I mean, procedures, approach, and even form. And so my background is from theater, but I've made a kind of big detour in video, in film, and visual art. And Modula came from a dance background, mainly. So our meeting made us rethink the form we wanted to give to our project, in a way, I can say. So it was this kind of regeneration that led us to think of a border piece, in a way, in which dance for words, words for sounds, for play, for let's say for life. And then Modula and I, I don't know, should I talk about how we met? That's what you told me. How we started the project.    09:22 But I would also love to hear more about, can you talk about the evolution of the project, both in its form and in the research trajectories or the themes explored, the more you started to now, going back to the beginning.    09:38 In 2022, I started a reflection on the project and at that moment, I was calling it a reboot, reboot because I wanted to reboot myself, considering myself as a machine because I studied communication and mass media sciences. After the school, I was working with so much artists, festival, art space as a community manager sometimes, but communication officer, mostly, and I remember that time I had often five Instagram, five Twitter, five Facebook accounts, and at a certain moment, I wanted to, let's say, to reconnect a bit because I realized that I was more connected to people who were far from me and I was really far from people who were close to me.  So I started thinking about this situation in a way, and then I had to develop the project into a residency in Switzerland, where I prefer to call the project Terre d'Oruma in French, human territory, because I realized that since the pandemic, we have been calling to, let's say, to end with physical meeting with social interaction, but then I started to think, we were already in that situation before with our phone, with too much screen around us, so we were in touch with people, but not really, and then the lockdown made us think really about this situation, because then we had a kind of official restriction so that, okay, don't meet people, don't talk to people, don't be in touch with people, so I mean, this in a way amplified the reflection that I had, and I remember that I wanted to call the project Terre d'Oruma because I was in need of meeting people in different territories, in different places, so all the residency that I wanted to be going out, meeting people, discussing with them, and kind of creating a map of a certain humanity that I was in lack of, and while in this residency, I met Madula in a very interesting festival in Riga, and Madula was talking about those things, the same as me, so we're like, okay, and then we start discussing, we start growing the conversation, and then I remember that the discussion that I had with Madula helped me a lot to construct, to build the performance that I was working on in Switzerland, so once I did that, I was like, okay, the next step of the project was supposed to be some things taking plus more physical, and I know that I've been far away with those visual art projects mostly, exhibition, installation, and I would love to experience something more physical because, yeah, in a way the project needs something like this, and I couldn't see someone else with whom I could develop it if it was not Madula, so I asked her if she could join the project, the adventure, and yeah, she was okay, so here we are.    13:25 During the pandemic, first I was like, yeah, now we have the possibility to be in solitary. But we weren't quite the opposite. We were on the phones. Everything possible was made through the lens, like all meetings and all decisions. Everything just went more and more into the digital. And I was worried about how do we, how can we won't be able to reverse this? And I don't mean it's a bad thing. I mean, we wouldn't have been able to do what we're doing here now if it wasn't because of Zoom, basically. But I mean, I have always worked in the interpersonal. So that became really hard for me to do any kind of work in that sense.  And I was also worried about social media addiction and all these addictions that come along with using these devices and started to read more on that. And also with inspiration from like meditation practice and practice from moving with other bodies as a dancer. I felt that now is my time to be off the phone. I mean, after the pandemic, I decided to get a dumb phone so I don't even own a smartphone anymore because I wanted to be with humans and meet them. And on that trajectory, I met Joseph who was in the same thought as me, as myself. So yeah, and came from a totally other background than I did. And also didn't think in the frame of like, because for me, it's very challenging to see things in the boxes of this is theater, this is dance, this is performance, this is visual art. Because I don't believe that we actually express ourselves in those framed ways. I mean, we're complex. So our art will be complex. And so when he said that he's open for like doing something that has anything necessary for it to be art that we want to put in it, I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. So yeah, that's the art.    16:00 And I'm hearing these, and also like reading from what you've written about the project, this thinking around social networks, the effect of both the pandemic and our, you know, digital technology on social networks and how these are redefining the social and even ethical codes of how humans interact and make the world this is something you've written about. And, and this, what is already here also is looking at surveillance and green energies and its relation to extraction of resources from Africa. How, how has it, how have those themes? How did those connect with the project for you from what you've been talking about in terms of like how we socialize in the digital technology implications?    16:50 And I can say a few words and then perhaps Joseph wants to say something too. But for me, it wasn't so much about like, oh, should we work with these materials? I mean, coming partly from Africa, you see how resources are taken from countries and made into devices and, you know, we see it with our own eyes. So we have I think we just have that I felt when we discussed that we like have this common pre-knowledge of like, we know it's not just the phone you get in the store.  We know that the track of where it comes from and where the like contents of the phone with the actual physical parts come from and where they end up, you know, as well. And so for me, it felt not so strange to have that connected to this. So it becomes like a zooming out. Like if we look at if we go from the from the social media and zoom out and look at the broader picture, that's kind of where we are, you know. So then we could bring those things into the to the work. So that's how how I do it.    18:08 As you mentioned, she's also from, she has African origin. So, I mean, in a way what is already here is some things that we really want to embody in a way, our history. And I'm someone who came from Congo. We know all the politics and all the, where the resource came from. But in a way we were thinking about to bring this narrative on a political level in a way. So that to just make people think about, I think that what is already here is some things also very related to Majula and I as humans first. And so as human, as we belong to some history, we belong to some narratives. And we wanted to bring those narratives on stage with us. So it's not just Joseph coming to play some things that have been experienced. I also want to come with all my context, with all the politics around me.  And that's in a way pushes to talk about where the others resource come from. They come from Africa, from Latin America, from also so, but the context we know the most is maybe where we come from. I mean, Congo for me. And for example, the lithium staff, the electronics car, all the world that you know in Congo, in a way it supports those production. The green vehicle, the people who paid the tributes, they are from Africa and mainly from Congo. In a way it's good to bring those narratives on the stage and to tell to the world that, okay, this is what is happening. So me coming here as a patient is not only talking about my disease, it's also to talk about the disease of all my people, all the region where I come from. Because it's like almost three hours from where I am, when they took the lithium and everything. So yeah, it's a reflection that, so because I believe that art is not just being in one state and creating beauty. I mean, we start do art when we end up with the beauty and we start telling story about our story, let's say. So yeah, for me, in a way that was really important. And I really like the fact that Madula and I share that need.    21:00 The work, in terms of the form, with Hertwech Eman, it started with installation, interactive installation, but there was, because it was interactive, my understanding is that your body, the bodies of the people were implicated in terms of like how they moved in space and that it was not like an installation and that there was some sort of exchange and conversation happening in the process. I wasn't there, I didn't, so you know, you can fully paint the picture if you'd like or correct me where I'm mistaken, but now it's going in the direction of a play, though I know that you both work in a very transdisciplinary way, but you describe it as a futuristic afro play and I know you've spoken about the need to bring the body and have the body more central in the form, I'm curious, how you, like I'd just love to hear you talk more about form, about why this this form, what you mean by a futuristic afro play.    22:11 I come from theater normally. And then I make a big detour into visual art, cinema, video. And in my part, I wanted in a way to come back to where I start from, which is theater. I don't really know why.  So this is some things that came to me recently. And so I was thinking about, OK, the next step of this project going to be something physical. I was thinking about the performance. I didn't know what exactly. And then when I met Majula, and as I was saying, once Majula came in the project, so it was a different project. It was some things that were supposed to change in a way because it's not only me, it's also Majula. So she also bring what she is in the project. So in this kind of free adaptation, so we were thinking about how we can express through the art our encounter. Because not only the encounter of Joseph and Majula is also an encounter of video, of dance, worlds, of body. So how can those elements share a space in a way? So it's not really a question that we had already announced. But we think that the play and the need of the play is to find an answer in a very formal way. So yeah, a little bit complicated.    23:57 Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I don't come from theater. But my experience in interpersonal and participatory interactive work is that you need to have an excuse to behave in a certain way, or to talk about things or to ask the participants to do something. And that's where the word play can be helpful. Because we say we're doing a play, but it doesn't mean that it's just like a fantasy, it's whatever. It can be a play really close to our reality that we live in. But we can use that play to go places, think about things and present them in ways that we're not used to or comfortable with. And especially if we are asking the participants to also be transparent or reflect or feel something, then the place is a really good excuse to do that.  And also in terms of dramaturgy, we can use the format of a play to go places. We have to go to the next, to the next, to the next, kind of. And also the idea of Afro play, for me, is a really nice way to say it's not, it might not be what you're expecting when you go to the theater. Because it's speaking maybe in another way in terms of it's not a theater with a stage and before an audience and how come they're talking and now I don't understand what they're saying or now she's dancing. What I said earlier, it doesn't have to have a strict form because it's still giving birth to itself, kind of. It's not yet there. So it's about this, yeah, for me it's a lot about that, to be able to create something that will probably not be what you expect when you go to a performance.    26:01 Now, thank you. I want to talk more about your artistic approaches.    26:07 Can I just add, I was trying to use the excuse there, because when Madula talked about the excuse, I remember. I mean, we also use the future as an excuse to, you know, because what is the future for us? I think the future is the place of invention, of creation, is the place where we put all our thoughts in. So it might be wrong.  Maybe it's not true what we are saying, but yeah, it is in the future. So we never know. We don't know what will happen in the future. So in a way, we take this Afro-futurist form in order to put our thoughts as person with all the context around, and to address some political issue, question, not only political, but also human issue, to address them in a very free form. So the future is also this escape space where we can escape from our imaginary, and yeah, and propose an inventive world in which we live, Madula and I, and all the people that are working with us on the project.    27:27 And I also now want to hear a little bit more about your collaboration from your different points of departure as artists, which you've been speaking to, but yeah, you know, Joseph your work spans theatre, film, photography, installation, creative writing, and a theme you've been working with, or, you know, generally your work is interested in addressing the complexity of memory and identity in a post colonial urban context. And Majula, your work explores bodily identities and the political nuances associated with them, generally through dance and interactive performance so I would love to hear you've spoken about it a bit but I'd love to hear more about what drew you to collaborate with each other and how your practices complement each other and actually more so the latter because yeah you've really spoken about you know the common commonality you found together.  So maybe you can speak more about how in this process, your practices complement each other or where there's tension points.    28:30 I mean, I can talk a bit about the, I mean, what's great in the CoLab is that we have so much knowledge. We have so much width of knowledge because we come from so different artistic backgrounds, which means also that we're curious on each other and how the artistic ideas that we have, which also means that, I mean, when Josef was in Stockholm in March this year, March-April, I think the first week we were just talking, talking, talking about different ideas and really taking them in, like, oh, could we do that? You know, it never ended because we were willing to, like, let's take everything in. Let's write everything down. And I think we're both very open in terms of process for putting ideas out there. And then at some point, yeah, we looked at that like, OK, here are some things that we actually feel that we want to keep and continue. So I think, I think we were lucky in the sense that the both of us are curious and are open minded. And I also get the feeling that none of us is too, like, too, like, hooked on. This is my, this is my artistic expression. Rather, like, what will my artistic expression be in this collaboration, I think. And that's what makes it work.  And we're willing to try each other's ideas. So I would say that, yeah, that's kind of where we need.    30:05 In a way, the process, it's about losing control. I think, in a way. I just remember it's just something that doesn't. I just remember that the first time, when I started this project, I wanted to experience something that's physical.  So I created this world installation with motherboards. And I was like, OK, I'm not going to work with video. I'm not going to work with immaterial material, in a way. But I remember that, as a videographer, I did a video in that process. Even if it was to document what I was doing, but I did a short movie at the end. So when I'm coming in a collaboration, it's like I'm coming with everything that I know. But in this project, it's a bit also different. So trying to do the things I do the less, in a way. And as I said, it has been a while I didn't play. I didn't perform in a very theatrical way. So it's also challenging each other to, OK. I remember that even in the process, we were like, OK. Ah, that's how you work. OK. I agree. OK, let's go. Ah, that's how you work. OK. So it's something of also losing control to find the other, and to meet the other. So yeah, for me, the process is more about that.    31:43 Can you talk about the version of what is already here that will be developed during the Push Festival while you're artists in residence? Yeah, because my understanding is that conversation with local artists, researchers, public who are thinking about these issues and how they affect society, but that conversation and that exchange with local community is really important to how you will develop this iteration of the work and that you are planning to also open the studio at different points to bring people in.  Can you talk about, yeah, what you have envisioned for your process at Push so far?    32:34 A part of it will be to build the installation. That's a big part of it, of course, to actualize the envisioned space that we have in which the performance will happen, the play. And another part is also connecting back to this humanity. For me, at least, it's really important to create the space.  Sure, it's futuristic, and it probably will be quite like out there. But when people come to that space, they feel that this place is, it concerns them. And we can't do that if we don't meet people, if we don't listen to what they have to say, what they feel, and any thoughts they have about the topics. Because otherwise, it's based on the thoughts of me and Joseph only. But we want to have, it's complex, and we want to have that complexity within the play. And also important fact, we need to meet people live. And also, I mean, we have been talking, and I've been reading on some about these issues, like about being addicted to phones, or about techno-feudalism. And I feel the importance of having those discussions to be able for that to color the whole work, basically.    34:06 So we had a first residency in March, April, as Majula mentioned it. And we tried to work a little bit on the dramaturgy. And our need is that in November, in the framework of the Biennale of Lubumbashi, to meet another residency. Unfortunately, Majula can't join because of some sanitary problem, issues that are in combo, but we'll make it online.  So we mostly working on the sound of the piece with Frank Mocca. So we wanted to take the time in Vancouver to start thinking on the light level of the project and all the installation level of the project. So I know that we couldn't have enough time to create the whole installation, but the idea is to rethink now the installation in a platform. Because what we had is like an installation that I display in the gallery, but now we have to think it's in a platform. So we probably start by there and to see what could be the possibility. How can we adapt it and see in the meantime to continue also on the dramaturgy with Majula, because we all be there. So that's why we're trying to bring with us our friend, Tabiso, who is like working a lot on light level. So to start those reflections with him in that space and to experiment. So we don't know what would be the, you know, the outputs, but we know that we'll experiment a lot and we'll try a lot to see how it can take, the play can take the space in a sort of thing on the sonography with different people. That is also interesting for us to meet not only professionals, but also people, because we need to start writing, to start understanding what are the concerns of the people, what are our concerns. So those interactions will help us in a way to structure, to also to say that, okay, let's lose again control and put more of what people really think about the topic, not us. Yeah, I think in a way it will be that.    37:03 I'm so looking forward to it. I'm so excited that this is happening.  I think that and this is, you know, our first artist in residency. There may have been some earlier ones. It hasn't been like, you know, we're in our 20th anniversary year for 2025. I'm sure there's been there have been some artists in residence here or there, maybe in, you know, informal or formal ways over the years, but really it hasn't been something that we've been doing. And I'm really excited about supporting the development of new work and also exactly the process you're talking about, inviting our communities to get to know you, to get to know your practice and to engage in these conversations. I'm thrilled that you'll be here for the majority of the festival and that, you know, that people will have the opportunity to step inside your into your world and see what you're working on. Joseph, we also met in Riga at the Homo Novus festival. And so that's just been a really, it's so nice that a conversation, one conversation, you know, there has led to this and led to me meeting you, and hopefully Tabisa will join as well. So thank you so much for being in conversation with me today and introducing our listeners to your approach.    38:25 Thank you so much for having us. We're really looking forward to coming to your part of the world and to meet the people. Yeah.    38:38 Yeah, as we've seen in Israel, we say, yeah, so which mean, thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for the conversation.  Because I think that every conversation that we had on the project help us to understand better what we want to do in a way. So that's the incredible things with discussion. I wish the play could be a discussion.    39:01 Who knows?    39:05 You just heard Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Majula Drame and Joseph K. Kasao Mobambwe, who will be doing an artist residency at Push Festival this year, which runs January 23rd to February 9th. A studio showing of their work in progress, What Is Already Here?, will be presented with Vivo Media Arts Center on Friday, February 7th.  Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and the lovely Ben Charlam. Original music by Joseph Kiribayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. This year marks the 20th festival for Push International Performing Arts Festival. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the last 20 years, please look for our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play season. And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival, and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca and follow us on social media.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Clayton Lee, who will be presenting The Goldberg Variations at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show on January 30 at the Waterfront Theatre, supported by CMHC Granville Island.  Show Notes Gabrielle and Clayton discuss:  Why do you only perform the Goldberg Variations once per engagement? What does it mean to identify as a performance artist and not just a musician? What are your thoughts in relation to care and consent in your work? To what extent is your own story the subject of your artistic projects? How do you use performance to actively reshape your life? What is allowed and not allowed in different performance contexts, and how do you respond to this? What did it mean to get married as part of a performance? What contexts are you currently playing with in your future work? How do we continue this work beyond? About Clayton Lee Clayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He is currently the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK and, as part of the Living Room Collective, will be representing Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. 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. Clayton joined the conversation from Toronto, on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. 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, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights a future conjuring and adding texture to the conversation.    00:17 I'm speaking with Clayton Lee, artist behind the Goldberg Variations, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 30th, 2025. Through an unapologetic investigation of desire, power dynamics, and identity, Clayton Lee explores his childhood obsession with the professional wrestler Bill Goldberg and the impact it has had on his sexual and romantic history.    00:38 The perplexing crossroads between dominance, submission, heartbreak, and vulnerability are laid bare in this candid and thoroughly unconventional performance, where fantasies are both indulged and deconstructed.    00:50 Clayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He is currently the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK, and as part of the Living Room Collective will be representing Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.    01:06 Here's my conversation with Clayton. A thrilling to be talking to you, thrilling to be part of the festival. Before we dive right into it, I would like to acknowledge that I'm on the stolen, ancestral, and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.    01:29 And I think today it's important to acknowledge the recent passing of Murray Sinclair, the Anishinaabe Senator, and renowned Manitoba lawyer, who led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He passed on November 4th.    01:44 And he served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba and directed the pediatric cardiac surgery inquest into the deaths of 12 children at a Winnipeg hospital before taking the reins of the TRC, one of the...    02:00 important bodies in Canada's recent history, which released its final report in 2015. And his work with the TRC, well with his work, his conclusion was that residential schools amounted to a cultural genocide, or his conclusion with his collaborators.    02:19 And this conclusion, this document has reshaped Canadians' understanding of the government-run boarding schools that devastated generations of Indigenous communities. And I'd just like to share a quote from him.    02:32 We have described for you a mountain. We have shown you the path to the top. We call upon you to do the climbing. And Clayton, where are you joining this conversation from today? Well, normally I'd be in Birmingham, UK, but today I'm calling from Toronto, which is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, as well as the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.    02:59 Unlike many artists, you prefer to only perform the Goldberg gradations once during an engagement. So for example, you requested to perform only one show at the Push Festival. Why is that? Oh, there's so many reasons for that.    03:17 You know, I think the kind of major difference between the ways in which I approach making versus other folks is I identify as a performance artist. And whereas I think most of the folks in the festival or in the festival circuit come from theater or dance kind of lineages and theater and dance, you know, have this kind of tradition of repeatability, right?    03:39 Where they make the work and then they kind of repeat it over and over again, hopefully on tour or over multiple weeks in a single city. And I'm, you know, for any number of reasons, I've framed Goldberg, the Goldberg variations as kind of a one-off live encounter event.    03:58 What this means for me is one, that the work is never the same twice. So the work is always being built and added onto it's iterative process. I kind of vaguely shape the conceptual framework for the piece is box sculptor variations with his 30 variations.    04:18 And the idea is every time I perform, I add one or two new variations to the work. And I'm interested simultaneously in what it means to present large scale work and to think about the spectacle of the live encounter and how to do this in ways of, ways within scarcity mindsets, right?    04:39 Where we don't have ton of money, but how do we pull all our resources into a way that feels big and bold and, you know, more daring than a kind of two or three performance run could be. So I really throw all the excitement into one basket and do it.    04:59 in that way for this. The stakes are high. The stakes are high and I think that's the way I like to kind of frame it, right? I really think about this performance as a score that I've built and I have no idea how it'll work and then the minute the performance starts the roller coaster begins and you know you can't get off of it and whatever happens happens and that's the kind of level of chaos slash controlled chaos I really thrive in.    05:29 Yeah and I really and I think the audience can feel that too, right? Because it's this one-off thing. They are kind of learning and experiencing it at the same time as I am. It is super exciting and you use the element of surprise and one result of this can be audience members yourself or your collaborators and or collaborators faced with the unexpected.    05:51 What are your thoughts on care and consent in relation to your work given this kind of the unexpected? Yeah, I think consent, of course, is key in all cases. And care, I have a funny relationship with care in the context of live performance, right?    06:11 And there's an artist named Bruno Gio who talks about how care is often a strategy to kind of maintain the status quo, that if we're never unable to kind of feel discomfort, how do we actually find new ways of being, right?    06:25 Not to say I'm explicitly interested in kind of abandoning care or kind of rejecting it, but for me, the work is not just about care. And I think when you or the audience experiences it, you'll kind of see very quickly that that's not part of the work.    06:43 And simultaneously, I'm interested in this kind of question around how artists of color are positioned within contemporary performance, right? This kind of critical need for representation, but the kind of limits of it.    06:58 And what I mean by that is, artists of color are often meant to be the kind of spokesperson for their communities. They're kind of intersecting communities. And for me, I'm not interested in doing that at all.    07:10 What if we don't position ourselves as forces of good necessarily, but forces that are kind of complex and are asking these kind of tangly, often unethical, often problematic questions, right? And what if we make that the starting point of the work and go from there?    07:29 And then I think the other kind of conversation around consent is, and perhaps this goes back to this kind of fine distinction between dance theater and performance art, but I think audiences often forget that there is inherent agency in their role as an audience member, that they can get up whenever they want, that they can leave whenever they want, that if they're gonna talk during the performance,    07:49 no one's gonna really stop. There are kind of these kind of standard practices in place, but also who's gonna stop them, right? And actually, I'm interested. interested in the ways in which audience members can or cannot exercise their own agency in the performance, and I can invite that in, right?    08:10 When I, you know, said earlier about kind of creating the score, it's like the kind of audience is in a way co-creating it with me, and if they want to kind of respond in any number of ways, that's invited, right?    08:23 You know, there are elements, there are kind of lines I don't cross, like, you know, this is not explicitly, this works not by, you know, it's not whatever, whatever, but it is kind of pushing the boundaries quite intentionally around care and what it means to be, you know, problematic or not, and yeah.    08:43 Yeah, I appreciate what you say about discomfort. I think there's some discourse around the difference between emotional and psychological safety, and that's like, you know, without emotional discomfort, there's no, there's no growth.    08:58 There's no room for diversity of perspective and opinion either, because inevitably we'll be uncomfortable when confronted by really different perspectives. I've presented this work before to kind of somewhat controversial results.    09:19 And I think so often that's coming from a place of what are the audiences or the presenters expectations of me as an artist? Who do they think I am as an artist? What kind of work do they think I make and what kind of artists do they think I can be?    09:37 And actually this work, so much of this work is about dismantling them. And there is this kind of inherent tension of, oh, actually you expect me to do this, but I'm doing this instead, and therefore you feel uncomfortable.    09:48 But then for me, there's the kind of reflection that's kind of quite essential in that. It's like, why, yeah, what were you expecting of me? Where are those expectations coming from? And how do we actually seek to not just dismantle them, but actually add texture to the conversation?    10:06 It should never be as simple as this equals good, this equals bad. I think the current discourse, especially in kind of performance circles are so reductive and simplified in these ways. And actually, no, I reject this wholeheartedly.    10:23 And actually what happens when we play in that kind of gray area and indulge in it where possible. The Goldberg Variations is in part an examination of your own desire. To what extent is your own story the subject of your artistic projects?    10:39 Yeah, that's a good question. You know, this one is very much my quote unquote story, though I often kind of reject this notion of people telling their own story. So I'm simultaneously kind of disgusted by myself and kind of making this work.    10:57 And I think... kind of there are two kind of key differences for me in kind of making this right the kind of you know I first thought of the title and the kind of reason for the title maybe in 2017 so seven years ago um but I wasn't able to make it until two years ago right and the kind of distance I had then that kind of drove that kind of conversation and who I was you know when I first made this are kind of two very different people and that kind of distance was useful but simultaneously I think in thinking about this like one-off encounter or this kind of site responsive work I'm simultaneously interested in this work as an examination of my past but also this kind of present and future conjuring moment right where I really am using this project to think about who I am right now think about the distance between who I am right now and the kind of feelings I'm thinking about you know I was thinking about seven years ago also how do we how do I use this performance to actively reshape my life and how do I use this performance to you know indulge in communities and meet with people that I wouldn't normally meet with right and I think there's something there's something in this work that has actually changed the way I move through this world and one thing what I mean by that is this piece is asking a lot of the audience and also of the presenters right and it you know the kind of work I made when I was first starting it was very small scale I was afraid to kind of take up a space you know I used to travel with a work that was just my laptop right and this work is the kind of opposite of that but if there's something in the kind of conceit of this work and the subject matter that has given me permission to actually ask for things of what if you know as artists we're often so um willing to kind of reduce ourselves or shrink ourselves down to make to make ourselves palatable and easy to tour right so that we're not kind of causing uh what's the word causing labor on to kind of present presenters but actually for me it's this this work is interesting because it's asking what if I start insisting on things or asking for you know crazier crazier things right when I first conceived this work it's always through the lens of like what if I did this what if I did this and those are tied up with ambition desire uh and trying to kind of like wash off this feeling of like not not being able to be an artist or whatever that makes any sense like I think we're so often afraid of the kind of things that we want to be and this piece is a strategy for me to kind of step into that I don't know if I answered your question at all but oh yeah yeah you did um and that giving oneself permission to ask you know I think there's like fear that I would imagine those fear to be perceived as a demand artist,    13:59 but my experience in working with you in this dynamic is not that. And yeah, you can always ask and then it's up to whoever you're engaging with to do what they will with that request. Yeah. And I think a large part of my work, you know, I, my day job is in kind of curating and producing, right?    14:18 Um, so I love kind of working within organizational or institutional frameworks to see what the kind of possibilities are. You know, we think of these spaces as so stagnant and immovable, but actually I'm in part using this work to think about how I relate to these institutions as an artist and using this work to in bigger or small ways shift the ways in which these institutions or organizations work.    14:44 You know, when I did, I was in residency with this piece at the Art Gallery of Ontario for three months and, you know, we had three meetings going back and forth of whether or not I was allowed to use the word faggot into the gallery space.    14:56 And for me, It's with a lot of labor on my part to kind of have those conversations, but it's simultaneously thrilling of like, why can't we use that word? Why can't I use that word in this context? And to not ever, I never approach these things with a kind of certain resolve, but as a kind of opening of, again, what if we do this?    15:16 What is actually allowed? What isn't allowed? Why isn't allowed? And let's get to the very end of that. And if, you know, I'm not allowed to say the word faggot in the context of the art gallery, then that's fine.    15:26 But actually, then we have this conversation and it feels, to me, both funny and potentially, or having the capacity rather to break things open. Right? It's not, for me, it's never just about the word faggot in the fact, it's about what do these conversations break open and allow ourselves to accept as new ways of thinking or working.    15:53 I want to step back to your mention of conjuring future, future conjuring. Can we talk about the content of some of the past iterations of this work? Oh, yes. What to say, what to say. I mean, we'll cut this after if you want me to say this, but the fact that you got married in one of the iterations, talk about future conjuring.    16:19 Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, so I'm just trying to think. Yeah, absolutely. This kind of thing of how does this work meet my current moment, right? And, you know, the kind of coyness of so I got married as the finale for my art gallery of Ontario performance.    16:35 And there's this kind of funny thing of recognizing the context where, you know, the art gallery of Ontario often rents its space out for weddings and is famously one of the most expensive venues in the city.    16:45 So how funny would it be if I made them pay for my wedding and did as part of it again. Also, you know, this work is about desire and love and romance and the feelings that come with it. Right. And this kind of funny thing of aligning where I was in my life, i.e.    17:03 I guess about to get married, which is something I also never thought I'd do, but making it part of this conversation felt interesting, you know, and the version. Again, I don't know if we'll keep any of this, but I'll defer to you.    17:16 You know, one of the iteration that you saw on Montreal was there was an extended section where I went in search of a stripper that was really obsessed with. Right. And I spent, you know, dozens and dozens of hours getting in touch with him and trying to find him and, you know, and, you know, and you did.    17:35 Well, I did find him, but he never actually showed up. Okay. I hired him. Another variation. But there's something in this, this thing of like, actually, again, the question is what if I invite this stripper I'm obsessed with into the performance.    17:52 Right. And what happens if I get to meet him? Right. And all these things of Yeah, seeing these kind of questions through to their end. And it's a way for me to kind of find new communities or find new friends or find new collaborators, which otherwise I wouldn't have ever worked with, right?    18:12 I mean, as an example, the New York version, I had the initial... I had this funny dream of like, oh, what if Philip Glass performed in the show? Right? Because I was performing at NYU Skirball, and the year earlier they presented The Tower of Glass by Philip Glass.    18:28 So I was like, oh, what if Philip Glass performed? And then, of course, he wasn't available or, you know, was quite sick and not performing anymore. So then I went down the list of like, oh, who are these other big name composers that I could work with?    18:40 And then eventually landing on or getting to meet Adam Tenler, who performed at last year's push and meeting him through this kind of funny path. And, you know, I, you know, adored him and was so happy to have met him through this performance.    18:52 But otherwise would never have met him, right? So this thing of like, I'm so... Can I use this work as a strategy to kind of reach the kind of tentacles out, right? And find new collaborators and find new friends and all these things of...    19:09 I don't know what will happen when I start a process. But at the end, it's like, oh, there's something really generative about being able to kind of reach out or reach in or whatever and see what happens.    19:19 You've been speaking about how this work involves with every performance, every variation, and the project you're collaborating on for the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. What's the name of this project you're doing?    19:33 We're called the Living Room Collective, but we're currently finalizing the title. Okay, okay. That, you know, these are just examples that reflect explorations of different forms for you from developing sense to design and architecture.    19:50 What context are you currently playing with or contexts? Yeah. You know, I think... I think what I've noticed about myself is the real desire to bounce around in context to context. And I think what I mean by that is like my mother worked at IBM for like 40 years or something.    20:10 And I think that has had such kind of profound impact on my life where I was like, Oh my God, I can't imagine working for the same company for that long. So I think throughout my kind of practice slash vocal career, you know, I find myself bouncing around and dipping my toes into new contexts.    20:28 You know, I started off in theatre, then performance art happened or whatever, and then dance and all these kinds of things. And I'm really interested in the ways in which each context has various ways of moving through the world.    20:47 Right. The language of dance is different than language theatre. The language of theatre is different than language performance art. But then what happens when you kind of expand that outward? and reach out into new communities.    20:59 So for the Venice Biennale of architecture, I worked with an architect for Rhubarb when I was a festival director there two years ago. And now we're doing the Canada Pavilion with other collaborators.    21:09 And for me, it's this kind of very strange toe-dipping experience into the world of architecture where half the meetings I'm in, I'm just googling things on the side because I don't understand what's happening.    21:22 But there's also something really luxurious in being able to do that, to kind of bring my own lens and bring my own perspective into these conversations and simultaneously let those conversations influence the ways in which I do things, right?    21:38 And I'm, you know, with this project that has me meeting with a lot of different contexts. So, you know, folks from the classical music world, DJs, bodybuilders, wrestlers, all these kinds of folks. And there's something quite intentional about the strategy that I've employed, where I'm interested in what it means to spend time with folks that aren't directly in what I would identify as my community,    22:04 right? And what happens when you spend time with bodybuilders? What happens when you spend time with wrestlers? And I think we are so obsessed with, you know, we kind of exist in such an echo chamber, right?    22:19 We're in our own community and we're so happy to kind of stick within it. But I think there's something valuable in spending time with folks that are not like us at all. And to do so, you know, of course, with the lens of criticality, but to do so with as little judgment as possible, or not even judgment, because I judge, you know, whatever, but like with a kind of openness that is so frowned upon,    22:47 right? Because we're in a moment that loves to, yeah, immediately kind of reduce or deny or reject because of who they present. as but actually what if we say no to that and spend time with folks that we either may think are quote unquote problematic and yes they may be problematic but actually there are like always is more to them than we kind of uh first assume uh so like right now i'm obsessed with my home gym in birmingham um and like and slowly befriending everyone there and you know it's just kind of very strange experience where you know the gym owner it's Ultimate Fitness Birmingham if anyone wants to google this but you know we're the gym owner eventually you know photograph one of the events that fierce where i work right and this this very strange mixing is so um so compelling to me of what happens when we attempt to step outside of these kind of boxes that we create for ourselves and find new ways of moving and living thank you so much Clayton I am,    23:49 this is the beginning of my day. I am feeling inspired. I am feeling thought-provoked. I'm feeling so excited to have you at the festival. I'm feeling so excited for audiences that don't, and myself, who don't know what we're gonna experience when we walk into the venue.    24:08 Yeah, I'm so thrilled that you're gonna be present for the festival and sharing your work. Just to say to the audience, if audiences are listening to this before, I really invite them to kind of talk to me after, if the kind of work has provoked or ignited or whatever.    24:26 Because I think the conversation that kind of accompanies the work is such a critical part of it. And I generally, I mean, I hate doing panels or whatever, whatever, but it's like, actually, how do we continue this work beyond?    24:42 And how does the prickliness of the thing kind of resonate with folks? Yeah, so folks can reach out to me, message me on Instagram, whatever, whatever, I'm happy to. Yeah, have the conversation in those ways, because I think it's part of the process, so.    24:59 Great, and there'll be a chat with you after the show as well. Oh, is there? Yeah, I think so. Oh, cool. Do we know who's doing it yet? I had some ideas. We'll chat about it. Okay, okay. So, okay, for the audience, there may or may not be about a show.    25:13 No, no, I love a post-show Q&A. Okay, there'll be a post-show Q&A. Okay, okay. All right, thanks, Clayton. That was the Goldberg Variations Clayton Lee in conversation with Gabrielle Martin. The Goldberg Variations will show at the Waterfront Theatre on January 30th for one night only during the 2025 Push International Performing Arts Festival.    25:39 Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and the lovely Ben Charlam. Original music by Joseph Kiribayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts.    25:53 This year marks the 20th festival for Push International Performing Arts Festival. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the last 20 years, please look for our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play season.    26:05 And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca and follow us on social media.    26:20 Coming up on the next Push Play. So as human, as we belong to some history, we belong to some narratives, and we wanted to bring those narratives on stage with us. So it's not just Joseph coming to, you know, to play some things that have been experiencing.    26:38 No, I also want to come with all my context with all the politics around me.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Sammy Chien and Caroline MacCaull of Chimerik. They are presenting Inner Sublimity at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show on February 7, 8 and 9 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Show Notes Gabrielle, Sammy and Caroline discuss:  What does it look like to transcend eastern and western philosophy in your work overall and in "Inner Sublimity" in particular? How does this project exist within a revitalization of Taiwanese culture? Why is it risky, and empowering, to talk about Taiwan? What is mediumship and what is its power in this performance? How does the space influence the design of the experience? What does it mean to use technology as an extension of the body? What was the creation journey for this piece? About Sammy Chien Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is a Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist-of-colour, who's a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, researcher and mentor in film, sound art, new media, performance, movement and spiritual practice. With over 500 collaborative projects, his work has been shared across Canada, Western Europe, and Asia including Centre Pompidou (Paris), the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), National Art Centre (Ottawa), Stratford Festival, Art Night Venezia (Venice Biennale) and Documenta 15. He's  worked with pioneers of digital performance: Troika Ranch and Wong Kar Wai's Cinematographer Christopher Doyle and hundreds of internationally celebrated artists and companies. Sammy has been featured on magazines, TV and commercials such as Discorder, Keedan, CBC Arts and BenQ. Sammy is currently co-leading dance projects "We Were One" & "Inner Sublimity"; intergenerational media arts project "Ritual-Spective 迴融"; documentary film "Soul Speaking", funded by Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Sammy is the official instructor of Isadora, Council of MotionDAO, Co-Artistic Director of Third Space Arts Collective and Co-Founder/Co-Artistic Director of Chimerik 似不像, a multi-award winning interdisciplinary non-profit arts organization who's worked with Google, Microsoft & NIKE, while prioritizing the focus on empowering various underrepresented communities with various sectoral change research and digital community projects such as Chimerik's Virtual Live Art Database.  Sammy is the winner of the Changemaker Award for BCMA 2022 (BC Museums Association) for creative engagements that increase awareness of underrepresented voices & the 2023/2024 Chrystal Dance Prize. www.sammychien.com About Caroline MacCaull Caroline MacCaull (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded and stolen territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First nations. As a dance-technology artist her work often questions reality and our perceptions. She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts and has had her work presented by Shooting Gallery Performance Series, Co.ERASGA's Salon Series, Gallery Series 258, Vines Arts Festival, New Works, K.Format/documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany), Drink & Draw (Berlin), FOUND festival (Edmonton), Festival International de Danse Animée (Réunion) and the Scotiabank Dance Centre. She has been artist-in-residence at What Lab (Vancouver), LEÑA (Galiano Island), Dance Victoria (Victoria, BC), ArtStarts Ignites (Vancouver), DeerLake (Burnaby), Dance on Fluid (Taiwan) and NKK Dance Centre (Siem Reap, Cambodia). As a movement artist she has had the opportunity to collaborate and interpret movement with Peter Chin/Tribal Crackling Wind, Okams Racer, The Falling Company, Oksana Augustine and Restless Productions. Caroline is currently the Co-Artistic Director of the Chimerik 似不像 which has given her the opportunity to work as a New Media/Projection Artist on various projects with many different artists/organizations. Some of these include: Veronique West(Rumble Theatre), Mily Mumford (PTC), Jasmine Chen(Rice and Beans Theatre), Zahra Shahab, Restless Productions, Affair of Honor, Ralph Escamillan(Van Vogue Jam), Luke Reece(Theatre Passe Muraille), Arts Club, Active / Passive, Indian Summer Festival, Stratford Festival and Mayumi Lashbrook(Aeris Korper). Caroline is very grateful to be one of the 2023/2024 Chrystal Dance Prize recipients.  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 collective healing and overcoming our shadow selves.    00:17 I'm speaking with Sami Chen and Caroline McCall, artists behind Inner Sublimity, which is being presented at the Push Festival February 7th to 9th, 2025. Inner Sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy through dance, creating a dynamic dialogue between traditions preserved across generations.    00:36 Through this synthesis of paradigms, the artists spark new connections between disparate cultural backgrounds, carving an artistic practice that challenges colonial narratives and enriches contemporary explorations of spirituality.    00:50 Sami and Caroline are the co-artistic directors of Chameric, a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary non-profit organization consisting of artists from underrepresented groups, from various age groups, backgrounds, levels of experience and disciplines.    01:05 Chameric has collaborated on over 500 multidisciplinary projects, which have been exhibited internationally. Sami is a first-generation Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist of colour, director, performer, researcher, and mentor who works with film, sound art, new media, performing arts, and spiritual practice.    01:24 Caroline is a femme-identified queer artist with background in movement, dance, new media, and mediumship. Here is my conversation with Caroline and Sami. And I know just before we hit record, you commented that today is the U.S.    01:41 election, so it's an interesting day to be doing this. There's all sorts of other pressures and nerves in the air. Yeah, it feels like you're saying it feels like a pressure cooker. You know, we are all in right now and not knowing what's going to happen next, but we are in here talking about, you know, you know, this exploration, this spirituality, and it just feels like the right time to be, to have those pressure and then something might come out that we don't even know as well.    02:09 So it's kind of exciting. I appreciate that optimism in terms of the unknown, the unknown can still be a positive place. We are on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the settler on these lands, and I continue to try to educate myself on the ongoing legacy of colonization, the ongoing colonialism here, and I often lean on or reach to the Yellowhead Institute for their incredible words and just framing the state that we're living in now.    02:55 So I'm just going to share some words from them on with regard to land back. Land theft is currently driven by an unsustainable undemocratic and fatal rush toward mass extinction through extraction development and capitalist imperatives.    03:10 It is further enabled by a racist erasure of indigenous law and jurisdiction. And as Yellowhead Research Fellow Henderson has noted, this fatal rush functions as a kind of malware released into our ecological system.    03:25 Indigenous legal orders embody critical knowledge that can relink society to a healthy balance within the natural world. This change must begin on the ground. Canada ceding real jurisdiction to indigenous peoples for this transformation to happen.    03:40 So thank you to the Yellowhead Institute's land back resources, specifically the red paper. We're going to shift gears a little bit in just getting right into talking about inner sublimity, which is the work, your work that's going to be realized during the push festival.    04:03 inner sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy. And I would love to hear what that looks like and feels like within this work, and how it relates to your wider practices. First, we want to say we love how you frame the question of look and feel, it just right off the bat for us to want to hear that question and really dive right into the body of the feeling, you know, and I will say that is probably where we will begin the process,    04:35 you know, about integrating the East, Eastern and Western philosophy and culture is through energetic practice. So why I say that because, you know, in dance, you know, and embodiment, it is really based on feeling the sentient, right?    04:50 And this senses our primary faculty of to connect everything together in our research, our journeys and inspiration, how we create work. And a lot of that in multiple different cultures and whether it's Eastern or Western, there is a lot of theories and research around consciousness and energy vibration.    05:12 And then for Eastern, it's quite, there is a lot of more focus in terms of energetic practices, such as qigong, it's one of the form. And it's kind of quite a wildly practiced form that focus on the flow of energy in the body.    05:28 So then, you know, you can gain this intelligence and control over energy through the body, which we all have, but just not paying attention and really cultivate, you know, the control or the embodiment of energy.    05:43 So I want to make it. I want to share that with the audience, you know, like the qigong is not just, you know, a practice that has to be its own form, but almost as a philosophy. And I was an inspiration for people to understand that it's just an entry point for us to access energy through our body and our consciousness, right?    06:04 So our mind activating those pathways and then have energy moving through. And it doesn't not only translate visually, but also by feeling energetically and vibrationally as well. So that I would say that is some of the entry point that we have is that you will actually feel the energy shift in the work, how we connect to each other, how we connect with the audience, how we connect with the space and how we connect with the spirit in the space as well.    06:38 Yeah. And I guess I wanted to just also kind of take a little bit of a side note off of that. But when we're talking about Eastern and Western philosophy within this context of this work and in our larger practice, we also really want to go into the nuances and complexities of those kind of dialogues, rather than thinking, oh, everything is great.    06:58 And, you know, we're able to move in this way together. We really want to dive into some of those shadow places where there's hard conversations, there's different kind of, you know, I think in a broad stroke, there's a lot of appropriation of these different cultures.    07:15 And we want to go into those difficult and challenging subjects so that we can arrive to a place where we have a deeper understanding of each other. And so throughout the work, there's moments of very meditative state.    07:28 When we talk about Eastern culture, we talk about this kind of like time passing, how we're witnessing time is a little bit at a slower pace, perhaps. But we also want to go into those moments of tension, conflict and really feel together what it means.    07:45 to be witnessing and experiencing that as a collective, so that we can also make decisions to kind of arrive to a new place together. So that's kind of some of the feelings that we're trying to wrap up within this work and within some of our broader practices within the context of Sami and myself both being from Eastern and Western kind of places.    08:07 Yeah, Kiran, you're right about like how, I mean, we're just talking about generalizing terms, right? Like how Western sense of time is quite linear based, right? You have the beginning, middle, and you're taught to think about narrative, you know, shapes and form, linear kind of progression.    08:25 And then in Eastern, again, generally speaking, you know, I'm generalizing the kind of overall framework of what holds the foundation of the culture a lot of the time, the sense of time is very different.    08:35 It's more cyclical, you know, there is more sense of meditativeness, which, you know, then the time kind of expands differently in the less linear. sense, you know, but of course, acknowledging the globalization, you know, a lot of people say, when I go to Asia, I don't feel the same way.    08:51 It's like, yes, it's modernization, modernity, globalization that's happening. We are in this big mess together, integrating both cultures from different routes, and that messiness and the shadow work, the conflict, you know, the dilemma is why we're also very interested in talking about that discomfort, what that is, and going deep down so we don't stay on this kind of just the point of like the generalization,    09:15 the superficial way of looking at each culture. And how does this project exist as part of a wider revitalizing movement of ancient wisdom and spirituality, specifically Taiwanese? Well, even talking about Taiwan is a very risky, it's anti-oppression work politically to be even talking about Taiwan.    09:39 So it's, I do want to say that it's very empowering to be in a place where we can even speak about that in this current political climate, because for the audience that doesn't understand the political situation, the history that, you know, there is like complex history, like colonialism that's going on in Taiwan that happened over the last 400 years.    10:03 And there were Dutch people and Spanish and Japanese colonialism that happened. And Taiwan has its own people, like my family has been there over 16 generations in our family book, we can trace back for 16 generations.    10:21 And then, and then another seven generations before they were installed in China to the migration. So when we talk about that, right now, Taiwan is being censored to be called a country with, you know, having its own presidency and currency and different, there's difference in culture as well.    10:43 I'm not here. to advocate Taiwanese independence, but I'm just talking about how it is where we are right now in Canada to be able to talk freely about this kind of discourse is actually a super valuable and progressive thing to actually have that kind of value we have right now.    11:01 And I'm grateful for being able to even speak about that. And the revitalization of spirituality in Taiwan is quite interesting because of the culture itself, you know, growing up, I didn't realize until I came to the West, you know, how we are quite conditioned, you know, in our brain to be very spiritual.    11:24 So ancestral rituals. a very common thing we do, everyday lives, we go to temples and it's not specific religion, it's more a mix and match of different folklore religion together. So it just became a lifestyle, right, growing up.    11:39 And we don't even question, just like something that we do with our parents, our grandparents or aunties, uncles, you know, and big families, we all do that together, even friends, you know, when you need certain things, you go to temple for certain, certain like requests that you have, you know, not, I don't want to advocate greed and all that stuff on spiritual, what we can talk about later, but it's just so ingrained in our culture.    12:00 And so it wasn't never a question, even the phone phrase situation, the direction of the space, how we understand energy, it's already in the culture so much. And I don't think people value that so much because just, you know, it's normalized, right?    12:15 And the globalization, the Westernization, it's been deemed as superstition, you know, and being reduced to lower value or uneducated kind of thinking. So the revitalization is about going back to the empowerment of those roots and history and to our spiritual culture that has been rooted for hundreds of years, tracing back and its mixture with indigenous culture as well, with indigenous people in Taiwan as well,    12:44 there is a lot of crossover sharing knowledge that also happened as much as the, you know, the problem of colonization and racial happiness or just also acknowledge that that happens everywhere. So, but now while talking about integration, revitalization and a lot of ritual practice are kind of integrating together in new ways.    13:05 And the young people are finding a, there's almost like a trend to like go back to the roots of what is Taiwanese ritual, Taiwanese spirituality, the kind of a temple shamans that are seen like from the older generation now are being empowered back, like they'll integrate techno music, electronic music, rave.    13:27 parties, you know, all these really like current underground movement with this grassroots kind of an older generational historic culture. Yeah, so that's interesting. Yeah, when we were there in Taiwan, it was quite interesting because we spent four months in Taiwan this last year doing some research and different kind of yeah, practiced in development with this piece as well.    13:54 And so we spent a lot of time having dialogues with various people from different kind of backgrounds and in various kind of religions, either monks or different kind of shamans or in the temples. And it was so interesting to also hear about this kind of almost this need to come back to this like almost emergent feeling of needing to come back to something much larger than yourself.    14:22 I think when we talk a lot about like Westernization in specifically Taiwan, like Taiwan is very heavily reliant on the US right now for their power dynamics. And I think a lot about the control and different invisible things that we don't always see that are happening behind the scenes and how that is also holding Taiwan in a different way.    14:43 And I think coming back to the people and coming back to these kind of everyday rituals is allowing a new kind of sense of belonging and identity that is kind of been missing over the last little while.    14:54 Oh, yes. And speaking of which, I do want to, because Gabriel, you mentioned about the ancient western. It is one of our research from years ago is, many of you might already know this, the word dance, the Chinese character of dance that we're using language in Taiwan that is the traditional character.    15:20 It's like a lot closer to the Oracle bone script. So I'm talking about this ancient Chinese language that's used across the Chinese speakers around the world. The character of dance, its original form is a shaman with holding spiritual tools like jades and feathers, rotating, basically doing ancestral and ancient rituals.    15:44 That is the character where dance evolved from. So then thinking about how we talk about dance and performance in the common everyday language while looking at a shaman doing rituals. And that is the secret work of what dance is.    16:03 So that is kind of that connection back to this culture and our context of movement practice. So this is a work that's been in development. And so I haven't seen what will be this realization of it, which is really exciting.    16:18 But when we sat down to talk about this work, you know what, I've seen some other pieces of your work. when we sat down to talk about what this piece could be. I mean, I just was really excited in terms of all the research and the intersection of practices that you hold.    16:35 And I would love to hear you speak about what mediumship is and the power, its power in this performance context. Yeah, thank you. So originally, I'll just give a tiny bit of context, but originally when just before I met Sammy in 2019, I was having these experiences Westernly diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis, and I wasn't quite sure where to reach out to in alignment with finding resources beyond beyond just the Western kind of medical approach.    17:14 And shortly after that, I had met Sammy and he had exposed me. and brought me to some of his different spiritual teachers from Taiwan and from various other places in the world and started opening up some of these kind of ideas for me of what this could be in a different context.    17:33 And through that kind of expanding experience and research, we've begun begun to explore how this can also be transcended into a way of sharing this kind of experience through performance. For the audience listening to this, it's in the Western lens, again, generalizing it.    17:55 When we talk about this kind of spiritual experiences, people think about ghost possession. They think about paranormal activity. They think about woo-woo stuff right away. So it's scary, right? Or they think about this person is crazy.    18:08 You are mentally ill, that it is your making stuff out psychologically. So that's usually where people go to in the Western context right away. And for us, again, growing up in the Eastern world, if you would tell my mom or my aunties about, oh, this is what I'm experiencing.    18:27 They will say, well, do you want to go to the temple and ask the shaman to see if there's something going on spiritually that's bugging you about this? So right away, I didn't come in with the prejudice, or around like what her experiences are and actually understand there, we just need to help find the expert, the right expert to figure out what to do.    18:48 And that's where this whole thing unfolds into actually full on, you know, legitimize meditation practice. Yeah. So that was so empowering to have those moments of dialogue and also to have these like intergenerational dialogues with his family and being able to share and not feel judged in these moments and really allowed us to go deeper into what are these experiences and how can we transform them into something that is more current and maybe it could work within our artistic practice.    19:19 So through, I mean now it's been about four years of specifically working on how to integrate this like safely into our performance practice, but we've kind of cultivated a space where we're able to call spirit and go into like a mediumship trance state, on stage performing it live and allowing people to feel what that actually means in that context and maybe receive what they need at that moment without me having to specifically tell them anything.    19:50 Just because I feel like sometimes with a more outdated states of mediumship, it is very much like it can get into states of telling you how you should feel or how you should experience your ancestors in your way and or in the way that I am prescribing to you.    20:08 But I really want to kind of open that up and also kind of decolonize some of that practice in a way of letting it flow and see how it can touch you in the way that. you need to be held in that, in that moment.    20:22 And just for the audience, like this is real stuff we're doing. It's not just performing a mediumship. It's actually doing this for real. So that's what it's, there is a sense of like real stake, you know, real risk.    20:39 And then when I say race, it's like, we are not just pretending and have to hit the marks, you know, the shapes are in shape. It's like, no, we really have to mind body spiritually, like be there and fully channel and connect and practice with the spirits on you, making sure you're, you know, it's the same, you know, building that rapport as well and have that same framework and bring a whole new,    21:00 a kind of experience for the audience, right? Whole new framework. Yes. And this work is being designed for performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is, you know, a very exciting partnership and a very exciting space.    21:15 But I would actually like to hear what excites you about realizing this work in that space. And maybe you can speak a little bit more to, yeah, how the space influences the design of the experience. Because I know that there's a number of performance or aspects to the design of this experience that draw people into a state of presence, embodied space, and also a space of ritual.    21:42 If you're, I don't know if you're actually using that word with regard to your performance. But yeah, love to hear about that, about the excitement around the use of the space and the general design elements to evoke these kinds of effects, yeah.    21:56 For the audience doesn't know the history of Vancouver Art Gallery, right? The VAG, it was built in 1906 as a provincial courthouse. And the basement is actually a prison, you know? So when you go in, there are some parts when the art party or the old fields, you know, when you open up those spaces there, that's a courtroom.    22:12 And this is like, you know, actually a prison. So, and, you know, it's historically, so that. context is very interesting to be in that building. And also it's the it's very iconic, right? It's a capital A kind of art in there.    22:27 Like, you know, people go there to to see what is the most like prestigious art in the city. And at the same time, you know, it's speaking of like that, it's historically a while, sorry, a white male dominated kind of a space, right?    22:44 You know, people think of like, only white men does art in here as I'm watching white men, white men, type painting. So I think to partner up with the VAC, when push festival, you know, and doing this type of work, it's really progressive.    22:57 And it's quite, you know, quite revolutionary to bring in this kind of work to witness something like this. And then we are taking a lot of risks in the way of like, you know, in theater is a different kind of safe space for performers.    23:10 You know, we're taking more risks in a different way. When we are in the gallery setting, you know, I feel like We both feel like the gallery space they set out has a different kind of amplification and resonance of the energy when we perform.    23:24 And also gallery is used to holding space for audience while coming to see stillness, to see still object, still paintings and sculpture close up in fine details. It demands already that kind of attention, right?    23:41 Very different from theater in many different ways. And then imagine this kind of audience is cultivating this kind of a scale of perception quality or coming to see this type of work where it's slow.    23:53 There's a lot of refined slowness movement, a lot of details and shift of vibration that's just slow and refined for them to actually take the time to be in the space to feel that as if you're watching a sculpture, moving, moving slowly, right?    24:09 And that to me, it's quite, it's very exciting. Yeah, totally. It's so exciting. And I also think that we're really grateful for this opportunity to get to spend more time in the Vancouver Art Gallery and think about how the work can really be integrated within that kind of space.    24:25 I mean, there's definitely a lot of creative challenges that come up working in a museum space, just even technically you can't have certain objects in there and you have to be careful of where the art is.    24:37 And so it's also allowing us to re-imagine and rethink how this work can cohesively kind of work with this space. Because a lot of our art and our practices about really that deep integration with either technology or with movement and I think also the space and how that all works together through an experience.    24:59 So we're really grateful to get to have that time. And every Tuesday where it's closed, we get to spend time to really think about how that will work together in the new year. So yeah, very grateful to think about how this can be reimagined in this way.    25:14 And you've been very creative and it's. since it was going to be in this space. And then there was a really large art piece that, I mean, the team at The Vag has been so great with us, you know, but just realistically, I think we had that surprise last week.    25:29 Oh, there's actually a giant art piece that can only go in the space that you were going to have your performance in, so. And now the audience get to go through this gate of heaven before they come to see our work.    25:41 And then it's going to be surrounded by a bunch of paintings that are in similar themes. So almost like when we think of attending churches or temples, they're all sacred kind of architecture. We're all coming to a different type of creative sacred architecture being surrounded by that.    25:56 And it's not something as like, you know, Dan's audience would just get to experience, right? Because you get to then have a totally different experience by the space and then see this, you know, to feel this experience coming out of that as well.    26:11 Yeah. I find that really, really exciting for the audience to actually go through, yeah. And you just referenced it, Caroline, technology in your work. So that's something that you're also really known for, that America is really known for, audiovisual, incredible audiovisual design.    26:30 You speak about using technology as extensions of the body. I would love to know what that looks like in this work. I think because we're really diving into this energetic practice within this work, it only makes sense for us to also continue to expand that through the unseen kind of visualization using technology of what that could be or what that could look like.    26:57 We, of course, don't want to spoon-feed the audience, but we want to allow them to open their mind and not have to worry about having to watch the body so closely in this kind of way, but also thinking about the whole space being the body.    27:15 Yeah. And just to, not to brag, but just like this is something that we've been doing over 15 years in our company is really to give you some audience, some context. This is one of our primary research is to center on the body embodiment sensory with technology, right?    27:39 So dance technology is our center of our research and our work. And we specialize this sense of immediacy, making sure that technology does not overpower the body, overpower the frequency that you animate from the body, the actual performance value and the experience, right?    28:02 The technology is always here to support. It's part of the body. So you won't be like your hands are not going to take over the whole show. Your eyes aren't going to take over the whole show, but the gates is so important.    28:13 your finger articulation, it just is important as your full body's movement, right? So we've got to think of that as part of our technology as well. It's part of our body, and that's something we really advocate and focus on.    28:27 So for this piece, really, we want to make sure that technology really is becoming a channel to kind of continue to open the bandwidth of what our body and spirit and our energy can do. It's continuing to amplify those bandwidth of frequency.    28:44 And so some people are really, really sensitive to that. So some audience might be like, I can feel you without opening my eyes. I can go through the experience, just like just feeling you being on stage, da, da, da, da.    28:56 But somebody says, I don't really see that, but because there's a projection that bridge the gap of those information, now it allows me to be on the same ride with this other person who are, you know, a meditator or a monk, you know?    29:10 So it's just like, they are, it's there to really facilitate the experience. So then help you amplify those channels so you can all be connected in a deeper sense. Yeah, I'm just gonna jump in because I've seen and experienced your work.    29:24 And so I know I feel very clear when you're describing that. I have images and I get that, but I'm wondering if you could give an example. So specifically with this work, we've kind of created a, we'll call it a DIY kind of motion capture setting system.    29:44 Sorry, not setting system. And by using that, we're able to kind of really show the particles that are falling off of the body, thinking of it as like, what if our energy were to expand through the ground?    29:59 What would that feel like? And how would that look? What would that look like? I think specifically thinking of it as a collaborator in this way, as a reflection, as an expansion allows us to really center on thinking about how technology can really support the work versus again, what Sammy was saying, like take away from the experience or compete with the work.    30:26 Yeah, because part of the actual experience is that like, when you work with energy, we in our practice, we call sending the power. And then when you send the power, you can gather energy, energy going through, we conjure the energy.    30:39 And then to expand that, you can imagine your own energy kind of expanding. outside of your skin and then you start to go beyond to like some people might kiss your astral body you know and subtle body and all these turns so you really can feel the shift that happens so the audience that are sensitive they can feel that shift so audience like cannot feel that shift right away you know we have projection to kind of just hint that you know subtly that this energy are actually shifting and going beyond your skin you're on your body and how that it's almost like a vibration that particle lies and comes back and another thing that Caroline does you know i hope it's not spoiled too much but the pendulum you know is another kind of technology we're using working with the spiritual mediumship practice yeah so with the pendulum we're we're using it as a way of actually guiding the movement through the space but also as a way now to expand into the soundscape as well live so we're thinking about how spirit could guide how the sound is changing in real time as well as the movement and the projection.    31:47 So this kind of extension of body, extension of self, extension of sound. Sound, yeah, and power I think is all rooted together in this kind of beautiful way that we're continuing to explore. But just a good, there are so many different example.    32:03 Those are just two that we can pick up. We do want the audience to create their own journey as well to think about how their own technology that this mechanism designed by modern nature, how your technology can also interface with our work as well.    32:19 And that is the most exciting part of why we want to create performance for audience to witness that as well. The continuation of the technology working with the body. And you talk about the creation journey for this piece with regard to research, creative exploration, iterations.    32:35 Yeah, this is a long time research that has kind of shifted through many different iterations and explorations until it's landed into this piece that we're really excited about. When we first were talking about some of this initial research, it was back in 2020 when we were kind of going through a phase where we were both really dealing with our own shadows at that moment and our own biases against each other.    33:04 Meaning like Sammy had dealt with a lot of racism and there was a lot of work that I was highlighting for him to unpack and same with me. And I had a lot of anger towards men were, and there was a lot of unpacking to do with that kind of process.    33:25 Since then, we've done many different residencies kind of across the world, including in Cambodia, working with Peter Chin as a mentor to kind of think about how we can formalize some of these grand ideas.    33:44 Yeah, it's, I just want to say like when we first met each other, it really felt like it's like our worst enemy manifested in what each other stands for in the societal lens, you know, there's like a social in both our social conditioning of like what our worst enemies, you know, this for me, it was like, I didn't trust white people, you know, I did it, I, you know, someone mentor that were racialized mentor that were still traumatized by,    34:11 you know, a lot of racism, they will, I was really conditioning saying that we can't trust white people about doing sharing our culture, you know, what can be tokenized appropriated, you know, there is a lot of fear, there's a lot of like, I would say, you know, there's danger and risk in sharing like deeper spirituality and, and I'm sure a lot of people are still feeling that way, you know, so we want to say that's real,    34:34 you know, that's what it is something that people are going through and we fall through that. We had to go through so much shadow work. There's a lot of pain. At the same time, I feel like what I used to call white people out on, I stand in that power of being seen as a man, which I never really identified myself as man, but on the societal lens, I'm still, I represent men in Caroline's lens.    35:03 So for me, it was interesting. I go through my own fragility, male fragility, be like, no, that's not me. I didn't do all this stuff. And then she's doing the same thing. We're both like, well, innocent, but we hate you, each other.    35:16 And at the same time, that complex, because love really brought us together to really fight through all these stereotypes and stigma and pain that we, it's so ingrained deep down to our psychic and our subconscious level.    35:31 But then a lot of times people would have given up already. I've given up so many times too, just to be safe, right? We need to take care of ourselves. But because our journey being twin flames, having our soul to be reincarnated into this lifetime to meet together, that we felt like we really, it's our purpose to really have to learn and push through those hardship and the shadow, the deeper shadow work.    35:57 And then we really want to share that part of the process and journey. And it really is not easy to face your own fear, discomfort, the darkest part of you. You don't begin healing until you recognize those dark part of you in the shadow.    36:18 But then you can do that by yourself too. You gotta do it with yourself and with people that you trust can help you do those baby steps until you, I wouldn't say you get out of it, but you just grow more muscle, you get more trust and you have more trust in humanity as well in different ways.    36:36 And then, through the process we're like we want to share more of this story because the more we get to know each other the more feel like we can share this connection and love we have for each other and hopefully that will amplify further to just elicit evoke some of the more creative and loving energy around the world a little bit right yeah i think especially globally there's so much divide happening right now and part of the reason why we're so excited by this work and by what we're doing together is kind of trying to think about how we can collectively heal some of these kind of misunderstandings or i mean shadows and really facing those things like i didn't know that that hurt you and really how do we unpack some of these situations together and through a more intersectional kind of lens and so Yeah,    37:26 it's been a lot of work and it's we've arrived in various kind of creative processes and then also personal processes. There's a lot of peers emotionally down in the studio and the journey. Yeah. But then it's still like it's always worth every process at all.    37:45 That was so worth to conjure that to process and to let go and release some of the things that it's not needed anymore as well. Like, oh, the things we really care about, we hold on to this value. It's like, oh, actually, that's not needed in this current time.    37:57 No, that's that's that's that's into something else. And that that feels very healthy and like moving forward. Right. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. When I hear you speak, like, first of all, it's so generous of you to share the real internal processes that, you know, I think creative process is often gets to those deep personal places, especially if you're really if you're going deep, if you're really doing like authentic research.    38:23 And so just to hear kind of the honesty around that and and the root of also, you know, your mediumship practice. It's, I think, really generous to share that with our with me and with the listeners because it's it's honest and because I think it's relatable.    38:43 A lot of these things are, you know, with regard to like the personal work we have to do, understanding. Intersectionality, how we are situated socially given the power constructs we exist in and and also like, you know, how mental health is viewed and and our general Western disconnect from spirituality and all these things.    39:04 So I'm just so excited that that you are bringing this work to push. I'm so excited to experience it in this iteration. I genuinely look forward to discovering it and just being present in the moment to experience it alongside the other audience members.    39:26 participants who will be there on the journey. And I'm so thrilled to follow your practice. Yeah, I think we're very blessed to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much. We are so grateful. And again, I, when we say our gratitude, it's not just, you know, a usual gratitude.    39:49 It's like, there's so many layers as we talk about, you know, how brave you are to pick up, to actually program our work, you know, and how much value you see, because you also are super open-minded person with such a diverse, you know, view on what's going on with the world.    40:05 You understand the complexity and that's needed in this political landscape that's happening right now. I would say some people might not get our work and someone like you, who does, who are, you know, bring us, this project into such a...    40:21 a beautiful and empowering kind of platform to share that in this really, I would say rare, collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery as well. For us, it really amplifies our deep, deep value of our project and our belief and some of the really deep down, so I think the sole value, the sole work that we wanna do for the world.    40:48 So again, thank you so much for having us to talk about the project and also be able to share this for real in the Vancouver Art Gallery Super Push Festival. Yes, thank you so much. We're so grateful.    41:00 It's been such a pleasure to get to talk to you and get to know more about you as well and we're so excited. Thank you. Thank you. You just heard Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Sami Chen and Caroline Rigal of Chamerique.    41:19 Presented with the Vancouver Art Gallery, inner sublimity will show at Push Festival February 7th to 9th. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and the lovely Ben Charland. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.    41:33 New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. This year marks the 20th festival for Push International Performing Arts Festival. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the last 20 years, please look for our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play season.    41:52 And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca and follow us on social media.    42:06 Coming up on the next Push Play. How do I use this performance to actively reshape my life? And how do I use this performance to indulge in communities and meet with people that I wouldn't normally meet with?

Gabrielle Martin chats with Julie Tenret of Focus and Sandrine Heyraud of Chaliwaté about their show Dimanche, which will be presented at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Dimanche will be presented with our friends at the Cultch on February 6, 7 and 8 at the Vancouver Playhouse, supported by Vancouver Civic Theatres. Show Notes Gabrielle, Julie and Sandrine discuss:  How do you address something with extreme clarity but also appeal to a broad audience? How do you tackle the theme of climate change and denial? Why is it important to show our vulnerability, fragility and smallness in nature? How do you achieve this? What do you mean by the work being "artisanal"? How do you mix physical and object theatre? How does humour as well as emotional distance fit into the work? How would you describe the journey of your two companies coming together? Have your different techniques stayed separate or been blended together? Is the storyboarding process typical for you? How have your artistic practices evolved since both companies were founded in 2009? What can you tell us about your new project? About Dimanche The Companies Focus (created by Julie Tenret) and Chaliwaté (consisting of Sandrine Heyraud and Sicaire Durieux) gathered around the collective writing of Dimanche. For a long time, the two companies had been following and appreciating the work of the other. It became apparent that they had a similar approach, a shared taste for unusual, visual, artisanal and poetic forms of theatre. The three artists decided to pool their talents to create a new form of writing combining gestural theatre, object theatre, puppetry, acting and video. This project is a continuation of their respective research. Since 2016, they have worked meticulously to create a unique, visual and poetic language that draws its inspiration from everyday life, the intimate, the "infra-ordinary", to tap into the universal. 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. Bettina joined the conversation from Brussels, Belgium. 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 an artisanal approach to connect with humanity.    00:17 I'm speaking with Julie Teneré and Sandrine Heroux, two of the lead artists behind Dimanche, which is being presented at the Push Festival February 6th to 8th, 2025. Between dreamlike fiction and stark reality, Dimanche paints a sharp yet tender portrait of humanity caught off guard by devastating natural disasters.    00:37 It depicts the ingenuity and stubbornness of humans as they cling to habits amid ecological collapse, asking how much longer can we ignore the storm at our door. Directed by Julie Teneré, who graduated from INSAS, the company Focus, from Brussels, creates shows combining theater of objects, puppets, actors, and video.    00:57 The scenic language she proposes is essentially visual, metaphorical, poetic, artisanal, and very close to a cinematographic writing. Trained in the gestural arts, Siqueur Duryu and Sandrine Heroux created Chaluaté Company in 2005.    01:15 Based in Brussels, they defend a visual language without words, poetic, physical, and artisanal, mixing gestural theater, object theater, circus, and dance. Here is my conversation with Julie and Sandrine.    01:31 I would like to acknowledge that I'm joining the conversation from the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, so the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. I'm a settler on these lands, and part of my responsibility as a settler is to continue to educate myself on settler colonialism and the indigenous fight for sovereignty.    01:57 It's not just an indigenous fight, but foreign. indigenous sovereignty over these lands. And so I reference it often, the Yellowhead Institute has this really great, many great reports, including the red paper, which looks at how indigenous consent is ignored, coerced, negotiated, or enforced in Canada with regard to land.    02:20 And I'm just gonna share a little excerpt from this red paper. We analyze how the land tenure regime in Canada is structured upon the denial of indigenous jurisdiction through the creation and enforcement of legal fictions.    02:35 This is followed by limited recognition, which includes an evolving notion of the duty to consult and corresponding government and industry responses. So today, while states are encouraged to adopt the principle of free prior informed consent at the international level, in the Canadian context since 2007, when the UN's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was first presented, There has been state opposition to a fulsome implementation of free prior and informed consent.    03:06 And I just really appreciate the clarity of this document and the other Yellowhead documents and what an incredible educational tool it is for myself and I know for others. Julie and Sandrine, where are you joining this conversation from today?    03:23 From Brussels, in Belgium. Great, thank you. And is that where both your companies have been based since they were founded? Yes, exactly. Even though we studied maybe in other countries, we started working really professionally in Brussels and in Belgium.    03:44 And soon I'm going to ask you about the history of your companies because they were both founded in 2009, so they have a beautiful history. But first I want to speak more specifically about kind of the themes of Dimanche.    03:57 So, Julie, you've described your work as aiming to deal with social issues, starting from the intimate, the infra-ordinary, to reach the universal. And this is clearly successful in Dimanche. You know, the climate catastrophe is a subject that there is surprisingly little theatre about considering the scale of impending change for humanity.    04:20 But you both, the focus and Chaluaté, seem to have done something very rare to create this work that addresses the fate of the path that we are on with extreme clarity while connecting deeply with the audience across a range of emotions.    04:36 So I'm curious what you think makes this work successful. Of course, there is the theme that is climate change, that is what we are all experiencing today. And what we concentrated on was the denial in which we found ourselves and the people surrounding us between the conscience and knowing that.    04:59 there is a quick action to take, an urgency and the difficulty to translate it in our everyday lives, in our everyday actions. And so it was, for example, we had this sentence of Bill Watterson in Calvin Hobbs that was saying, this is not denial, it's just the reality that I accept.    05:29 And so it was, yes, all this, this absurdity between this knowledge that we have now with all the scientific evidence that we are facing really an extreme urgency of action facing climate change and this impossibility sometimes in our everyday lives to translate it in actions.    05:54 So that was the starting point. That gives rise to a very sadistic situation and so that creates humor and tragedy, and in our work we try always to talk about tragedy through the prism of the humor and tenderness.    06:17 And it was also to recall big things with very simple means because the show is actually with a very artisanal, an artisanal way of using accessories, etc. And because it shows our vulnerability and fragility facing nature and our smallness facing nature, so that was something we really also, was also possible by the means we use in the show, the tools we use that are object theater with physical theater and puppetry.    06:58 When you say artisanal, because this is a, you know, the word exists in English obviously, but I don't often hear it used in the context of theater work. For you, does that relate to the objects? When you say, what do you, can you explain a little bit more what you mean by artisanal?    07:15 It's that there's not a lot of machinery or very sophisticated. We think that there is a big part of the emotion. It's to advocate something bigger than us, which a very simply way. Simple means. Simple means, you know, and that gives something very fragile and very, very human, it brings humanity and poetry.    07:49 And for example, in Dimanche, there was also the mix between physical theater and object theater where, for example, the body is the landscape. and sort of a metaphorically saying that we are parts of the nature.    08:03 So there was also this game between the scales that is very rich between the fact that you can zoom in the images and then take a certain distance. Yeah, I'm hearing that the play and the humor is really key.    08:19 I mean, and I feel that was my own experience, you know, in reflecting on a subject that's so heavy, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it just is. But also I think there's something, you know, both of your practices are rooted in object theater, visual theater, physical theater.    08:42 And I think with the use of objects, puppets, There's something about the metaphoric language that you both talk about. And I think that there's something there, too, in terms of our ability to, by taking kind of a step back, or playing with perception, or taking it out of from the very literal kind of narrative theatrical context, where we're seeing like, you know, a couple characters going through this particular series of events,    09:20 I think that the fact that we can relate at moments with a polar bear. That's why also it was very important for us, the question of the humor inside this, this piece is because also it brings an emotional distance.    09:34 And it's activates our sense of proportion, proportion. And yeah, and as you were saying, it it lets us see the absurdity of our human condition. But also, yet it, it brings another point of view, another way of looking at things.    09:56 So it was very important for us not to be in a more realistic approach or scientific approach, because I mean, we're not we are first of all, telling a story and trying to, to put all the means to tell that story.    10:11 Yeah, and humor poetry, it's really something that we always search for. In August 2018, your companies came together to present backup of 30 minute performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And then Dimanche is the full length development of that work, which I had the privilege of seeing in Edinburgh in 2023.    10:34 Can you talk about the journey of collaboration between your two companies, and also the distinct signatures from each of your approaches in Dimanche? Like will we see, can you refer to a certain use of form or technique as something that's more focus or chalawate, or is it a true blend of aesthetics and techniques?    10:55 Well, I think we have, we met first in 2015. Because we used to have shows that were often presented in the same festivals or in the same theatres, and so our paths often crossed. And I think we had also a common taste for unusual theatrical forms.    11:26 As we were saying, very artisanal way of treating images without words. That was something also that was common to us, that we weren't, we, let's say we, the absence of words aroused visual creativity for the both companies.    11:48 And so even though we had different skills, Judy came more from object theater and puppetry, and with Siqueir we came more from a physical background of the arts of movement. But the language was very similar.    12:06 Of the shows that we had, there was a similar, as she says, language. And so it was very organic, the way that we met and the way that the creation was started. And there was really a blend of these tools without saying, OK, now is the puppetry moment, now is the object theater moment, or the physical moment.    12:32 It was really first to tell the story, what we wanted to tell, what were the images that the subject aroused for us, and then how we can make them the more. And I think we had a different approach. But finally, it doesn't depend about our tools.    13:00 Yeah, you know, it was just because we are a different person, but we tried to write a story and was very concentrated about that. And so we took like three years to create the show. It's a very long process.    13:12 And the first years, we just was writing on the table. We really tried to realize a storyboard and a story and then re-approve it on the stage. And some things are reveals themselves. Very interesting orders, not a duel, and yeah.    13:39 Then we re-write things. Of course, seeing how it works on stage. But re-write, this show really like a movie. re-imagines like a movie, it's our process. And so everything with object theater by other tools, but with object theater, we can dream absolutely every we want.    14:03 There is no, yes, no limits. There is no limits. And then we try to translate all the time. We try to find the translation on the stage because we don't want to write a movie, but we won't write a piece of theater, but it's always to try to find a tradition with a very artisanal language.    14:31 And so we try to create a new language with an remix on and mixed all these skills, but yeah, but it's very, we, the very... La Richesque, the rich, the important things for us, it's the collective processes.    14:54 So there is absolutely not one person on this side. And finally, we talk so much that it's just impossible to see how we find this idea. You know, we talk and you propose something interesting. I propose something not interesting, but because I think about it and you know what I mean.    15:15 So finally, it's always quite magical, because you don't really know how the ideas are aroused, but it's a lot of confiance, how do you say, trust, no, it's a lot of trust between us three, because I think that was something that was very important in the collective work, because there's not one person that is a stage director.    15:48 We are three, really writing and experiencing on scene, on stage, the ideas. So it's a lot of trust and a lot of... And for a show like Dimanche, we have write a show, and finally, we lived a lot of things we really loved, but it was not...    16:07 Serving the proposed. Yes. And so it's a long process. But it's very interesting and funny, you know. It's a lot of joy, yes. It's first a lot of joy to work together and the first years we write at three, but the second years, and then finally, we have a big team with us.    16:37 And the sound in our process of writing is very important. We write the song because we don't speak, like Sandrine said. And so we write a song because we, uh, it's as dramaturgical as the rest of the, the tools, because it also, uh, brings the situations, the, the, yeah, it really participates with us.    17:03 Uh, so we worked with someone that comes, came from cinema. And so that really specialized all the sounds on stage. So it would really come from the different, uh, spaces. And so that was something really, that was, um, uh, a big work also.    17:23 Was that new to this process or had you done that before work with that sound in that way in previous projects? Yes, a lot, but maybe it was, uh, even more specifically worked in Dimanche. And the process of storyboarding, is that also usual for your process?    17:41 That first you're going to sit down and really map it out visually like that? I think for Julie, yes. For us, with Siqueur, it was not so clear, because it depends on the shows we made. Sometimes it came more from improvisation, even though there was a theme and direction we wanted to take.    18:04 Maybe we worked at first a lot already on trying things. For my presentation and for Dimash, it was very necessary, because we talk about a very complex subject. When you improvise something, there is always something very interesting, and it complicates to choose what we follow and what we leave.    18:31 Because we had write a script and a scenario, it gives us a guide. Yeah, like limits. And so it was possible to improvise everything that gives us a very big freedom. Yeah, I guess my next question is about the evolution of your artistic practices.    18:57 As mentioned, both of your companies were started in 2009. I would love to hear about who you were as artists then compared to now. Also, maybe after this process, I'm curious if Julie, you're integrating more mime work and Santorini, you're integrating more puppets.    19:14 If this Dimash creative process has affected how you work in your future projects. Generally, I would love to hear about the evolution of your creative process, your interests. I think it's complicated to know that, because we are writing together a new show.    19:36 That's three right now. So yes, I feel that we always tried at each show to open on new or collaborations or new tools. So on a recent show, we worked a lot with circus, but on another show, we also worked a lot with object theater.    20:01 So it was also always something that was serving the dramaturgy and the story we wanted to tell to go and pick things that can bring the best image that serves the story. It's true that we had never, for example, done puppetry before, but it was very, yeah, it was very exciting to work on that with Judy and it's for sure the fact that we worked on Dimanche for the new show, there's something maybe more evidence than that is,    20:41 of course, that we experienced before. So, After it's difficult to always know how we change in our languages because there are so many influences, so many things that are also maturity in our time and work that changes, of course, the way that we that we avoid the creations.    21:05 But for Dimanche, it was the first time we worked together, the two companies. And so I think I really imagine a movie through the prism of the object because it's my formation. And finally, it's like in a bit too the usually, usually, there's some habits.    21:28 But when I it's interesting for me to have to have the body on the stage all the time, you know, because it's not evident for me, for example. But I really love it. And that brings a very poetry dimension.    21:50 But it's not evident for me, you know. And so I'm very enthusiastic and exciting to see another language and that brings me a lot. But I can explain more. That's great. Can you talk to us about the new project?    22:11 Oh, it's really the beginning. We're starting, we're just starting from the beginning of September. We started working on this new project. But we tried always a subject society through the prism of poetry.    22:25 And so that will be something like that. And we mix again, again, our different tools. But I say different, but finally, it's a mix of what we say. But the language, finally, will be very, I suppose, different from Dimanche.    22:45 because we we try to create something like a surprise for ourselves too and so we don't we really don't want to do exactly the same show but uh monday you know but we will do our best it's a surprise for us because we you can write a long time and finally at the end we discover our show and so it's oh okay that's it's that's okay wow yeah i think especially when you're working with the body um when you're not working with text i think there's um there's maybe even more space or i guess it depends how you're working with text but i feel like that that process of letting the work reveal itself you know or when you really get the bodies in space or the objects in space i suppose and you really start to understand them it's always a discovery when when the show finally is presented we also discover Yeah,    23:44 what we didn't especially think we were showing, but that reveals itself. Okay, well, we'll have to, we'll be excited to follow. For our sake, we'll hope that it's a faster process, but I really respect a long creative process as well.    23:59 Understand that, you know, that's, I'm sure that's why Dimanche is as strong as it is, because it's had that really rich process. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.    24:12 Thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure. When Heather Redford and I saw the work, so Heather is the director of The Cult and we're co-presenting this work in Vancouver. And when we saw the work in Edinburgh, we just got up and looked at each other right away.    24:27 And, you know, it was just this, this, just this total clarity with regard to what an impactful piece this is and how much we would love for our audiences to experience it. So we're just thrilled that it's finally happening.    24:42 Yeah. Thank you. We're thrilled as well. That was Julie Tenre and Sandrine Herro from Focus and Shaliwate Companies. Their work, Dimanche, will be presented with our friends at The Cult during the 20th International Performing Arts Festival on February 6th, 7th, and 8th at the Vancouver Playhouse.    25:05 Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charland. Special thanks to Joseph Hirabayashi for the original music composition. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.    25:18 Coming up on the next Push Play. I think in a broad stroke, there's a lot of appropriation of these different cultures. And we want to go into those difficult and challenging subjects so that we can arrive to a place where we have a deeper understanding of each other.

Gabrielle Martin chats with Gabriel Dharmoo, who is presenting Bijuriya at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on January 28 and 29 at the ANNEX, with Music on Main and the Indian Summer Festival and support from the Government of Quebec. Show Notes Gabrielle and Gabriel discuss:  How do we artfully engage with colonialism? What does it mean to have a transcultural perspective? What does it mean to be an artist at the intersection of high and low, east and west? Have you always worked across so many forms and disciplines or was there a trajectory that led from one to the other? Are you more interested in self-directed projects these days? What does it mean for you to investigate queerness? Can you talk about the direction of your aesthetic since Anthropologie Imaginaire? What are you working on next? About Gabriel Dharmoo Gabriel Dharmoo is a composer, vocalist, improviser, interdisciplinary artist and researcher. After studying with Éric Morin at Université Laval, he completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with Serge Provost, graduating with two Prix avec grande distinction, the highest honour awarded. His works have been performed in Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Singapore, and South Africa. He has received many awards for his compositions, including the Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for his chamber work Wanmansho (2017) and the Conseil Québécois de la Musique Opus Award for his opera À chaque ventre son monstre (2018). He was also awarded the Canadian Music Centre's Harry Freedman Recording Award (2018). Having researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai (India) in 2008 and 2011, his musical style encourages the fluidity of ideas between tradition and innovation. He has participated in many cross-cultural and inter-traditional musical projects, many led by Sandeep Bhagwati in Montreal (Sound of Montreal, Ville étrange) and in Berlin (Zungenmusiken, Miyagi Haikus). As a vocalist and interdisciplinary artist, his career has led him around the globe, notably with his solo show Anthropologies imaginaires at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival (2015) and the SummerWorks Performance Festival (2016). They also explore queer arts and drag artistry as Bijuriya (@bijuriya.drag). He is an associate composer at the Canadian Music Centre and a member of SOCAN, the Canadian New Music Network, and the Canadian League of Composers. Since 2015, Gabriel has been a PhD candidate at Concordia University's PhD "Individualized Program" with Sandeep Bhagwati (Music), Noah Drew (Theatre) and David Howes (Anthropology). 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. Gabriel 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 intersectional exploration and drag-pop aesthetics.    00:18 I'm speaking with Gabrielle Darmout, artist behind Bijuria, which is being presented at the Push Festival, January 28th and 29th, 2025. In this quirky yet poignant examination of the intersections between queerness and brownness, Gabrielle Darmout engages in a self-reflexive dialogue with his drag persona, Bijuria.    00:38 This musical conversation delves into the power of song to express the hybrid, multifaceted layers that coexist with an identity, offering an insightful reflection on the fluidity of human experience.    00:51 Gabrielle Darmout is a music composer, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist. He was awarded the 2017 Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music, following up on his internationally acclaimed solo, Anthropologie Imaginaire.    01:05 His new production, Bijuria, merges music, drag, and theatre, and has been presented a dozen times in Canada since 2022. Here's my conversation with Gabrielle. So just before we dive into really getting to know you, I want to acknowledge that I am participating in this conversation today from the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.    01:35 So the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Tsleil-Waututh. I'm a settler here, and it's my responsibility to continue to think about what that means, my relation to decolonization and restitution, and educating myself.    01:52 And that looks differently each day. And recently, I mean, I refer to this actually quite often. in these land acknowledgments is acknowledging Yellowhead Institute because it's an incredible wealth of information and an incredible educational resource.    02:10 So I've been reading their cashback red paper and it really does a great job of framing what cashback is all about, about restitution from the perspective of stolen wealth. And framing it that it's not a charity project and it's a part of decolonization and understanding that colonization is an economic project based on land theft that requires a political system that operates through domination and violence to maintain theft and therefore enriches the settler state necessarily,    02:49 impoverishes or in enriching the settler state and necessarily impoverishes and criminalizes the colonized. And I just find it so, their writing is so clear in how they frame these things that, yeah, I learn a lot.    03:04 Gabrielle, where are you joining this call from today? Thanks for sharing that. I am talking to you from home in Montreal or Joe Chaggy. Here's land of the Kanyakahaga, who are recognized as the custodians of the land and waters.    03:21 I have Indo-Caribbean ancestry from my father's side. So a whole history of indenture and a race sort of cultural ties to the South Asian subcontinent. And my mother is a French Canadian, present of such things, so I'm half white, half brown, but are they really halves?    03:46 You can't quantize it that way, but that's been my, yeah, my art is a good way for me to actually engage with all questions related to identity and power or decolonization or reflecting on coloniality as this thing that is part of everything and that we have to mindfully engage with.    04:15 And art for me has been the channel. Thank you for sharing that. And definitely I can relate to an aspect of what you're saying, and it's just a very kind of simple way of also being half-half, half-black, half-white, if we can call it them halves, it's much more complicated and richly complicated than that or complex.    04:38 But this is something that I'm super interested about your practice is the trans-cultural perspective. And it really stands out in your work, both in the perspective you bring to the work. and in the disciplines that you engage with and the historical context for those forms that you're working with.    04:58 So as a composer, you completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal with people I'm not familiar with, but who sound very important, and you graduated with two pre-Vécagrand distinction, the highest honor to be awarded, and you've since won numerous prestigious awards.    05:20 Your compositions have been performed around the world, and as well as studying in Western music traditions, you researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai over several years, and you're a drag performer.    05:34 So what does it mean to be an artist at the intersection of Western and Eastern artistic practices, as well as the intersection of high and low or popular art forms? First, I just want to say how I can't see how it could be any other way, and I wouldn't want it any other way.    05:55 It's not very straightforward of a path that I've had, but I've always kind of balanced all these ingredients that we just mentioned, whether we think of it as geography or in terms of type of art form, like with quotation marks high and low or popular or sophisticated art forms.    06:21 It's always been kind of a balancing act because I did undergo kind of training in music, which is very, very directly linked with Western classical music. So we could call it like urological. Santi Bhagwadi calls it urological.    06:43 So it's Eurocentric, but it's not anymore. It's everywhere. This type of music is everywhere, but it follows rules that have been born out of arts music at a certain period of history in a certain place.    06:57 And the tough part is like, it's kind of great music in many ways, but it's hard for me to be all in and it's hard for me to do only that. Even if I look at it from an avant-garde kind of position, because I could easily say I don't like classical music from the past.    07:17 Now I'm in the present doing that. That's one way of looking at it. But I don't feel like that sphere is where I want to have both feet in. So underground arts or I guess grassroots arts or hybrid forms, formats have always interested me.    07:42 And I also don't disavow the existence of art that's linked to through capitalism or commercial art or pop culture and all that. But I, so I engage with everything and I also am critical of everything in a way.    08:03 And the only way I can exist with this is through playfulness and through question marks, just asking lots of questions about it and thinking that it's both super, super, super serious and also kind of not really at the same time and sort of not funny, but something that can be, you know, poked at for the subject of satire or exploration.    08:33 Have you always been working in all of these forms? Like, for example, have you been you know, expressing yourself in drag, as well as pursuing this formal education in classical music? Or has there been kind of a trajectory that led you from one to the other back to the other?    08:53 Or yeah, how did that work? And also with with your training in Carnatic music as well? Yeah, no, it's, it's closer to the second part of your your second hypothesis is closer to the truth in the sense that I was, I'm, I say that I kept balancing it, but the proportion that it occupies in my life, or my activities or my projects have shifted has shifted.    09:21 So when I was a student at the conservatoire, for sure, I was way more invested in that type of urological music composition, and very invested in playing that game. I think near 20s is kind of the era of seeking a validation as well.    09:39 And validation from peers and from a network or from a community was something that I, I kind of was very, you know, that it affected a lot of decisions in a lot of ways that in choices, not necessarily negatively, but sometimes I do feel like that's a big part of it's such a formative decade.    10:06 And I've spent a lot of it in that field. But at the same time, I was doing other types of projects. But I also always had in mind that I wanted to go to India and study classical Indian music Carnatic music, which is one of two systems of classical Indian music from the south of India.    10:25 And I went there after my after I graduated from conservatoire. So that's 2008 11 ish that I went there. And then drag came 10 years after that. So 2018 that I started. And I guess if I look at the broad patterns, with hindsight, I'd say that I've been gradually and mindfully distancing from the more urological contemporary or new arts performance, interdisciplinarity, and that involved drag as well.    11:16 So it's a balance, but there's also a direction to it. Now when I take on projects that I feel are more linked to contemporary music, I choose them more, I don't know, I choose them. I weigh the pros and cons way more.    11:38 And I take less and less of this for different reasons. And is that also maybe because in those projects you are, are those opportunities to come in as a composer or a musician? I'm curious about also the relationship between, is more of your work expressed these days as like self-directed projects?    12:00 And is that a priority of yours? Or do you also enjoy working as a musician on other people's compositions? So with composition and say composing in that tradition of being commissioned to write a piece for a specific ensemble, et cetera, I've done a lot of that in the 2010s and it became a less and less.    12:23 And then the pandemic just really made me go like, okay, like, let's, let's, let's consider what this is. And if I like it, I never actually really liked it. I never liked composition, the act of being alone and writing the notes, that part I've, I've never felt healthy doing that.    12:43 It's always felt very, it was hard for me to find joy, except maybe at the beginning and then near the end when you're like, this is actually going to be performed. I'm actually going to work with people.    12:55 And so that social part of it is very rewarding for me. So I've kind of I've been drawn to projects where I have more agency also in what I can engage with. And that's not necessarily a question of like permission, like people wouldn't want me to do a piece on identity.    13:21 It's not so much about that. It's for me, it's more, I can't see how the media matches the message of what I'm trying to put out there. So with the piece that I did in 2014, kind of live arts performance.    13:41 I knew that I wanted to explore power, coloniality, voice, satire, all tons of stuff I wanted to explore with that piece. And I could not do that with Wood Quintet's commission, like it makes no sense to me.    14:01 So I knew that this was a live theater slash music slash voice hybrid that I had to do and self produce. And so that's been kind of what I've been craving. It's because I still like to collaborate on things.    14:20 Because it just makes for a more balanced kind of creative cycle as well to sometimes be involved in other people's things or to perform or to not be the one organizing everything and all of that. I think that's a very healthy balance, but for sure.    14:37 all the projects that I dream up of are are usually also not very typical in their formats and need me to have a very slow time in the slow gestation period. I don't know if that's a word in English as well.    14:58 Yeah. And so these I'm curious to learn a little bit more about these forms. Like, was there a moment of kind of rupture where you just got introduced, you know, where you immerse yourself in in drag or karmatic music, or I know that you're also working in other with other forms and disciplines as well.    15:20 Or it sounds like it's kind of been more an organic process of, you know, those being the natural forms to to realize the dramaturgy necessary. But I am just curious to learn a little bit more about that integration of these different practices and what that what that was like to start working.    15:44 And maybe also it was like to start being having your work in those forms received by different public or the same public differently. Yeah, I think it's been organic, but very mindful and also a process in which I allow myself space and grace, I guess, because there's lots of overlapping things.    16:11 And if you look at it like chronologically, I'm still like I have an album of chamber music with the National Arts Center Orchestra musicians that came out last year, which kind of celebrates stuff I was doing in the 2010s.    16:26 I'm still it's, it feels like a bit of a bubble in time to go back to that. But I would I still felt proud. I still feel proud of that work. And I still want to kind of engage with it, but that also came with the question, do I want to write a new piece for orchestra?    16:44 And my gut feeling was no. But let me look backward and see what I want to do with the NAC Orchestra, and that it was to celebrate things that already existed, and that didn't take creative energies away from the stuff that I feel is me now or me in the future.    17:04 So I guess I finished my PhD last year, and my whole thesis was just kind of research creation around voice and theater music and anthropology. And my framework is one of alignment, or seeking alignment, or in my case, seeking vocal alignment, where I want my literal voice that sings and speaks and does things.    17:37 the voice that sounds and then the more conceptual voice, like what we want to say as artists or as people, and to have those kind of aligned and different projects. So you're like, huh, I'm actually using my voice to be my voice.    17:52 Anyways, it's a little confusing kind of thing, but just to kind of bring all of that together. And for me, that takes time. And it takes a bit of accepting contradiction also, because you, you can't, you can't switch.    18:08 We can't switch so fast. I think maybe some people are wired that way. But for me, I kind of need to really feel things out. And that's been so I think this, this like seeking alignment thing, this, this process has has been what led me to, to think like, oh, I did this project.    18:31 And these are the little things about it that I feel are still a bit misaligned. So how can I address that in the next one? And, oh, maybe this way, oh, maybe going more, more. So maybe less commissioned work, more self directed work, that was one step, and then maybe more Indian music influence and less of that European stuff.    18:53 That was another way of aligning. And then with the jury, it was the queer kind of like really going into more of a queer way of, of doing things and of engaging with queer culture as well. And this intersects well, because you're talking about queerness, which, you know, Visuria engages with.    19:13 And I would just love if you could talk a little bit about more about how your practice investigates queerness, and specifically with this work. Yeah, of course, Visuria is a drag persona. It's the name of the show, but also the name of my my drag personality.    19:32 She's she's a character. who's also me, and the explanation between my queerness and my brownness has been really not that it was impossible to do it before I did drag, but really accelerated that and got me the confidence to tackle my South Asian-ness with more confidence and with less of this imposter syndrome that lots of mixed people have sometimes, when in reality, because it's a feeling, because the reality is that every South Asian person,    20:13 even if they're like fully South Asian, will have huge differences in terms of cultural language, religion, background, family history, journey across the globe and all of that. So it's kind of, it's a bit self, not self-centered, but like it's.    20:37 It's easy to just think of like how we are different when in reality, the experience now of engaging more with the South Asian queer community has just revealed how many, all the different ways you can feel like a misfit, it could be because of all these reasons that I've mentioned.    21:00 And for me, Bijiria really helped me to lean into this queerness, not just in theory, because I've always been attracted to that queerness as a lens kind of approach, you know, that you kind of look at things sideways and you have different ways of working on and against dominant culture, the kind of Munoz, this identification model, like I really related to.    21:31 But this was, this felt more real, more grounded in community and challenging myself to not stick with the cultural reference, with the cultural references, say, of the canon and more of the communities I'm already engaged with.    21:52 So Bijiria kind of offers me the opportunity to have lots of different influences and cultural references intermingle in my work from Bollywood to Trinidad stuff to Quebec stuff to sound design that's more experimental, which comes from my work as a composer.    22:18 Yeah, so I feel like the queerness and Bijiria go hand in hand for sure. And you've also been reflecting on coloniality on the new music scene and you unpack how coloniality is reflected in your music making community.    22:40 How have your kind of more academic observations influenced the direction and formats of your work? I think I like the idea that to tackles power. So in a sense, coloniality is just like this structure of a power that we can write off the top of our heads, like white male patriarchy, wealthy, et cetera, North American, European, all of these things that we associate as intersect.    23:14 If you have that as part of your intersection, you have more privilege in a sense. But I like the model that thinks about having a multitude of counter discourses to channel, to challenge the fact that There's not one way of being in the world, which is such an evident kind of statement to do, but it's mind-boggling to me that it's not integrated at all.    23:47 So I tend to want to really lean into specificity of who I am or what I'm thinking or just specificity as a kind of counter-cultural suggestion. You know, it's not like everyone be like me, and that's not what's interesting here.    24:07 It's to have a community of artists that are offering different types of non-standard ways of doing, and that's artists, and that's not the end either. We need artists, we need militant, we need activists, we need all sorts of people to do this.    24:29 So that's why I kind of like to emphasize that I'm an artist, and there are hints of critique and activism to what I engage with, but I feel like what I do best is be creative about the question marks and about the challenges and just be glad that there's other people that are wired to do it differently, and all together we contribute, hopefully, to some sort of questioning or, what's the word, kind of disintegrating the rigidity of what is considered to be a standard way.    25:23 And standard ways exist in so many different spheres. It could be political, it could be social, it could be different things. but it could be about arts as well. So I'm kind of always been wary of artistic figures, kind of emphasizing that this is the way to do this.    25:49 This is how that to me makes absolutely no sense. And I think as artists, we have to just really tap into what we have and go strong in that direction. Speaking about directions, Anthropologie Imagineur was presented by Push and Music on Main in 2016 to much acclaim.    26:14 And can you talk about the direction trajectory of your aesthetic, formal conceptual interests from Anthropologie Imagineur to Visuria and beyond? Yeah, Anthropologie Imagineur for listeners who haven't seen it is a solo performance for myself as a vocal performer who does not actually speak but more so vocalizes and kind of evokes traditional-ish song or vocalization that you could assume are linked to cultures that are on the verge of extinction if not extinct.    26:59 But in reality they are it's all fake so it's kind of a mockumentary. So behind me, I'm the only performer on stage, but behind me is a projection with five speaking heads who you assume are anthropologists or musicologists who have an increasingly flawed and problematic analysis of the sounds that I'm doing.    27:28 So with that project, it was already a very big step from from being a composer. I've always been a improviser and I've used my voice a lot in different performance settings, mostly underground, and this was kind of bringing this vocal exploration with a theatrical framing.    27:50 I'm super proud of that piece, but I knew from its success, I guess, that I wanted to do another one and my hunch for a long time was really that this next piece tackles something a bit more vulnerable and personal, which is my intersection as a queer and brown person.    28:15 So this is what Pejoria allowed to do and in terms of formal kind of like how my my artistry has developed in a way that there's There's more, like the theater part of it takes up more space, because in in Autopolégy Maginart I framed it, I've used theater to frame it, which was and the script did not me speaking it, it's like it's the mockumentary doing it.    28:47 So with drag it allowed me to lead more into character work, if we, you know, sound-wise and music-wise got me to tap into songwriting in a more of a drag-pop aesthetic, which is something I used to do more as a joke.    29:09 I've written lots of joke songs in my life, but never like genuine songs. So carrying that through instead of composing orchestral or chamber music, but really like accepting how I can play with other types of music that I do enjoy but haven't really done.    29:34 I did this in collaboration with a co-composer Gabrielle, another Gabrielle, Gabrielle D'Eau. And so this is how, I guess, my trajectory expanded in each piece. So Bijerio kind of embraces more of the performance and the speaking and the theater side of it.    29:59 And, I mean, the makeup and the drag artistry, which is also a huge thing to learn, very long learning curve. And it's a skill I'm very glad to have developed and really sharpened my visual brain, having been an ear-based person in my work for all of my life.    30:25 And would you say that an approach more rooted in theater is the direction that you see yourself going, or that's just this project? And are you working on something next? Do you have inklings of what you want to explore from here?    30:46 Yeah, I have a project in mind that I'm working on, which would be also at the intersection of music and theater, I'd say. It's too early to kind of be able to say what the proportion is. But to say the truth, I don't really know what theater means, in a sense.    31:07 I think we have kind of fixed ideas of what every art form is. And when we haven't trained in it, we can think of it as the cliche version of what it is. So for me, it's very easy to think in a very nuanced way about music and about sound.    31:29 and I know that some of the stuff I do that's more theater leaning isn't music, so I call it theater, but I don't have, yeah, it's hard for me to identify with the field in a sense, because I don't feel that's where I come from, and that's not where my points of reference are, except when I go see, except as a viewer, but as a viewer, I tend to go see more of a interdisciplinary form of theater, stuff that you'd have at Bush,    32:09 for example, but in Montreal, the F.T.A., for example, or all the O.F.T.A. and all the, that kind of community, the Arvizant, or live arts, I guess you would translate. So yeah, I see myself, yeah, going towards theater, but in a hybrid and...    32:29 unclassifiable sort of way, I guess. And I love dance as well. And sometimes I've been programmed as because you're in dance festivals. So in a sense, all these communities see things in the work that fits, but usually what they're looking for is a fresh take also on what those art forms are, what those boxes are.    32:55 And in some way it's a benefit to not come from a field but kind of like dapple with it. But I think only if you really lean into what you do have and the stuff that you do have a grasp over, which for me is sound and music.    33:14 So that'll always be kind of at the center of my process. And hopefully as the formats expand, it can relate to other artistic communities as well. Thank you so much Gabrielle for this conversation. It's been such a pleasure.    33:33 Thank you. And I look forward to visiting your city. You just heard Gabrielle Darmou in conversation with Push Artistic Director Gabriel Martin in support of their work, Bijuria, appearing as part of the 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival on January 28th and 29th at the Annex.    33:55 Bijuria is presented with our good friends at Music on Main and the Indian Summer Festival with support from the Government of Quebec. My name is Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles.    34:08 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.    34:29 And on the next Push Play. So it was very important for us not to be in a moralistic approach or scientific approach because I mean we are first of all telling a story and trying to put all the means to tell that story.    34:45 Yeah and humor, poetry, it's really something that we always search for.  

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. 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.  

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. 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.  

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. 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.  

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)). 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.

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. 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.    00:56 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.    01:16 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.    01:28 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.    02:44 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,    14:20 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.    16:51 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,    19:27 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.    19:42 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.  

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. 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.

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. 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?  

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. In this episode, Gabrielle references a previous PuSh Play episode: Multilingual Creation: its dramaturgy and implications. Show Notes Gabrielle and Carmela discuss:  Why adapt and translate A Taste of Empire? 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. 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.    23:40 I mean, I feel like the work is anyways.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Bettina Szabo of Petrikor Danse about Habitat, which will be presented at the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on January 28 and 29. Show Notes Gabrielle and Bettina discuss:  What is the relevance of the Hermes metaphor and sculpture? What drew you initially to the sculpture and made you reach out to the artist? Can you speak to your trajectory with form over your career as an artist? How does sound spatialization fit into this production? How do you manage all of the lighting cues yourself while onstage? How do you integrate your workshops into your practice, and vice versa? What is cultural mediation and how does it affect your work? What is the purpose of bringing art back down to earth and demystifying the process? What is relationship between form and subject matter? What is internalized misogyny? Are there recurring dramaturgic elements or social themes in your work, or is the throughline about process, making each work totally unique? About Bettina Szabo Born in Uruguay, Bettina Szabo is a dancer and choreographer. Before she arrived in Montreal in 2007, she studied with Hebe Rosa (Uruguay), and Rami Be'er (Israel). She graduated from the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal (EDCM) in 2013, and obtained her BFA in Choreography at Concordia University (Montreal) in 2017. She has participated in many workshops with renowned artists such as Marie Chouinard, Dave St Pierre, Hildegard De Vyust, Guy Cools, Benoit Lachambre, and Clara Furey. In 2006, Bettina formed the collective Jeli-Mien, with whom she was awarded the emerging choreographer award given by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Uruguay. She also performed for the Ballet de Camara de Montevideo (2004-2007), the KCDC (2010), the collective Interlope (2013-2014) and for Jason Cutler in 2019. She founded Petrikor Danse in 2016, which has allowed her to fully realize her multidisciplinary works mixing contemporary dance, music and visual arts. Bettina first created Noir=+ (2014) for dancer and vibraphone, and later presented Séquelles (2017), and Habitat (2020). Her work has been presented in Geneva, Paris, Lyon, Düsseldorf, Vienna, Seoul, Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto and Bilbao. She was invited on multiple occasions to work with musicians such as the Bakalari ensemble, the Architekt ensemble and composer Laurence Jobidon. She is a member of Diversité Artistique Montreal (DAM) and a former elected board member of the Quebec Dance association RQD). She actively fights for a more culturally diverse art scene in Montreal. 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. Bettina 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. Today's episode highlights multidisciplinary practice and the process of coming out of one's shell.    00:18 I'm speaking with Bettina Zabo, the lead artist behind Habitat, which is being presented at the Push Festival, January 28th and 29th, 2025. Born in Uruguay, Bettina Zabo is a dancer and choreographer living in Montreal since 2007.    00:34 As a dancer, she is interested in collaborative processes based on somatic explorations, and as a choreographer, her creations are interdisciplinary and marked by profound collaboration with music and visual arts.    00:47 Here is my conversation with Bettina. I just want to start by acknowledging the context from which I'm speaking to you. I am on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, so the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil -Waututh.    01:06 I'm a settler on these lands, and part of my commitment as a settler here is to engage in ongoing learning about what that means. And that looks like different things each day. Today, that looks like reflecting on Indigenous alternatives to climate risk assessment, and that is something that is supported by the Yellowhead Institute, which is just an incredible resource, educational resource.    01:32 So currently, I've just been reflecting on the exclusion of local and traditional knowledge and sustainable management practices with regard to climate assessment. And also, how this contributes to a view of climate change that's linear and a lack of engagement in shaping what future generations will inherit.    01:55 And I know that you are currently somewhere. different from where you're usually based. Can you share a bit about where your relationship to your place? Absolutely. So right now in Paris, I have two homes I live here, but also in Tuchague.    02:16 So Tuchague is a city land also known as Montreal or Mounyan and Nabi -Chawee, and it's an island that is traditionally a land for exchange for many First Nations and is guarded by the Kanyinkeha people, also known as Mohawk.    02:36 My relationship to the situation is quite weird because I didn't learn about the situation and the oppression that the First Nations live in Canada until after five years living in Canada. And yes, I am being accomplished through this settling, which is very uncomfortable because it's wasn't something we knew before immigrating.    03:03 So yeah, it's really, it's quite a hard situation to be perpetuating depression in such a passive aggressive way. But yes, so I try to be a Malay as much as I can. So I'm very glad to let you know that the name of Montreal is actually I'm going to jump right into talking about habitat.    03:27 So in the visual symphony of deep sea bioluminescence, an entrancing interaction with a seemingly sentient structure draws us into a hypnotic meditation on the search for home. And this structure is called Hermes or Hermes, Hermes, and this is the sculpture that you dance with in habitat.    03:50 Can you talk about, can you talk about it and the relevance of its metaphor for you? Of course. So Hermes has been my partner for the past six years. This sculpture was created by the wonderful Shasanda Rasp, who is a visual artist from Quebec.    04:10 She's not from Tijage. And yeah, like we met in 2016, she actually had exhibit a video of the sculpture movement while we were both studying at Concordia University. And through a production class, I tried to imitate it to make a costume.    04:32 And out of that exploration, the interest was very high. And also like I really liked the very first prototype I did, trying to not copy the sculpture. But yeah, somehow it gave me the courage to reach out to her and ask her if she would like to collaborate.    04:48 We had never spoken to each other. So it was quite took a lot of courage to be honest. And I happened to contact her apparently in the moment that she was looking for a dancer to make the sculpture move.    05:02 So she took around one year to build Hermes. It's made out of Abaca fiber. She actually did the paper by hand, cut it and assembled the sculpture that the one that it weren't going to be dancing a push is made of 800 paper cones and they all articulate.    05:22 And yeah, it took for making that iteration, it took around five months of work between making the paper, cutting and assembling the sculpture. And what drew you to the sculpture when you first thought, why did you want to reach out to her?    05:38 Well, I found it super hypnotic. It was like in slow motion. It really looked like a pot of fish moving around and it was wonderful. It was really beautiful. And at the time of Studio 303, there was a, there was a platform called Metamorphose where they invited visual artists.    05:57 of the costume makers to collaborate with performing artists. So I proposed to her that we apply and we got in and that's how we started working. And I did have my very first vacation to Cuba and I saw handmade crafts and I was like, oh, that's the excuse because I was like, what am I going to use as an excuse to get in relationship with this sculpture, other than it's just wonderful.    06:20 I like the honesty of excuse. It was really like, okay, how can I just say that I'm going to work with this, other than like, this is just cool. It was really, and also like, I really like to do work that has a subject that has a story behind.    06:41 So like, it was very important for me. There wasn't just an anesthetic exploration, let's say. So it all started with the hermit crab. And at the time, the Pacific Ocean had just started to increase the temperature.    06:58 And there were massive deaths of fish in the coast of Chile. I grew up by the ocean. And one of the things that I did as I get with my parents was volunteer in a, gosh, I'm having a blank with the names, in a rescue, in a refuge for sea animals.    07:23 So seeing this massive deaths of fish and whales was really heartbreaking for me. And we were just starting to talk about bioplastics and their effects on animals and like us eating them and all this stuff.    07:40 This was back in 2016, 15. Anyway, so that was the very first inspiration and reason why to get into the sculpture with it. But yeah, it was later on, but then like the other immigration discourse came in.    08:00 It was much later. But yeah, the sculpture the right now like the metaphor that it represents for me is more Canada and like its opportunities and like it's more about like the idealized place of migration because yeah obviously I think that like anyone that immigrates anywhere has idealized the hosting place like this.    08:22 Nothing that can actually prepare you to actually migrating and you choose it because you think it's better and it's definitely something that is better than your situation and that it is idealized. So yeah when I did that costume people were like oh like I had made a lot of origami paper cones and put them on a pair of pantyhose.    08:49 I made a hole to make a head and make a sweater and I got some lights from Dolorama. and I didn't know they changed color and it was great because like I just put in a friend was like just move slowly close all the lights put just that and people were like oh my god look like Aurora Morales on glaciers and I was like so yeah that's one of the big images that do come back today on the piece but this idea of coming from South America from a country has no snow the glacier and Canada did seem logical to me as a as a relation yeah and hermit crabs they don't have their own shell is that what's unique about that yeah yeah so they don't have a shell and they change off shell as they grow if you look online it's really funny you can see like um hermit crabs moving and you'll see like a row of hermit crabs so a very big one needs to change the shell so it's a whole bunch are lining up behind him to catch the shell that is left over is almost like Montreal on July 1st everybody's moving yeah they don't have a shell they are very protective they have kind of they have a tail that curls up inside the shell or whatever they find to protect their living organs and uh yeah apparently like they're you can tear a hermit crab apart if you try to rip it off his home actually yeah you describe habitat as a multi -disciplinary solo with significant dramaturgical weight attributed to sound movement and sculpture can you speak to your trajectory with form over your career as an artist yeah so um relating a bit also to the next answer so the beginning approach was very aesthetic and then once i started working inside the sculptures when the real theme of the piece came out um uh the particular thing about working with Hermes is that I mean I decided to make a solo because I wanted to finish school having a solo and like something to present my the way I work or like what I like to do let's say.    11:09 And also when you make a solo engineer is to put yourself in value as a great performer and then when I started exploring with Hermes it was like a giant struck to my ego because the most interesting thing was to disappear.    11:24 It was to not be there to be hiding behind the sculpture and while being inside the sculpture like I really have my head down I'm in all weird positions just to try to fit in and that just brought up the cellular memory of the first to fit in or trying things out how I could behave like entire phenomenon that was going on between me and the sculpture, this thing of having to disappear, having to be very uncomfortable,    12:02 yet it looks wonderful from outside. You know, like I will go back to Uruguay and I was like, well, I'm cleaning windows for 30 bucks an hour. And it's like, well, but you're playing a plane ticket. That's wonderful.    12:15 Which I mean, yes, it was great money. I mean, it was all this weird things that that happened. So yeah, like that's when the real theme of the piece came out. And also during that time, I when I when I studied, I actually when I moved to Canada, I went to Concordia University, then stopped Concordia, went, did an intensive training in Israel, in the north of Israel with Kibbutz -Gaton.    12:44 And then after that, I went back and did LADMI at the time, which today is the EDCM. And after I finished, I decided to go back to university to finish my degree. All this to say is that when I moved to Canada, I was English speaker.    13:02 So I was speaking English at Concordia, but there's no thoughtful exam that prepares you to actually go into school in English. It's really tough. Then I was in a completely Francophone environment for three years.    13:15 And then I went back to the Anglophone environment, and it was somehow more comfortable. And being in that environment and being in university, we started talking about the colonization. I mean, we weren't talking about the colonization yet.    13:28 But I did at least became more aware of like the situation with First Nations. And but I did also became very self aware of my internal colonization, because I'm a white passing person. I'm like, well, I'm not with blonde hair, but like, I'm Caucasian.    13:47 My descendants is Italian and Eastern European. My parents are both European and born in Europe. way, like my grandparents too. But yes, we have this thing of always thinking that it's not as good as it is in Europe.    14:06 And I had this speech when I moved to Canada, where I would say like, oh, I'm from Uruguay, but it's the most European countries of America, what level of education is this? It's like I had like a discourse that was basically saying, I'm white like you.    14:24 And it was at the time I was creating habitat that I realized that that's what I was doing. And started questioning it, seeing what belonged to me, what didn't, how to take it out, or and yes, it was the process of many years.    14:40 So regarding going back to the interdisciplinary part, I would say that at the time I also had started meeting with people in contemporary music and I had tried some live electronics. So yeah, it was like a great way of like amplifying the interpretation and well also like because of the hermit crabs and also because I'm born and raised like two blocks away from the ocean.    15:09 So like for me making it like with a sea theme to it was super natural. And yeah, like in terms of all of the other mediums, they're all being directed. Like I'll say that I'm artistic director of the overall thing, though Hermes was already the way it was.    15:31 There's like the only change, there's no artistic direction I have given regarding it. It's only just a bit bigger, so my torso would fit. So I wouldn't consider that artistic direction. But in terms of the music, yes, there was collaboration with the composers.    15:46 We were exploring together, doing all kinds of sounds. I was exploring all vocalizations possible. And you have an experience in exploring sound spatialization from a very young age. Yes, yes, yes, because and then because it's a thing habitat is a project that took like six years to really like were being born.    16:12 Like the very first iteration was in 2016. Then there was the second one in 2020. And then the full piece that you guys are going to experience wasn't premier until 2022. But in between all of that, I was able to find the right collaborators to make the vision that I wanted happen.    16:33 So it was in 2019 that I started working with the sound spatialization that is something that I knew we could do. And it was this idea of like bringing the people in this culture with me. So I was telling you before a conversation that as a kid, I got exposed to the idea of sense specialization when I was in elementary school, because my dad works with that kind of technology doing adaptation of software for visually impaired people.    17:05 So in 2019, I met a technician like a scientist that creates software for sense specialization. So then it added an extra layer onto the, not only onto the, how we use the space, but also regarding the way we conceive the composition of the work, because during with Habitat, like I have live effects that are done on my voice.    17:34 So this specialization is allowing us to specialize in different speakers, which sound comes from which side. So though I'm alone, it sounds like I'm there with a whole bunch of. friends, little other creatures.    17:50 And it really gives that we give a surround system. And yeah, the first thing we presented it was with 13 speakers. But yeah, it can go very far. So yeah, that's with the sound specialization and then regarding the costume.    18:06 So Hermes is the sculpture is my partner, but then I also have a costume that has the lighting embedded on it. And that's also another thing that it took years of the technology to actually catch up with what I wanted to do.    18:22 Because I now I'm able to do the auralis effect because at the beginning was just fairy lights. Then now we have special LED lights that we can program. And I can do the cues of light. So and you do all the cues yourself in Yeah, Hermes.    18:39 Yes, I have them. I have two Arduino boards on my belly. And I had to push push buttons and turn them on and off. Yeah, it was like the very first iteration, it was like a look like very pregnant crab, like I had like six different battery packs.    18:58 And now we were able to make it a lot more ergonomic and comfortable to work with. And ecological as well, too, because the amount of double A batteries I was consuming was ridiculous. So yeah, all of these things were over the years, you know, one thing came after the other and allowed me to, to push the dramaturgy further.    19:21 And this research is really embedded in your teaching practice, too, because I know that you offer workshops for, for folks of all ages, for general public, also for dance artists, which really, in my interpretation of it gives folks the tools to have creative agency and really explore with a range of different mediums.    19:42 So yeah, these workshops are really integrated into your practice. and which is a work that you describe as cultural mediation. And can you define what cultural mediation means in the context of your work and your key experiences, why this is important to you?    19:58 Well, I think that the word cultural mediation, I use it just because it's a literal translation as to what we say in French. But yeah, I think like, so regarding workshops in general, like the transdisciplinary workshops that I give is more of like just there, go and try it.    20:17 Which is something that I didn't at the beginning. And then I was like, ah, I'm kind of half making it. And then finally we have this thing going on and it's actually working. So it's more about like there to try and to touch other.    20:31 substances they'll say, other mediums, because even if it's not yourself that is going to take care of that medium, it's important for me it's super important to know the very basics so I can have a better level of conversation with my collaborators and find the right collaborator for the work I need to do.    20:50 With the workshops that I do with Habitat, it's just I literally do what I did for that costume in university. So it all started with fairy lights from Dolorama, cooking paper, and Origami is then a pair of pantyhose.    21:09 So it's just like to bring it down to earth, like right now it sounds like a very complex multidisciplinary technology, Arduino is this that well it started really with fairy lights and pantyhose and cooking paper.    21:22 Like it's bringing it down to earth and make it and demystifying the artistic process. And this is something that you speak about in the context of Petre -Cordance's vision and Petre -Cordance being your company, which is to democratize art by combining different art forms and investigating socially engaged subjects.    21:45 So we'll look at your in the context of your new work Cunha, which is based on the phenomenon of internalized misogyny of women. Can you talk about that relationship between form and subject matter in your wider practice?    21:59 Yeah, so I'm very happy to have found some kind of like recipe or practice. Yeah, you can give it which earning me, but like I cannot have like a little protocol that I have developed that I called moving subconscious.    22:17 With moving subconscious, I've been able to help myself embody theoretical concepts. So I used a meditation process, scanning the body with lots of detail, also on the side of my elementary job at the time was massage therapy.    22:47 So, and I'm a big nerd about anatomy, I love anatomy. So like this meditations really go through a very thorough body scanning, and then I bring in the information of the subject that we're gonna work.    23:00 So in the case of Cunha, this piece was like after many years of reflection and realizing like internal dialogues that I have regarding judging myself or other women and coming from a very patriarchal country to then being in Canada and being like, oh, I don't have to insult this thing that badly of this lady has a very short skirt because she's not putting herself in danger or anything like that.    23:25 Or like where did that came from? Because anyways, she looks great. Thank you. So like, who am I to judge? Anyway, so all of this came up. So what happened with Cunha, for example, it will go. So I decided to subdivide a piece in the different life stages of women.    23:45 I did a survey while I was in school because for me, the planting of this internalized misogyny starts in childhood. It's when the very first time when you're taught to not do something because you're a girl, because you're putting yourself in danger.    24:07 In my case, it was you kind of climb up trees because you're a girl. So we're like, I couldn't, and especially it was because I was wearing a skirt. So I couldn't go up the trees and all that, right?    24:19 And so I did a big survey asking people what they couldn't do as a girl when they were kids. And if they had a piece of advisors that they could erase of their life, where would it be? And the answers were super rich.    24:35 So moving subconscious is a method that is helping me combine theoretical concepts, ideas, or memories, and embed them on the body. So in the case of Cunha with my ancestors, for example, we did explorations of administration.    24:53 I had done lots of research. I found drawings of menstruating uteruses online. So we discussed about it, like the pains, whatever we had. We found drawings that we could have a relation regarding their period.    25:11 So then after that, after a good three -hour discussion and how periods are viewed in society, et cetera, I invite them to do the meditation process. And they're invited to choose themselves and memory that is related to that.    25:28 And through the meditation, I make them. bring back the memory, imagine like in detail how the word dresser, like what are the colors of the area where they are, like all of that, and then scan the body to see if there's any physical reaction, if there's any sensation that is growing from anywhere and how it's growing, and then as we continue the process like where they write a bit, we take pauses and we go back in,    25:53 I make those sensations increase to the point of bringing them into movement, and this raw movement, then they get to do a phrase, we record it, but I'm filming everything throughout the entire thing, I have tons of hours of video to watch, yes, but then they get to choose like do like a little phrase of what they want from that, and then that becomes the base material with which I do my choreographic writing,    26:23 so for instance, once somebody was dancing with her fallopian tubes, and her hands were the ovaries, the fallopian tubes were the arms, and I saw a different image, so I was like in terms of like doing the choreographic work or like what I call the choreographic writing, it's like I will play more with like saturation, repetition, orientation, like okay, something that was standing, it would go on the floor,    26:51 change the phrase to become something that is jumping to change a bit the dynamics, because it's true that like with this process of creation, a lot of the stuff, because often we start on the ground, then all the material is on the ground, so I had to find a way to bring it up and change it a bit around, so my being subconscious is now something that I've been practicing for seven years and have been using it in different subjects and with different people,    27:20 and it has always, it still fascinates me. I find it super powerful because a lot of the time all this imagery, it doesn't only bring like a very particular kind of movement, but also like it gives you, sometimes it gives you a crazy stability, like people are capable of doing things with their body that normally they wouldn't, but because on the imagination it's like okay, there's a fallopian tube doing that,    27:45 then it works. It is a very powerful tool that brings, the interpreters are in a meditative state, and it makes it super super strong, so yes, I'm not bored of it obviously, and I really enjoy using it, yeah.    28:05 Yeah, it sounds very rich and very responsive to the people in the room as well. So I'm hearing the cohesion or the continuity in terms of process for you currently, at least in your current projects, I'm wondering if there are recurring dramaturgic elements or social thedians as well within your work, Or if the through line is really about process right now and each project is totally unique in terms of integration of form and the subject matter explored.    28:41 So, as I said, moving subconscious is a common factor for sure and also like, it becomes as well, a source of raw material also for sound and for image and the environment that we may create for a piece.    28:57 In terms of subject matters, I think that like definitely womanhood is something like this in the like the situation of women in society is something that is marking my pieces lately. I mean, for Konya, one of the tableaus is menopause, which is now turning into its own creation.    29:19 This is called Helichrist. It's going to be an installation. And in terms of aesthetics, I would say like I. I have finally kind of like found my realm but like yeah from the beginning I like the idea of using surrealistic worlds or like what I call magical realistic worlds to talk about society because I think that we're a lot more porous when we're talking about like magic lens to talk about reality rather than using reality to criticize reality I think that I can bring it allows people to be more open -minded or like question things a bit further and as a South American I've been exposed to magical realism since I'm a kid.    30:08 I read those books since I'm very young so it's just natural for me it's just like intuitively what comes out so in general a lot of the times when I'm seeing this improvisations I see animals I see plants and I look into making those more obvious for other people so I guess that those are yeah definitely those in terms of if we're talking about dramaturgy those are late motifs that I can see however I think it's a bit early to name a lot because there's not that many creations that I have behind me so we'll be able to tell later yeah to be continued in a future conversation.    30:52 Wonderful thank you so much Bettina I find your process fascinating I love habitat you know it was a totally transformative or transporting experience both when I saw the work in Edinburgh a couple years ago and I'm just so thrilled that we're finally able to bring it to Vancouver.    31:12 That was Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Bettina Zabo of Petri Corradance and the work Habitat which will be presented during the 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival taking place in Vancouver BC from January 23rd to February 9th.    31:28 Habitat will be presented at the Scotiabank Dance Center on January 28 and 29. For more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival .ca.    31:47 Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. Special thanks to Joseph Hirabayashi for the original music composition. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.    32:00 Coming up on the next Push Play. So there was so much about my culture that I shut down and really like put away, you know, like never never wanted to really be too Filipino. Working on this has really been a journey of reclamation, not only of language, but of culture.

Gabrielle Martin chats with Jaha Koo, the artist behind The History of Korean Western Theatre, which will be presented at the 2025 PuSh Festival. The History of Korean Western Theatre will be produced by CAMPO at The Roundhouse on January 23 and 24, 2025. Show Notes Gabrielle and Jaha discuss:  What is the role of drama and history in reclaiming the pre-colonial past? Why hamartia, or tragic error, for the title of the trilogy of work? What western or eastern influences do you perceive on your work? How do these aesthetics complement or come into tension with each other? How do you see your practice evolving over the past eight years up to the current production? What did it mean to become a father during the creation of this trilogy? What creative risks and experiments are you embracing going forward? What's next for you? What are the differences between audiences and responses between east Asia and elsewhere? About Jaha Koo Jaha Koo (he/him) is a South Korean theatre/performance maker, music composer and videographer. His artistic practice oscillates between multimedia and performance, encompassing his own music, video, text, and robotic objects. His most recent project, the Hamartia Trilogy, includes Lolling and Rolling (2015), Cuckoo (2017) and The History of Korean Western Theatre (2020). The trilogy represents a long-term exploration of the political landscape, colonial history and cultural identity of East Asia. Thematically, it focuses on structural issues in Korean society and how the inescapable past tragically affects our lives today. Currently, Koo is working on a new creation, Haribo Kimchi, scheduled to premiere in 2024. Koo majored in Theatre Studies (BFA, 2011) at Korea National University of Arts and earned a master's degree (MA, 2016) at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. 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. Jaha joined the remote recording from Ghent, Belgium. 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 multimedia practice and finding one's artistic authenticity in relation to the Western theater canon.    00:19 I'm speaking with Jiaha Koo, the artist behind the history of Korean Western theater, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 23rd to 24th, 2025. This visionary documentary theater performance examines how the suppression of culture under Western assimilation has shaped Korean theater and by extension the national identity of South Korea.    00:40 Through a patchwork of personal narratives and historical analysis, it offers a deeply authentic perspective on the past and defiantly imagines a future free from cultural erasure. Jiaha Koo is a South Korean theater performance maker, music composer, and videographer.    00:57 His artistic practice oscillates between multimedia and performance, encompassing his own music, video, text, and robotic objects. Here is my conversation with Jiaha. In 2025, this will be the third time that you're going to come with your work to Vancouver.    01:15 The first time was with Kukwoo in 2020 and then Lalling and Rolling in 2023 and now 2025, the history of Korean Western theater. So it's just a really nice evolution for us to follow the evolution of your practice and just be in relationship with you and the themes that you're working with.    01:38 I'm very honored to present my Trilog works, Everything in Vancouver. So I'm very excited to meet audience to share my last piece of the Trilog, yes. And we're speaking about Vancouver and Vancouver is how this place is colonially known, but it is the stolen traditional and ancestral.    02:00 territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh, and I'm a settler here, and part of my responsibility is ongoing learning about the colonial past and participating in a reclaiming of history and imagining of possible decolonial futures.    02:21 Today I'm really inspired by a podcast which is more like an intersection between documentary theater and a weaving of critical fabulation and historical documentation, a podcast called Marguerite La Traversé by Emily Monet, who was here at Porsche in 2023 with her work Oakenham.    02:48 And listening to this project has been very educational for me. It centers around Marguerite Du Plessy, an indigenous woman who was also a slave in the 1700s in Quebec. And this woman is the first enslaved person who took recourse to the justice system to have her freedom recognized in 1740.    03:08 And it's been really eye opening to realize the history, you know, in the 1700s at 90% of the slave population were indigenous people. And the other thing that's been critical fabulation, the need to the role of drama and imagining history as part of reclaiming the forgotten and erased histories of the past.    03:46 So for our listeners, I encourage you to check that out. And today, Zaha, where are you joining the conversation from? Now, I'm currently in Ghent, in Belgium, in the studio of Kampo, where I'm working with the last five years, I'm associate artist of Kampo, the production house in Ghent.    04:11 Yes. And this now is Friday evening, but I'm still in the studio. Yeah. Well, let's talk about what your work is in the studio or what you've been working on. So the history of Korean Western theater is the final part of your Hamartia trilogy.    04:28 And this word means tragic error in Greek. Why tragic error as a title for the trilogy and what makes these works a trilogy? I think this is really nice question to open up our conversation because it's really ironic and paradox why I made Hamartia trilogy as my title.    04:51 Actually, this is really related to the last piece, the history of Korean Western theater. Actually, I made the concept and plan of this trajectory in 2014. At the time, I already made the idea about rolling and rolling, and cuckoo, and the history of Korean music theater.    05:15 And this project was about imperialism and colonialism, and how to reflect the past, the tragic past, and for the future, actually. Because actually, we don't know what kind of tragic past are staying with in our life, but actually, there are many things, many layers, and then this kind of tragic trap is still going on with us.    05:45 So that was a really big inspiration for me. the history of Korean Western theater, actually the motivation is very important to talk about why I made the Hamartia trilogy. In 2008, you know, I was a student studying theater studies in the university and by extent I went to want a big celebration in the theater in Seoul, South Korea.    06:15 Then they were really excited and then I was curious what kind of event and it was 100th anniversary of Korean theater. Wow, 100 years. And then suddenly I made a question myself, which country or which culture can count the age of theater history?    06:40 That's really strange because we learned that theater history started already before, you know, like more than southern or 2000, we never knew. But they are counting the history like, yes, 100 years anniversary.    06:56 That's really strange. And then I tried to research and then think about what's the starting point. Actually it was 100th anniversary of Western style theater in Korea. So it means that their theater is based on Western theater.    07:15 So it's really separated from Korean traditional theater or Korean folk theater. And modernization was a kind of foundation, kind of like barometer. We have to throw away our past and then we have to make a new feature based on Western canon.    07:37 That was the mentality of the modernization. I think there is no autonomous modernization in the concept. So that was motivation for me about the history of Korean theater. And why? You know, I wanted to talk about my theater, my route, but and I realized that I don't have my authentic knowledge, and my tone, and my, how can I say, my route.    08:11 So everything that I what I learned, actually, it's from Western theater. So there was no time to identify myself, culturally. So conceptually, at the same time, part of schooling, I wanted to bring Amartya from artists to tourist weddings, because that was only one term that I learned.    08:40 So you're talking about, you know, the history of Korean Western theater, examining the history of theater. history of colonization and Western influences. You moved to Amsterdam in 2011. You did a master's at Daz Arts in Amsterdam and then moved to Belgium in 2016.    09:05 So as you've referenced a lot of your, and before that, as you've just said, like a lot of your theater education was based in a Western tradition. I'm curious if you could speak, I would love to hear you speak more about how you, what Western influences you perceive on your work and Eastern influences, or just to kind of talk about those aesthetic, the ways that those aesthetics complement each other or maybe come into tension in your practice or in your context.    09:42 When I look back, when I was living in South Korea in 2010, the Korean theater scene was very conservative and very hierarchical structure. In that structure, I found that it's not easy to make artistic growth myself because the structure forced younger generation to follow their Western canon in a different way because I have to talk about the Western canon.    10:21 Actually, it was interpreted by Japanese people during Japanese colonial period. So it's kind of like monster Western canon. It's not authentic Western canon. So in this sense, the conservative scene always divided like theater, dance, and multidisciplinary performance and visual art performance.    10:48 So there was no synergy to each other. There was no kind of good reaction or feel like each other. I wanted to escape and avoid it from this structure. And then I wanted to figure out what I want in my artistic practice.    11:07 Fortunately, at that time, performance works that I was inspired and I like. Actually, it was from Belgium and Germany, actually. This is really funny because I was thinking about what is our own theater.    11:25 But at the same time, I like and I'm inspired from European theater. But there was something different because what is contemporary. I was inspired by the meaning of contemporary. And then I found maybe I can establish what I want.    11:45 want what I wish in my artistic practice. That's why that was the reason I decided to leave. Of course, in European theater, after that I learned that in European theater also really divided like a classical theater and contemporary theater.    12:01 But somehow one is really important is that the diversity and international experiences and then different cultural moments that I really appreciate. It's really different from Korean theater because there is a North Korea, so geographically it's a part of the continent, but politically it's an island, so it's really isolated politically.    12:35 In this sense, there was kind of artistic liberation myself. That was the 13th point. As you mentioned, in 2011 I moved to Europe and I studied my master's program in Amsterdam from 2012 and then I moved to Belgium from the Netherlands in 2016.    12:59 In that period, I got a big question myself. I have to admit that my artistic background and my artistic practice are rooted based on European theater. I think this is the reality that I had already from South Korea when I was a student.    13:26 So in this sense, when I decided to make the history of Korean Western theater, it was a big issue for myself. How to figure out and how to develop further based on my own authenticity. Honestly, I don't know yet, but every different project I try to develop further, I think in that sense, the history of Korean Western theater is kind of like a hunting point for me to think about the future, what is autonomous modernization or artistic practice.    14:09 So in my artist practice, how to develop my own aesthetic quality and how to make the new contemporary Korean artistic aesthetics, for example, even though I live in Europe. I think this is a great moment to talk a little bit more about how you see your practice as having evolved from lolling and rolling to the history of Korean Western theater across this 10 years.    14:43 Or I guess it was eight years by the time, yeah, that last work premiered. Audience, audience members, maybe someone already saw my previous work, like Lo Ling and Lo Ling and Cuckoo. Maybe they already recognize who I am as an artist, maybe.    15:01 Basically, I'm a theater maker, but also I'm a composer, music composer and video artist. So always multi -media elements are important and I believe that music and video are my performers and my artistic languages.    15:23 So always how to organize the musicality and then how to make multi -sensure drama thirds and structure in my performance, they are really important. So from Lo Ling and Lo Ling, I already tried to organize my video work as a performance language.    15:44 In the meantime, my own music can talk about so many subjects itself. After that, I want you to go further with my multidisciplinary elements and then I start you to develop my robot performers. And of course, rice cookers perform in cuckoo.    16:05 And actually, the one of rice cooker will come back to Vancouver with the history of Korean written theater. Of course, in the performance, there is also new robot performer. The important is about, I already mentioned about future, but in the practice, in the project, Lo Ling and Lo Ling and Cuckoo, they are mainly focusing on the past.    16:33 So what was tragic past and what kind of effect, what kind of tragic effect on our lives today? But the history of Koreanness and theater doesn't stop at present. So it goes further to the future. And then how to reverse our future and how to unfold and fold a new feature.    16:58 That is an artistic question, actually. So in the sense, I try to bring Korean folk theater and dance into my music and video work at the same time, even though I'm not dancer, but I try to practice on the stage my own choreography.    17:16 And then furthermore, there is a new character that I mentioned, the robot character. Actually, it's my son. My son was born during the creation of the history of Koreanness and theater. And then I tried to imagine the future together.    17:35 How can I say? It can be a little bit kitschy and a little bit cute way, but somehow that was a reality because, you know, I became father during the creation of the Hamatiya trilogy. And then it gave me many different layers and it gave me many different realities.    18:02 So I couldn't have to think about my chart and then future generation as well. So in the sense, the history of Korean S &P author is a perfectly, I would say it's a final piece of the Hamatiya trilogy to close, to wrap up the trajectory.    18:22 And now that you've completed the trilogy, will you continue to work with the self -solo form? I mean, I reference these pieces as solos, but as you've just said, you have other characters on stage, robotic characters, rice cookers, et cetera.    18:41 I'm just curious what kind of creative risks you are embracing. You just premiered a new work since this trilogy. So yeah, can you tell us about your current experimentations with form or thematics, et cetera?    18:59 Oh, you mean the related to my new performances, the new work together? Yeah, I guess the question is what's next for you now that this trilogy that you've been working on for so long has completed, what's next for you artistically?    19:14 Hamatiya trilogy is my first chapter in my artistic career. And to see the second chapter, the first chapter is really important, of course. So in the first chapter, the Hamatiya trilogy is like autobiography storytelling.    19:38 and sometimes lecture performance, sometimes documentary performance, documentary theater. So every time in a different way, I try to develop a little bit further. And one day I realized Matia too large is completely about myself.    19:58 And then if I'm not in the topic or I'm not in the work, then what kind of challenge happened? I thought this is quite crucial and important and relevant question for me as an artist. So recently I made Playboo Kimchi.    20:24 It's about food and it's about diasporic status who lives outside of the hometown. So in this sense, I want you to develop. how to organize narrative in the performance. And for example, the Hamatea theology is more like the documentary stories, but Haribo kimchi is more like fictional, but plus personal stories, it's kind of like mixture.    20:54 So I try to make a distance between my work and my self and then in between the distance, I think my musicality and my video work and my installation work, my cinematography and my robot performance can do many things.    21:13 In the sense that my work can transform into another way, I think. So kind of like in the middle of the transition. So after Haribo kimchi, I want to try next work and not on the stage, for example. And then if I'm not in the performance, what kind of artistic urgency?    21:41 And your work has toured extensively internationally. What would you say are the differences between audiences, connections, or responses to your work in East Asia or elsewhere? Amartya Tillers, yes, he was shown in a different continent and different cities.    22:05 Luckily, I'm so appreciative of opportunities because I was able to see many different audiences and then they gave me many different reactions. In European countries, there are also similar experiences like East Asia economic crisis.    22:26 It was also happened during like 2008, around 2008 in Greece or Spain or Italy. So we were able to share a common feeling and experiences and a harsh time, so the emotional engagement was totally different, so the kind of reaction was also really different in European countries.    22:57 Sometimes, you know, some countries, I feel like, wow, in East Asia, you had a hard time. Sometimes, you know, in this kind of conversation, I can feel also this connection, because audience can think this is really far story, you know, it's not our story, it's your story, something like that.    23:23 But mostly, international audience gave me intimacy and engagement to share their experience. So even though I'm talking about Korean history and political matters, every country, they have their own stories and their background and their problems.    23:46 So even though I'm talking about Korean stories, it automatically transforms into the local stories that I was really surprised from their reaction. On the other hand, when I perform in Asia, it's quite different because like Kuku or the history of Korean theater, this kind of work, you know, they have different understanding depending on the political landscape.    24:20 So different perspective can be shared. For example, different interpretations about Japanese colonialism between Taiwan and Korea also. Of course, I respect their opinion and their decision, but somehow it was quite different interpretation I found.    24:42 So it was also a fruitful experience for me to see the different dimensions of perception. In Taiwan specifically was your last reference, one last thing. Last year, I performed Amatya trilogy in Seoul altogether.    25:01 I was quite surprised from the reaction because, you know, the history of Korean based theater, it's still going on in their history and in their art scene and in their society. So I was able to feel their anger, but at the same time, some conservative audiences, they were really angry, for example.    25:37 After the show, some people sent me a message via Instagram, we never give the right to talk about Korean theater at the outside of South Korea. At the time I was hurt and I was sad, you know, I left 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, this colonial remnant is still going on in our contemporary society.    26:06 Last 13 years, my cultural identity is also getting changed. When I go to South Korea, they treat me as the Korean who live outside, so it's kind of like a stranger. But in European society, I'm still South Korean, I'm not a European, so I'm still living kind of like in between culture.    26:34 films. So in this sense, my perspective is losing the power as a Korean. That is quite sad. Somehow as a person who can see the society with distance as a start viewpoint, the history of the history of Korean medicine theater is still very valid in Korean theater scene that I was able to observe and to see the society last year.    27:14 Yeah, the themes of your work are so relevant here, as in many places of the world, as you know, you're talking about, or the work is addressing themes of imperialism and colonization with walling and rolling, specifically language imperialism, with the cultural genocide that took place here and continues in many ways.    27:38 It's very relevant. It's always interesting to identify parallels with other places in the world. There's so much knowledge of specific Asian history, I feel here, that having this kind of opportunity to connect through you and your story and your perspective.    28:03 I think it's also really beautiful how you do with each work, weave in the personal in a way that makes it very, very emotionally touching, very concrete, and very accessible. I am thrilled. Thank you so much.    28:19 Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for coming back to Push. I so look forward to welcoming this piece. Actually, this was the first, the history of Korean Western theater was the first piece of yours that I saw, so it was my introduction.    28:34 to your work because Cuckoo was presented at Push Before My Time and then we brought Lalling and Rolling which was the first piece in the trilogy in 2023 so it's yeah I'm just very excited for our audiences to get to this to experience this this part and the and for those lucky audience members who will have experienced all three over the the last four or five years that's just awesome so thank you again for your time.    29:01 Thank you very much I'm so honored and I'm so excited to meet first of all audience talking and then I'm so happy I can share like fully know completely all trilogy in Vancouver. Thanks a lot. That was Jaha Koo, the artist behind the history of Korean Western Theatre with Gabriel Martin.    29:26 Jaha's new piece will be presented during the 2025 Push Festival, January 23rd to February 9th in Vancouver, B .C. The history of Korean Western Theatre will be produced by Campo at the Roundhouse on January 23rd and 24th.    29:41 It's the third in his trilogy of shows that has been produced at Push, so for fans of Koo Koo and Lulling and Rolling, you don't want to miss this one. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Trisha Knowles.    29:54 I'm one of the producers of this podcast along with the lovely button, Charlynd. Special thanks to Joseph Hirabayashi for the original music composition. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.    30:07 Coming up on the next Push Play. So it all started with fairy lights from Dolorama, cooking paper and origami as a pair of pantyhose. So it's just like to bring it down to earth.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Châu Kim-Sanh, the artist behind Bleu Néon at the upcoming PuSh Festival, January 23 - February 9. Bleu Néon will be presented with Plastic Orchid Factory at Left of Main on January 28 and 29. Show Notes Gabrielle and Châu Kim-Sanh discuss:  How is mobility a social determinant of health, specifically for Indigenous peoples? Why the squat and what does it represent to you? How does meaning change between places, such as Vietnam compared to the Philippines? How do you deal with class differences in this particular work? What does it mean to have a chair compared to being on the ground in terms of sociopolitical status and meaning? What do you mean by Asian body roots and what is being revealed through this work? Where does pride fit into creating and developing this piece? What is your experience performing this work in different contexts? How is the birthing process related to this work? How is this show related to or informed by your past?  Why Vietnamese rap, especially when you don't speak Vietnamese? What is the process of rap mentoring and why has it been important? Why is the cheating of the squat interesting? How can we do something together in performance without having the same abilities?   About Chau Kim-Sanh Châu Kim-Sanh (she/her) is a choreographer-dancer, filmmaker, and cultural worker. Her stage creations have been presented at the MAI, Tangente, l'Arsenal, l'Écart (Canada), Krossing-Over (Vietnam), Performance Curator Initiatives (Philippines), and SIDance (Korea), among others. In 2023, she collaborates as a dancer with Ariane Dessaulles, Erin Hill, and compagnies Katie Ward, Carpe Diem /Emmanuel Jouthe. Châu is the artistic director at Studio 303. She was an associate artist at EQUIVOC' from 2018 to 2024. In 2024 she founded her own company, MIDLAND, which supports her artistic practice. 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. Châu Kim-Sanh 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 the subversive potential of movement and the reclamation of pride.    00:18 I'm speaking with Chow Kim -san, the artist behind Blue Nail, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 28th and 29th, 2025. Chow Kim -san is a choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker. She is Vietnamese -French and lives in Jojage, Muyang, Montreal.    00:35 Kim -san is interested in diasporic practices and works in relation to her Vietnamese heritage and North American context. Here's my conversation with Kim -san. I'm really thrilled to be having this conversation with you today about Blue Neon, about your wider practice, and just I'm so excited that Blue Neon is coming to Push.    00:56 We've been in conversation now for a couple of years. The piece was going to come in 2023, 2024, for this last festival. And then you had a baby, which is great. And now you have a baby and you'll bring the piece to 2025.    01:11 Yes, that's very exciting. Yeah. So yes, it's all coming together and I'm just really thrilled to introduce our public two -year practice this way. And then of course, I hope they all come see the show.    01:24 So just before we really get into the conversation, I do want to acknowledge that I am here speaking to you from the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh.    01:39 I'm a settler here. And part of that responsibility is ongoing learning. And that looks like different things on different days today that is in relationship to gender and generational justice. And a lot of my learning these days is in thanks to Yellowhead Institute's report.    02:00 I am really grateful for so much learning through this institute. And so specifically, with regard to their report on transportation inequities for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+, the learning has been about recognizing mobility as a social determinant of health and the need to call the Government of Canada to align with the need to address this, because current health policies failed to address the significant barriers First Nations face when accessing essential services from reserves.    02:42 Kim San, you were born and raised in France. You've lived in Canada for 12 years, and you've been travelling to Vietnam and collaborating with Vietnamese artists and organizations for eight years. Can you tell us about your relationship to place?    02:56 Yes. Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Gabrielle. Yes, so my name is Kim Sanchao, and I'm Vietnamese and French. I live in Géo -Géi, Muyang, Montreal, and I would like to start by acknowledging that I live on unsaid territory.    03:15 The Géo -Géi nation is recognized as the custodians of the land and water, and Géo -Géi is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, including the Ganyan Gehaga, the Euron Wendat, the Abenakis, and the Anishinaabe.    03:36 Also, since I travel and partially live a little bit in Vietnam, I started doing research about Indigenous people over there in order to make also connections and sense to me. Vietnam accounts for about 50 Indigenous populations, and in Asia they're named ethnic minorities.    04:09 Their history is different than here, so sometimes I don't fully understand what I research about Indigenous populations over there, but what I found is that the main five ethnic minorities are the Thai, the Thai, T -H -A -I, different than the Thailand, the Hmong, and the Yao.    04:36 The city where I come from, which is Daigon, it's where my family has been living for generations, was historically inhabited by the Khmer people and various Chiang communities before the significant settlement of the Khin, which are the dominant populations.    04:57 the Vietnamese. And I also read that Saigon, that is now called Ho Chi Minh City, was back in that day's name. So under the Khmer people, it was named Prey Nokor. That's it. Thank you, Kim Sanh. Thank you.    05:22 And I forgot your first question. I haven't asked it yet. I was like, oh my God, that was very quick. No, I'm actually going to just contextualize it with a little bit more information on the neon. So bathed in neon luminescence of an imagined Saigon nightscape, child Kim Sanh's rap incantations and meticulous motions form a prayer to the embodied yearning and fantasize nostalgia of the Asian diaspora.    05:55 Blue neon is a solo performed entirely from the position of the squat, used as a cultural, political, and aesthetic symbol of Asian being. So let's start with why the squat, and what does it represent to you, or in general?    06:07 Yes, so I've been working on the squat position for a while now, and I'm still working on it for a future project. There's many reasons, but I would start with the very beginning. So at the very beginning, blue neon was meant to be a trio piece, and with COVID, it became a solo with myself.    06:30 And while I was doing the body research, the explorations, I very quickly realized that the squat was a position where I felt comfortable, but mostly I felt very secured and empowered. And blue neon is about nostalgia of Vietnam that I was not born in.    06:56 So it's the imaginary stuff that you learn from your parents. It's not a real nostalgia, it's also, it lives in our dreams. And I think it's very, it's part of being a diasporic population. So I was working on reconnecting with nostalgia, and I found that the squat was actually a very strong vehicle for me to access body memory.    07:32 And later, I also, I mean, later also quickly, I also realized that it was the case for most people, most Asian people I would share the work with. Now, the squat has also predicted more like my personal relationship with the squat, but the squat is also, a very nice choreographic challenge to me, because at first it hasn't been explored that much, but there's not a lot of work, research.    08:08 All we know about the squad is about training in North America, the so -called Asian squad, like yoga position. It appears here and there, but there is no real research or deep research. So there was the challenge of starting something about it, and also to work from a position that is hard on the body when you move, like it's not easy to move up and down.    08:39 And it's also a position, it's a still position from the beginning, so a position to rest. So there's a lot of constraints that for me are very exciting too. work around either to feel more comfortable, find ways to be more comfortable with the squad or now I'm also working on how to cheat the squad so that's for me that's very exciting.    09:10 And then there is also the political aspect of the squad such as being low versus higher on a chair. There is a class and financial aspect of it like who has a chair and who doesn't have a chair. There is a historic and also cultural which is what I was talking about in the first place the fact that it's widely used in Asia.    09:40 And your research has shown differences between the meaning of the squat in for example Vietnam compared to the Philippines. Can you talk about that? Yes, so when I started I thought the squad was just the squad which to me meant with my references the squad is related to the functional position.    10:09 It's used to work, to hang out, so you're having a coffee. I have a coffee with my family with smoke cigarettes that was the squad. It's also a position to rest, to wait but in my perspective it was definitely a functional and modest position.    10:33 And then as I started researching and also touring I also realized that even in Asia it has different meaning and representations. So the example I often mention is when I went to the Philippines in 2023 I went to show the work and also teach and work with dancers in Tagaitai and Manila and the dancers over there often, there's a few who said very strongly that for them the piece was, they were wondering if it had a spiritual meaning and when I asked what kind of spiritual meaning they're talking about,    11:17 they said it's because for us it's a representation of an indigenous god who is often represented in this wedding -sitting position and this god is protecting the right props. So they were very curious to know, does my piece have anything to do with spirituality?    11:43 And also they questioned the representation of using the bathroom which is very in Asia. toilet came very fast, very, very late. So there is the way people used to go to bathroom was worrying, but there is the opposition between a position that is very spiritual, but also dirty, you know, in many ways, you know, and, and then I also, and then I realized I had, he had other meanings or references.    12:21 I think the one that comes back often that I was not so aware at the beginning is the class reference. So my partner who is from like, Indian descent, there are smellies. The first thing he told me was like, Oh, does it have to do with class?    12:42 Because in India, it's only the lower class who would sit on the ground. So then it, it's at this point that I started to research on the meaning on having a chair who has access to a chair, what does it mean to have a chair?    13:00 And, and how and also the opposite, what does it mean to be on the ground? Because the squat is a position where you're on the ground, but you're not white on the ground, like your bum is not touching the ground.    13:15 So you can be on like the dirty ground without getting dirty. And maybe I'm going somewhere but it's also I shared with a dancer named Brian Falman. I don't know if you know Brian, but Brian was a is the different room.    13:39 And they work in intense performance. And they were telling me that they're working around tools of body control. And that the chair was One tool from the Western world, Western culture about controlling bodies, like the squat.    14:00 When you squat, even if it's still positioned, but you must move at all times. And there is always like a muscle activity. So someone who is squatting, they will eventually travel around because you can't sit on a squat forever.    14:19 Whereas you can sit on a chair forever. So when people are in a line, they put them on a chair, they stay in line. When you work and you work on a chair, you can work forever on your chair. If you're sitting in a squat, it's different.    14:36 People cannot control you for that long because you must move either like a little bit or more, which is more like traveling. was super fascinating. Yeah, all the symbolism and references and the subversive symbol that it is, given that history.    15:02 And you've spoken about the the squat being a tool to connect or reconnect to Asian body roots through because teaching is a big part of your practice. And you've witnessed that through your squat workshops there's this reconnection for Asian, Asian diasporic folks.    15:20 Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by Asian body roots and what's been revealed through this work? Yeah, so I've been teaching in Asia and I've been teaching in Montreal mostly for the squat.    15:37 And in Montreal, I taught with a collective named Superboat People, which is a diasporic from South East Asia collective. And we did this amazing workshop with all type all kind of age and ability in the bodies.    15:53 And they were all Asian descent. And at the beginning, I find that they're a little shy, you know, but Asian people are usually mostly doers. So if I say let's squat, then everyone, everyone will just squat.    16:09 And at the beginning, they were a little shy. But after a while, they started we started talking about how I think they were they were expressing that they were very proud. They realized that first, the squat was quite easy for them to do like they were, they found mobility, strength, but also beauty in this position.    16:40 And we talked about we all have memories of I have memories of my uncles, a lot of people have memories about their grandmothers. cooking, taking care of kids, just doing a day -to -day thing and it was very moving how they, it's kind of like they forgot because we don't sit squatting here, we sit on chairs so we forget that we have this ability and usually when we remember it's not a very proud,    17:18 it's not with pride that we remember the squat. So in that workshop, in that context of dancing, it was very lovely to see them reconnecting with their with their body and when I teach in Asia it's also different because for them the squat is very much part of their life, like it's actually like the, often the first minute like I said oh let's squat and then there was quite perfectly and vigorously and everything you want and then I'm like so what do we do now and I'm like oh well and then we discuss about why we do what you know but there is always this pride in the process of being able to squat in a beautiful and I would say like not a modest way you know like with yeah with with elegance and yeah.    18:21 And you spoke a bit about the difference different reception and the different references that people have when they view the work for example in the Philippines compared to elsewhere and you perform the work in Canada you perform the work in different Asian countries and in Canada too I imagine Asian and non -Asian audiences can you talk a bit about how the work is interpreted or just your experience of performing it in those different contexts?    18:51 Yeah so here in Canada I performed so far in Quebec in the city in Montreal and outside Montreal and I perform for general public but also for Asian communities and also in Asia I perform in different places.    19:14 I would tell you that there is their reception but also my perception of performing in those different places. When I'm in Montreal I get a little nervous because I how my peers are going to look and think about my work and when I go to Asia there is this but there is also oh I'm Asian but also Western for them you know so in Vietnam I'm not I'm not Vietnamese, I'm called Viet -Q, which is a specific word for diasporic people.    19:55 So we're not really part of it. And I feel always a little shy, but also very at ease because I find that in Vietnam, the public is very... They're very direct, and they also don't assume that they know better than you.    20:19 And they don't assume that they need to understand everything. There are certain things they understand. Some others they don't. They will tell you they're very straightforward, but they don't need to understand, control, analyze, and question and confront everything.    20:39 Which is much easier for me than to have a dialogue. I find it a very enriching process. And for them, when I perform in Asia, they recognize the squat very fast, because the first images I do are a squat where I'm at the cafe with my uncle.    21:05 I take a very usual position, so they recognize it straight away, which is not the case here. Here it takes a little bit of time for people to recognize what I'm doing. So there it is. And I think in Asia, the feedback I receive is much more about the link between the effort of the squat and the impact on the emotions.    21:34 And they talk a lot about the Blue Neos, also a lot about Vietnamese rap. So they talk a lot about the Vietnamese rap because I don't speak Vietnamese. So they usually say to me that I'm very brave, which I don't really know what that means.    21:53 It's not really a compliment, but I'll take it. And it's true that, I mean, if I can elaborate a little bit on it, I would tell you that the piece is very physically demanding, like I sweat a lot, because I squat the entire time.    22:18 And it takes me to a place where at some point, at a moment in the piece, I overcome the pain of the position, and there's like a superpower coming from inside of me to the outside. And here, people, they mention a lot the birthing process through squatting, which I can I see the, because I gave birth this year, which is funny because I didn't give birth squatting at all.    22:55 I just laid down. I was like, I was like, ah, it's too painful for me. I'm just going to lay down. No squatting. Thank you. But, but I see the, the relationship, I mean, I was more about the, the strengths, the resilience, but also the release, you know, so you need to, when you give birth, you often navigate between those three.    23:20 And then it's like super power coming out of you. So, so the, I find the Asian, Asian audiences a lot, like they, they ask a lot about this aspect of, of the work. And here I find people being moved and talk about their emotion, but they also, they try to analyze a lot of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.    23:47 the references, which I understand, you know, but they, that's the difference to me. They try to intellectualize why I do this. What does that mean? What does that represent? How does Blue Neon relate and form or subject to your past or upcoming projects?    24:03 So I've been, I've been, uh, re -coaching on the squad and doing the Vietnamese rap for a while now, uh, and I'm still doing it. Um, for the future, I will, uh, continue squaring, but now I'm, I'm in the process of, um, uh, researching for four people.    24:24 Can I just interrupt to ask why Vietnamese rap? Why? And you don't speak Vietnamese. Yeah. Um, yeah. How did that come about? Uh, so it's, it, for me, it's another way to, to connect with Vietnam. So, uh, Vietnamese rap has, has been extremely popular for maybe 10 years in, in Asia, in Vietnam.    24:52 Um, they, they watch a TV show like, um, uh, King of Rap, uh, Rap Viet. So they're like, uh, So You Think You Can Do Vietnamese Rap? Uh, so it's been extremely popular. Of course, uh, it's, uh, uh, inspired by, um, black American, uh, hip hop culture.    25:13 Um, it translates in an awkward way because there is no black American really in Asia. Uh, so it's a little bit clumsy. Um, and, uh, and I was very moved because it's the first time that I saw, uh, Asian young people talking about themselves with pride.    25:41 Um, Asian, Asian people, we're often, we must be very quiet. known for that, and it's true. We're very discreet people. And we, I find like we often subdue or when we don't, we do it, we don't do it in an upfront manner.    26:02 But with rap music, I saw young Vietnamese people talking about themselves, what they do, who they are. And I was very moved by it. My generation, like because they're younger than me, my generation, we didn't have that.    26:20 We must be ashamed of being Asian. So I was, I was very moved by it. And during the pandemic, I didn't, I lost touch with Vietnam, like I couldn't go anymore. So I would just watch those TV shows at home.    26:37 And then I started also thinking I have a lot of friends and family, like my cousins in Vietnamese rap scene in Vietnam, and also I don't speak the language. It's really hard for me to learn, so I've been learning Vietnamese for many years now at school, and Vietnamese rap was just a beautiful way for me to say something that sounded correct.    27:11 It really helped with the pronunciation, and I felt like in the same way that the squat was about embodying my Vietnamese connection, the Vietnamese rap also had this effect on me. So for Plunion, I had a Vietnamese rapper named Jay, who lives in Toronto, who wrote the text for me, and I thought the lyrics would be simple, but the lyrics are very heavy.    27:52 The text is very dense, pages of lyrics, and also I've been mentored a lot, and I used to do it in a very shy manner, and then I had like rap mentors who came, like actually all of them, they came to the studio, and they were like, if you do it, you have to do it fully, because rap music is about being proud.    28:13 It's not about being shy, and I used to do it in the dark, and I had like a little blue light on top of my head. Now I think about it, I'm like, that was cute, but that was a bit silly. So anyway, I had to learn these pages and pages of rap, and also to embody it without understanding what it, like, I mean, I understand the text, but when I say the words, I don't understand what I'm saying, so then I had to learn,    28:42 with my mentors, my different coach, I had to learn the gesture that I'm supposed to be using and it was funny because it was more, it was easier to accept in my body than in my memory of the lyrics.    29:01 So anyway, all that to say that now I'm working on, I'm still doing some rap research but now I'm doing, I'm and I call it rap for babes because I speak like a baby who is three years old. So now I started rapping also children's book in Vietnamese and I do that with the kid.    29:25 It's very cute. It's very cute. It's, but it's not, I'm not sure it's good from on a professional standard, but at home it's great. Yeah. I mean, I'll bring my two -year -old to your concert. Thank you.    29:42 Thank you very much. Vietnamese rap was really something in my life, and maybe to end this little loop about it, I would tell you that since Blue Neon, I've also done a rap mentoring here in Quebec with different artists, and this process was very interesting because it made me realize that I was really not born here.    30:15 I can read and meet a lot of people, but to understand the historic, social, economic context of rap music here in Quebec, I can only access it intellectually. There's something that really doesn't integrate physically.    30:42 I've been doing that, and it's been great, and I did it after creating Blue Neon, so it's kind of like after that I connected some elements. So now it's interesting also to still perform Blue Neon, but also have done that process afterwards.    31:07 And I had interrupted you when you were going to speak a bit more to how this research is related to your current projects or your previous projects. Yeah, so I don't know if it's for, I only know for the future, and for the squad.    31:28 Right now I'm working with three other dancers, so with four performers squaring, and I chose to work with a mix. cast of Caucasian and Asian people and so I think it's going to be more it's going to be a little it's going to be less about the Asian squad to say but it's going to be more about the question on domination and cheating cheating the squad and how to support each other be be together while having different bodies and performing the squad and the cheating of the squat is that for now like purely physical challenge choreographic challenge with regard to the physical language and then and its relevance in terms of uh the concept of the piece will be developed as you explore it physically or do you already have a reason like a conceptual reason for why that cheating of the squat is interesting yeah Um,    32:37 I don't know yet I'm very early in the process. So right now, all I know is that with different, because for Blue Neo, it was easy in a way, because I only work with my buddy who can quite very well.    32:49 But now I also work with different bodies and some, some of them don't quite so well. Uh, and I think I'm more interested about how we can do something together without having the same abilities. Um, so I kind of have to go through the chain, but maybe it's not the end.    33:10 Uh, maybe, maybe it will turn into something else in a similar way. I'm, I'm very curious about, um, putting the space. Um, but I don't know yet if I'm going to go there. I'm going to do research, but, um, I don't know yet if it's going to be part of the, of the, of the piece, you know, because Montreal, like many, most of our cities, everything is getting more and more expensive related to space.    33:38 And so there is this, I'm interested with the idea of squatting space, um, about, um, getting in, um, from a political, um, and activist perspective. You know, what does that, what does that mean? What can we do with it?    33:54 So I don't know yet, but that's the, that's the, the things I'm working on right now. Well, there's a lot of rich material there. Um, and, and ideas. Thank you so much. I'm really so thrilled to welcome you here.    34:08 And now I'm thinking about how we can organize your, um, baby rap concert as well. Thanks so much. Thank you. That was Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Kao Chim San, the artist behind Blut Nayon, which is being presented at the upcoming push festival in Vancouver, BC from January 23rd to February 9th.    34:37 Blit Néon will be presented with Plastic Orchid Factory at left of Maine on January 28th and 29th. I'm Trisha Knowles. I'm one of the producers of this podcast along with Ben Charlin. We'd like to thank Joseph Hirabayashi for the original music composition.    34:53 New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. This year marks the 20th festival for Push International Performing Arts Festival. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the last 20 years, please look for our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play season.    35:11 And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup, visit PushFestival .ca. Coming up on the next Push Play. After the show, some people send me a message via Instagram.    35:25 We never give the right to talk about Korean theater at the outside of South Korea. At the time I was hurt and I was sad. Even though I left 10 years ago, this colonial remnant is still going on in our contemporary society.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Gabi Gonçalves, producer from Corpo Rastreado of Renata Carvalho's piece, Transpofagic Manifesto, at the 2025 PuSh Festival, January 23 - February 9. Transpofagic Manifesto will be presented with Latincouver at the Waterfront Theatre on February 7 and 8. A special film marathon of Renata Carvalho's work will also be shown at SFU during the Festival on February 9. To listen to an interview with Renata in Portuguese, please check out the Latinos en Canada podcast. Show Notes Gabrielle and Gabi discuss:  What does it mean for your work to give voice? How did Corpo Rastreado come to be, and what does it do? What is the difference between an artist and a producer? What does it mean to be a producer in terms of enabling art and artists? What is the difficulty of using the word "project"? What is the "tree philosophy" of art? What makes a Corpo Rastreado artist? What does it mean to be a "political act of great courage?" How did you start working with Renata Carvalho? What has led to Renata's international success? How do we approach trans rights across countries with such different laws, such as Brazil and Canada? How do we take care of the audience? How do we learn to work on the micro-political level? About Gabi Gonçalves Paulistana, articulator of the whole zorra for 14 years and our doctor in Communication and Semiotics (Communication and Cultural Production in Brazil - a study on the operators of helplessness and firefly artists - 2016), Gabi Gonçalves is one of the main responsible for this melting pot that is Corpo Rastreado. Working with production, in her opinion, is studying, researching and mainly a political act and a lot of courage, with a pinch of madness!  For this premise, she brings in her experience the production in the biggest national and international festivals, knowledge in all the notices and forms of sponsorship (direct or not) as well as full experience in all areas of culture. 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. Gabi Gonçalves joined the conversation from São Paulo, Brazil, home to the Guarani, Guarani Mbya, Guarani Nhandeva, and Tupi-Guarani Indigenous 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 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 building relational foundations and plants as inspiration for micropolitical actions.   I'm speaking with Gabby Gonzalez, the producer and longtime friend of Renata Carvalho, who is the artist behind Trans -Pothagic Manifesto. This work is being presented at the Push Festival, February 7th to 8th, 2025.   And on February 9th, we will also be presenting a marathon of Brazilian films starring Renata, including her own film, Body, It's Autobiography. Trans -Pothagic Manifesto is a courageous and thought -provoking work that challenges perceptions of gender non -conforming and trans -feminine people.   Through a radical expression of empowerment, Renata Carvalho subverts the obsessive scrutiny of trans bodies, distilling this gaze and transforming it into art, literature, and education. Gabby Gonzalez holds a PhD in Communication and Semiotics and is one of the main people responsible for the melting pot that is Corpo Hestriado.   Working with production in her opinion is studying, researching, and above all, a political act of great courage with a dash of madness. Here's my conversation with Gabby. So just before we get into speaking about your work with Corpo Hestriado and with Renata Carvalho, I just want to start by acknowledging the Indigenous lands that I'm on, that I'm on, stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples,   the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh, and as a settler here, I continue to educate myself and engage in thinking on what that means that looks like different things every day. today, today that looks like reflecting on indigenous futurisms, largely thanks to a podcast episode by Riley Esno called Land Back to the Future on CBC Gem.   And in it, she quotes Nehiya scholar Erika Violet Lee, talking about reconciling the apocalypse. And I found it really evocative with regard to the role of artists and the role of imagining futures as part of a decolonizing practice.   So she quotes this scholar in saying that the job of writers and artists is to be the mirror for the people That we build what could have been what should have been that we find the knowledge to recreate all that our world would have been if it wasn't for the interruption of colonization and Riley really underscores this word interruption and encourages us to consider colonization as not being permanent or inevitable.   And so those are the thoughts I'm sitting with today. As I join you in conversation Gabby and can you let us know where you are joining the call from. I'm here. Yeah, I'm here in Sao Paulo in the city of Sao Paulo the biggest city, the biggest city in Brazil, and here where I'm right now in Corpo has to add there was, there is a lot of rivers under the street.   These rivers are very important for us but now they are silent, you know, they are under the city, they cannot breathe. So, this for us it's very very bad for our city for for everything for all the, all the people, all the, all the humans are not humans that live here.   Thank you, this bridges into my first question because I want to talk about the work that you do, and the work that you have been doing for the last 14 years as a co founder of Corpo has to add oh, and you've been leading this organization which you've referred to as madness, at times.   Yes, for 14 years. And my interpretation from afar is that it is a network that breathes life you talked about these rivers being stifled being silenced, and that a lot of your work is about giving voice.   but I'd love you to tell me about how Corpora Castrellado came into existence and from your perspective, what it is that you do. Well, first of all, Corpora Castrellado has 18 years old, almost 19 years old.   You know, Gabi, I was a dancer. I come from the stage. And this is very important for my producer, work because I really understand all my job from the perspective of an artist, but I'm not an artist.   I'm a producer. This is very important to start. Well, I started so many years ago trying to understand how I can help the artists, how I can help the work of the artist. So many things happen and many, many ideas I could change because this is important as well with the time I could go deep inside of all my job, all the production perspective, the artist perspective, and understand when and where we connect and how we connect.   Well, so I start to understand that I could do a kind of job that I can keep myself together with the artist and I can keep working during the journey of the artist or I can keep with the artist during their lives because I believe on time, I believe that we need time, I believe on continuity and then I decide to build a kind of work that building continuity in this country that it's completely discontinued way of being.   Because of an instability and infrastructure funding these kinds of things. Yes, this kind of thing. So I try to find a way to keep all these people that work with me together every day, every year, day by day, doing and thinking about production in art and art of production.   So now a day what I believe that my work work, my producing work, is try to find the space, keep in movement, and find a context. This is the most important thing for me to build this organism. For me, it's a kind of life organism that needs things to be alive, so sometimes we are more healthy, sometimes we need to stay a little bit quiet because the movement, if we spend so many energy, everything is a metaphoric way to talk about this,   but we have to understand very strong to understand how we can move ourselves, how we can move our ideas, because it's a very political work, so we have to understand where we are, which context we are.   Nowadays, I'm not interested to talk anymore only about executive production and just to look to the artist and say, what do you need? What can I do for you? In this moment, I'm not interested in artists.   I work with artists, but I'm not interested only in artists, because I could realize that if I spend my time looking for the artist, I cannot move all around to do good. If I stay all my time looking for each artist, I cannot build something from the whole, all the artists, because what I believe right now is the production, it's a kind of floor.   I have to build a strong floor for the artist to stand, for me to stand for all the people that work on the artistic world. Our artistic place can be strong and keep doing their job, because what I'm interested in is to find a way to keep the people working, keep people, artists researching, and not only live by project.   because nowadays our problem is the projects. I don't like to use this word in a way, project, because it's something that's kind of beginning, middle and end, and we finish on this. And this is very, very hard for the artist because it's another way to be.   So when you talk about creating that floor, are you talking about building networks for presentation, international development in terms of, because you're not only producing, but you're also distributing or promoting the artist, supporting their onward touring.   Does it look like lobbying the government for more arts funding? Or what does that look like, that building the floor? This floor, first of all, for me, I always call myself as a producer. Sometimes I can be a creator, sometimes I can do programmation, sometimes I can distribute, sometimes I can be an agent, and sometimes I do an executive production.   But I prefer to call myself as a producer because I believe that this in producer, I can do all these things. And I think it's also a way to be more relevant for the producer, you know, because we never have space to talk, we never have space to create.   I believe that it's a very big space of creation, the production. And when I tell you about the floor, maybe a very good metaphor that I like to use, because all my knowledge and my thinking, it's about the vegetable philosophy.   I really love them, and I believe that it's a very good way to understand how we are living, how we are working. So I really like to think about the trees. The tree itself, maybe it could be the artist, and the roots.   Roots, yes, it's what I want to build, this place of the roots, because it's very important, and the tree cannot be so beautiful if there is no good roof, you know? And for the plants, there is no hierarchies, so it's important.   what is out and what is in, doesn't matter. And I like this metaphor of the roots because for me, it's a very strong and very smart way to be, you know? There is so many organisms together with the roots.   It's something amazing how they develop and it's a lot of intelligence that there is in this. So I normally, I think like this, this is a very important metaphor and an image for me. It sounds good. I don't know if it help you.   I don't know if you help you to understand what I'm talking about floor when I talk about this group. To me, I hear like the deeply relational approach you have. And the community building that much must be a very important part of what you do the support systems that you create for the artists and the interconnectivity.   The interconnection the relationships between all of the people that you're working with. That's how I interpret that. Yes, and there is and there is no one doesn't exist with the other. It's a part of the same organism.   And I'm really getting a sense it's wonderful to hear from you because I get a sense of your vision and how you've been able to hold this organization for 19 years. I am curious about what how you there must be so many artists that want to work with you.   So I'm curious, like, for you, what makes a corporal has to add to artists like how do you select the artists that you want to work with. Now I now a day I work with around 60 artists and from all around Brazil and you know, I don't select artists.   I'm not going to looking for artists. The artists come to me because I you know what I what I really believe that if I keep working every time. And, you know, nothing very big and huge with a lot of advertising.   No, I keep doing my work every day with these artists that it's bigger and the other it's smaller in the students that are beginning people that's just trying to to express themselves with something that I believe that's interesting.   So it's a lot of people, a lot of artists working with me, and you come to me and ask me to work with you. And then, and then you. tell about my work for another one that come to me and talk, you know, it's something very natural, it's something very normal that starts to happen with us, you know.   And then after my work with Renate, after I started to work with Renate 10 years ago, of course this changed a lot because changed myself completely. So I start to work with another artist and in the main thing I start to, I could understand how pretty it's my job, where I really can go with this, what I can exchange with people from this.   But there, of course, 10 years ago, I have no idea exactly all the things that happened with us, of course. And also now I have, we are now 26 people working here in Corpora Striado. So, for me, it's also very important to realize that our job is completely collective, completely.   It spends much more time, it spends much more energy, but all the time I'm doing this with them, you know. With all these producers and also all the artists, so this, and also I don't have a method to work.   I work with you in a way that I will find with you because your work is something very singular and so we need to work in this way. With Renata, it's completely different because she's completely different from you, she's interesting about other things.   And so this is the way that the art is coming, and coming, and coming, and coming. And I like to spend time with them. Renata, it's with 10 years, Leah Rodriguez, I'm living 10 years, and so many others, it's around at least 10, 8, 6 years that we are together.   And I want to talk more about your relationship with Renata, but first I want to circle back to something you said about the political aspect of your work and that being realized over the years. You've spoken about Corpora Striado's work as a political act of great courage.   wondering if you can just explain what you mean by that, a political act of great courage. Because when, with Hanata, for example, when we start the gospel according to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, and we did this performance, I decided to pay by myself this show, this production, because nobody wants to pay for this.   Could you explain why? Yeah, what that project was doing. Sure, it's very easy because Jesus never can look like a travesty, he can look like for everything, everyone, but travesty not. So this has become a big problem for us here in Brazil.   We have a lot of constellations in our, and censoring. ship a lot a lot of censorship in almost all the places that we went with the show we had very big problems with people in front of the the theater telling that we what we are doing against Jesus against the church of course but you know all these people that came and do and do this kind of manifestation they sure don't come inside the theater and see the show sure because if you go if you went there you will see that she's talking about love all the times she's talking about and how you can and how we can respect the others how we how you you make your your life better if you believe that Jesus is always talking about love and they never go against uh went against the travel transgenders and travis cheese and black people and all of love uh queer communities there is no even one word about this and so there i realized that my job it's completely uh political and then i decide to uh to be in touch more with uh the artist that is talking about something about uh all the black issues all the visual issues the uh trans issues and i work with these with um hey all the the this the questions of um and i don't know in english no but i will find,   I will find the world. But you know, it's, it's something that comes to me as well, because the artists understand that I am really interesting about these, not to be, to be famous and to have likes in the Instagram or all the these things.   But because we are really interesting about these because I really believe that this can move ourselves to other place can change our life completely, my and all the others that I'm working here. So these people changing another's and another's and another's and that and we are working on the we, you know, I like to stay with the trouble Gabby.   I really like stay with with the trouble. because I think it's this is the only way to to move the things you know and and with my job I could see that I can be on it and on this place moving the things changing and and with the artists all the time in partnership with the artists all the time in partnership with them this is a very important part of my job this is why I me and Renata for example we we change each other so much because we are always working and being together you know she in my opinion she always go forward of us you know she's all in front of us she's thinking in front of us so this helps me a lot to go you know and and it's very powerful for me to to be in touch with this kind of of artist and also this kind of person this human being incredible one yeah but yeah you've spoken about yeah thank you so much for sharing that and I think it ties in beautifully I have another question about that specifically looking at your relationship with Renata because you talk about it as or you talk about her as being like a sister and I want to just learn a little bit more about that first project you worked on so the god spell according to Jesus queen of heaven a piece that you produced in 2014 and this was an adaptation is my understanding and I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit more about what made you like how you met Renata what made And if you can share how you perceive that her career or her practices in artists has evolved since 2014.   Yeah, so Natalia Malo, it's a very good friend of mine and also a director, a theater director, and an artist, et cetera, that we call, so she went to Ejiburgu in French in 2014, or yes, 2014, and she saw Joe Clifford doing the gospel according Jesus, Queen of Heaven.   This, Joe Clifford was the writer and also the actress of this. text. She wrote this text after she did the transition of to be a transgender woman, because she was married with a woman that had a very big problem in his head.   It's a kind of and she died very quickly, something very strong to her. And then she decides to do something that she all the life wants to do it. And she did this after 50 years old, something like this.   And she was a person that used to go to the church. She really goes to the church. And then she had a lot of problems in the church after the transition. And of course, she realized that probably this is not a place for her anymore.   And then she decided to study about the Bible, about the text of Mateus, the text of Peugeot, all this, that these evangelicals, I don't know if it's right. And she in this research, she realized that there is not even one word against trans, against queer community, not even one word, nothing about this.   And then she wrote this text, and she decided to go by herself. And Natalia could see and ask her, please, can I translate to Portuguese and do this in Brazil? in Brazil, this will be a completely another thing.   And then Natalé did this translation and also we start to try to find an actress. And then a lot of artists send us a video telling a small part of the video in Facebook that time. And then she's for sure she's amazing.   And then yes, and then we went to the city of Renate. It was Santos, she used to live in Santos, very close to São Paulo city. And then we start to work, we try to apply for so many different funds. But of course, nobody wants to pay for it.   In the beginning, and then we decide to do by ourselves and I decide to do this production and it was the first time that I decided to pay for a production and I keep after this I keep doing this with so many different artists since right now since with Manifesto Nosporfaszka as well and we we did our this uh all these rehearsals and all this creation together me myself I was the assistant director because as I told you I come from the the stage and with Renata and Natalia we work one year because it was our money and so I don't have so a lot of money so I keep I keep doing this rehearsing and every every month and Renata was someone that in that time have a lot of difficulty with money a lot so she really needs this one to keep doing to keep working with us and all the things and then after one year we decide to to do the premiere and we did during I think two years and this show and we had a lot of problems with censorship and it was amazing because so many different festivals invite us to go and all of them have problems with the local politicals and the majors and the you know the institutions but after these I realized that people around from the festivals and from the institutions that invite us are very engaged with us only in that time that we are there.   They are engaged sometimes. You know, in the end, I'm not sure if people are engaged with us, with Hanata, with the question of that body or if they are engaged with them to be on the Instagram and all the, you know, having place, have light sometimes.   They are, you know, this movement, it's a very important move to them, loco. And for me, that's okay. But in the end, they believe that they did something. And we leave with the problem. Is there a commitment to actually be working?   engaged socially on addressing these issues in a long -term form. But during this time, many important things happened. For example, all the movements to say yes for a trans talent, say no for trans fake, and all these movements that Renata did, it was very important because the represent activity, it's very important and it's very quickly.   When we start to work on it, you start to move things very quickly because you you give light for something very important. These bodies have to be in all these places that they want to be. This is very important.   And then all these movements start with this process of the Jesus. Okay. And I know that also Transwafakic Manifesto has toured quite a bit internationally. It was nominated for an Audience Choice Award where I saw it at Zokritiatro Spectacle in Switzerland.   I would love to hear you speak more about what you think has led to Renata's international success, but also how to speak more about how her work is appreciated, received, interpreted in different places in the world.   You know, Gabi, I think our discussion here in Brazil, the discussion of about transgenders, about Black issues, all about the queers issues and also the original people issues. I believe in the case of queers, first, we are in front of all the countries that we used to go.   The questions, what we are asking about, what we are working on it, what we are fighting right now, I think in all the places that we went, we are in front of these, we are some steps in front, of course, because Brazil is the first place in the world that died trans people.   We have to move, you know, it's not because we are incredible. No, but we need to do this. We need to fight for this. We need to talk about this more and more and more. And transfer B, here, it's something that you go to the jail.   So, Renata, in all the countries that we went to now and so many cities inside of Brazil, she did manifest in so many places. She, people love the work because she brings these questions. She brings all these points and these very important political points to the stage and to the audience.   And say, let's talk about this very easily, you know, in a very good way. She's very funny. She has a lot of humor. So, this helps a lot. She's a very good actress. This helps a lot. So, she can work with so many different audiences that there is more trans people, only white people and heterosexual people, cisgender, you know, so many different audiences around the world.   And there is one very, I think, smart thing that when she, the first time it's with subtitles, normal show, okay, but the second part with another transgender person, that speak a very good Portuguese and a very good language, very good English, very good French, very good Italian, very good Germany, you know, the language of the place, the local language.   And this helps a lot because people become close of her as well. They can, you know, they can, because it's not easy when you come to show. I normally think, and I always tell to the artists that I used to work, that it's not all the performance, all the shows that are internationalization.   You know, you cannot go abroad with any kind of shows. It's something that you have to learn with time. It's something that you have to build. Sometimes you have a very nice show. talking about something very specific from the place doesn't make sense you know you are you're not going to connect it and this is something very important to to know and and manifest we think that we could change our possibility to be international when we realize what the big importance of translation you know how because this is about it's not about translation it's about communication i want to communicate myself with you if i don't have this perspective in my work it's not going to to happen you know and i think for so with this with this perception with this attention because it's something that you have you have to take care of your work and and with the audience if you don't take care with the audience i i don't understand why we're doing this connection you know yeah and it seems like it's been a beautiful trajectory that you've been on with ronada from having her be an actor in this first work uh gospel according to jesus queen of heaven um and then now with transphagic manifesto where it's really like she is communicating herself with the audience in this work um i'm really yeah i'm it seems like such a beautiful partnership and such a necessary partnership for the development of her work you know as much as you've spoken to how she's also contributed to how you're perceiving your work the impact of your work the way you're working in in financing projects yourself.   That's a huge investment commitment. It's really wonderful to hear about how you're working. Yeah, because, you know, Gabby, in the, in the world that we live right now, that innovation, it's a world that people love that all the the the the the funds and the projects has to have to be innovation and things highlight is the world's talking about how we are amazing, you know, how, how incredible how can be economic policies and the work of the,   the artists, I believe that we have to find another way to keep, you know, to keep doing our job. For example, I believe that the future of our work, it's completely handmade. It's completely handmade, you know, because it's, it's collective and handmade, because in some way, you know, we have to, to think how, how we can work the micropoliticals.   Because I believe that this is the only possibility for the futures. Micropoliticals also, because I believe that the plants all the time are doing micropoliticals. You believe that this one in my side, she's so beautiful, and she can keep alive without movement, without moving themselves, you know.   So this is, this is very beautiful. And I really believe that this is a possibility of example, good examples. You know, so I think it's in this way that I like to to be to to think, for me, production, it's a, I want to think about the language of the production.   How is the line because a dance theater have a lot of language, you know, all the time they are talking about the language, I want to talk about language of the production, I want to talk about the dramaturgy of the production, how we can build this in some way, you know.   We could keep talking. It's really fascinating. And it's so inspiring to hear you speak about your philosophy with regard to creative producing. artist accompaniment, political, social action, cultural mediation.   And I really appreciate that you also kind of made a full circle in the conversation, bringing us back to futurisms and the role of art and artists in that work. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you.   Thank you so much, Gabi. Thank you too, my dear. That was Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Gabi González from Corpo Hastriado, who is producing Renata Carvelo's piece Transpofagic Manifesto at the 2025 Push Festival, January 23 to February 9 in Vancouver, BC.   Transpofagic Manifesto runs at the Waterfront Theatre on February 7 and 8, while a special film marathon of Renata Carvelo's work will also be shown at SFU during Push on February 9. For more details on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup, visit pushfestival .ca.   Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charland. Special thanks to Joseph Hirabayashi for the original music composition. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.   Coming up on the next Push Play. At a moment in the piece, I overcome the pain of the position. There's like a superpower coming from inside of me to the outside.

Gabrielle Martin chats with Tom Arthur Davis and Jiv Parasram, co-creators of SWIM by Pandemic Theatre and Theatre Conspiracy. SWIM will be presented at the upcoming PuSh Festival, January 23 - February 9 in Vancouver. SWIM runs from January 30 to February 2 at VanCity Culture Lab and is presented with Touchstone Theatre and The Cultch.  Show Notes Gabrielle, Tom and Jiv discuss:  What was the beginning of your relationship with PuSh? What was the process of developing and realizing "Daughter" at PuSh in 2018? What role does Bouffon clown play in your work? Why is post-show after-care so important with some of your work? Where are you at in the process of developing SWIM? How are you using sound to emphasize the themes of your work? How has your practice evolved, or stayed true, over time? What is the importance of local and hyper-local work? What is your experience of the cultural context of PuSh? About Tom Arthur Davis Tom is a theatre artist, producer, and project manager. Originally from the unceded territory of the Algonquin nation (Ottawa) with colonial lineage from the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk and the Mi'kmaq peoples (Newfoundland), he has recently relocated to Lekwungen territory (Victoria), after spending most of his career in Mississauga-Anishinaabe-Haudenosaunee territory (Toronto). In 2009, he co-founded Pandemic Theatre (then less distastefully named), for which he has acted as the Artistic Director since its inception. From 2018-2022, Tom worked with Why Not Theatre, acting as a Managing Producer where he led artist support programs such as RISER, Space Project, and ThisGen Fellowship. From 2014-2019, Tom worked with the Toronto Fringe in multiple capacities, including as the inaugural director and program designer of TENT, an educational program that teaches entrepreneurial skills to emerging theatre artists. From 2022-2023 Tom worked with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival as the Interim Director of Programming. Currently, he is working with the BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, helping to organize their annual Indigenous youth conference, Gathering Our Voices. About Jiv Parasram Jivesh is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist, and facilitator of Indo-Caribbean descent. His work has toured Nationally and Internationally. Jiv is the founding Artistic Producer of Pandemic Theatre, and became the Artistic Director of Rumble Theatre following three years as the Associate Artistic Producer at Theatre Passe Muraille. He was a member of the Cultural Leader Lab with the Banff Centre and Toronto Arts Council. His public service work has included collaborations with the Ad Hoc Assembly, The Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and as an advisor to the National Arts Centre. His current cultural practice centres decolonization through aesthetics. 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  00:02 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, Push's Director of Programming, and I'm speaking with Tom Arthur Davis and Jiv Parisram, the artists of pandemic theatre who, along with theatre conspiracy, have created Swim.    00:20 But today's episode goes further back, reflecting on their 2018 Push show Daughter and the trajectory of their practice to Swim. Swim will be presented at the Push Festival January 30th to February 2nd, 2025.    00:34 Swim is an immersive, sensorial experience that imagines challenges endured by refugees who brave the treacherous crossing between Turkey and asylum on the Greek island of Samos. Harnessing cutting -edge technologies to stimulate audio and tactile sensations, Swim invites the audience to meditate upon the emotional toll of displacement and sacrifices made in pursuit of new beginnings.    00:56 Jiv Parisram is a multidisciplinary artist of Indo -Caribbean descent based on the unceded Coast Salish territories. He grew up in Mi 'kma 'ki and spent the first decade or so of his artistic career in Taq Aronto, where he co -founded Pandemic Theatre with Tom Arthur Davis.    01:13 Tom is an arts and culture worker who is based on unceded Lekwungen and Songhee territories. He was also Push's 2023 Interim Director of Programming. Here's my conversation, recorded on location near the studio where they recorded the sound for Swim with Tom and Jiv.    01:32 Just to start out, to give some context, we're here on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh. We are also next to Sound House, is it?    01:47 It's pretty close, yeah. Just down the road that way. That way? Where you're about to be recording some audio for swim. Indeed. So I've caught you in the middle of your residency, thanks for taking the time.    01:59 We're gonna talk about swim in a moment, because it's actually a very exciting kind of sneak peek for Push 2025. But let's go back to the beginning. So you have a relationship with Push that, well, started at least in 2018 when Push presented daughter.    02:16 But why don't we, why don't you tell us what was the beginning of your relationship with Push was? When did it start and how did it develop? It was the year before, maybe two years before we became for a pitch, before they say he fell, which was a project we had done with our, with Dawn of Michelle St.    02:33 Bernard and near Barracat. And so, yeah, we came to the pitch sessions and that was kind of our first kind of introduction to the festival. We'd heard about it, we'd met some folks kind of at, like, Magnetic North, I think, at the time.    02:48 Back when Magnetic North still existed, made rest in peace. Yeah, and kind of made that connection. So it was, it was really, you had to try to also get over to Vancouver to see what was happening because I think it can be pretty, you're Toronto based at the time and you can be pretty isolated in Toronto, kind of in the center of the universe situation where you don't really know what's going on elsewhere.    03:10 So, yeah. And it was pretty key for us to develop a lot of the international relationships we had and national relationships. That's true. So yeah, so like in Vancouver, that was really important to connect with that community.    03:20 But also it got us in touch with a bunch of folks like from, like Wes from who used to run Sydney Festival, who ended up then taking one of our shows later. So like, yeah, that was the start of that.    03:31 And that was like a multi -year relationship really the kind of like it started back at that pitch and then we stayed in touch and eventually we found the right project and you know so it's good in that way.    03:41 Yeah and as you mentioned you were not based here at this point and now both of you are here or relatively local to here and how did you end up being involved in the pitch did you did you have a relationship with Joyce or Norman or did you just apply out of the blue without having a connection?    04:01 I had met Joyce at Magnetic North and to be honest I hadn't even heard of the festival really before that I kind of vaguely knew that there was something like this out here again towards its Toronto thing but yeah so we were chatting at Magnorth about it a little bit so that gave a bit more context for me and then I think that was really it otherwise it was just an application yeah we lucked out.    04:29 Yeah we did luck out. I think it was more than luck but anyways and then the next year so how did you how did you come to have daughter presented at Push 2018 maybe you can also tell us about this project and the process of realizing it for the festival right here.    04:51 Yeah so we worked with I mean you could probably speak better to the actual project because you're co -creator on it but we're working with Adam Lazarus who's a like kind of a master bouffant clown in Canada and the world I think and he's up there yeah so yeah we did the workshop presentation with him on that project as a part of summer works and that's where Norman saw it and then had interest to bring it over and we did it as a part of the club Push in 2018 where we learned a lot about the project but maybe I'll let you talk about like what the project actually is.    05:25 Sure it's a surprise I mean it's it's a bouffant show but not really classic bouffant and we came up with some different. terms for it to try to describe it in grand terms, but essentially the difference really is that Adam is not in any way wearing a mask and he is to assert, he is kind of wearing a mask in the sense he's performing, but it's not that kind of grotesque, clear bouffant where you can tell the difference,    05:48 and that was an interest for him. But it kind of started with this project, you know, he was concerned or he was, you know, expressing I think what a lot of young fathers expressed, which is like, oh I have a daughter and the world's messed up, how do I protect my daughter?    06:05 And that kind of question around protection, like what exactly do you mean by that, unpacking it more? It's like, are you talking about protection? Are you talking about ownership? This is now going into the artistic project, not his actual relationship with his daughter.    06:20 And so it became this thing that's, the game of it really is, I've done some bad stuff, I'm gonna tell you the bad stuff and you're gonna see if you're still okay with me. And gradually that game starts to wear away in the sense that he stops asking, he just tells you that you're okay with him and you kind of tend to go with it.    06:40 Yeah, and like, I guess there is an actual moment of asking, but it's actually more, it's more like, as long as you're laughing, you're telling me it's okay. Yeah. And that's kind of the game, so like when I first saw it, it was like, oh, I was, I thought it was funny up to this, this point and it was, the point was about like, oh, he talks about how he's had STIs and he kept sleeping around and not telling people about them.    07:03 And that's where I drew the line. That was your line, yeah. And just to be clear, this is not Adam himself, this is the character. The character, yes. Don't want to disparage Adam. The father, yes. So that was the line that I drew and then, and then it gets more grotesque after that.    07:16 But then I had to, then after the thing, after I saw it for the first like, you know, rehearsal presentation, I then had to go, oh wait, why was I okay with this and this and this and this and this? And that's kind of the game that's happening with the audience, particularly the men in the audience.    07:28 Yeah. And I would say that's where the target audience really is. It's, it's, um, I think after we started doing it, it really established a lot of people don't need to see the show. It's not a show that everyone...    07:39 I mean, it's a great show, but I don't know that it's going to be eye -opening for everyone who sees it. But for the people who it is eye -opening, it's quite eye -opening and shocking. There's people who immediately see who this man is, and then they have a miserable time.    07:53 Or maybe they see it and they're like, oh, I see what you're doing, and they appreciate the craft of it. But you can see certain people walking out and they look like zombies after the show because they're like, yeah, they're contemplating some stuff about their own lives.    08:09 And it is, and maybe we can be a bit clearer too, like what it really is doing throughout that kind of work back is it's showing this layer of toxic masculinity that's been there the whole time, but just when do we recognize it and when do we question it.    08:22 And I think that what made it really interesting in terms of specifically what happened to the push was that was also around the time of Me Too, it was also in the Toronto center of the world context around the time when there was a big falling out with an artistic director of a major theater company who sucks, and it was all kind of coming out.    08:43 And so it was a sensitive time around the subject matter, I think, of toxic masculinity, of assault, of where those lines are. I mean, yeah, it became very, very topical. It was always topical, but it became really off the moment, I think, in a way that even that was programmed a push even before that happened.    09:07 It's true. I think when it was when it was part of summer works, it definitely had an impact. But I think part of what we thought was a part of the art or the experience was the deceit of the piece, was that it takes you a while for many people to understand what the piece is actually about.    09:22 So then we took, I think, Norman experienced it that way, and then we took it to push that way, and then we kind of framed it more as like a comedy thing. We did it in the Fox cabaret. In the Fox, yeah.    09:32 it was very like laid -back kind of atmosphere and then I think because Me Too was like right in the midst of its peak at that moment, just emerging, I think it had a very different impact. So then we learned a lot because we saw the effect that that was having on some audience members who were coming.    09:49 For when we eventually did an Edinburgh year or two later that we were like, oh we have to put a lot of context around this piece for people so they understand what they're coming into and then we need to add a component after the show is done of audience discussion where that's so that we can grapple with these things together because I think just throwing people on the street felt a little careless.    10:13 And quite literally like with the Fox you were just like okay show's done, lights on, out onto main. And you know that's not ideal and we knew that wasn't going to be ideal. We tried to be like kind of get the idea that we need to do some onboarding or something but the post -show aftercare I think really emerged after the presentation of Push and I think has become, it's a pretty essential part of doing the show now.    10:36 It would last longer than the show. The show's about 75 minutes and those talks would last two hours because people just had to grapple with it or had to tell us, get mad at us about the show or had to thank us for what it was.    10:51 I remember one person with that show who was quite upset because they felt like that was a representation of their father and they didn't want to be in the movie. They were quite upset and were like I'm really sorry we wish we better prepared you for this.    11:04 And then immediately after that person left someone else came up to us and said I just want to thank you. That was also my father and I want you to bring it to England. I want to bring him to it. So it was you know it's one of these things of yeah we learned a lot and I think we're still learning a lot about audience care around that kind of work and how to really prepare people for that kind of project.    11:25 And I think Push was an integral part of that learning. So it was nice to have that environment. And those are big questions too with regard. to work that is intended to subvert, and how do you prepare the audience well at the same time being able to have the desired theatrical effect take place.    11:44 That's quite complicated. How would you say that, how does that work relate to pandemics other work? Like is that audience care piece, does that continue to be really prevalent in your work because of the themes that you're working with, and because of how you're drawing the audience into those themes?    12:11 I think to some extent it's a project by project thing, but certainly our awareness towards responsibility for audience care has shifted. I feel like generally, at least in Canada, there has been a shift that takes that a bit more seriously.    12:29 When we were doing Daughter, it was still a point where people were very skeptical of trigger warnings or anything like that too, whereas now I think that that's pretty normal, that you would have content advisory that's available if people would like them or something like that.    12:44 And then in terms of the pandemic work, I think all of the stuff that we try to do is connected to there's some political action, whether it's in the creation or whether it's in what we're asking the audience to do.    12:57 And I think maybe now, looking at it, there's more of a consideration of what is their experience moving through it rather than maybe before it was more of their experience being impacted by it. So it's a bit of a more relational moment to moment thing for me, yeah.    13:16 Yeah, I think for lack of a better word, like buzz term -y thing is the audience engagement component then became, okay, well, how do you actually integrate that into the art itself? Because that was around the time we did another project called The Only Good Indian, which is...    13:32 about it's basically dissecting what your identity while wearing a suicide vest so there's different performers every night and that we all share like 40% of the same text and then 60% is our prompts that we work with the artists to build based off of who they are and how their bodies are othered or are not othered within within the world and what does it mean for that body to be wearing a suicide vest with an audience so that was also I mean that was a pretty direct ask of the audience just to stay in the same room with someone who is you know we all know it's a fake vest but like I think there's a few people were like there was like a 10% chance I wasn't quite sure if it was equal or not so I think that's a that was another one where we feel like okay we're actually building in an ask of the audience and then with that one we do also we included the big post show which was like doing a long table that's right that's right and so that one was about like let's unpack what we saw let's unpack what is bringing up for you yeah and there's take the milk as well yeah and that one that one does no aftercare per se but it's a gentler show I think but they're certainly asked hasn't asked the audience to self identify in that case and if they identify as having a marginalized experience as we define it in the show we get them to stay and if they don't we ask them to leave for five minutes it really pisses a lot of people off but you know it is I still think it's it's gentler than arguably most of the stuff we've done sure in my opinion so let's talk about swim so swim would be presented as part of the 2025 push festival it's a work we've co -commissioned that we presented with touchstone theater and the cult and it's also a project between pandemic and theater conspiracy can you tell us about this project and where you're at in the process Yeah,    15:34 so this has been developing for quite a long time. We started off with a residency with Crow's Theatre in Toronto in 2018, 2018 -19 year. Yeah, I think it was 2019 and we actually started on it maybe.    15:49 Right, yeah, it's just summer I think. And then so yeah, we kind of got started and we managed to build like a first draft of the script and then this thing happened in the world. Also called a pandemic.    16:01 Yeah, it really changed how cool our name was. So then, yeah, we didn't really work on it for quite a long time. But Laura Nanny at SummerWorks had heard about the project, I think you talked to her about it.    16:14 Probably, yeah. She was talking about creating over distance and at the time, Tom was still in Toronto, I was out here. So we were actually creating over distance and the piece is kind of about distance, so it was a good pitch for Laura I think.    16:25 So yeah, so then we got to kind of develop it there and do a first draft of like what an audio version would be. I think you heard that then and then you were like, oh, this is neat. And then, so then we got you guys commissioned it, which is very generous.    16:37 And then we've been working with theater conspiracy since then to yeah, to develop what the project will be like in its full iteration. Do you want to talk about what the project actually is? Sure. So, I mean, like we're trying to make it sound as least pretentious as possible, but if I go, it's an immersive audio meditation, but it is that.    17:02 But the idea of it, we were closing or opening a show and kind of just thinking about what the next thing is. And we were just talking about, at the time there was a news story about this Italian sea captain and she was standing trial for harboring refugees, I believe, which was the exact phrasing of the charge was.    17:23 But by the law of the sea, if you're a sea captain, you're out there and you see somebody drowning or in need of help, you have to take them in. It's Italy's laws are different in terms of bringing those people into Italy It really highlighted the what was being called the refugee crisis at that time So it got us reading a bit more about what's going on in that migration path and the migration path that we were interested in is this eight kilometers trek that's between Turkey and Greece and It is something that people swim people have swam it and we we wanted to delve into this topic Kind of like so as I'm saying like that our work is kind of has a political ask of the audience or has a political ask Of us in some ways this one I would say the political ask of ourselves was to really delve into Imagining what that experience might be like not necessarily too Appropriate or have that but for us to try to connect with it in some way We had been doing a lot of identity based work For the past few years And I think it was important for us to try to do something that's actively thinking beyond our Experience too and this was a very extreme situation So we wanted to kind of delve into it there And so what you what happens in the show is and it's taken different forms But you are kind of becoming this character and it's kind of a stream of consciousness of what might go through someone's head Doing it and then in making it actually we swam a bunch and kind of that was what Helped us come up with where would the mind go like and we didn't sort of full eight kilometers But we swam like maybe like one or two and that was exhausting even in the pool So to think about that we're also very out of shape.    19:10 Yes, that is true. That is true Still though the Mediterranean. I mean, I wouldn't have lasted 20 20 meters. I think I would be I'd be dead. So personally for sure. Yeah, but Yeah, and the original idea actually of this project.    19:24 So it's it was also So yeah, but you mentioned that story of the Italian sea captain, but there's also a story of a refugee who went through Turkey and did this specific swim. So yeah we were just curious what would go through their mind.    19:43 What was my point? The original idea we can talk about. Oh that's what it was. Okay I'm gonna go back. Yeah so we we've heard about the story about the Syrian refugee who swam from Turkey to the nearest Greek island, that eight kilometer trek that you mentioned.    20:02 And then that kind of inspired us to be like oh what if the audience actually has to do that physical journey themselves. So the original idea as maybe insane as it was was to have the audience swim during the duration of the audio piece and somehow have some waterproof headphones and you know design in your local swimming pool or in lake or in the ocean or something.    20:27 Then when we did it in summer works we kind of realized oh we don't actually need to do that. There are other ways to allow someone to feel immersed in it. So then we thought we started thinking about walking, what's it like if people are walking while doing it.    20:40 And now because we're working with theater conspiracy, David Lucia and Gavin Shima, they do a lot of really cool immersive work with different types of tech. So we're looking at doing vibrotactile vests that have multiple vibrating points in them to give like that kind of immersive quality and also binaural sound technology which is basically like it's like kind of a 3d version of sound.    21:06 So if you know it'll sound like someone is whispering in your ear or like behind you kind of thing. So that's what we're working on with it now. Yeah. And can you take us back or can you reflect on from 2018 or even 2017 when you first started your relationship with Push to Swim 2025?    21:28 How has your practice evolved? stayed true, what are you thinking about differently? Either as a pandemic or individually. I know that you both have other artistic projects, G of U, also Artistic Director of Rumble.    21:46 Tom, you've been interim Director of Programming at Push and you know are working on your own projects independently, so whatever you'd like to share there. I mean like I think in terms of how it shifted since getting involved or coming to Push, maybe in our work.    22:04 You can just see if you agree with this or not, but certainly I will say speaking for myself like the range of what is contemporary performance that can live in Canada I think has changed in that time.    22:20 Like not to say that we were all, I don't know that we were ever like very conventional, conventional like theater, like you know Norm Foster style theater, respect to Norm Foster. But I think it pushed the boundaries of what we were seeing.    22:37 Like we had the opportunity when we were like coming out of school actually to see a bunch of stuff in Europe because of some weird relationship the school had and that was good. But to see what kind of here too I think was, it impacted me at least in terms of thinking about how I might approach a project and where that project could go and where it could live and what life it could have after just doing it in a pretty significant way.    23:09 Yeah, which felt like it actually it really informs what the art is to understand like if you want it to move and you want it to be able to speak to a wider audience than just your initial community and how do you do that in a way that's ethical and not just feeling like you said this before like the airdrop mentality of just like coming in doing your show and like you know and then leaving like okay well like what does it mean to impact that community and how do you engage?    23:32 with the community. I feel like that all started to kind of come together around the time of push and seeing the impact that daughter was having and the conversations we were having around that and wanting to do that you know do to be able to do that in other places but also do it in a better way.    23:47 So yeah that really felt like it really does feel like that was actually kind of a turning point I think for us as a company I think prior to that you know we had some stuff that was okay but like it felt like you know a bit very young and very messy and around that time was allowed us to kind of a see some really cool art I remember seeing Lee Mediad at a push of having my mind blown and being like oh cool I want to be on this level not that I've ever achieved that because that show was cool as hell but but like yeah wanting wanting to to reach that level so it's impactful for me personally.    24:26 Maybe on the flip side too I would say like it has helped me separate one of the projects that I look at in a more international arena and one of the projects I look at in a local arena and they're not always the same sometimes they are the same but they don't have to be the same and both can exist and both can be practices onto themselves because the relationships that certainly like now that we both live here too like the relationships off just the way people kind of are out west is a little bit different the way people are out east and the community aspect of it is I don't want to necessarily say stronger but it is perhaps more connected more web -like than the kind of isolation you can have out east for better or worse so I think that that lends itself to a certain different way of thinking of even just doing political work because I think our stuff was always kind of like you know it had relevance locally but we were often looking at topics that were these large global issues like iced tea versus a like you know some of the stuff we have coming up really is about integrating more into who is here in the moment and how do we work with them.    25:38 Yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like I mean doing stuff that's hyper -local and is meant for hyper -local is super important and like I think actually we need more of that. Like these Fanpanto, Jiv and his partner Christine did this past year.    25:52 Legit one of my favorite things I've seen in a long time. It was such a blast. It wouldn't really work. Not that they showed us a tour. Yeah but it was a goddamn blast and yeah so yeah that's a good distinction to kind of say to understanding what's that what the difference is.    26:08 Like okay how am I gonna serve hyper -locally or how am I going to serve communities that we're not from. And what are your thoughts on the cultural context and significance of the push? I know that you I mean have a relationship with push even beyond what we've spoken about.    26:25 I've touched on you know that Tommy were curating with push. Jiv you've been working with Push as a co -presenting partner over the years. Yeah I can go. I'll put on my old years. Tell me. No I mean I think Push obviously has a really important role.    26:45 I think I've even touched on this as we've been talking here. I think it's really connected a lot of Vancouver and Canadian artists internationally and kind of helped to kind of show that I think I think what Push has helped do is actually kind of deteriorate some of the mythology of Canada internationally.    27:04 Of like the polite the the meek the at least and and and the I don't know the wholesome too because I think we've actually some of the works that have come out of Push or at least some of the artists that have come out of Push and gone on to do international stuff have kind of helped to highlight that Canada is not the utopia that a lot of the world thought it was.    27:25 I feel like I feel like that image is starting to change but like I don't know I think about Cliff Cardinal or Terra Vegan. Marcus's work, like these are, it kind of, it kind of showed the world that there are some like punk rock artists coming out of Canada and I think that's pretty rad.    27:46 Yeah and I guess like I might just add in terms of like its significance, I have the benefit of actually being at Rumble of being able to go through and read some of those early documents when they were thinking through it that I can find.    27:58 Because Norman started Rumble. Yeah and he started Rumble and it was with Touchstone, so actually there you go, Touchstone Rumble, back at it again. So I could, you know, I've read a little bit about like what the thinking was in the early, when it was a series and that kind of stuff before it became a festival.    28:15 That it was about like kind of like bringing in some international, bringing some external, perhaps even more so the international, external influence into the scene here. And I think that it still does that and I think that it doing that led to what I would consider like some of the more interesting like contemporary art coming out of Canada living in Vancouver.    28:40 Like the reputation in Vancouver being out East for so long was that it's the experimental place. We got here and actually like there's a bit of a mix, there is a mix, let me tell you, but the experimental stuff is here too, is here too.    28:55 And I think that what that is, it's being made by the generation that since push started has kind of, they were, they were at the right time to be very influenced by that. So I think it continues to do that for local artists here and I think as more people are coming to see the festival from other places in Canada, I think it's, it's good, it's very good and it's, we don't have much like it.    29:23 There's Luminato in Toronto but it's not the same vibe. It's a different thing onto itself and push manages to kind of maintain still like a small festival feel, they do huge stuff you know but like it still has that hub element that I think a lot of these larger international festivals that do exist in the country which are not many but like they lose that a little bit towards the kind of more pushing the spectacle and being and performatively part of the city maybe whereas this seems still quite art driven,    30:00 art and dialogue driven you know so yeah I think certainly from participating in the industry series and those conversations when Joyce was organizing it and understanding like what are the international conversations what are people thinking about influences the kind of work that we might make and position ourselves also there and find out like where it is actually interesting for us to to pursue because sometimes the conversations were not interesting to like that people like this is your priority cool I'm not into that or it's not really it's not my vibe and that's cool like it's good to know what's going on there but that's not that's not the right market for us to kind of try to hit yeah and just also highlight that like Norman and Joyce like what they created with push and also the whole team prior to them with them you know I think they really created something really special with with push and for the community here and also creating what feels like like you were saying like an intimate community but somehow an international one too like it would feel like you would see people seeing old friends that live in China and live in Australia and like wherever so yeah they actually managed to create like that actual global village but like feel like doing it in kind of what felt like a more ethical way than you might see in like a really huge festival like like in Edinburgh or something so and yeah and you and Kelty have done an amazing job of continuing that legacy and it it feels like at home when you're when you're there so yeah that's that's pretty special thank you Thank you so much.    31:33 I'm so excited to experience the premiere of SWIM at Push 2025. Us too. It's been five years. Great. I won't keep you any more from the studio. All right. That was Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Tom Arthur Davis from Pandemic Theatre and Jiv Parasram of Theatre Conspiracy.    31:57 SWIM will be presented at the upcoming Push Festival January 23rd to February 9th in Vancouver, B .C. Swim runs from January 30th to February 2nd at Vancibi Culture Lab. It's presented with Touchstone Theatre and The Cult.    32:14 Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and the lovely Ben Charland. Special thanks to Joseph Hirabayashi for the original music composition. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.    32:28 And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theatre, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival .ca. Thanks for joining us.    32:42 Coming up on the next Push Play... I try to find a way to keep all these people that work with me together every day, every year, day by day, doing and thinking about production in art and art of production.

Gabrielle Martin chats with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, co-directors of asses.masses. Show Notes Gabrielle, Patrick and Milton discuss:  How did your relationship with PuSh start? What are the importance of youth programs across various festivals? What is asses.masses and what was the process of creating it and bringing it to PuSh? What is the place for participatory work? What are the other patterns and ways of showing work? Who is the live body on stage and how does it interface with the digital world? What is a performing arts festival now, especially after Covid? What is the future of asses.masses? About Patrick Blenkarn Patrick Blenkarn is an artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. His research-based practice revolves around the themes of language, labour, and economy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books. His work and collaborations have been featured in performance festivals, galleries, museums, and film festivals, including Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, the Humboldt Forum (Berlin), Festival of Live Digital Art (Kingston), STAGES Festival (Halifax), Banff Centre for the Arts, Risk/Reward (Portland), SummerWorks (Toronto), rEvolver (Vancouver), RISER Projects (Toronto), and the Festival of Recorded Movement (Vancouver). In 2020, he was nominated for Best Projection Design at Toronto's Dora Awards. In 2022, his work with Milton Lim, asses.masses, received a National Creation Fund investment from the National Arts Centre of Canada. Patrick has frequently been an artist in residence at galleries and theatres around the world, including USC Games (Los Angeles), The Arctic Circle (Svalbard), the Spitsbergen Artist Center (Svalbard), GlogauAIR (Berlin), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver), Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland), VIVO Media Arts (Vancouver), and The Theatre Centre (Toronto). Patrick is also the co-founder of and a key archivist for videocan, Canada's video archive of performance documentation. He has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King's College and an MFA from Simon Fraser University. His writings on the politics of theatre have been published in Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, GUTS, SpiderWebShow, and Canadian Theatre Review. He is based out of Vancouver and Los Angeles. About Milton Lim Milton Lim (he/him) is a digital media artist, game designer, and performance creator based in Vancouver, Canada: the traditional, unceded, and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His research-based practice entwines publicly available data, interactive digital media, and gameful performance to create speculative visions and candid articulations of social capital. This line of inquiry aims to reconsider our repertoires of knowledge aggregation and political intervention in the contemporary context of big data and algorithmic culture. Often cheeky and audience/participant driven, his work challenges standard performance traditions including duration, linearity, and repeatability. Milton holds a BFA (Hons.) in theatre performance and psychology from Simon Fraser University. He has created works for and performed in various international festivals and venues including PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), CanAsian Dance Festival (Toronto), Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), Carrefour international de théâtre festival (Quebec City), IMPACT Festival (Kitchener), Seattle International Dance Festival, Risk/Reward Festival (Portland), Festival Internacional de Teatro Universitario / FITU at Teatro UNAM (Mexico City), Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, Mayfest (Bristol), artsdepot (London), Battersea Arts Centre (London), New Theatre Royal (Portsmouth), Strike a Light Festival (Gloucester), Teatre Lliure (Barcelona), Inteatro (Ancona), Hong Kong Arts Festival, soft/WALL/studs (Singapore), and Darwin Festival. Performance credits include The Arts Club's The Great Leap, Gateway Theatre's King of the Yees at Canada's National Arts Centre, and Theatre Conspiracy's award-winning immersive show: Foreign Radical at CanadaHub (Edinburgh Fringe). Milton's media artworks have been presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery, San Francisco State University, F-O-R-M, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and The New Gallery. In 2016, he was awarded the Ray Michal Prize for Outstanding Body of Work at the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. He is a co-artistic director of Hong Kong Exile, an artistic associate with Theatre Conspiracy, a co-founder and key archivist with the videocan national video archive of performing arts documentation, a recent artistic-leader-in-residence with the National Theatre School (Canada), one of the co-creators behind culturecapital: the performing arts economy trading card game, and one of the co-creators of asses.masses: the video game. In 2022, his work on asses.masses received the prestigious National Creation Fund from the National Arts Centre of Canada and it is now touring internationally in 5+ languages. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded in 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.  Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim and the 2024 Push Festival. Patrick and Milton are conceptual artists whose collaborations include video games, participatory installations, and card games, exploring urgent questions around social value of art, digital labor, and the political and artistic potential of games.  Gabrielle Martin 00:43 Here's my conversation with Patrick and Milton. My name is Gabrielle, I'm the Director of Programming with Push, and today I have the pleasure of being in conversation with Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim.  Gabrielle Martin 00:56 Thank you for joining me.  Patrick Blenkarn 00:58 Hello, very happy to be here. Bye. Bye.  Gabrielle Martin 01:00 And we are here in Jojage, or Montreal, which has long been the meeting place of many First Nations, including the Kanyan -Kahaka, the Abenaki, the Anishinaabe, and the Wendat. And we're also in front of the Festival Transamerique headquarters for Festival...  Gabrielle Martin 01:16 Croix des Generals, Festival Hub, because Patrick and Milton were just presenting us as masses, which was presented in Push 2024, so we're going to be talking about that. But first, I just want to have some context of understanding how your relationship began with Push and how it's evolved.  Gabrielle Martin 01:34 So, Milton, I know that you have a history with Push, with your work with Hong Kong Exile, you were artist in residency, your work was presented at the Push, numerous times for that company. Can you just give us a bit of that context?  Milton Lim 01:48 Yeah, I guess to start off, I'd kind of known about Push when I was a student at Simon Fraser University. It was like the thing that we all saved up our money for every year just to like splurge and see all the shows that we could because it was bringing in the most exciting international work.  Milton Lim 02:05 We could see it very visibly kind of changed the kind of formal and aesthetic conversations that we were having as artists. And I think by far like it's done one of the most important kind of jobs of helping Vancouver artists not only be seen on the international stage, but also draw from the international stage back into our own local aesthetics.  Milton Lim 02:25 And so as a student, I remember just like being in awe every year of the shows that we wouldn't always agree upon coming out. And that always felt really strong in terms of like having work that was taking a risk, trying to be innovative in some form or another.  Milton Lim 02:39 And then I had started a company called Hong Kong Exile with Natalie Tinyan Ghan and Remy Su. And we were very fortunate under the tenureship of George Cesario and Norman Armour to have been asked as local artists to be the artists in residence for two years.  Milton Lim 02:54 What years were those? That was kind of 2016 -2018. We got to present in Club Push the first year, and then we got to present Foxconn Frequency as part of the main series in 2018. Was there precedence for the residency before you?  Milton Lim 03:10 I think there was, but it wasn't formalized and it also wasn't a local artist. Yeah.  Patrick Blenkarn 03:14 I feel like that was a big ache.  Milton Lim 03:15 deal. Yes.  Gabrielle Martin 03:16 And what did that residency, what was that comprised of? What's that, that was a commitment to present you?  Milton Lim 03:22 Pretty much. More than once. It was the commitment to present us in Club Push and then to present us again on the Wayne stage which came with some funding, which was very nice as emerging artists. But especially as people who were starting to get to, I guess, some modicum of being established in a community, we were also asked to run the youth program, which you and I engaged in together.  Milton Lim 03:47 So Natalie ran the larger youth program and I was in charge of the Young Ambassadors program, which was about kind of pairing mentorships with touring artists and emerging artists in the city.  Gabrielle Martin 03:59 And how did you meet Norman and Joyce, how did that come about?  Milton Lim 04:05 Yeah, it's a pretty small community. So we kind of see each other around, but I think Norman and Joyce are really good about seeing, or having seen lots of different works and trying to keep eyes on what's happening.  Milton Lim 04:20 And I know that Joyce had supported some of the works of Hong Kong XL before, especially through some of the dance programming. And Norman had seen some of the works that we had done at the Far Hall Arts Center, and just like other kind of small things we were doing at the time, because we truly were just like putting out as much kind of ragtag work as we could at the time.  Milton Lim 04:40 Yeah.  Gabrielle Martin 04:41 And so you had actually been, I didn't know that you were coordinating, visioning, leading the youth ambassador program, which shows how Patrick's relationship with push started, if I'm not mistaken.  Patrick Blenkarn 04:55 It is, but I'm trying to remember if I did the book dance piece the year before at the youth program or whether those were the same years. I was a big, I feel like I've been a big, I've been very privileged to participate in a lot of the youth programs that have existed across the big festivals of Canada.  Patrick Blenkarn 05:20 So, Magnetic North used to run one, Summerworks used to run one, Push had one. Push's was the best of course. Push's was the best. Those were contexts where young artists would come together and you would see each other.  Patrick Blenkarn 05:34 You would see who else was interested in making work that was intellectually rigorous, aesthetically provocative, which is actually not that easy to find in a lot of spaces in Canada. So, these were sort of like bastions of shit disturbers and people who want to change things.  Patrick Blenkarn 05:56 So, I had participated in, either it was the year before, it was exactly the same year, but Push would have this big day where we'd all come together and we would meet each other and we would test things out.  Patrick Blenkarn 06:06 I had got a chance to test out a dance piece that I was prototyping and then I was invited or I had applied and accepted to be in the Young Ambassadors program, which was literally like all of our friends.  Milton Lim 06:23 I don't think there was an application. There wasn't an application. I used to say that. It was fair. It was fair, but when you look at the people who were in it...  Patrick Blenkarn 06:34 There are all the people who are still transforming, I would say Vancouver, I think we're all in our early thirties now, and we all would have been in our mid -twenties, and there are all the people who are, you know, it's like Sofia Wolf has started a massive festival that's sort of changing how people are thinking about dance and film.  Patrick Blenkarn 06:50 Ario and Arash and the Biting School. Wolf was in that group, I mean, there was a huge, there was a number of us who were in this, and we were all paired up with a different artist who was in the festival, and you would get a chance to hang out.  Patrick Blenkarn 07:01 And so my buddy was Tiago Rodriguez, who was just here at Eptea with Katerina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.  Gabrielle Martin 07:08 I'm now the director of Festival Abigail.  Patrick Blenkarn 07:10 Yep, so every once in a while when we like cross paths and I'm like, hey, you remember me? You know, whether or not your activity is something like being invited into their tech rehearsal or, you know, something more substantial.  Patrick Blenkarn 07:25 Get in your coffee. Or literally just writing emails because that's what it's like actually when you're on tour. Like Tiago and myself and Magda, his partner, you know, we just spend the day writing emails and doing things together.  Patrick Blenkarn 07:37 But, you know, being around in a way that you're like, oh, this is what it's actually gonna be like. And I can confirm, eight years later, that's what it's like when you're on tour. You're like, all right, let's all sit down at the cafe and like figure out where we're going next.  Patrick Blenkarn 07:49 So, yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan, I would say, of making sure that these types of festivals, FTR has one as well called Conversations on Performance or Con Contre. And, you know, it's like we need these spaces because they are, I think, a bridge to where we're going or, you know, to being in the festival themselves, right?  Milton Lim 08:15 If I can clarify on the application front, we were given the list of touring artists and I felt like my task for the Young Ambassadors was to find the young artists who were most complementary in terms of their art practices.  Milton Lim 08:28 So it wasn't just like I'm choosing friends, it was actually a big challenge.  Patrick Blenkarn 08:32 And let's just keep going down the tunnel of your curation. Tiago was there with By Heart, which is a show about books, and what happens if we lose books? And I was spending my entire graduate studies at Summer Fraser University making a dance show about books.  Patrick Blenkarn 08:52 And the relationship we had with books and what it meant if we lost them, or what do we do with them after they become useless? So the curation was just.  Gabrielle Martin 09:06 Okay, 2024, Assa's Massas was presented, pushed, big festival hit, people didn't know what to expect. Can you just talk to us about what the show is for those who didn't get the chance to attend and also what was the process of realizing it from festival?  Patrick Blenkarn 09:21 Yeah. So in a nutshell, Asses Masses is a video game that is played in a live context inside of a theater from beginning to end over the course of seven and a half -ish hours.  Milton Lim 09:34 It's a narrative epic that unfolds over ten episodes about a herd of donkeys that are trying to get their jobs back amidst industrialization in their region.  Patrick Blenkarn 09:44 And, you know, but really what it feels like is if you ever played video games in a living room or a basement with your friends or family, and you were passing controllers around, you were criticizing someone for not being maybe as good at the platformer sections as they could be, or, you know, taking turns to, you know, accomplish or beat the next level.  Patrick Blenkarn 10:02 It's that, but with 200 people in the room with you.  Gabrielle Martin 10:05 And even if that does not sound like a good time to you, and you haven't done that before, it is surprisingly engaging, and it's designed in a way that invites people, and that for whom that might not sound like a good time.  Patrick Blenkarn 10:18 For sure. It's a great time and I think the thing that we arrived at that project as well as our other project because we were interested in works that felt really alive and we had seen a lot of participatory work at Push over the years.  Patrick Blenkarn 10:33 Really thoughtful. Why are we participating? How are we participating? And we were seeing places where people participate in types of performance that just hadn't yet had their time on stage or in the spotlight.  Patrick Blenkarn 10:46 And we've been doing us as masses now for almost a year. And every single time, it's really exciting to see just how alive it can feel in that room as people share the responsibility of completing the story.  Milton Lim 11:03 Yeah, there are some people who would say like, oh, this is not like live theater or live performance, but for us, there are so many components of understanding what contemporary spectatorship looks like that we did want to encounter some of those ideas about things that are not being included in the arts sector as kind of serious art.  Milton Lim 11:21 And so, Asa's Masses became one of the main avenues for us to kind of say like, actually this is another way we can think about social gathering and as an extension as part of the thematic content of the show, this is another way to think about like politicized action, politicized space inside the theater.  Patrick Blenkarn 11:36 So, Vancouver was, we were very excited to come back to Vancouver, we premiered the show in Buenos Aires in Spanish, and then we had some other stops in Kingston and Dartmouth and then Toronto, sort of getting it, you know, ready and figuring out really what it's going to be, and we knew that Vancouver was a, you know, it's a pretty major hub in Canada for game development.  Patrick Blenkarn 11:58 We actually went and visited the sort of independent game developers community to share the project with them, and a number of them came out to see the show, which was really exciting because it really did mean that we were successful in making something that was both exciting for gamers who were, you know, self -identified as such, or theatre, you know, art, high culture, like high art kind of focused individuals,  Patrick Blenkarn 12:24 and we've always been interested in how that project can be accessible both as a high conceptual art experience, but also a very lowbrow, like, you know, it's for the people, it's full of ass puns.  Milton Lim 12:39 Aspans and donkeys and donkeys.  Gabrielle Martin 12:43 and it posed some creative fun challenges for our team, specifically our hospitality coordinator, Jenny Lee Craig. Thank you. How do we feed the masses on a budget? We did, and we did. You were very creative about, you know, trying to figure out how...  Patrick Blenkarn 13:04 She was wheeling soup from one building to the next, and we should say that if you're watching this and you haven't seen Ass's Masses, there's food at all these intermissions because the best way to make people feel like they can relax and kick off their shoes and hang out with you for eight hours is to make sure they don't have to leave to go and get some sustenance.  Patrick Blenkarn 13:25 I think what we learned how to do at Push has become the model that we've used and it's the model that we're going to use in Germany, in Italy, and all the places that we're now, thanks to these opportunities, we're getting to go.  Milton Lim 13:41 And because it was Hometown Crowd, we were able to try something we'd never done before, which is do a show every week of the festival, which was massive. Because previously we had done the show like three days in a row, which really, it's a long show for us as well, so it really drained us.  Milton Lim 13:57 And it also didn't allow us to do the snowball effect for people to say like, hey, to all their friends, like, you should be here.  Gabrielle Martin 14:03 eight -hour show sounds like way too much of a It's not that long  Milton Lim 14:06 Say it along.  Gabrielle Martin 14:06 Actually, it's worth it  Milton Lim 14:09 This show on Netflix the day before so it's actually like the same thing, but I think that  Patrick Blenkarn 14:13 openness is, you know, I think we're at a time where we need to be rethinking when shows start, where they happen, and who's there, right? We want live performance to be a space that is sought by the public for, you know, engaging with ideas, engaging with each other, and what we were, you know, what we collaborated on and then were able to test out at Push has shown that there are other, maybe, patterns or ways of showing work.  Patrick Blenkarn 14:42 And we were, I think we were largely inspired by the collaborators we have in Argentina for whom that's a fairly normal structure to run a show once a week for months just because of their economic situation or what's available to them.  Milton Lim 14:56 And also the cultural standards that they've acclimatized to around that.  Patrick Blenkarn 15:00 So, you know, those types of experiments, I think, are really, really cool and exciting.  Gabrielle Martin 15:05 So now I just, I would love you to tell me about how your artistic practice has evolved from first working with PUSH as a youth in the youth ambassador project or program for you, Patrick, Milton, when you first started as an artist in residency with Hong Kong exile, maybe we'll start with you, Milton, can you just talk about how your interests or experiments with form have evolved over that period to up until assets masses now and your projects,  Gabrielle Martin 15:32 other projects.  Milton Lim 15:33 There are quite a few components and I would say largely our projects together have molded a lot of the thoughts that I have and I would say probably both of us have about like performance and the directions that we kind of want to go in and also the standards of like rigorous thought that we hold ourselves to especially around like what does it mean politically and conceptually to have someone stand and do something that's already fixed and finite versus something that is open and like there's agency to move around and discover what that is.  Patrick Blenkarn 16:04 to stand on stage or like be a participant in some way, yeah.  Milton Lim 16:08 Yeah, so I think a lot of the works that I was doing at the time of like the Arts in Residence program were at the beginnings of thinking about like where does digital media interface with the live body on stage.  Milton Lim 16:19 And I think since then, maybe just to like to have a shortened version of it, that now I think the question of the live body on stage has become one of like who is the live body on stage. And that's very clear in the works that we're doing in Culture Capital, our trading card game about the arts economy and assets masses where the audience becomes that body and it's either one body or the whole body of the mass.  Milton Lim 16:42 And so those conversations I think continue into our role -playing game with Laurel Green, Fars, which is tabletop role -playing game for industry series events or has been used in industry series events.  Patrick Blenkarn 16:54 I feel like I see in the works that you guys were doing with Hong Kong XL though, there was already an interest in the body being specific, thinking about how Foxconn framed the pianists as visibly Chinese performers, and we were talking about that a lot even in the pre -phase.  Patrick Blenkarn 17:12 So I think that's a question for all of us artists, I think right now, who's on stage and why, and when it comes to making games or making participatory work, I think the question that we've asked ourselves before and now is, okay, well, we can either cast the players, that's one version, or it's open, and anyone can become a player.  Patrick Blenkarn 17:38 Both of those are equally valid strategies towards asking important questions about whatever you're interested in. But that's something we keep coming back to as, okay, is this for specific people to play it that we've curated, or is it for the public and that's a big fork in the road?  Patrick Blenkarn 18:00 I would say I'm not making any dance theater shows at the moment, which is what my focus was at that time when I first came to Vancouver. But I also was very interested in participation. So seeing the evolution, I think, of an aesthetic in Canada.  Patrick Blenkarn 18:21 There was an aesthetic in Canada that was heavily influenced, I think, by Forest Fringe and a kind of participatory work that Push and Eftaya and other festivals, by bringing other works to the table, you're like, oh, right, there are other versions of it.  Patrick Blenkarn 18:38 It doesn't have to always be quaint or calm. There was a lot of calm participation, which makes sense. It's a space where people maybe feel insecure because they're put on the spot or in the spotlight.  Patrick Blenkarn 18:58 But I felt like that was a real strong theme, and I feel like my own work has participated in that in the past. There was an evolution through from that time, and we're now entering a new era of, as everyone is participating more and more for digital culture and whatnot, I think there's a different aesthetic theme.  Patrick Blenkarn 19:14 Welcomed for participation, whatever that's going to be. And I think ASOS Masses is probably in that new next generation.  Milton Lim 19:23 I did see today on a side note, I saw that someone, I think Major Matt Mason is doing a prototyping of a narrative card game. Oh yeah. I would love to chat with him about that, but I feel like this is part of a larger movement that's happening and we're happy to be part of it.  Patrick Blenkarn 19:39 it. And maybe in 20 years everyone will be like, can we just get back to something else? Or it's going to be one of those things where there's the game series, the dance series and the circus series.  Patrick Blenkarn 19:51 They all have a place within the context of our international festivals. And I think that if some young person or older person or anybody person saw Assas Massas and thought, oh, I never thought I could pitch my game to push.  Patrick Blenkarn 20:12 Maybe you're going to get a phone call or an email at some point. And because now those people maybe feel a little bit more welcome to a space that in the past, it wasn't seen as for them.  Milton Lim 20:24 And maybe not even in the festival capacity but just to have the imaginative boundaries of what is performance, what is an artistic practice, especially in a city like Vancouver that is so expensive.  Milton Lim 20:34 One of the movements into digital media that's really useful is that it doesn't necessarily need to wait on having a workshop with actors all the time but that can start to imagine in ways that previously weren't necessarily at my disposal.  Gabrielle Martin 20:49 Which segues nicely into my question about how you perceive the cultural context, but I guess also the relevancy of push and how that space has been important for your work. So I'm hearing, you know, the fact that festivals like push have brought in works like yours, works that just open up, you know, how we perceive the possibilities of participation, etc.  Gabrielle Martin 21:14 Can you expand on that?  Patrick Blenkarn 21:16 Yeah, I mean, I think we've been very lucky to hear audience members come to Assas Masters and say, I've never seen, I never thought this would be here in a theater. I've never come to the theater before, but I haven't been in the theater since I was a kid.  Patrick Blenkarn 21:30 Those types of things. People said that to us in Vancouver at Push, and I would hope that that's, I mean, that to me is kind of what a festival like Push is for. It's for reminding people that what you thought was normal or traditional or whatever doesn't have to be the case.  Patrick Blenkarn 21:46 There's always new possibilities pushing into, trying to make a pun, pushing into new, pushing beyond the boundaries or whatever it is. I feel like it has been, for aesthetic purposes, for artists, it's a place where you discover that what you thought was your form or what was solid is actually can melt into air very, very quickly and destabilize you in the best possible ways.  Milton Lim 22:16 I think there's a question there for me of like, what is a festival, especially like what is a festival right now, in a time, especially coming out of the height of COVID, where like everyone has been so segmented and conversations were attempted to have online festival still remain one of the most important places where aesthetic conversations can be shared across international boundaries and pushes one of the few places in Canada where that happens.  Milton Lim 22:38 So to be part of push really meant a lot, and it continues to be like a kind of signposting when we travel abroad, or like, people recognize that we've been part of push. And to be to be blunt like we were only really programmed at FTR because they saw that we were at push, and they were like, okay, now we've seen that push.  Milton Lim 22:56 Now we know that it's, it's something that can be in the space and these discussions with all these other shows. So, so yeah, these these kind of boundaries that seem like they can be porous are really bridged by these kind of relational components of like talking across festivals, talking with people other artists as well.  Milton Lim 23:19 And I feel like we've been really bolstered by the conversations that we've had across not only push but because of push and tell these other festivals that we've been so lucky to be part of.  Gabrielle Martin 23:28 Stevenson's Push, you've been to Mayfest, you're here, and just update us about your tour days. Where can we find Ass's Masses? We are going.  Patrick Blenkarn 23:38 to be in Italy at the end of June. So if you're watching this in the future, you've already missed it. But June 18 and 20, we're in Ancona at Inteatro festival. We'll be in Germany in the fall and the winter.  Patrick Blenkarn 23:53 We'll be in Quebec City in the winter as well.  Gabrielle Martin 23:59 You weren't supposed to say that, were you?  Patrick Blenkarn 24:01 But they don't, you know, we'll be around.  Gabrielle Martin 24:03 Yeah, by the time this is public.  Patrick Blenkarn 24:07 And then we'll be in, we're talking to some new friends in the United States, been receiving some phone calls from people in, not phone calls, emails, and Instagram people don't do that anymore. Call me from Japan, from Japan, which is amazing, Instagram messages from Japan.  Patrick Blenkarn 24:26 And one of that is that the work is translated, and we work with these different translators from around the world to make the work available to as broad an audience as possible. And I think that that is, you know, that's part of the work that we are always going to keep trying to support.  Patrick Blenkarn 24:45 So if we have to make a new translation for, I don't know, another context, we'll do it. Like, that's what makes it best.  Milton Lim 24:53 We're in the midst of confirming what the future of Ass's Masses looks like, but if you do want to know more, follow us on Instagram at Asses .Masses and our website is AssesMasses .work. But truly that is where we'll update things most regularly.  Milton Lim 25:12 And you'll see the list of festivals that we've gone to. We've done that for other artists as well, like where have they traveled to.  Patrick Blenkarn 25:19 You know, how do you do this? How do you tour work through festivals like Push or Eftaya? I had no experience in it. This is gonna be the first time I've had a tour of this type of scale. But what we did is we did read artists.  Patrick Blenkarn 25:34 We would go to artists' websites, or they're friends of ours too. We would look at and talk to them, but where did they go? Where does someone go with a work that's long like ours or has this extra amount of audience care required?  Patrick Blenkarn 25:47 Because not every institution or not every festival or theater is set up in a way to provide that kind of extra audience care, which Push did so well. So, you know, when we look at that list, we would see, ah, Push is on like the record as some place that some of our peers have gone who have these types of shows.  Patrick Blenkarn 26:06 And we would have been following actually who is that community who's interested in work of this scale, of this kind of community meets experience like integration. And so that's been a...  Gabrielle Martin 26:21 Thank you for closing this with a tip for those emerging young artists, the artists of our future, tips for packaging mountain, inspiration, how to create a world tour. No, it's really been so nice to hear about your history with Kosh.  Gabrielle Martin 26:37 Thank you so much for having been in the festival and having created this important work and for chatting with me today. Cool. And thank you for that.  Milton Lim 26:45 Stewardship and for all the work that you've been putting into push, like, it's phenomenal.  Tricia Knowles 26:51 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.  Tricia Knowles 27:12 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. 

Gabrielle Martin chats with lighting designer, photographer, writer and performer Itai Erdal. Show Notes Gabrielle and Itai discuss:  How did your relationship with PuSh start? What inspires the effects and choices in your work? What is the world of international touring like? What was the genesis and process of How to Disappear Completely? What is Soldiers of Tomorrow and why does it need to be told today? What is the role of the lighting designer? What is the cultural context and significance of PuSh? About Itai Erdal An award winning lighting designer, photographer, writer and performer, Itai is the founder of The Elbow Theatre in Vancouver, for whom he co-wrote and performed in Soldiers of Tomorrow, Hyperlink, This Is Not A Conversation and A Very Narrow Bridge.  Itai has designed over 300 shows for theatre, dance and opera companies in over fifty cities around the world. Some of the companies he worked with include: Arts Club Theatre (16 shows), The Stratford Festival (11 shows), New Victory (Off Broadway), The Vancouver Opera, Vancouver Playhouse, Bard on the Beach, The Electric Company, National Arts Centre, Soulpepper, Tarragon, Factory, The Citadel, MTC, The Segal Centre, The Jerusalem Lab, Haifa Theatre, Tamasha, Box Clever and Teatro Villa Velha in Salvador, Brazil.  He worked with such choreographers as: Crystal Pite, Nigel Charnock, Noam Gagnon, Robert Hylton, Serge Bennathan, Kate Alton, Chick Snipper, Noa Dar, Susan Elliot, Idan Cohen and Toru Shimazaki. Itai has won six Jessie Richardson Awards, a Dora Mavor Moore Award, a Winnipeg Theatre Award, the Jack King Award, a Guthrie Award, Victoria's Spotlight Choice Award and the Design Award at the 2008 Dublin Fringe Festival. He was shortlisted to the Siminovitch Prize in 2018.  Itai's first one-man show: How to Disappear Completely (The Chop, directed by James Long), premiered in 2011 and had 25 remounts in 21 cities. It won the best director award at the Summerworks Festival in Toronto, and was shortlisted to the Dublin Fringe Award, the Brighton Fringe Award and the Total Theatre Award at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.   Soldiers of Tomorrow received Summerhall's Lustrum Award and was nominated to an Offfest Award at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.   Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Itai Urdao and the 2023 Push Festival. Itai is a local lighting designer, playwright, and performer. He is the artistic director of the Albo Theater. His first play, How to Disappear Completely, has toured to 26 cities and won the Directional Award at the Summer Works Festival in Toronto.   Gabrielle Martin 00:42 His latest play, Soldiers of Tomorrow, won the Lustrom Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and is touring today. Here's my conversation with Itai. I am here with Itai Urdao, and we're gonna be chatting about your relationship with Push.   Gabrielle Martin 00:59 You've been involved in many capacities as a lighting designer on some really iconic shows that we've already spoken about with some of our other interviewees. Also, Push's co -commission of one of your works in more recent years, but I just wanna start by acknowledging that we are here on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh,   Gabrielle Martin 01:23 and we are incredibly privileged to be on these lands. And in so -called Vancouver, yeah, we are in your home because we went to a cafe to shoot on a patio, but it was raining and loud and... Here we are.   Gabrielle Martin 01:36 Yes, here we are. So just to, yeah, recap. So your relationship started with Push from the very first festival. So you were a lighting designer on the Empty Orchestra of Theatre Replacement for 2005.   Itai Erdal 01:51 Yeah, it was 2005, the first one, I think maybe it was the second.   Gabrielle Martin 01:54 So the series, the performance series, started 2003 and then officially it became a festival in 2005.   Itai Erdal 02:00 Yes, yes.   Gabrielle Martin 02:03 And then you were also a lighting designer on Crime and Punishment, New World.   Itai Erdal 02:07 Both of them iconic shows, really, because Empty Orchestra was the very first show that Theatre Replacement has ever done. And I designed the set on that and lights. We did it at the dance center and then on the dance center was the director.   Itai Erdal 02:21 And it was really a fantastic show. Michael Bayamomoto and James Long were both very young. They were both in it and they were singing. The show Empty Orchestra means, and that's what karaoke is called in Japanese.   Itai Erdal 02:34 It's an empty orchestra. So it was a show kind of about karaoke and it was a very dark apocalyptic play about people falling in love in very dark, futuristic, environmentally disastrous future where Vancouver was all covered in snow.   Gabrielle Martin 02:51 So we've talked to Jamie about this, Jamie and Micah, but I say, yeah, but Jamie, because, uh, I think that was the project that, or maybe it was Micah who was saying that, um, you know, at one point they had an early version of the work in Darren was really unimpressed and made them go back to the drawing board.   Gabrielle Martin 03:07 And so it was a, a process. I mean, I guess as any first works, uh, uh, the creative processes for, you know, your first works, it's bound to have those kind of, uh,   Itai Erdal 03:18 It's funny you should mention that, because I just talked about Kathleen Oliver, who was the publicist for the show. And we saw an early version that they did at the Russian Hall, and they asked us to come, and Kathleen and I loved it.   Itai Erdal 03:35 And then they went and worked with Darren for a few weeks, and then asked us to come back. And we looked at each other, and we were like, we thought it was better before. And Darren said, oh, I'm sorry I ruined your show, and we were like, no, no, no, that's not what we meant.   Itai Erdal 03:49 We tried to take it back, but it was too late. But then they went back to the drawing board, and they changed a bunch of things, and they sort of got back some of them. But it was a very tumultuous process, yeah.   Gabrielle Martin 03:59 So it wasn't Darren's fault, it was just an awkward stage in the process.   Itai Erdal 04:04 Maybe, maybe, yeah, but it was very interesting to be asked to watch the piece so early and then give our feedback. And also, I was very young and new to the collaborative process and maybe didn't know how to speak about the work in progress, and so it's possible.   Itai Erdal 04:24 So I was also a very fresh new immigrant to this country and, you know, as an Israeli, I have such different sensitivities and sensibilities than Canadians, and in retrospect, I was probably insensitive.   Itai Erdal 04:39 But I loved the final show. I did love the final show.   Gabrielle Martin 04:44 And you were also working on crime and punishment, and we've also spoken to Kamiar about that project and just what a kind of colossal ambitious project that was and   Itai Erdal 04:53 That remains one of the best shows I've ever worked on in my life, Crime and Punishment, and a big fan favorite. People still bring it up all the time. James Fagan Tate was just a genius in adapting these novels, these huge stories on the stage with Julissa Pankanya, who wrote the music and performed it live.   Itai Erdal 05:13 And so there was 20 chorus members, and we painted, and the set by Brian Pollack was also stunning. There was a square, like a grid for each chorus member to stand. And so there was like 20 people. There was 20 people, and then principals, and then the musicians.   Itai Erdal 05:33 So there was maybe 26, 27 people on stage in total. And Jimmy takes these epic novels, and with music, and with those little chorus members singing, beautifully singing, and simple choreography that Jimmy did that was so effective.   Itai Erdal 05:47 And that was the first of many shows like that that we did. We did The Idiot, and The Life Inside, and with the same team.   Gabrielle Martin 05:59 were doing the lighting design. Yep.   Itai Erdal 06:01 For all of them, yeah, yeah, we did at least 10 shows together with the same team of Mara Gottler doing costumes, Jelisa doing sound, Brian Dinsett and me doing lights, and then Jimmy kept hiring us and adapting these big novels.   Itai Erdal 06:15 But Crime and Punishment was the first, it's not the first time we worked together, but the first time that it was this huge, ambitious project that sort of the whole world saw what a genius James Fagan Tate was, and everybody wanted to do that kind of theater.   Itai Erdal 06:32 It was physical theater that was driven by music and that had simple, beautiful, super effective choreography and the choreography and the music and the lighting. All the design elements were so naturally intertwined together, were so organically combined that that's why I still, to this day, when I put a portfolio together, I always put pictures from Crime and Punishment because it was also my first time when I sort of dared to do a show only with sidelighting.   Itai Erdal 07:03 I didn't have any front lights almost at all.   Gabrielle Martin 07:07 choice, what inspired that choice, or what was the desired effect.   Itai Erdal 07:10 Well, it was a very dark play in a way, and side lighting highlights the body more than the face, you know, and front lights is great to get the tingle in the eye that everybody loves in musicals and in children's play, but it flattens everything, and side lighting makes everything three -dimensional.   Itai Erdal 07:31 And so by lighting everything from the side, we gave everything depth, and then they would just, it was very easy for somebody to just completely disappear into the darkness, and we really wanted that.   Itai Erdal 07:47 And the side lights were all open white, which is very, very warm, so it felt like candlelit a little bit.   Gabrielle Martin 07:56 You're making me want to see it. I mean, of course I would love to see it, but the way you're pretty into life.   Itai Erdal 08:00 There's an archival. You should watch it. I don't know why nobody produced it after. I mean, there was talk. BAM wanted it in New York and Soul Paper wanted it and I think it was very close to going to some places, but it ended up not going anywhere, which is another reason that it's such an iconic production because so few people got to see it.   Gabrielle Martin 08:18 So was that the beginning of your relationship with Push in the 2005 festival, or were you already working on some of the projects of the series?   Itai Erdal 08:29 That was my first time.   Gabrielle Martin 08:30 men armor or katina done   Itai Erdal 08:32 I did work with Katrina and Norman before, but that was my first time. And I remember when the whole push started as a reading series between TuxyTone and Rumble.   Gabrielle Martin 08:50 So yeah, you've referred to the many productions that you were involved in as a designer over the years Namely with new world after that first year. No, whatever   Itai Erdal 09:00 Everybody really, so many people, so many shows they did were, ended up being part of Push that were like not, yeah there was a show I did from Manitoba Theatre for Young People, about Rick Hansen that ended up being part of Push and there was other shows with Jimmy but then were not New World and then theatre, other theatre replacement shows I'm pretty sure Broiler was also part of Push, I'm not 100% sure but other theatre replacement shows that I've done but also Norman had these breakfasts that he would invite you to come and meet other artists and so for a few years whether I was in the festival designing or not I would get invited to just meet with artists from around the world and that was just a fantastic thing to do and I met some Argentinians and Germans and I remember Limini Potokol came for a few years in a row and Gob Squad and Sishi Pop are all from Berlin and I speak German and so but we spoke English but I got to hang out with them and then go and see their shows and those are some of the best shows I've seen in my life,   Itai Erdal 10:16 really. Some of the shows that those companies that I mentioned, those three companies from Gob Squad is half England but these are the two are Berlin companies, oh no, not Berlin, Limini Potokol is somewhere else in Germany but Sishi Pop is Berlin, I've done some of the strongest work I've ever seen, same with La Maria from Argentina.   Gabrielle Martin 10:38 We spoke about with Boca de lupo, but yeah that 2011   Itai Erdal 10:43 That's the first time that I met these guys and we became friends and then I ended up seeing them in a lot of other festivals around the world. Because then I would travel with how to disappear completely and I would see the same people that I met at Push in other places and you realize the world of international touring is actually very small.   Gabrielle Martin 11:02 And these breakfasts were just at a cafe or at somebody's house.   Itai Erdal 11:07 No, it was always, Norman had his famous favorite place was La Bodega and it was always at La Bodega. Sometimes it was breakfast, sometimes it was late night, it was always paid for by push, which was really nice.   Itai Erdal 11:18 But it was just in, it felt so privileged to be invited to meet with artists from around the world. And I always loved how the festival wasn't just for us to see what the world has to offer, but they also wanted the world to see what we have to offer.   Itai Erdal 11:33 And so I feel like, yeah, working with those people has opened me up as an artist and inspired me. I ended up taking a workshop with Gop Squad, the theater replacement did. So I've worked with them for two weeks and let some of the most eye -opening and inspiring work that I've ever done that maybe want to write and perform and do other things.   Itai Erdal 12:00 And I met them through the push festival. So I think the first kick show I saw of theirs was Kixen.   Gabrielle Martin 12:07 What year, do you remember what year you did that workshop?   Itai Erdal 12:10 don't. It was at least 10 years ago. Maybe 10 years ago. So you had already created atmosphere completely? Yeah.   Gabrielle Martin 12:16 Okay, so you were already working as a director. Please no.   Itai Erdal 12:22 So, performer and writer, yeah, James Long directed How to Disappear, and then Anita Rochon has directed all my shows since, I've never directed them, but I've been writing and performing, and How to Disappear was also heavily influenced by Push, even though it was not at the Push Festival, we were in the very first Push -Off, which Theatre Replacement did, it wasn't even Theatre Replacement then actually,   Itai Erdal 12:44 no, it was Joyce, and yeah, it was not Theatre Replacement, I'm sorry, it was Joyce, and I forget who else, Joyce was the dance person, and there was a theatre person that they did Push -Off, and they asked me to do 10 minutes, and our show wasn't finished, we barely had, we had 10 minutes, but maybe we had half an hour of material, and we just chose 10 minutes, and I think we did the first 10 minutes of the show,   Itai Erdal 13:08 and the College Lab, which was also a brand new venue at the time, and that first Push -Off, the artistic director of On the Boards in Seattle was there, Lady Coplinski, and he immediately fell in love with the show, and came to me after, and I said, I want this show, and I'm going to tell my friends in Portland, and then the Portland People TBH Festival ended up taking it too, and the other person was there was Ken Gass from Factory Theatre,   Itai Erdal 13:38 and the same thing, he booked it on the spot, so even though the show was not even finished yet, because we did it at Push -Off, you got booked to Toronto, which led to many other gigs, and you got booked to Seattle and Portland, which was just a phenomenal experience to be able to take the show to the US, and I would have never gotten these producers to see the show if it wasn't for the Push Festival,   Itai Erdal 14:01 so Push has been instrumental in my career, like you said, on many, many different capacities, and many different, yeah.   Gabrielle Martin 14:09 from your artistry, had that opportunity over many years. And so How to Discipline Completely was my introduction to your work. I didn't get to see it back when it had just been premiered, but you shared an archival with me in 2021 when I had just started to push.   Gabrielle Martin 14:25 And that really made me interested to read the script that you were working on at the time for Soldiers of Tomorrow, which was incredibly powerful, jumped off the page. It was really a compelling read.   Gabrielle Martin 14:38 And we were in a position where we were able to come on board as a co -commissioner. And the work was presented at the 2023 Push Festival was premiered. Yeah, which and it was a we had great audiences.   Gabrielle Martin 14:49 And you also have such a community here because you know, your work has been prolific. And it was really just beautiful to follow that process and to see it realized, just you know, by very established artists, you know, you and Nita, artists who really like you know what you're doing and just to to benefit from the treatment that you gave the script was incredible.   Itai Erdal 15:17 Thank you. It was, again, I cannot tell you how Instrumental Push Festival was in creating that show because as a company, the album, my company, we're not on any operating funds. We just write project grants.   Itai Erdal 15:30 And so we just, we come up with a project, we write grants for it. We've been, thank goodness, pretty successful so far in getting those grants, but the grants are very limited in scope. You can only use them for what you said that you would use them for.   Itai Erdal 15:41 And therefore, it's always like barely scraping together enough money to do what you need to do. And creating a piece like this, and that's part of my company's mandate, is that I was determined to give things enough time.   Itai Erdal 15:54 I've seen so many shows do work that looks like it's a great workshop, but it's not ready. And so I was determined, also I'm a lighting designer, I don't need this as my livelihood. I have other means of income.   Itai Erdal 16:05 So I was determined to give the shows enough time and enough workshops until they're ready. And because we were commissioned by you and we got the Canada Council grant and not just one of them, we were able to do several workshops and work on it and work on it and work on it until it was ready.   Itai Erdal 16:20 And that's what made the show good, the time that you bought us by commissioning the piece. Because when you work with the money that is commissioned, I don't, the Push Festival didn't ask me, what did you do with every cent?   Itai Erdal 16:34 You just gave us the money and we could move it around. And we can choose to spend it on a musician, and we can choose to spend it on more rehearsal time. We can choose to spend it on anything we wanted to spend it.   Itai Erdal 16:45 And it shows, the show is tight because we had enough time and enough money to do it properly. And so I can't thank you enough for commissioning it and for believing in it.   Gabrielle Martin 16:57 So tell us about what is soldiers of tomorrow for those who are listening, watching who don't know what it is.   Itai Erdal 17:03 Soldiers of Tomorrow is maybe the story that I've been wanting to tell my whole life because I feel so so strongly about it and it's about my military service, I'm from Israel and You know military service is compulsory in Israel And I was sort of a leftist before I went to the army I always knew that the Palestinians deserve to have a state and when I went to the army I was determined to be the good soldier and my mother said to me You know if we leave the military to all the right -wing fanatics then then If all the people like you don't go then we'll be leaving the army to all the crazy people and we should balance things out And so I went to the army trying to do good And I did sort of my best effort to do good,   Itai Erdal 17:46 but while I was in the army, I realized that You cannot Wear a uniform and and not be an oppressor that the Palestinians who saw me all they saw was you know A guy in uniform. They don't care if I'm a nice guy or if I root for them or if I don't root for them I was still there oppressing them and so During my military service.   Itai Erdal 18:05 I had a real sort of realization that I felt like I was lied to and cheated to by by my country by my Education system by the media and you know all the a lot of the massacres that happened in 1948 and in 1967 I'm not mentioned in any of the history books in Israel and so when I left Israel I was determined to tell the world what is happening in Palestine.   Itai Erdal 18:28 I felt a really strong moral obligation Of course now the shit has hit the fan and things are sort of the worst nightmare scenario that we have right now with this horrible genocide that is happening in Gaza, but Before that when I started writing the play and there was a feeling that a lot of people And just don't understand what's happening there And and just we're afraid to take sides and I wanted to make a play that helps people take sides and to say look I am a proud Jew Everyone that I love lives in Israel if I can criticize Israel and so can you and it felt I felt a real strong moral Obligation that I feel today even stronger and to be that voice because I know what I'm talking about And I've been to Gaza as a soldier and I can tell you how horribly wrong it is And so it's really a play that that covers the entire history of the conflict.   Itai Erdal 19:24 There's a lot of information I think Anita and Colleen Murphy who wrote the creator to play with We're really smart in finding a way to to transfer a lot of information without it ever being didactic without being a lecture It's a very entertaining piece of theater It's a very compelling piece of theater, but it really does explain the entire conflict from beginning to end And it's an attempt of me to take responsibility for my action and As a soldier and to try to make a better future for Palestinians anyway   Gabrielle Martin 20:00 And the work went on to a long run at Summerhall at Edinburgh.   Itai Erdal 20:05 We won an award in Edinburgh and we got a lot of five -star reviews and the last term award. The last term award is the award that they give for innovation. But also more than the awards and the five -star reviews, it was the reaction of the people.   Itai Erdal 20:23 I've had many, many Palestinians and Jews, but a lot of Palestinians come to me after the show and saying, we've never heard an Israeli, we've never heard a Jewish person speak like this. We, in fact, never heard anybody speak like this or iterate those thoughts in a play.   Itai Erdal 20:41 And so many people came to tell me how important they feel their work is. And so being able to go to Edinburgh, it just opened me up to thousands of people who saw the show who would have never seen it in any other way.   Itai Erdal 20:59 And now there's a lot of interest for next season and we're hoping to do a Canadian tour. There's companies who want it in Calgary, in Toronto and in Montreux, sorry, in Ottawa. And I really hope that the show is going to have a long life.   Itai Erdal 21:17 And again, we were able to do that also because of your commissioning money also allowed us to take really good documentation of the show. When we did it at Bush, we filmed it, I wore a lavalier and we had three cameras and we got a really good quality recording of the show that now can help sell the show.   Gabrielle Martin 21:37 it's such a relevant and masterful piece so I really hope that it has a long touring life. Can you talk to us about you know those early days when you were lighting designing for the empty orchestra for crime and punishment up until now your work on Soldiers of Tomorrow and then and you have new works in creation as well.   Gabrielle Martin 21:57 How has your artistic practice developed, grown over this period?   Itai Erdal 22:02 Well, even as a lighting designer, I always felt that I was a storyteller, that I was part of the storytelling, and I think that's what made me a good lighting designer, is that I wasn't just confined to my own thing, but I saw how it affects the entire storyteller.   Itai Erdal 22:18 So people think it's a huge stretch from being a designer to being a performer, but in my mind I was always telling stories. But having the opportunity of having this thing happen to me with my mother and having all the video that I have, and having friends like James Long and Anitha Roshan, who wanted to create a show with me, made me realize that there are no blueprints for a career in theatre or in the arts,   Itai Erdal 22:44 that you can try different things, and if you go to this, then you can do this, and if you go to this, you can do that, and so the success of that show, How to Disappear, opened me up to the possibility of being a performer and a writer, and I realized that those are the most rewarding things that I can do.   Itai Erdal 23:01 How to Disappear completely, we did in 26 different cities. I've had thousands of people come to me to tell me about losing parents, about finding love, which is another theme in the show. Many people told me that they learned more about lighting in an hour of watching that show than in 20 years of directing theatre.   Itai Erdal 23:21 And so being able to connect with people is the most wonderful gift that performing and writing has given me, and I would say that's what's changed. I've realized that I can do a lot of different things.   Itai Erdal 23:38 I've started my own theatre company, so I'm not dependent on other people to hire me, and I can produce my own work, and I can do work about things that I think are important. I also believe in the peer system that we have in this country for various public funding, that if you can articulate your ideas into sentences, and if you're articulate, I suppose, then you can raise money from the government to create art.   Itai Erdal 24:04 And so I'm very thankful for that, and I don't take it for granted, and I think that's the main way that I've... I still love designing lights, I've got to say, I don't imagine ever stopping designing lights.   Itai Erdal 24:15 I can't imagine retiring. I think I'll design lights when I'm 80. And I love designing lights, but I also love being creative in a lot of different ways. I like taking photos, and I like writing, and I like performing, and it's such a wonderful thing to have a balance of being able to do all these things together.   Gabrielle Martin 24:35 Do you have any final words on how you perceive, uh, what you perceive to be the cultural context of push and pushes significance to Vancouver, to your practice? I mean, you've spoken about that to your career quite a bit.   Gabrielle Martin 24:47 Um, and you've also spoken about, you know, how meaningful it was to have these artists, breakfasts or late night gatherings, bringing together international and local artists. Um, yeah. Any last words on?   Itai Erdal 25:01 I think, yeah, I spoke about the significance for myself, but for the city, I think when you travel around the world as much as I do and you go to festivals, when you mention the Push Festival around the world, people's eyes open up.   Itai Erdal 25:14 They're like, oh, I'd like to go there. It is considered, Vancouver has this allure as a very beautiful place, and the Push Festival has this reputation of a festival that brings great works of art. And I think, like I said, the names of the companies that I mentioned earlier that I've seen are some of the best people in the world.   Itai Erdal 25:36 I've met Castelucci, and I've met, you know, Consco Quartet, and I've met, like really, some of the most amazing artists, not just in North America, but in Europe and around the world. And I cannot overemphasize how important that is to our theatre community and to our art scene to be exposed to the world and to have the world exposed to us.   Itai Erdal 26:02 And that's a symbiotic relationship that goes both ways and enriches ourselves as artists and enriches the city. And so, yeah, I think Push is absolutely crucial in raising the bar of the work that we see here because if somebody goes to see a great piece of art at Push, they don't care that it's from some of the best companies.   Itai Erdal 26:25 That's what they want to see. And so it pushes us all to do better work, and it inspires us all to try to create works like some of the best theatres happening around the world.   Ben Charland 26:39 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run from January 23rd to February 9th, 2025. Push Play is produced by myself, Ben Charland, and Tricia Knowles.   Ben Charland 26:56 A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.   Ben Charland 27:15 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with composer Njo Kong Kie. Show Notes Gabrielle and Njo Kong Kie discuss:  How did your relationship with PuSh start? What was the process of presenting work at PuSh? How do you interpret and react to the source material? How did you pivot to digital work during Covid? How does the work transition back to the live stage? How has your artistic practice grown over time? About Njo Kong Kie Njo Kong Kie (composer) is a composer for dance, opera and theatre. His works include music for the play Infinity by Hannah Moscovitch, the same-sex rom-com opera knotty together (with Anna Chatterton), and the music theatre work Mr. Shi and His Lover (with Wong Teng Chi) - the first ever Chinese language production at SummerWorks, Tarragon Theatre and the National Arts Centre English Theatre. Long-serving music director of La La La Human Steps in Montreal, Kong Kie has further worked with choreographers Anne Plamondon, Aszure Barton, Shawn Hounsel and others, providing original music to their productions for companies such as Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballet National de L'Opera du Rhin, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Singapore Dance Theatre and Ballet BC. His soundtrack for TV documentaries includes Fisk: Untitled Portrait and China Rises. In development: The Year of the Cello, a play with solo cello music set in Hong Kong in the 1920s (with Marjorie Chan); The Futures Market, an opera exploring the complex moral dimensions of the trade in human organs (with Douglas Rodger) and I swallowed a moon made of iron, a song cycle set to the haunting poems of Chinese poet Xu Lizhi (Canadian Stage, May 2019). Kong Kie is the artistic producer of Music Picnic. More at www.musicpicnic.com. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded in Tkaronto (Toronto), on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. Tkaronto is covered by Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaties signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 00:02 Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and play with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.  Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Neo -Conkey and the 2022 Push Festival. Born in Indonesia of Chinese heritage, Neo -Conkey is a Toronto -based musician and composer who creates and produces music theatre works in various forms.  Gabrielle Martin 00:37 Here's my conversation with Conkey.  Gabrielle Martin 00:43 I'm here with Nyo Kanki, good morning. Good morning. Yeah, and we are here in Takaranto, which is the home of many, traditional home of many First Nations, including the Mississauga of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee.  Gabrielle Martin 01:00 And today is also the home of many other nations, including the Inuit and the Métis. And we're also at the Theatre Centre on the garden patio.  Njo Kong Kie 01:11 yes wonderful yes my my neighborhood theaters well center of theaters i guess and also a favorite cafe in the neighborhood yeah so we are here in the rooftop of the theater center  Gabrielle Martin 01:23 Yeah, thanks for recommending this place. And we'll talk about this neighborhood a bit more in a moment because it's your home where you've shot the digital version for the 2021 presentation of I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron.  Gabrielle Martin 01:36 So that's the project that was presented by Nyo at Push. But I just want to rewind a little bit and talk about how your relationship with Push began. Can you take us to the next thing?  Njo Kong Kie 01:48 Um, I'm like, yeah, I've, I've known about the push festival, of course, sometimes like before I even started creating work, you know, and, um, just, and I've met Norman a number of times through, um, at receptions or, you know, performing, uh, performing arts platform and arts market, those sort of situations that I've kind of always known about the festival.  Njo Kong Kie 02:11 And I've been to Vancouver with a lot of human stuffs quite a few times in the past, uh, as, as performer, uh, or musicians. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just to distinguish, I'm not quite a dancer, not at that level anyhow.  Njo Kong Kie 02:24 And yeah. Uh, and so, so I think our paths, I, yeah, I've crossed paths with Norman quite a few times and yeah. But, uh, and, uh, when I first started sort of making work, of course, that that's kind of one of the first, uh, festivals that jumped out as we'd be.  Njo Kong Kie 02:40 Okay. This might be a possible collaborators in the future for some of the work.  Gabrielle Martin 02:46 Why is that just because of the kind of conversations you've had with Norman?  Njo Kong Kie 02:49 the kind of work that the festival has been presented or interested in, you know, I met Michael Green at the time of the high performance rodeo in Calgary and so, you know, through conversation and push, it's never really far away from the conversation, you know.  Njo Kong Kie 03:08 And often, I think in past you have done a lot of collaborations or co -presenting between the two festivals in the past, right? Yeah, yeah. So, that's kind of like, it's always in the conversation. And then when I made a work called Mr.  Njo Kong Kie 03:25 She and His Lover here at the Theatre Centre, actually as part of the Summer Works in 2016, and Franco Boni, who was then the artistic director of the Theatre Centre, really, I think he recommended to Norman that he should come and see the work while he was still here.  Njo Kong Kie 03:42 So, then we began a conversation actually about that piece of work going to a push, but it just never came to be. Yeah, so then, you know, in 2019, when after I made the ice roll of Monomaid of Iron, Franco again saw it and then, yeah, during the time that he was at the push festival, if he wanted to program this work, yeah, so that's how it came to pass.  Gabrielle Martin 04:10 Okay, so can you just tell us about the work I swallowed and made of iron? Can you just talk to us a little bit about what it is and the process of realizing it for the festival? Because you presented it in both 2021 in a digital version, because this was our very small mid -COVID festival.  Gabrielle Martin 04:26 And yours was one of a handful of pieces, and you were able to kind of pivot it to this beautifully realized digital version, and then also the in -person version in the 2022 festival. So yeah, you can just talk about that.  Njo Kong Kie 04:40 So essentially, I Swollen Moon, made of iron, is a song cycle. It's set to the poetry of a contemporary Chinese poet, who was a worker at a factory in Shenzhen, China, by the name of Xu Yizi. So during his short life of 24 years, he produced this body of work, of poetry, that spoke to his experience, especially as a migrant worker, from the rural part of China into the new city, so to speak, seeking his work and his way of survival.  Njo Kong Kie 05:19 So through his poetry, he talked about his own experience, but also, in a way, it is reflective of a larger group of populations that go through the same similar experiences. So I was very touched by his poetry and also, there is an instinctive connection, perhaps in some ways, because of the language as well, because it's all written in Chinese, obviously.  Njo Kong Kie 05:47 And so at the time of his death in 2014, I immediately thought, OK, I really would enjoy the privilege of being able to set these words to music. So it took a while before we were able to make that happen.  Njo Kong Kie 06:10 And at the time in 2019, in 2018 and 2019, I was an artist slash company in residence at the Canadian stage here in Toronto. So this is the second piece that we presented in the May, yeah, during that residence in May 2019.  Njo Kong Kie 06:27 It has actually gone through quite a few iterations in terms of format. We decided as a stage show, essentially, yeah, rather than a music recital. I can explain how you...  Gabrielle Martin 06:41 See the difference of those two things.  Njo Kong Kie 06:43 Yeah, so I guess, in a way, I could perform this sound cycle in a concert setting, I suppose, with just me and the piano, with nothing else, it could work, yeah, and I actually have done it also. But because I have, although I'm a musician, I work mostly with other artists, like whether it's dance or theater people, and so I have quite a few, I guess, influences coming from those practice.  Njo Kong Kie 07:16 And so when I wanted to put this on stage, the first thing I thought of, like, how can I realize it in a more theatrical setting? So I guess, in that sense, I think of that the onstage performance is more like a theatrical experience beyond the music.  Njo Kong Kie 07:36 I have collaborated in videos, in lights, and I had some coaching in movement, and obviously I had to sort of like get some coaching on my own performance, my SS as a singer. I didn't set out to write it for myself to sing.  Njo Kong Kie 07:53 It has always been thought that in the early part of the development, I always thought that I would play the piano and somebody else would sing it. But as we got into this staging part of the process, it became a little bit more evident to us, the people in the room, working on the work, it's much more impactful to have just one person.  Njo Kong Kie 08:19 Then even though I didn't set out to sort of embody the poet himself as a performer, but people read it anyhow, right? So while I wasn't trying to, but just because there's only one person on stage and he's talking about the solitary life of the poet and experience.  Njo Kong Kie 08:39 So I think it's as cleaner as a theater experience, and people can sort of get into it a lot more. So that's kind of ultimately what we decided to do, I guess maybe through the first couple months of starting to write the songs.  Njo Kong Kie 08:55 I came to that realization and then of course I had to sing.  Gabrielle Martin 08:58 I'm so glad you did. Like, I know for me, I discovered the project. I started it with Push in 2021. And as you mentioned, you'd already been in conversation with Franco. This is a project that had kind of been on the table, but then we were in a bit of limbo in the organization and Jason Dubois brought it to my attention at that point.  Gabrielle Martin 09:15 And I remember watching the video and just being so touched. It was so the emotional, the haunting emotional quality just jumped right off the video, which is hard to do from video. But it was really clear to me that this is such a special work.  Njo Kong Kie 09:31 think that the words, you know, speak volume, you know, by itself. And like, as far as for myself, my starting point is to how do I interpret or I guess, react to them in my own way. When I send an invitation to my collaborators to participate in this project, so I always just tell them we should all react to it in our own way, in our, through our own medium.  Njo Kong Kie 10:02 Yeah. And then we can put it together. So the process is a little bit, I would think that is quite organic as everybody jumps in with their contributions and then we collectively kind of shape it to the form.  Njo Kong Kie 10:16 It is so, so it didn't really start from, yeah, I guess I didn't like, maybe for all the creations the same, like you don't really quite know where you're going to end up. And this is where we end.  Gabrielle Martin 10:26 And then for 2021, was it you who made the suggestion, oh, well, why don't I do this? Okay, you know, we're in the middle of the pandemic. I can't perform it live at Push. Why don't I shoot it in my living room?  Gabrielle Martin 10:37 Or was it somebody at Push who recommended that or how did that? That version of that. And how did it end up being in your living room? Yes.  Njo Kong Kie 10:47 In 2020 May, I don't know if you remember that the National Arts Center has put out an initiative to invite artists to live stream from home. So I was one of the projects that got the support from that platform.  Njo Kong Kie 11:04 And it was this song cycle that I performed. But I mean, it was obviously more, not obviously, but I mean, we stripped it down to just the core element, which is basically the song. So the format we use is like a steady cam on me sitting on the piano.  Njo Kong Kie 11:23 I talk to the audience about each piece of poetry and how they relate to the timeline in his life and what they talk about. And I'm not quite sure. I don't even remember whether we have subtitles or I just read the poetry.  Njo Kong Kie 11:39 I think I might have just read the poetry both in the Chinese and the English translations. And then let the audience experience the songs themselves like that. So it's a very basic presentation. That kind of got us, kind of like me and my collaborator, who is already at that time back to Macau because the team is made of people from Canada, Macau and Hong Kong.  Njo Kong Kie 12:04 So they were already back there. So I think I got a lot of help from my technical director who is in Hong Kong in terms of how to stream. And then how to set the angle and all those kind of things. So I think it was just a straightforward experience that way.  Njo Kong Kie 12:19 So to the very last minute, we were still thinking that I think I remember trying to because once the pandemic hit, there's a lot of travel restrictions. Up till November, I think we were still trying to see if we can get a special exemption for my collaborators to come into the country from Hong Kong and Macau.  Njo Kong Kie 12:43 And so there were some artists who were from Germany or something. I remember the conversation vaguely that they seemed to be able to come in, but then they couldn't. And so ultimately at the end, we abandoned that possibility.  Njo Kong Kie 12:59 And then I'm sure I think probably once Jason and whoever else might be at the office at that time decided, well, we just need to do a digital festival. So I think everything pivoted to that.  Gabrielle Martin 13:14 integrate the visual elements as well.  Njo Kong Kie 13:16 Exactly. So once I had that opportunity, then it begs the question as to, okay, do we do a live stream of the stage performance? Because that seems like an obvious... But then you get into the restrictions of not being able to have too many people in the room, even time, even performance or technician thing, there was still a limit.  Njo Kong Kie 13:40 I can't remember exactly.  Gabrielle Martin 13:43 It's a bit different than Vancouver as well.  Njo Kong Kie 13:45 Exactly. So here's a bit different. And then, you know, we still have the fine venue and it was very last minute. And obviously a lot of venue was empty at that time. But it's just the fact that if I couldn't get the technicians, the technical help, then we can't really do the stage performance.  Njo Kong Kie 14:02 Work. So even if we could... Yeah. So one of the venue I thought of was here at the theater center, but then even if we could get the... Could we get the technicians in and can we sort of like get all the elements to come together?  Njo Kong Kie 14:15 So that seemed to be a little bit too complicated also. So then ultimately, okay, what is the alternative venue? So then of course we remember the experience of doing the National Art Center live stream that was also in my place.  Njo Kong Kie 14:31 So we thought, well, why don't we just do it in my place? But since we have already done that version, we can't really just do the same version, right? So do we include the theatrical element?  Gabrielle Martin 14:44 Because I think people will hear, if you haven't seen it, then you'd imagine, okay, live streaming, or streaming this, rather, shooting it and then streaming it from, you know, a set that is somebody's living room might be very reductive or overly simple.  Gabrielle Martin 15:01 And it was simple, but it was still, you know, you had a lot of these elements of the work that made it.  Njo Kong Kie 15:07 more than yeah yeah yeah so I think that's a kudos to sort of like to my both the lighting design Naira and then the technical director uh who is also often uh co -produce my my my music theater works anyway uh so Eric and Gabriel yeah so so we ended up sort of like thinking okay if we're going to do this uh by then we have also seen a lot of digital works right yeah can learn from that we want to see if we can somehow use this medium to its own advantage then do things that we cannot do on stage yeah so that's always kind of at the back of our mind and leading guard leading the process so so we kind of like ultimately decide okay what are the elements visual elements of the show that we can incorporate we in the in the live show we have a square screen and because the poet one of the poems talked about you know living in in a small square room and so we thought okay we're going to just crop everything into a square right so that's how the visual is a square not a long rectangle screen right yeah so so we we did that and then we actually and we wanted to use a simple uh uh simple equipment that we can find so all the we had four cameras they're all iphones so that has some connections to the poetry because ultimately he he worked at a factory that produced iphones yes yet yet he could not own one right yeah but anyway so we thought okay that would be uh the equipment that we want to use so i call a lot of my neighbors that anybody have an extra old iphones that is not being used because i need for a week to test and everything so we ended up with four and then we once we decided where to put things and then basically we clear out my my my my i live kind of in the semi loft situation so there's really not the divisions of living in kitchen and everything i just clear up one everything of the main room let's say i move the position the piano at a certain place that we want and then you know put the uh the cameras wherever we could find and then you know and um and so that's kind of how we came to frame so all you see is just the piano very close up and myself so so there are several angles and then we were able to to bring back some of the uh movement elements not all of them because there's no space yeah yeah and then  Gabrielle Martin 17:35 But in some ways, you're talking about, but when you talk about the work and the content in the work and what the poetry talks about, solitude, there's a reference to living alone in a square box. This piece really landed itself very well to shooting it or realizing it in this way, and I'm curious then.  Njo Kong Kie 17:56 we kind of lucked out in that situation, yeah. But we also, I mean, one thing that I find the most, well, we were able to, as I was saying earlier, we wanted to see if we can introduce some technique that's only possible in the film, rather than on stage, because one of the poetry talked about, the ending poetry kind of talked about sort of like, I guess, disappearing from this world, so to speak.  Njo Kong Kie 18:26 So then we were able to, my technical director came up, the idea that we could actually, we filmed, we could make you disappear.  Gabrielle Martin 18:32 Yeah.  Njo Kong Kie 18:34 you know, and on a graduate and in a very subtle way then so I think those moments were came about only because of the film.  Gabrielle Martin 18:43 So then, because you did present it at Push 2022, in person, at the Waterfront, it was a very memorable experience and I'm so glad we got to have that version as well. But for you, was there something missing then?  Gabrielle Martin 18:57 How was the relationship going back to the stage in terms of how the medium communicated content of the work? How was that transition? Yeah, I think...  Njo Kong Kie 19:11 I've recently been sort of like working at the Stratford Festival for Salesmen in China. I don't know if you have heard about that. That work that's going to be premiering. And they're... What's your role?  Njo Kong Kie 19:23 No, but my role is I will happen to be a roommate of one of the actors. That's the extent of my role. But then, you know, and they were saying, oh yeah, we have seen the digital version. And then, so when the live show came around, they thought, well, we have already seen it.  Njo Kong Kie 19:41 So they didn't come. But other folks came, right? So the people that I talked to, you know, I always like doing a live show. You always, you know, sometimes you get to talk to the audience, where it's like with the digital.  Njo Kong Kie 19:54 I think we may have a window for people to engage afterwards a little bit. I remember talking to a volunteer, a long time volunteer of the festival, who is of Chinese heritage. She was very moved by the fact that there is a Chinese language work that she was able to catch in Canada.  Njo Kong Kie 20:19 But she said, well, yeah, it seems like I have been sort of like waiting for it. Yeah. But she has, you know, she's an avid supporter of, like, has been volunteering for the festival a long time. Elsie, was it Elsie maybe?  Njo Kong Kie 20:30 I can't remember her name exactly. But yeah, and then there are also some students from the mainland China who had not heard about this poet before. I mean, they have been living abroad for some time as well.  Njo Kong Kie 20:47 But anyway, so there are also those kind of connections. I don't know if they I don't know if they would have clued into that. There was a digital version or not. Maybe I think there is something live that still draws people in.  Njo Kong Kie 20:58 Absolutely. Yeah. And and and and and so sort of the life.  Gabrielle Martin 21:01 singing too, there's something about experiencing, I mean, I would say about experiencing any performing art live. I think I have to say that. But with singing there's something, I think, yeah, having that live, feeling that residence in the space just communicates, the emotional power is communicated that much more.  Njo Kong Kie 21:22 Yeah, yeah, no, and it's always kind of like, we always hum and hum about sort of technical setup and everything, but at the end of the day, when we travel, we put up a show at a different venue and then it's always, inevitably it's always quite a rewarding experience working with the local people, right?  Njo Kong Kie 21:42 They have that connection, whether they're technicians, whether they are administrators or whatever, just so there's that context as well, you know, and prior to that we had just, you know, performed in Kelowna, a few shows already, so we were quite ready to do the work, but there were still other technical challenges that had to be met, and that they see people coming together and solve the problem.  Njo Kong Kie 22:03 Yeah, yeah. It's always good.  Gabrielle Martin 22:04 But there's a special community that is built through realising creative projects. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that project started in 2018 with the residency at Canadian Stage. And so since then, how would you say that your artistic practice has grown?  Njo Kong Kie 22:20 mm -hmm to till now yeah um so what are your I don't know I always feel that I haven't grown that much so it's hard for you to say yeah yeah I guess um yeah I'm still interested in making uh to finding like ways to present music in a theatrical settings or way so there are a few other things so I'm continue to make work that involves music and text and theater so I'm currently working on a piece for young audience with the liberties from from from this area Liza Balkan and that's it's for young audience so that's new to me okay so I'm sort of trying to develop that we are developing a an operatic web series so that's came out of the experience of doing all the digital work and there's a VR projects on an earlier show based on an earlier show and so I guess there's a bit more digital yeah seems to come into play yeah and and there's another song cycle that that we are developing or there we made a short film for so based on the story of uh uh who was a long time vancouver resident yeah  Gabrielle Martin 23:47 I was going to say, it seems like there's also a theme around being inspired by biographies.  Njo Kong Kie 23:52 Yeah, yeah, so the past yeah, I know I think by by by all accounts I lived you know a fairly privileged life here in you know in Canada and you know artists You know livelihood may be a little bit kind of haphazard to another people's mind But nonetheless we make work and we get to sort of like, you know, we're not going hungry.  Njo Kong Kie 24:13 We are not like You know suffering from war and all those You know traumatic experiences. So so by so it's kind of like I don't know I kind of feel for myself There's not much from my own experience I can draw from You know that that that sort of like yeah and then and so so I'm always kind of feel more inspired and empathize or you know with other other people's experience and sense so so so I guess that kind of  Gabrielle Martin 24:48 So you said you're working on one project now that is inspired by an artist who is based in Vancouver. Yeah.  Njo Kong Kie 24:54 I guess he wasn't an artist. He was a medical student in Shanghai, but then he met a German sexologist in the 1930s by the name of Magnus Hirschfeld. So they had a relationship. But the discovery of that relationship is quite interesting in itself because when he passed in Vancouver, he left a lot of suitcases.  Njo Kong Kie 25:23 This is documented by Story in the Extra Magazine in a number of years ago. But anyway, so his luggage was left outside in a garbage dump basically of his apartment complex. So then the superintendent found it and was curious to see what was inside.  Njo Kong Kie 25:44 So it was discovered from among that collection, there is a lot of old documents and also a death mask of somebody he did not know. So he, through some sort of like research and inquiry, he found out that it was the death mask of Magnus Hirschfeld, the scientist, yeah, himself.  Njo Kong Kie 26:06 So years later, somehow the post that he put online was discovered by the Institute in Germany that is dedicated to the preservation of the work of this scientist. So all of that just to say that then when my collaborator John Grayson was recommended by another filmmaker friend to read this article, he passed it on to me.  Njo Kong Kie 26:38 So that kind of triggered their conversations and about, is there something that we can highlight in this story of this extraordinary encounter in the 1930s, between a Chinese man and a German, and how their travel sort of like speaks about the early studies of sexuality or and then racism to sort of dynamic between an older man and then the sort of age difference between the two of them and all those kinds of things that are that jump on immediately as to sort of like it kind of like calls for an inquiry in terms of,  Njo Kong Kie 27:26 but yeah, so we're kind of still in the process. We have made a short film of it, which is called Death Mask. And so it is, I guess it's going around in the festival circuit at the moment and we're hoping for more screening and so on.  Njo Kong Kie 27:43 So I think it was shown here at the Real Asian and it was actually made it to the, I think it was, and yeah, come to think of it, premiere in Vancouver at the Vancouver Film Festival. Great, okay, so we'll keep our...  Gabrielle Martin 27:54 eyes open to more from you. But I do want to just comment on how you know you mentioned that you've been interested in other people's stories and I think a lot of artists you know create because there's a need to tell their own stories which is important and at the same time there is something really important to these stories that you're talking about are you know it's so important to honor the histories of these people whose experience has been erased or almost erased and I think that work of that like artistic work and yet there's the work of the historian as well yeah  Njo Kong Kie 28:29 I think I'm in obviously both a good starting point for sure for our own practice just as for myself I tend to veer that way maybe I'm a bit more an introvert so it's much easier to talk about general that rather than something that's specific to myself so I think that may be part of the reason too yeah  Gabrielle Martin 28:55 Well thank you. It's been really nice to speak to you. It was so nice. It's such a strong memory I have from the 2022 festival. Working with you, hosting you, it was so great to get to meet you in that context and it's been a while.  Gabrielle Martin 29:11 I think we saw each other a year and a half ago and New York was the last time and I think that was before the premiere of this film Death Mask. So it's just nice to hear about your work. Thank you for taking the time of chatting with me.  Njo Kong Kie 29:23 Yes, absolutely. Hope to be back.  Tricia Knowles 29:28 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.  Tricia Knowles 29:49 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlton. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabrielle Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. 

NOTE: Due to technical difficulties, the audio quality for this episode is not at the usual standard for PuSh Play. Gabrielle Martin chats with Fay Nass, Artistic and Executive Director of the frank theatre and Artistic Director of Aphotic Theatre. Show Notes Gabrielle and Fay discuss:  How did your relationship with PuSh start? How do we explore the relationship between form and content? What is the importance of public and private spaces for performance? How has your artistic practice grown and evolved? Why is the concept of exchange important in theatre? What is the cultural context and significance of PuSh? About Fay Nass Fay Nass is a community-engaged director, writer, dramaturg, innovator, producer and educator. They are the Artistic Director of the frank theatre company and the founder/Artistic Director of Aphotic Theatre.  Fay has over 17 years of experience in text-based and devised work deeply rooted in inter-cultural and collaborative approaches. Fay's work often examines questions of race, gender, sexuality, culture and language through an intersectional lens in order to shift meanings and de-construct paradigms rooted in our society. Fay's work celebrates liminality and trans-culturalism, and blurs the line between politics and intimate personal stories. Fay's work has been presented at PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, SummerWorks Festival, Queer Arts Festival, the CULTCH and Firehall Arts Centre. Her readings and experimental work have been presented at various conferences and artist-run galleries in Spain, Berlin and Paris. Their co-creation project Be-Longing was part of the 2021 New York international Film Festival, NICE International Film Festival and Madrid International Film Festival. Their most recent credits include: co-creating Be-Longing (the frank theatre), co-directing Trans Script Part I: The Women (the frank theatre and Zee Theatre at Firehall Arts Centre), directing She Mami Wata & the Pussy WitchHunt (the frank theatre at PuSh Festival 2020), co-directing Straight White Men (ITSAZOO productions at Gateway Theatre), and dramaturgy for Camera Obscura (Hungry Ghosts) (the frank theatre & QAF). Fay holds an MFA from Simon Fraser University. Currently, they are doing the Artistic Leadership Residency at the National Theatre School of Canada. As an artistic leader and a practitioner, Fay has deep and involved relationships—both creative and organizational—with a wide spectrum of artists across generations and stylistic practices. As an educator and facilitator, their philosophy and pedagogy are rooted in anti-racism and anti-oppression. 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we are revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.  Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Feynas and is anchored around the 2020 Push Festival. Feynas is a community -engaged director, writer, dramaturg, innovator, producer, and educator. They are the artistic director of the Frank Theatre Company and the founder artistic director of Ophotic Theatre.  Gabrielle Martin 00:40 Feynas has over 17 years of experience in text -based and devised work deeply rooted in intercultural and collaborative approaches. Established in 1996, the Frank is the oldest professional queer theater company based on the occupied stolen lands of the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil -Waututh First Nations, collonially called Vancouver.  Gabrielle Martin 01:01 It's one of the few theater organizations in the country led by a gender -queer immigrant woman of color and collaborates with a large community of 2SLGBTQ -plus artists and arts workers. Ophotic Theatre is committed to creating vital and innovative performance.  Gabrielle Martin 01:16 With an emphasis on developing new plays written and or created by women, women of color, queer, queer trans people of color, its approach is distinguished in prioritizing who tells the story and what story they want to tell.  Gabrielle Martin 01:30 Here's my conversation with Feynas.  Gabrielle Martin 01:35 We are here in the stolen and traditional ancestral territories of the post -anish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh. It's an absolute privilege to be on these islands and in so -called Vancouver we are downtown, we are close to where you live, close to the push offices and we're going to be in conversation about your relationship with push and you have a relationship with push in two capacities as artistic director of the Frank Theater and as artistic director of the aquatic theater.  Gabrielle Martin 02:07 So we're going to kind of anchor the conversation around the cafe which was a co -production with push actually that premiered finally in 2023 and I say that because that was a journey that began before my time at push but also the Frank Theater presented duets for misunderstood in 2016 or rather push presented duets for misunderstood of shank theater in 2016 and in 2020 when you were at the Frank Theater push presented with the Frank Shumami Wata and the Pre -V witch farms and and since 2022 we've been collaborating because you've been the curator of one of the club push nights wearing your Frank Theater hat.  Gabrielle Martin 02:50 That's right and and and also a co -presenter of Sully Locio which is a festival favorite performance of 2023 by Tiziano Cruz. So a lot of a lot to talk about so let's just go back to the very beginning how did your relationship with push start?  Fay Nass 03:05 So, I started my leadership at the Frank in 2018 and before that there was already a partnership between the Frank and Push under Chris Kachallian and under Norman's leadership. But in 2018, when I started my leadership at the Frank, one of my major focuses was like to focus on these stories of BIPOC queer artists and also to look at the relationship between form and content in a way that is not just,  Fay Nass 03:32 you know, queer BIPOC stories, but in a way that's like the form breaks the Eurocentric framework of storytelling and to show different modes of storytelling and that hasn't very much part of the programming that I have been excited about.  Fay Nass 03:46 So, when the B. Young contacted me and they said that they're interested for me to direct Jim Amiwata the Pussy Witch Hunt, first of all it was a huge honor because I'm a huge fan of their work but also I was like okay so where would be a venue that can kind of hold space for a piece that's really the script is fluid, the form is fluid, it's really questions colonization through a very exciting Jamaican lens as well as like you know it's a sexual cabaret queer wonderful piece,  Fay Nass 04:20 you know.  Gabrielle Martin 04:21 But I know to be young, and I've heard so much about this work. It is like an iconic show that people talk about to this day. I feel like I saw it because I've heard so many people.  Fay Nass 04:32 Yeah and you know it was fantastic like I pitched it to Norman Armour originally and he loved the idea and then Joyce got on board and Joyce and I started talking and it was just like a very beautiful smooth process you know and to be has been always wanting to collaborate with Push.  Fay Nass 04:51 So it was just like a really fantastic opportunity for all this group of people that been thirsted for this collaboration to come together. But also what was exciting is because the script is alive and Ruby is an amazing energetic human who kind of goes with the energy of the audience.  Fay Nass 05:06 Sometimes the show was like 90 minutes and sometimes it was 100 minutes and I have to say as someone who's worked with many festivals the fluidity and flexibility of the festival to allow that was something really beautiful which kind of led me to wanting to continue to collaborate with a festival that understands that one of the notions of decolonization is recognizing that we are not working within this like in a very rigid Eurocentric framework which means that 90 can become 98 if we want to honor a Jamaican artist who is breaking those you know patterns.  Gabrielle Martin 05:41 talk to us about the cafe. What was the cafe and what was the process of realizing for the festival?  Fay Nass 05:46 Yeah, so The Cafe was a project that I started writing about and imagining it in 2008 when I was writing my master thesis, which is really about the idea of proximity in a site -specific show with different audiences.  Fay Nass 06:00 The concept of it came to me as a margin from Iran and a lot of time public spaces like coffee shops were spaces that people had the most political conversations in before and after the revolution in Iran.  Fay Nass 06:12 And yet these are not private spaces and so I wanted to look at the mosaic of Vancouver and the intersections of identity and stories and the conversations that happened in a coffee shop and yet people can eavesdrop and then yet there is a hidden first wall in a sense.  Fay Nass 06:33 But the way that the project would work was really commissioning artists from different voices, I wanted to hear different languages in the piece. So for many years I talked about the project when most organizations were like, it's a really expensive project, at the end we were commissioning 9 playwrights, 14 actors, site -specific pieces means 30, 35, 50 audience members max, right?  Fay Nass 06:56 So financially it's a very challenging thing to do, especially in Vancouver with the ticket prices that we have. So it's as you actually got excited about getting on board and they have a huge history of site -specific work.  Fay Nass 07:11 Apartic Theatre, the company that I found and I'm the artistic director of, focuses on stories of women, immigrants, LGBTQ, BIPOC, but also kind of site -specific and more experimental work. So the two companies came together but we were like, okay, where can we show these pieces, right?  Fay Nass 07:26 And again, we talked to Joyce Rosario and I remember sitting outside in a sunny day with Sebastian Archibald and Joyce and Joyce was like, I love the idea, why not? And really until that time, I haven't seen a lot of site -specific pieces.  Fay Nass 07:41 And so it was like really amazing to get the exact push. And so it was really exciting for Joyce to get excited about it, right? And then, so we started working on it, commissioning, going through the development.  Fay Nass 07:56 And then the pandemic happened, you know, and it was just like really, and then transitions happened, that push. So it felt like, oh, this project, it took me like 10 years to finally get people excited.  Gabrielle Martin 08:07 conversation with Joyce happening in what year?  Fay Nass 08:10 It would have been 2018 -2019, right? Like 18, yeah.  Gabrielle Martin 08:15 we got a conversation about it in 2021 and I remember we were supposed to present it in 2022 and the Omicron would happen at the pandemic and I remember being on the phone with you and like trying to figure out how we could still make it work for 2020 until I really tried to find as many creative solutions as possible but it was just because as you mentioned it's uh at intimate it's meant to be experienced in an intimate way and there's a large cast it was just very complicated.  Fay Nass 08:43 almost like opposite of what the health, you know, adversary was, right? And so, yeah, it already got canceled once in 2021, right? Yeah, because like we had to last minute be like, we have 14 actors, we can't put people in that close proximity.  Fay Nass 09:02 And then, and I said the project is over. And I was really excited that when we, you and I talked and you're like, we can still support the project through development fund for to not die. And to also be able to, you know, pay the artists and to actually focus on dramaturgy, because we never work in a way in Vancouver, that is kind of a European style of like, having this duration of time to allow the scripts to actually settle,  Fay Nass 09:26 right? So in some strange ways, where we cried, and we were heartbroken with the support of first and you know, your enlistment in the development of the piece, we could actually keep going and do more dramaturgy, change them with actually some of the script change based on the pandemic, you know, having stuff with like, you know, like hand sanitizer or mask, we added those things for it to become relevant.  Fay Nass 09:47 And the piece was always supposed to be a piece that we can see in a contemporary coffee shop as a relevant piece, right? So yes, then it finally happened in 2023, right? And that was like, just dream come through, you know, and I was like, also like, really fantastic that we had, I think a huge support from Push in development and actually cool productions, which we have never done.  Fay Nass 10:09 It has always been Push being a presenting partner, but in this case, Push was like a huge contributor to the project happening. So thank you.  Gabrielle Martin 10:17 I mean it was an awful much pleasure because it's I think those are the type of pieces that people remember the most. The pieces that are intimate, the pieces that are in non -preventional spaces and I feel like this is a piece that would really adapt like it's built to be adapted and to grow in in its different environments.  Gabrielle Martin 10:39 I would love to see this piece again in another in another space and also because like it's a bit of a choose your own adventure so you get little snippets of conversations here and there which is really fun in terms of like changing the dynamic of the spectator, a little more agency in terms of like the narrative that you experience.  Gabrielle Martin 10:59 And so now like that year also we co -presented Soliloquio and that year also well no 2022 we started the collaboration with Club Push with the Frank, the Frank curating a bigger Club Push which continues this will be its fourth year in 2025.  Gabrielle Martin 11:16 So can you talk about the growth of your artistic practice since you know you first came into relationship with Push in 2020 with Shunami Wata and Deepa Simcha.  Fay Nass 11:29 Yeah. You know, I think that's one of the things that has been very exciting is like this, like, I have always been interested in this idea of exchange and fluidity. And I think, you know, as a producing company and as a new artistic director, I came to push in 2018 -19 with the pitch of Shimami Wata for it to happen in 2020.  Fay Nass 11:51 And it's like, okay, we're a producing company breaking for Shimami Wata happens. Then it's like, okay, now we can be a little bit braver. And what if we pitch something that is not even within the confine of theater and it's in a coffee shop.  Fay Nass 12:05 And then we pitch, you know, the cafe and, you know, then the cafe happens and then you reached out to us, to myself and the enable us and about the international presentation of soliloquy. And I think in that way, that was like the exchange of like, you know, that kind of collaboration of like, okay, like, well, we are the presenting partner, but we can also reach out to communities that they have the network,  Fay Nass 12:31 they have done the work with the LGBTQ communities, and we don't need to do this alone. And we can share this spotlight and we can also benefit from like, you know, their knowledge and their access to the community.  Fay Nass 12:42 So I was really excited to get that email to be like, do you want to partner with us? You know, and, and we have been very interested in, you know, international representation. So, so that happened.  Fay Nass 12:53 And then also, you know, you contacting us about claw push, because one of the things that we do is like, you know, very much like subverting that like relationship between what is the art in the theater spaces versus underground performances, and the excitement of the LGBTQ BIPOC community through drag performances, dance movement, that is not necessarily within the legacy of theater, and that's something that we've been doing,  Fay Nass 13:20 and we're good at, and something that we have like, very strong ties and connections with. So being able to do claw push and highlight the voices of, especially BIPOC, LGBTQ community, within the legacy of push has been exciting both, I think, through the eyes of presenters that are like, oh, this is the texture of the fabric of Vancouver that we don't necessarily see.  Fay Nass 13:42 And also for the artists that they've been wanting to have those platforms in order to showcase their work. So I feel like there are all these different layers that's, that's exciting, both in like, I would say progression, but also in a circular notion of exchange, you know, that is like in a while is like, you know, moving forward, but it is also actually starting from the same place of intention,  Fay Nass 14:04 which is pushing the boundaries, trusting and believing those relationships, and believing that progression is actually has like a circular movements, you know.  Gabrielle Martin 14:13 Well, I personally have benefited very greatly from our relationship growing and just to be able to discuss work with you, you know, whether it's here or in Montreal. And I feel like there's a lot of shared interest and value we have.  Gabrielle Martin 14:26 And I really enjoyed those conversations. And so I'd just be curious to hear your perspective on push the cultural context of push and the significance of push within the local artistic ecology within the city for Frank Peter for a father.  Gabrielle Martin 14:42 Whatever I want to speak to, I would encourage that.  Fay Nass 14:47 I think Pusha is, in my opinion, one of the most important festivals, not only locally, but in Canada. And I think that everything that we just talked about is really about bringing that excitement. I mean, sometimes I personally feel like, oh, Vancouver, but it's just like I look forward to February because it's about that pulse, that exchange.  Fay Nass 15:09 We can all kind of stay in our own silos and not really know what's happening in the world, but also not knowing what's happening in our local community. And I think the cultural context of Pusha is really that awareness of these intersections between what is important in terms of a thriving community locally, but it's also that exchange that happens with international partners.  Fay Nass 15:33 To not be afraid, I think we're in this cultural moment that we all want to do well, but it's also about pushing the boundaries that aesthetic and art forms are speaking for themselves and to not be afraid that things that are other than or the things that we don't know are maybe too much or risky and trusting that our Vancouver audiences and our international audiences are ready for material that may be challenging.  Fay Nass 16:00 And I think with all of those kind of the trust that Norman had in my work and then Joyce and yourself, that is to me the legacy of Push and I think there's intentionality around culture means, exchange by culture means also the fluidity that things are constantly shifting and we need to speak about them, we need to be brave about them and we need to kind of challenge each other in order to benefit in this kind of ecology that we existed.  Fay Nass 16:32 And I think that's something that Push has the power to do and I also think that it's an organization that can be innovative in order to move those conversations forward and I think, yeah, I mean, I hope that it just continues to do so, you know, under your artistic leadership I feel very confident that it will.  Ben Charland 16:58 That was a special episode of Push Play, in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run from January 23rd to February 9th, 2025. Push Play is produced by myself, Ben Charland, and Tricia Knowles.  Ben Charland 17:15 A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.  Ben Charland 17:34 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review.   

Gabrielle Martin chats with Miriam Fernandes, co-artistic director of Toronto's why not theatre. Show Notes Gabrielle and Miriam discuss:  What was the process of creating Prince Hamlet and bringing it to Vancouver? What does it mean to create work with and for those hard of hearing? How do you take a huge show that isn't built to tour on tour? How did your relationship with PuSh start? What was it like to collaborate with David Suzuki? How do you work with performers who don't have professional experience? How did why not theatre's artistic approach evolve, and how did your own artistic evolution fit into that? How do you incorporate stumbling into live art? What have you brought to why not theatre that has informed its direction? About Miriam Fernandes Miriam is a Toronto-based artist who has worked as an actor, director, and theatre-maker around the world.  Acting credits include Jungle Book (WYRD/Kidoons), Animal Farm (Soulpepper Theatre), Prince Hamlet (Why Not Theatre), Dinner with the Gods (Wolf and Wallflower, Sydney AU), The Snow Queen and A Sunday Affair (Theatre New Brunswick),  The Living (Summerworks Performance Festival), and Soliciting Temptation (Tarragon Theatre).  She has trained with the SITI Company, and is a graduate of Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.  Directing and creation credits include Nesen, (MiniMidiMaxi Festival, Norway) The First Time I Saw the Sea (YVA Company, Norway).  She is currently in development for a few new pieces that she is co-creating including an adaptation of the Mahabharata, Three Pigs, and a new play called Partition.  Miriam is the recipient of the JBC Watkins Award and was nominated for the inaugural Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize. About why not theatre When a well-respected global performer couldn't get an audition in Toronto, we knew it was time for a change. Ravi Jain moved back to Toronto after building a career in theatre in New York and London. After years of growth and creativity, his ambitions came to a standstill when traditional companies wouldn't welcome his voice. When adversity pushed, Ravi pushed back and launched Why Not. Since 2007, Why Not has taken on modern social issues and redefined what it means to be an independent theatre company. Ravi was later joined by Owais Lightwala and Kelly Read, in a unique tri-leadership team that was key to Why Not's success. Today, this leadership structure is being further expanded into a more collaborative model, with Ravi, Karen Tisch, and Miriam Fernandes at the helm. Together, we are forcing doors open, inventing, encouraging and building a creative community, welcoming stories that look and feel like Toronto, and sharing it all with the world. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded in Tkaronto (Toronto), on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. Tkaronto is covered by Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaties signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.   Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Miriam Fernandez of Why Not Theatre and is anchored around the 2019 Push Festival. Miriam is a Toronto -based artist and Why Not Theatre co -director who has worked as an actor, director, and theatre maker around the world.   Gabrielle Martin 00:39 She has trained with the Citi Company and is a graduate of École Automacional de Tiâtre Jacques Le Coque in Paris. Miriam is the recipient of the JBC Watkins Award and was nominated for the inaugural Johanna Metcalfe Performing Arts Prize.   Gabrielle Martin 00:55 Since 2007, Why Not has taken on modern social issues and redefined what it means to be an independent theatre company. Its mission is to make things better through art, to reinvent how stories are told, to inspire new ways of thinking about creativity and civic engagement.   Gabrielle Martin 01:12 Here's my conversation with Miriam. And we are in Tkaranto, which is the traditional home of many First Nations, including the Mississauga of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Wendat, the Chippewa, and the Haudenosaunee.   Gabrielle Martin 01:30 And it is currently also the home of nations, including the Inuit and the Métis. And we are also in the backyard, Miriam's backyard. Yeah, and your new backyard, because you just moved here a couple weeks ago.   Gabrielle Martin 01:43 And so today we're gonna be focusing on Prince Hamlet, which was one of the Why Not Theatre works that has been presented at PUSH. So this was a 2019 PUSH presentation, but Why Not Theatre has also been presented at PUSH in 2014 with a brim full of asha, and in 2020 with what we won't, what you won't do for love.   Gabrielle Martin 02:04 But let's just jump right in. I would love to know about Prince Hamlet, about, if you could tell us a bit about this project, and then maybe how, what the process was for bringing that work to Vancouver.   Gabrielle Martin 02:18 Yeah.   Miriam Fernandes 02:19 So, Prince Hamlet is a show that we built actually in 2017 for the first time. It premiered at the theatre centre, where you were earlier today, and it was a completely deaf and hearing, fully accessible production.   Miriam Fernandes 02:34 So it's Hamlet basically remixed, and it centers a deaf performer, Don Janne Burley, at the centre of the show. Don plays Horatio, who's Hamlet's best friend, who's really the only person left living at the end of the play.   Miriam Fernandes 02:49 And so Hamlet, if you know the play, in his dying breath, he says, Horatio, tell the world my story. And so our production begins at the very end, with Horatio recounting the story through his memory.   Miriam Fernandes 03:02 And so, it was the first time that we at Ynot had ever worked with a deaf performer, and Don was really a ferocious champion around, Don is a third generation deaf person and an artist, and was really ferocious about creating a production that was completely intersectional, so that it wasn't about hearing people, including a deaf person, in the show.   Miriam Fernandes 03:26 It was actually really truly for both audiences. And so the entire show is bilingual, the whole show is both being signed by Don all the time. So she signs for like three and a half hours, as she's narrating, it's pretty remarkable.   Miriam Fernandes 03:40 And also the hearing act, the rest of the cast is hearing. And so the scenes kind of, it's kind of like two plays in parallel, that are intersecting throughout. So we... Super ambitious.   Gabrielle Martin 03:52 It was super ambitious. And that's why it's so memorable, too. It's an iconic piece of pushes that I've heard so much about.   Miriam Fernandes 03:59 You know, and it's funny, like most why not shows, like we don't know what we're making when we're making it. And so when we made it in 2017, we had no, it wasn't really built to tour, but it was clear.   Miriam Fernandes 04:10 Like it, it was so exciting that the audiences that came to see the show were truly mixed. It was like deaf and hearing audiences together. Most deaf audiences have never experienced Hamlet before because it's not, it's not accessible.   Miriam Fernandes 04:25 Why would you go to the theater if you can't, experience your language? And so John's translation of Hamlet was also like super beautiful and poetic. She is like a real master with, with language. And so she translated Shakespeare basically to a heightened poetic ASL.   Miriam Fernandes 04:44 And so, for deaf audiences, they were experiencing their language, but like in a really beautiful heightened way for the first time on stage like that in Hamlet. Audiences, so many people mentioned that it was like the first time that they experienced Hamlet like that, even though they'd seen the show a million times, but the visual component was like, it just brought a whole new dimension.   Gabrielle Martin 05:06 And I remember that I wasn't there, but I've heard so much that she also gave the keynote speech of the industry series because, or address of the industry series. And I think that choice, you know, reflecting on it is probably because of just how progressive and innovative and original this adaptation was.   Miriam Fernandes 05:29 Yeah, I mean Dawn, so Dawn is a Canadian artist who lives in Finland right now. She kind of lives between Canada and Finland because Finland has so much, it's a way better place to be deaf because you actually have access to interpreters and, um, work and there's national deaf theaters in Finland and Norway and Sweden.   Miriam Fernandes 05:49 And so Dawn has actually been a real champion for bringing a lot of that work back to Canada and we've been supporting her in creating her own company over the last few years, which people should check out, 1S1 Theater.   Miriam Fernandes 06:00 Um, she has a new show coming up this fall, which you can see on the website. Um, but it really, it all started out of Hamlet. So in 2017, we created Hamlet without any real idea that we were going to tour it.   Miriam Fernandes 06:11 And there was such a, an interest in the production and clearly like all of this conversation around like equity, which had been bubbling for years, like all of this language around diversity and equity and inclusion, um, it was really kind of like at a breaking point.   Miriam Fernandes 06:28 And so I think the interest in Hamlet and for, and for us, it was also like, it's not, it wasn't about inclusivity. It was actually an innovation in form that it was an artistic innovation. That's that, that's why the show is, is special.   Miriam Fernandes 06:42 And so there was a bunch of interest to tour it and we really wanted to tour it across Canada and push. I think we're one of the first folks that came on board.   Gabrielle Martin 06:50 And you said it wasn't really built to tour is that because it was 17 people on the road or the cast   Miriam Fernandes 06:55 So the cast was nine people, plus we had a stage management team of two or three, plus we have two interpreters who travel with us, and a producer, and then touring a show like Hamlet, which is intersectional, we went like, you can't just tour the show like you tour a regular show, like we have to be in contact with the box office, like the whole experience has to be accessible for deaf folks who never come to the theater otherwise.   Gabrielle Martin 07:19 that mean that you brought more people on the road or that you just had more conversations with the presenters leading up?   Miriam Fernandes 07:26 So the two interpreters we definitely brought on the road with us, but they were really Dawn's interpreters. And then each venue, basically it was a deeper conversation with each presenter. So each venue had front of house interpreters who were there to welcome deaf folks as they came into the theater.   Miriam Fernandes 07:43 There were, the way that we marketed the show was like completely different. Like it was something that hearing people would never think about, but like all of the print language was for a lot of deaf folks, English is not their first language, sign language is their first language.   Miriam Fernandes 07:59 And so having people spread the word through videos, through vlogs, like that's how the word spread. And like there were people, people drove from Saskatoon to Vancouver to see the show because there was so much demand.   Miriam Fernandes 08:11 You don't see that show across Canada. So it was really special to like have so many people show up in Vancouver to see the show.   Gabrielle Martin 08:18 And you had just started with why not at that time and you were the associate artistic director at that time And now you're the co -artistic director And so this was that your first tour then with the company?   Gabrielle Martin 08:30 Yeah, it was actually okay. Yeah, and so what was it like? Coming to push. What was your how did your relationship start with push? What was your perception of the festival when you were there?   Miriam Fernandes 08:40 No, it was really, really awesome. I think, uh, as someone who was born, who's from Toronto, like my point of references are like the Minato and Tiafah, and, um, kind of stuff that happens on the East coast of the States.   Miriam Fernandes 08:53 So, uh, having the chance, it's funny, even in Canada, like we were talking today about how East and West Toronto don't mix, it's often in Canada too, like East coast and West coast don't. It's, it's a big country.   Miriam Fernandes 09:06 Um, but going out to push was so awesome because I got to, uh, like meet so many Vancouver artists, which was really beautiful. We were performing at UBC, which was gorgeous. Like I'd only ever heard of UBC before.   Miriam Fernandes 09:19 Um, and like the audiences, it was clear, like the energy in the city was like all around push and it was such a big deal. I was there for the industry event because Dawn, uh, Dawn was the keynote, which was great.   Miriam Fernandes 09:31 And like, I met so many international presenters and also to like understand geographically, there were so many presenters and like artists from like Asia Pacific or Australia or New Zealand who were coming to Vancouver.   Miriam Fernandes 09:44 And I was like, Oh yeah. Like we in Toronto, we get like Europe kind of Europe and the States kind of coming up to Toronto, but it was so cool to be like, Oh yeah, there's like a whole, the other half of the world actually comes to Vancouver for push.   Miriam Fernandes 09:57 So it was great to meet people and yeah, hear what people are working on. And then.   Gabrielle Martin 10:02 In 2020, you came back, so just the next year, with What You Won't Do For Love. And that project is a collaboration with David Suzuki and David Suzuki's partner, Tara Cullis. And did you meet them while you were there then?   Miriam Fernandes 10:22 It's funny actually, when we came to push for Hamlet, the week before we did Hamlet in Vancouver, we spent a week with David and Tara just roughly researching this idea.   Gabrielle Martin 10:36 At that point, what was the idea for people who don't know?   Miriam Fernandes 10:39 So Ravi had reached out to David actually saying, Ravi had wanted to make a show about the climate and he had worked with a woman named Elena Mitchell on a show called Seasick, which is now Tour of the World.   Miriam Fernandes 10:51 And Ravi was saying, I want to make another piece about the climate and who else would you make that with than David Suzuki in Canada? And so he reached out to David in an email and David, originally the idea was for David to play Galileo in Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo.   Miriam Fernandes 11:06 And David was 84 at the time and he was like, hey, like I've never done a play. I'm super flattered. You asked. I would love to, but I don't think I'm going to memorize all of these lines. And so Ravi was like, okay, maybe that's not the right one.   Miriam Fernandes 11:20 Like let's like, if you're interested, let's try to like, see if we can make something. So over the time, David was also like trying to retire. He was 84, but he's like, he's never going to retire. He kind of retired now.   Miriam Fernandes 11:33 Anyways, he spent a lot of time talking about his wife, Tara and his kids and his grandkids. And so Ravi said, look, what if we, what if we actually try to make this show quality time with your wife and we try to make something with you and Tara?   Miriam Fernandes 11:45 And so everybody who knows David and Tara knows that David's kind of like the front of camera guy and Tara's doing everything in the background. Like she started the foundation. So, uh, we said, like, let's just, let's just spend some time.   Miriam Fernandes 12:00 David said, if you can convince Tara to do this, like it's, she says, yes, we're it. And so Tara, so we spent a week that, uh, before we did Hamlet, we spent a week with them at the DSF in Kitsilano, just kind of like exploring what this play could be.   Miriam Fernandes 12:18 Again, we had no idea what we were going to make. We didn't know what the form was going to be. We just knew it had to do with the two of them. And so we spent a week in a boardroom, listening to their stories and going through a bunch of pictures.   Miriam Fernandes 12:30 And then from there, we kind of, we gathered a bunch of stories, but we're still completely lost, but we're like, okay, it's clear that Tara's story, Tara's the center of this thing, which everybody knows David, but so few people know Tara.   Miriam Fernandes 12:43 And she's like a force of nature. She, she's so amazing, so inspiring. She was the executive, she started the David Suzuki foundation, was the executive director for many, many years. Like, uh, one of my personal heroes, she's amazing.   Miriam Fernandes 12:59 And so we knew that the show was going to be about the two of them, but really highlighting Tara. And so we just needed time to develop and then push was really awesome. So Franco was, uh, taking over push at that time.   Miriam Fernandes 13:12 And Franco said, well, why don't you come back and just, and develop this for a little while. And so, and then you can do some kind of sharing at push, which is really how we as a company develop work.   Miriam Fernandes 13:21 We're kind of we're company of divisors. Revvie and I both come from a Rekok background. And so iteration and reiteration is like just how we work. So we're like, great. We have like this idea of David and Tara and their stories.   Miriam Fernandes 13:34 And we have three weeks in a rehearsal hall, and then we're going to have a show to, we're going to present something.   Gabrielle Martin 13:40 In those three weeks, we're in Vancouver.   Miriam Fernandes 13:41 They were in Vancouver, they were in the Russian hall. And Push, so Push helped us organize the space and everything. And we had an amazing time. And it was actually during those three weeks that we kind of cracked open what the show was going to be.   Miriam Fernandes 13:56 Which was a conversational piece of theatre between David and Tara. And at the time it was Ravi and I sitting with them.   Gabrielle Martin 14:02 Mm -hmm and is that the version that you did?   Miriam Fernandes 14:04 in 2020. That was the version we did in 2020. So it was David and Tara and Ravi and I having a dinner party, like a kind of quote unquote dinner party. And we had a Vancouver design team, Jamie Nesbitt, Meg Rowe.   Miriam Fernandes 14:18 And it was really beautiful. We captured all their stories. I scribed them all because we were like, there's their stories.   Gabrielle Martin 14:27 incredible lifetimes.   Miriam Fernandes 14:28 crazy. Yeah. You could spend months sitting at this table. Yeah. But I started kind of scribing them and then we cut and we were, we shaped the piece like that basically in our like Airbnb for over three weeks.   Miriam Fernandes 14:40 We were up to like two in the morning every day just trying to put it together. But it was, it was so awesome to not only have the space to like develop over three weeks, but have a presentation in a festival like that at the end of that.   Miriam Fernandes 14:54 I feel like um, that was really, it was really important for them. Sure.   Gabrielle Martin 15:00 And it's not, that's a more rare kind of engagement that Push has in terms of hosting artists in residency. You know, it's something that has been done, but just the nature of being a present, an organization focused on presentation, not having our own space, makes it a little bit more complicated to host artists in that way.   Gabrielle Martin 15:19 So yeah, I'm so glad that why not was able to develop this work? And then you ended up doing a version that was a digital version after that, because then the pandemic hit. And I remember just side note experiencing that work, which was a wonderful introduction to Tara and also to this idea of thinking about climate and also contextualizing it in relationships and kind of having that micro to macro relationship where those two conversations happening simultaneously through the work.   Gabrielle Martin 15:52 And I remember also you brought up questions, I believe you brought up questions about kind of the implication of having children in this time. Yeah, and now I have a two year old and you will soon have.   Gabrielle Martin 16:03 Nine months pregnant. Maybe, so questions that maybe we're still reconciling.   Miriam Fernandes 16:10 Well, the thing is funny actually being, because before I got pregnant, I mean, it's, I feel like for, for me, it really was a question. Like, how do you think about bringing more people into this world?   Miriam Fernandes 16:20 Uh, but David and Tara, like they're so, the, the central question of the play really is if we could love the planet, the way that we love the people who are closest to us, would we change? Cause we would do anything for the people that we love.   Miriam Fernandes 16:32 We would do anything to protect them. And so David tells us great story about, uh, his daughter, Savran, who says like she has, who has two kids who now runs the DSF, she's the new executive director.   Miriam Fernandes 16:45 And she says, my kids are my commitment to the future and your understanding of the future and the generations to come is actually just becomes visceral as soon as you have kids. And so that really stuck with me.   Miriam Fernandes 16:58 And like the conversations that we had that we unpacked was, uh, really powerful for me as like, as a person and as an artist, but also just thinking about like, uh, the power of love. Like, actually, if love is as Kara says in the play, like love will make us do impossible things and this climate crisis right now is impossible.   Miriam Fernandes 17:20 So we have to fuel it with something more than just science. It's the statistics are not doing it for us right now. So.   Gabrielle Martin 17:27 And what you won't do for love, obviously you're working with folks who don't have a professional performance practice, and that wasn't a new thing for you. So, A Brimful of Asha was the work that was presented in 2014 at Push.   Gabrielle Martin 17:43 I understand there was a similar theme there. Maybe you could talk to us about kind of the evolution of Why Not Theatre's artistic approach over these years, and how your own artistic approach fits into that mix.   Miriam Fernandes 17:58 So I would say, so Brimful of Asha was the first show that Why Not Brought to Push, like you said, in 2014. It was a show that Ravi Jain, who's my co -artistic director, did with his real -life mother.   Miriam Fernandes 18:10 And they tell the story, the true story of how Ravi's parents tried to arrange his marriage in India and it went very poorly, but it's a very funny story. And Ravi's mom is somebody who's never been on stage before.   Miriam Fernandes 18:21 She spent her whole life raising kids, cooking, like taking care of them. And so, but she is hilarious and completely steals the show. And so when Ravi was making the show, he said, he thought like, if we're going to tell this story about arranged marriage, both of our perspectives actually have to be part of it.   Miriam Fernandes 18:41 And so they crafted the show. It's actually very, it inspired what you want to do for love in a lot of ways in that it's a non -performer who's on stage. So how do we create the container around that person to make them the most comfortable so that they can shine?   Miriam Fernandes 18:56 And so if you ever, anybody who's seen Brimful, it's toured around the world for like 10 years now. It's great. It's like set in Ravi's mom's kitchen and they're sitting at the kitchen table and they're trying to convince the audience who's right, if it should be a love marriage or if it should be a arranged marriage.   Miriam Fernandes 19:13 It's very, very funny. Mrs. Jain is very convincing. And so I would say like that work, that was one of the first like major works that why not created. That work kind of set the stage for a lot of the way that the company has developed and Ravi's work and by extension, the work that we've made together, we just really all it has to do with like who is in the room, the people in the room creating the project will determine what the product is.   Miriam Fernandes 19:41 So in a similar way with Hamlet, because Dawn was there and because Dawn is who she is and who was fighting for the deaf audience to have the exact same amount of access to the language and the story as a hearing audience.   Miriam Fernandes 19:56 We made that show what it was because of Dawn. It would have been a completely different show if it was somebody else. And so in creating What You Want To For Love, which was again, we were looking at a show with non -performers, people who are not used to being on stage, Tara, especially like David's used to being in front of a camera and speaking in the script, but Tara has never done that before.   Miriam Fernandes 20:18 And so we basically wanted to create a container that would showcase her and support her. And so we sit at the table. We don't, we have our scripts with us in front of us and we tell the audience, we kind of make a joke of it at the beginning because David says, I don't want to, I'm not going to memorize lines.   Miriam Fernandes 20:35 And we say, great, we won't memorize any lines. We'll just read off the script. And so those kinds of like little tools, which not only support the performers, but they also kind of like open up a vulnerable relationship with the audience that started to become a language that became really successful in that work.   Miriam Fernandes 20:57 Because then we're all, we don't, we're not actually pretending, we're like, we're all here together. We're, we're. It's honest. It's honest. Like we are who we are. David and Tara are David's 80, 88 years old now.   Miriam Fernandes 21:11 Like you're still doing the show. David's 88. I won't say how old Tara is, but like there will be moments where we stumble and it's okay. It's like, it's where it, it actually is the thing that we do in theater that's live.   Miriam Fernandes 21:25 And so I feel like, yeah, the evolution from Brimful of Asha to another show that we did made called like mother, like daughter, which is similarly inspired by Brimful of Asha to what you want to do for love.   Miriam Fernandes 21:39 There are even bits of it in Mahabharata, which is our newest and largest show where there's a meal in between the two productions. And there's a meal that's basically myself and Sharda Ishwar, who's a community storyteller.   Miriam Fernandes 21:53 And so we sit at a table while everybody's having a meal and we have our scripts with us and we speak about the show. And it's, again, it's crafted, it's scripted. It feels improvisational, but it is very scripted.   Miriam Fernandes 22:05 And it's again, a way to like highlight a non -performer in a setting that they're comfortable in that lets them shine and that where the whole audience can kind of just like relax their shoulders because we're not pretending.   Gabrielle Martin 22:19 All right, and had you been working in this way before joining WhyNot in 2018?   Miriam Fernandes 22:26 No, uh, 20, yeah, 2019, 2019, not, not so, um, not so specifically, I, yeah, no, not so specifically. I think it's a pretty unique way that why not because it is very difficult and time consuming, but it's worthwhile.   Gabrielle Martin 22:44 how did your artistic practice match and meet the company's work and how did you end up with why not in this role and what you what either were kind of underlying interest that you shared or something that you brought that has in informed its direction so   Miriam Fernandes 23:07 I come from a theatre -making background, so I studied at a school in Paris called Le Coq, the name of Jack Le Coq. And so for me, I think the way that Ravi and I make work is very similar in that it's a very iterative process.   Miriam Fernandes 23:27 And so it's tricky because you never, you're just going on instinct. Sometimes we start with the script, sometimes we don't start with the script. A lot of the time it's just, it's impulse. So for what you want to do for love, we're like, we think there are love songs.   Miriam Fernandes 23:44 So we spent a bunch of time with the whole creative team just gathering everybody's favorite love songs and listening to them and getting into the mood. We're like, we think it's about love and the planet.   Miriam Fernandes 23:57 And so we're just kind of following that impulse and provoking with questions.   Gabrielle Martin 24:02 I mean, that's a great answer. I just threw that at you, the sort of genuine curiosity in the moment. But I think you're speaking to it, you know, that just the process of devising and clearly you and Ravi have a similar language and kind of trust in following your intuition.   Gabrielle Martin 24:24 And I would imagine that there's some affinity between your intuitive impulses.   Miriam Fernandes 24:29 Yeah, there's definitely like there there are things where we both completely agree on and then there are other ways where we just pull each other in different directions and sometimes he's right and sometimes I'm right, but it's like it's the trust to know that like, okay, I'm going to let this person lead me and then I'm going to lead and then we're going to find a way together.   Miriam Fernandes 24:46 Mahabharata was kind of like the, the biggest process. We were writing it together for five years. Wow. And so it was really hard, but also really amazing to be in a process for that long and trying to, and both of us trying to follow our impulses together and find our way through this huge maze of stories.   Gabrielle Martin 25:07 Well, it's been so exciting to follow the development of the company. And this project, Mahabharata, has been a national creation fund supported project. So the scale of the work has grown, the international acclaim and distribution, the company's capacity.   Gabrielle Martin 25:28 And I should also mention that I was a 2021 This Gen Fellow. So part of the cultural leadership stream, a mentorship program of why not. And I was paired with Marcus Yousuf. It was an incredible long -term mentorship, which has continued since then.   Gabrielle Martin 25:48 So that's how I first met Miriam and Ravi and was introduced to your work. Thanks so much for chatting with me and providing us with a little bit more context and insight into your relationship with Push and into your practice.   Gabrielle Martin 26:03 Thank you.   Tricia Knowles 26:06 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.   Tricia Knowles 26:27 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabrielle Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Gabrielle Martin chats with performance artist Ralph Escamillan. Show Notes Gabrielle and Ralph discuss:  How did you come to know about PuSh and get a commission for Hinky Punk? How do you elevate the performer into the visually iconic? What is Hinky Punk? How do you embody aspects of queerness in one performer? How do you work with restriction? What role can costume play? What is the value of ballroom culture in other artistic practices? How do you find your place in society like you find your category in ballroom—and then transcend it? Does the collective community ethos of ballroom translate into your other work? What does it mean to have a true open door with the community? What is the cultural context and significance of PuSh? How do we continue building bridges between the different artistic communities? About Ralph Escamillan Ralph Escamillan is a queer, Canadian-Filipinx performance artist, teacher and community leader based on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations - on so called Vancouver, BC. Starting at age 14, Ralph trained first in Breakdancing then explored a multitude of other street dance styles such as HipHop, Popping, House, Waacking and Locking. His passion for dance expanded to include training in Vogue, Ballroom, Ballet, Modern, Jazz and was a graduate of Contemporary Training Program Modus Operandi in 2015.  Ralph has worked/toured with Vancouver companies: Company 605, Co. Erasga Dance, Kinesis Dance Somatheatro, Out Innerspace Theatre, Wen Wei Dance, Mascall Dance, apprenticed with Kidd Pivot in (2014) and and was a guest dancer with Ballet BC (2020).  In the commercial industry, he's worked with choreographers including AJ Aakomon, Luther Brown, Kenny Ortega, Tucker Barkely and Mandy Moore as well as artists Victoria Duffield and Zendaya Coleman, and was a guest dancer for Janet Jackson's "Unbreakable" tour in 2015.  With his company FakeKnot he creates work that strives to understand the complexities of identity using sound, costume, technology and the body. Ralph is currently premiered his all philippine cast work inspired by the queen of Philippine textile Piña in Vancouver May 4-6 2023 (Co-Presentation with SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs and The Dance Centre).  Ralph 'Posh' Gvasalia Basquiat has been in the Ballroom Scene since 2014, founding his own Kiki House of Gvasalia in Vancouver and joined the Mainstream House of Basquiat in 2021. The founder and Artistic/Executive Director of the non-profit organization VanVogueJam, Ralph shares his passion for Vogue/Ballroom culture at his weekly pay-what-you-can classes and vogue balls, acting as a beacon for the queer dance/culture in Western Canada.  Ralph was recently awarded the Inaugural Miriam Adams Bursary fund at the DCD Hall Of Fame in October 2022 in Toronto, aswell as the Inaugural RBC Emerging Artist Award at the 2023 Governor General Performing Arts Awards in Ottawa. 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.  Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Ralph Eschimulen and is anchored around the 2018 Push Festival. Ralph, aka Posh, Visalia, Basquiat, is a queer, Canadian, Philippine ex -performance artist, choreographer, and teacher based in Vancouver.  Gabrielle Martin 00:40 As the Artistic Director of Fake Knot, he develops collaborative performance works that have been presented both nationally and internationally. His work questions notions of identity, tradition, and clothing, and the influence of pop culture in a globalizing world.  Gabrielle Martin 00:54 Ralph is a recipient of the inaugural Miriam Adams Bursary Fund at the DZD Hall of Fame in October 22 in Toronto, as well as the Inaugural National Arts Centre RBC Emerging Artist Award at the 2023 Governor General Performing Arts Awards in Ottawa.  Gabrielle Martin 01:11 Here's my conversation with Ralph. I have been acknowledged that we are here on this stolen traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh.  Gabrielle Martin 01:25 I am unbelievably privileged to be on this land. And we're downtown, we're close to your offices.  Ralph Escamillan 01:33 and new offices, and also close to where I used to grew up. I actually grew up in downtown Vancouver. I went to school at Lord Roberts Elementary and came to secondary, grew up in Chinatown. So this is, I'm a Vancouver kid, for real.  Gabrielle Martin 01:47 urban experience. Yes, yes, yeah. OK, so yeah, we're just going to dive right into it. 2018 Push co -commissioned, or maybe it started earlier, you can let us know, Push co -commissioned Hinky Punk, which is a work by you through the company Fake Knot.  Gabrielle Martin 02:05 And then it was presented as part of Club Push that year in 2018. And I had the privilege of seeing it in 2021 at the Vancouver International Dance Festival. You saw the report? That's what we met. You saw it in person.  Ralph Escamillan 02:18 right you saw the little small because he did it online right he got you came in okay  Gabrielle Martin 02:30 Okay, so just take us back to the beginning of your relationship with push shredded it start have the conversation start  Ralph Escamillan 02:35 with this work specifically with HIKI PONK, correct? Or just like, what do you want to do?  Gabrielle Martin 02:39 come to know the festival and then yeah and then how did the conversation start around commissioning hinki fun  Ralph Escamillan 02:46 Yeah, truthfully, I feel like my relationship to Push when I was younger was actually quite nebulous. I was still really learning, even until my first performance with Push, I was like, what was it? Because my training didn't come entirely from contemporary or ballet first, and like that kind of dance, kind of making world, and it was more street.  Ralph Escamillan 03:08 But I think one of the first shows I saw might be, I think it was Hiroki Omeda.  Gabrielle Martin 03:14 Oh, yeah.  Ralph Escamillan 03:15 During Push, that was in maybe 2017, maybe, or even earlier. I remember that show, I think, was such a great introduction to the festival in that it was this really groundbreaking performance work and that embodied the values that Push has till today, I think, and like, in pushing.  Ralph Escamillan 03:40 You know, where performance can be and live and that show really, I think, transfixed to me even now and actually, I think, did penetrate into that first work in some capacity. And yeah, that was, I guess, my introduction.  Ralph Escamillan 03:56 And then learning more about it and seeing the breadth of programming, I think it's really exciting to think that it's still here, it's still in the city, and how much work that takes to maintain something as a behemoth as Push.  Gabrielle Martin 04:15 And we'll talk about that a little bit later, like your work with Vancouver Vogue Jam because you're, Van Vogue Jam, Van Vogue Jam, because you are artistic director of multiple companies, so you have a sense of that and, you know, but today we're gonna focus a little bit more on the fake not work.  Gabrielle Martin 04:29 So, did you approach Push with that project or did Push approach you?  Ralph Escamillan 04:33 Yeah, so how it worked, how Higgipunk worked originally was a commission for the Vancouver Art Gallery Fuse that happened, I believe, in 2016, around 2016 -2017. And they were doing like a kind of retrospective of queer art making, and Paris's Burning was one of the documentaries they featured during that, and Joy Cesario was actually the guest curator for the programming that time.  Ralph Escamillan 05:02 And she knew I was kind of into voguing, into ballroom, and commissioned me to make something in response to Paris's Burning, which is easy because it's like it's just make something about ballroom. And I had, like the initial thought, because I was so new to ballroom still that time, was like my experience of battling, of being a walker, being in competition, and me and the sound composers I was working with at the time,  Ralph Escamillan 05:33 we were both really heavily entrenched in this ballroom thing. And we wanted to build this solo that kind of showed the inner workings, or the thought process, and the fear, and the grandeur, and the extremes.  Ralph Escamillan 05:51 And doing it in the gallery, when it transposed into the gallery, we actually ended up performing with all the Andy Warhol prints. Originally the rotunda was the thought, but a way for us to get the audience enveloped into the work is also a quadraphonic soundscape.  Ralph Escamillan 06:11 And the rotunda made it really hard to do a quadraphonic sound, because it's beautiful, but sonically it's really hard to control. So we wanted just a room, and we ended up working on a 4x4 plinth, which became, actually moved forward into the premiere of the work as a way to really specify the performative space, but also elevate the performer to transform them into an iconic image, or a structure,  Ralph Escamillan 06:41 and visually, from an audience perspective, put them lower to the character.  Gabrielle Martin 06:47 Could you just talk a little bit more about, yeah, just continuing on this stream of thought? What is the word? What is in Kefunk?  Ralph Escamillan 06:55 Yeah, Hankypunk, from that point on after, as we got time to develop it and research it to like my first grant that we got, leading up to the push, the club push shows, we leaned into the iconography of, of like what that is found in queer culture.  Ralph Escamillan 07:12 These images are these like superhuman characters that exist that kind of define a lot of queerness. How we communicate in queerness is like, is through these icons, through these names, through these, these brands of people.  Ralph Escamillan 07:30 Yeah, so the solo really became this idea of embodying these hyper mask and hyper feminine figures found in the media. And I think someone, and it being a solo, and my fluidity in my own gender, I think really lends itself to that transformation within like the hour of time, and working with restriction to, which is something that I carry on in my work now is like, how, and which I think is an extension of being a queer person of color,  Ralph Escamillan 08:04 feeling the boundaries that you're able to take up. But also making use of that and what does that mean to not seeing it as like a negative, but also more like acknowledging the parameters and what can you do with them.  Ralph Escamillan 08:21 I find that like the four by four cube, we really exhausted the capacity of what that cube could do.  Gabrielle Martin 08:28 And I really appreciate having seen Paris as burning this, at least the seed of it being in response to that, and I think that that's really important, that framing, and literal framing, and then a reference to the social parameters, specifically for queer folks of color.  Ralph Escamillan 08:50 And then the introduction of some video, new media design, projection design with Schmerich was really exciting because I wanted to incorporate more images into the work that I couldn't do just with the body.  Ralph Escamillan 09:04 Not saying that the body can't do that, but at that time I was really ambitious and I wanted projection, I wanted a hologram. And we ended up buying this like crazy like pepper scram from like Belgium or something that, and then I got this set design made by Underground Circuit.  Ralph Escamillan 09:23 Wait, Underground Circuit is Peter. So I was kind of leaning into like some circuit stuff. All of this work, like this piece came at the end of my graduation of coming from Out of Modus. So I had a lot of like big ideas and I look at the piece now and like it's beautiful.  Ralph Escamillan 09:41 It's really crazy that we did so much. It's insane.  Gabrielle Martin 09:45 Incredible like debut. I mean, I know that you've been performing before but would you say that this is kind of like your Dave you choreographic work Yes, I would say yeah  Ralph Escamillan 09:53 Yeah, for sure. This was the debut of the work I did with Fake Knot, and it foreshadowed the work that I do now, I think, still, and it was really an accumulation of all these ideas and all these experiences I've already had as a performing artist, as working with other people, but also my aspirations of where I think performance can transform into.  Ralph Escamillan 10:14 I'm learning now that I'm like, wow, that was so ambitious to also do it at the Fox, because this wasn't even a main stage show in a way. This is really meant to be, because Club Push historically has been this like, oh, it's a show.  Ralph Escamillan 10:27 Just come in and do your thing. Of course, with varying degrees, but...  Gabrielle Martin 10:33 because it's a bar.  Ralph Escamillan 10:35 So after there's all the like the bigger shows too like later in the evening and That I really took the opportunity of like getting extra grant funding on top of that to build this like pretty big show in a way Was pretty wild and I think even Joyce I remember was like surprised It was like so I didn't think you were gonna do all that And I think that's always like my hope is like you almost like surpass the expectation.  Ralph Escamillan 11:00 Yeah And like and it was genuine is really of interest and I think early on to this idea of costume played a role because I love the color blue and the blue sequin costume became the motif of the whole work and I worked with like a costumer and local customer at the time and say I want these sequins and But we couldn't afford like all the beautiful finishing So like the inside of the costume like like sharp sequins like I have a scar and it's first week years performing this piece just from like the sequins and I know but it was so beautiful and like and then also the ability this what sequins are able to do in the history of sequins But with glamour and like pomp and and like camp just lent itself Additionally to the concept of the work and then also how we use light to transform it to just like basic LED colors like you can change the blue like it just shifts so much and Yeah,  Ralph Escamillan 11:53 it was this idea like how do you pull that one thread? Like how do we keep pulling pulling pulling from that one idea of iconography of the image? Yeah, I'm still super excited and proud of it And I don't think if I were ever to redo it now it would I would want to remount it in someone else Because it's such a hard work  Gabrielle Martin 12:14 Um, an hour solo  Ralph Escamillan 12:16 So on a little cube, on a four foot high, four foot cube. It's pretty insane. Like it's like.  Gabrielle Martin 12:22 Your face is covered.  Ralph Escamillan 12:23 covered all the motifs are still in my work now it's like it's funny it just transformed  Gabrielle Martin 12:29 That's what I was going to ask you about. So that was 2018. We, I mean, it was a little sneak peek, but we are collaborating with Dan Vogue Jam, where Push is going to co -produce the winning ball for 2025 Push, which we're very excited about.  Gabrielle Martin 12:43 And so, but also, you know, you've continued to create work with Bake Not. You have a curatorial practice. Can you just talk about that moment with Hinky Punk, premiering it at the Fox Cabaret to now, where, how your artistic practices go?  Ralph Escamillan 12:59 Yeah. What's exciting, I mean, what's cool is like tracking that time too with Push, with like, with HinkyPunk, was that's when I started teaching classes in the city, the free buy donation. That's kind of when DBJ started, it's 2017, 2017 -ish.  Ralph Escamillan 13:13 And we, in tandem with the classes, the community also has grown so much since that time. And for me, one way that I've articulated, at least through the funding bodies, and people that don't really understand what ballroom is, is that in my kind of practice of wanting to show the value of ballroom culture in other artistic spaces, is that like, it has its own codes, it has its own forms of curation and artistic practice that parallel,  Ralph Escamillan 13:47 if not even go over a lot of the Eurocentric art practices that we know today. And in the idea of how its way of making is not only individual, but it truly is like a community practice, which I think is a really, especially at a time now where I think a lot of people are longing connection and forms of community.  Ralph Escamillan 14:16 I'm really inspired and happy to be a part of a community that is actually community -based first, focus first, but because of that, the art that comes out of it through the balls and what's put on the runway is just so much more invested in every way.  Ralph Escamillan 14:37 There's so much care and wanting to constructively one -up themselves and one -up each other, which I think it's like...  Gabrielle Martin 14:48 Do you find that to be true across ballroom, in ballroom culture, nationally, internationally? Do you tour internationally with this work and with this practice? Or would you say that's particular to Vancouver?  Ralph Escamillan 15:03 I think it's ingrained in the ballroom culture in general, right? Because I guess the history of ballroom, of course, is coming from the Black, Latinx, the trans -queer communities of Harlem, and the ballroom, these balls are a space for people to really explore and become things that they're not allowed to yet in society.  Ralph Escamillan 15:23 And what I think is exciting is that now that tool of the faking is becoming realized. These people that are dressing up to look like executive realness are actually CEOs of huge companies, or people that are making best -dressed garments, or are actually designing for celebrities now, like the transition, and that social shift, and that tool that you learn about, I think the most important skill you come out of ballroom is,  Ralph Escamillan 15:55 how do you find your place in society and understand it to a point where you transcend what it can be? And in ballroom, it's like finding your category. How can you find your category, make moments in it, and transcend it, and push it forward, which I think is so cool and exciting, and it creates a sense of past -present.  Ralph Escamillan 16:20 We have to acknowledge the past, too, and we honor that through shouting them out through being inspired by them bringing them forward. There's all this intergenerational knowledge that is shared, because our experiences and how we exchange in ballroom is through the balls, is through showing what we put on the floor.  Ralph Escamillan 16:38 That's how we shout out. And it's through participating. It's not just writing or building within your own practice. It's like you have to put it forward in order for it to be remembered, to be physicalized, to be valued.  Ralph Escamillan 16:56 This idea of being seen becomes so important.  Gabrielle Martin 17:00 And it seems like the creative process is often also done in community and collaboration. I mean, I know traditionally in contemporary dance practice, like there's a lot of choreographers who are working in their studio by themselves, but my sense, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's a lot of ideas being workshopped in the collective.  Ralph Escamillan 17:23 Yeah, collectively, but all the time. And what I was saying recently, we just had a ball in the city recently, and I feel like, and it's a similar in street dance, the work is a continual one. So every time you walk on a ball, you're adding to your story, you're adding to your narrative.  Ralph Escamillan 17:42 And so people will remember what you did the ball before, the ball before that, and if you're able to build that storyline, like the idea of it is a continuing it, and how do you continue to build upon it.  Ralph Escamillan 17:53 And so it's almost like a continuous work. Like, so it's not just like a piece, every ball is like a piece, but your whole career in ballroom is a performance. It's a whole performance, which has been really cool to be able to encapsulate.  Gabrielle Martin 18:09 And would you say that also for your work with Fake Knot, that there are themes that you're exploring through every piece? Also, you're speaking about community and you've been really central in establishing this ballroom community in Vancouver, or at least facilitating it.  Gabrielle Martin 18:25 Does that community ethos, communal ethos, ethos of collectivity, does that also translate into your work with Fake Knot?  Ralph Escamillan 18:35 Yeah, wholeheartedly, yes, I think. More so now, I think I'm understanding it more now. Because I thought that they had to be separate. Because I don't see that want of... I think there's efforts of people wanting to build community and contemporary practice in the contemporary community, but it just hits a wall, because how esoteric contemporary practice can be.  Ralph Escamillan 18:56 And it's like, I don't know, girl. But I'm just like, oh, actually, it's not about just the practice, but it's also the environments we make for people to be together, which I think I'm learning is actually community.  Ralph Escamillan 19:10 To me, it's not just about the sharing practice. So even, say for P &Y, my most recent work I did with Pineapple Fiber, building, having the fiesta piece in the beginning of the show, and having exhibits and webinar, auxiliary programming as ways to connect to the work, I feel like we found a little small community through there.  Ralph Escamillan 19:31 And that was maybe a starting point of, oh, how can I involve, not just community, but also the educational piece into the practice, into my work. And I feel with my newer work, which is about ballroom as well, My House, which is very, very new, which is kind of like a coming back to ballroom through Fake Knot, and almost like an extension of the work that we did with Hinky Punk, actually, I would say.  Ralph Escamillan 19:57 I'm really questioning, how do we bring ballroom community into practice? And I think I'm proposing is like, including it opening the doors for rehearsal from the beginning of the process. And what does that mean to have an open door kind of policy for people from the community to come observe and watch and learn and or question and have dialogue?  Ralph Escamillan 20:22 Because for me, bringing ballroom into on the stage, and maybe any forms that aren't meant to be on there, or weren't originally made to be on stage, what does it mean to bring our culture there? What does it mean to bring our community there?  Ralph Escamillan 20:35 And also understanding that it's gonna be, it's different. We can't just put a ball on a stage. Like, when we're with Push, that's not what we're gonna be doing. What's happening is like, Push is supporting the ability of putting a ball together.  Ralph Escamillan 20:49 It's like, the ball is in a piece, is what I'm trying to explain. And I think which is a very, it's a hard, I guess I'm learning from some artists and presenters in the country. Like, there is this like, not inability, but it's hard to understand what a ball is because the way we see work is like fixed in some sense.  Ralph Escamillan 21:15 I feel there's a fixedness. Whereas ballroom is so like random and like gorilla -like. And it is actually steeped with so much other threads that connect to it, politically and, I mean, politically, even within the scene, like politically and, but yeah, sorry, tangent.  Gabrielle Martin 21:37 Yeah, no, I mean I think that that is something that Push has valued from early days, you know, work that is not necessarily conventional piece there. And there are a lot of sit -downs, theater works, but like I think fundamentally there's an interest and an excitement to Push form, to play with form, and to honor like different types of artistic experience within the festival.  Ralph Escamillan 22:06 What I would add, though, maybe just to lean into what does make it curatorial, like what makes a ball a curatorial place is, I guess, whenever anyone's putting a ball together, there's always a theme or a concept or an idea, and all the different categories have different effects or costume proposals that are really prompts for people that are walking to explore.  Ralph Escamillan 22:33 So I think there's curation in that practice. There's also curation in the panel, the judges that you bring in, and also curation in the programming that's surrounding it. So the workshop series that surrounds it, or like a potluck or like a barbecue, you know, like they're, and so that's how I've been framing what curation means to me in context of ballroom and which I'm excited to explore with a push,  Ralph Escamillan 22:58 like how does that, how does it change when we have a festival that has this reputation of pushing, you know.  Gabrielle Martin 23:06 Stay tuned. Stay tuned. And so, you have this artistic practice in ballroom. What does fake knots serve you? Or how does it serve you in regard to what your artistic needs are? Why create work outside of the context of ballroom?  Ralph Escamillan 23:31 Oh my gosh. It's interesting, I think, so originally Fake Knot really was, I want to find a moniker for my work where it wasn't my name first, it wasn't about the Ralph. I mean ironically all work is about autobiographical, so it's like I didn't know that until I guess later after.  Ralph Escamillan 23:53 So yeah, I guess I can't really take the work away from the person who makes it, but I think for me it still becomes a container for the multiplicity of ideas that I have that transcend not just ballroom but also like contemporary ideas and what I'm learning though is like BBJ and Fake Knot, like they are, like they have this like interesting relationship like that can overlap and like cross through,  Ralph Escamillan 24:22 but I like being able to delineate my practice into two separate kind of world, I mean many, many, many hats and I feel it helps me create boundaries for a creative process, but they definitely feed into each other and I think what I'm learning with Fake Knot is that at this moment it's been a container to explore like textile and fabric and clothing as ways to create choreographic narrative and I don't think I yet,  Ralph Escamillan 24:53 I understand how that overlaps with my ballroom persona, but I'm still interested in seeing how I can contain it on a staged space and I also understand the value of me taking up those kind of spaces still through Fake Knot.  Ralph Escamillan 25:11 So yeah, maybe there's a world where they'll like become one. No, they don't need to, I like thank you for sharing.  Gabrielle Martin 25:18 And so, we're very honored that the Van Woon Jam has honored us with the opportunity to present the Winter Ball with you, because it is going to be an iconic moment, I think, within the history of the festival, and it's our 20th anniversary, and it's a special festival.  Gabrielle Martin 25:36 And so, yeah, I'm wondering if you could reflect on why you're interested in that partnership. What is the cultural context of push in your eyes, and the significance of push, either within the city, or with regard to the work that you're doing?  Ralph Escamillan 25:51 Well, for me, I think what's exciting about Push is one, the audience that it brings. And I think it has a cult following of people that want to see weird and new stuff. And I feel like even though we've been doing ballroom in this city for the last eight years now, people still don't know about ballroom.  Ralph Escamillan 26:17 And I'm hoping that this ball with Push becomes an opportunity for people to learn more about what ballroom is, more than just the Vogue Madonna video or Paris is Burning or what we see in mass media, but actually see the complexities and the value of it.  Ralph Escamillan 26:35 And I think aligning it with Push gives that opportunity. And it also takes up some space that I think Push is wanting to offer, and it's part of the ship that Push is wanting to see, I think, is how do we include these communities that are already making art somewhere else.  Ralph Escamillan 26:54 It's really just like, here's the space to do it. Here's the resources to do it, which I think is the conversation we want when it comes to forms of reconciliation and also forms of building trust back to these communities that maybe would never watch a Push show because they never thought that they were allowed to or they knew what to expect.  Ralph Escamillan 27:14 So for me, I think my whole practice that transcends everything that I do is really like, how can I continue building bridges between the different artistic worlds and not just Vancouver, but within the country and hopefully further out into the world?  Ralph Escamillan 27:31 Because I think once we value more of each other's practices, the stronger a community we can become, and the more informed we can be, and excited, and passionate, and supportive. So I think that's what I've noticed in my whole career and still now is this like, it's like closing off.  Ralph Escamillan 27:57 And I think a lot of it closes off because people are afraid. People are scared. But I really offer people to go outside, just go outside and see what's out there in the world and be curious, not just like in your own practice, but in other people's practices with respect, with respect.  Ralph Escamillan 28:19 And find those connections. So I think those connections, at least for me as someone who does like wonderful Manko now, finding all these new connections, it's so inspiring and excites me and keeps me passionate and keeps me wanting to learn more about my body and what dance means to me and why I even perform.  Ralph Escamillan 28:38 It keeps me pumped. So I hope to share that with other people, that there is value in putting yourself in a place of risk or challenge.  Gabrielle Martin 28:50 I love hearing you speak about this because that speaks to me and what I feel excited about with regard to push and the space it occupies and what it can be possible with regard to just creating a sense of impossibility, challenging our assumptions of challenging how we see the world and therefore also how we understand ourselves with the world, whether it's as individuals, as artists.  Gabrielle Martin 29:21 Thanks so much, Ralph. I'm so excited for 2025 and beyond.  Ralph Escamillan 29:26 No, it's not that far away.  Ben Charland 29:31 That was a special episode of Push Play, in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run from January 23rd to February 9th, 2025. Push Play is produced by myself, Ben Charland, and Tricia Knowles.  Ben Charland 29:48 A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.  Ben Charland 30:24 And if you've enjoyed this video, please like, comment and subscribe! 

Gabrielle Martin chats with Owen Underhill, Artistic Director of Turning Point Ensemble. Show Notes Gabrielle and Owen discuss:  How did your relationship with PuSh begin? Why was interdisciplinary work important? What was Norman Armour's role in the early stages of Turning Point Ensemble? How did the company evolve in terms of process, practice, points of interest and project choices from its inception until now? What are the benefits of partnering with PuSh? What is the cultural context of PuSh and its significance in Vancouver? What are you excited about with upcoming projects? Of all the Turning Point projects at PuSh, of which do you have the fondest memories? About Turning Point Ensemble Founded in 2002 by its musician members, Turning Point Ensemble (TPE) is a large chamber ensemble (16 instrumentalists and conductor) with a mandate to increase the understanding and appreciation of music composed during the past hundred years. The ensemble has built a strong reputation for outstanding musicianship and linking seminal 20th century repertoire to contemporary works through thoughtful programming and innovative presentations. Uniquely and flexibly sized between a small chamber ensemble and a symphonic orchestra, TPE presentations offer a symphonic palette with a chamber music sensibility. In addition to its concerts, tours and recordings, the ensemble has regularly mounted innovative interdisciplinary productions including operas, and collaborations with dance, theatre, visual art and moving image. Turning Point Ensemble has released six CDs and one DVD on the Artifact, Centrediscs, Atma Classique, Redshift Records, Orlando, and Parma labels. We have presented a diverse range of repertoire, commissioned and performed works by Canadian and international composers, and partnered with a number of community and cultural organizations. In 2010, TPE was awarded the Rio Tinto Alcan Award for Music 2011 – the largest production prize for music in Canada for its presentation of FIREBIRD 2011, resulting in 4 sold out performances in March 2011 at The Cultch in Vancouver. Other significant large-scale interdisciplinary projects include Flying White -飞白 which was co-produced with Wen Wei Dance for the 2020 PuSh Festival with three sold-out performances and the premiere of air india [redacted] (5 performances November 2015). We have also had two major partnerships with Ballet British Columbia, and several projects with live music and moving image. We are proud to have presented a diverse range of repertoire, commissioned and performed works by Canadian and international composers, and partnered with a number of community and cultural organizations. A highlight is our ground-breaking cultural collaboration with the Westbank First Nation in the Okanagan for an outdoor presentation of Barbara Pentland/Dorothy Livesay's 1954 opera, The Lake at Quails' Gate Winery, the original homestead of Susan Allison and her family. The central artistic vision of the TPE is to bring to the public extraordinary music for large chamber ensemble written from the early 20th century through to present day. We draw audiences to this music through outstanding performances, and intelligent programming that creates a lively context for the music. We seek to create links from the music of earlier times to new music, to explore relationships and connections between composers and their music, to perform significant large-scale works from the Canadian and international repertoire, to collaborate with multiple art forms in extraordinary ways, and to establish meaningful long-term relationships with some of Canada's most talented composers through commissioning and multiple performances. Turning Point has toured internationally in 2018 to Asia and the Czech Republic, in addition to two Canadian tours. We have performed in many festivals and series including the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, New Music Concerts Toronto, ECM+ Montreal, groundswell Winnipeg, New Music Edmonton, MusicFest Vancouver, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, the Sound of Dragon Festival and the Modulus Festival. 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.   Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Owen Underhill of Turning Point Ensemble and is anchored around the 2017 Push Festival. Owen Underhill is a composer, conductor, and programmer who has been active in new music in Vancouver for several decades as the Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music, 1987 to 2000, and in his current role as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Turning Point Ensemble.   Gabrielle Martin 00:45 From 1981 until his recent retirement, he was a faculty member in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Turning Point Ensemble, founded by its musician members in 2002, is a collaborative large chamber ensemble committed to the performance and production of music of the 20th and 21st centuries in flexible and innovative contexts.   Gabrielle Martin 01:07 Intersecting with multiple art forms, crossing genres, working with diverse communities and partners, engaging with ideas of contemporary relevance, and inspiring and enlivening local, national, and international audiences.   Gabrielle Martin 01:21 Recent tours have included Montreal, Zagreb, Belgrade, Santander, Taipei, Beijing, and Singapore. Here's my conversation with Owen. We are here on Victoria Drive, just off Commercial Drive, in so -called Vancouver, which is on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh.   Gabrielle Martin 01:49 It's a place that both of us call home. You're just up the street.   Owen Underhill 01:55 Yes, I've been in the commercial drive area for quite a few years. Love it here.   Gabrielle Martin 02:00 and I grew up here as well. This, we're just across from Victoria Park, where I spent a lot of time as a kid. So in a feeling very comfortable in the neighborhood and happy to be having this conversation here and grateful to be on these indigenous lands.   Gabrielle Martin 02:15 Turning Point Ensemble has a wonderful, long, rich history with the Push Festival. We're gonna definitely be talking about the 2017 production that Push presented. Zappa meets Verez and Oswald, the present day composer refuses to die.   Gabrielle Martin 02:33 But there are also so many other projects that Push presented, so we're gonna get a chance to talk about some of those. Yeah, let's actually go right back to the beginning. Would you just talk to us about how your relationship with Push began?   Owen Underhill 02:50 Well, I've known Norman for many years and so witnessed the start of the push and from the beginning with Turning Point Ensemble we really wanted to be more than just a chamber ensemble and to also explore interdisciplinary work with theater and dance and with film and so we started looking at the work that Push was doing and thinking that it would be fit in very well some of the projects we had in mind to propose them through Norman.   Gabrielle Martin 03:34 And you knew Norman very well from the 80s.   Owen Underhill 03:39 Yeah, from the 80s. Yeah, Norman came to the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and I just come there also as a faculty member, as a composer, and we were starting a composition -based music program there.   Owen Underhill 03:58 And...   Gabrielle Martin 04:00 my dad went to.   Owen Underhill 04:01 which your dad went to, yes. And my colleagues, Mark Diamond and Penelope Stella were great in theater. They were great colleagues to also collaborate with. So from when I first started going to, or being part of faculty there, I started working on projects, including plays like Sam Shepard's Suicide and B -flat, which I wrote music for.   Owen Underhill 04:37 And Norman was lead actor in that. And so, and he was already doing fantastic work there. So I got to know him as kind of a partner in productions rather than as a teacher, because I was teaching primarily in music.   Gabrielle Martin 04:58 And so the first well actually when was when did you co -found turning point ensemble at your site?   Owen Underhill 05:06 We co -founded in 2002 and our first concert was in 2003.   Gabrielle Martin 05:11 OK. And then in 2008, Push presented Dual Eclipse Orchestra of Two Worlds. And then, you know, in 2012, presented Trené Point Ensemble's Colorful World. In 2013, Cinema Musica. The Zappa meets Verraz and Oswald in 2017.   Gabrielle Martin 05:31 Radio Rewrite in 2018 and Flying White, which was also a project with One Way Dance in 2020. But how did the conversation, how did Dual Eclipse end up being part of Push 2008? Why was it such a great fit?   Gabrielle Martin 05:46 How did that come about?   Owen Underhill 05:49 Well, the Dual Eclipse project was with Balinese Ensemble, which they had at UBC. And we were doing works with dance. Jennifer Mascow was choreographing some works for that production. So it was, first of all, a cross -cultural project.   Owen Underhill 06:14 And secondly, it involved dance. So those were the kind of productions we worked with, with Norman, tended to be the ones that were more interdisciplinary and also included original work.   Gabrielle Martin 06:32 than Colorful World, how did that, you know, did Norman just kind of invite the next project that was interdisciplinary, or did you end up kind of pitching that work? How did Colorful World end up being part of?   Owen Underhill 06:47 The Colorful World project was more of a concert that included some new commissions. I know we did a piece of Rodney Sharmn there. So we tended to, I tended to pitch projects to Norman every couple of years that I thought would be of interest to them and also, you know, we're a large chamber ensemble, I should say.   Owen Underhill 07:14 So we're in between a small chamber ensemble and an orchestra. We usually have at least 15 players. So they were, you know, we tend to do quite major works, major scale. And so those that were a good fit for push were a lot of those projects that involved other disciplines.   Gabrielle Martin 07:46 Talk to us about what was Zappa, Mitzvahrez, and Oswald, the present -day composer refuses to die. I mean, first of all, it has an incredible title. Can you just explain this project a bit?   Owen Underhill 07:59 Yeah, sure. Well, the present -day composer refuses to die, I remember, as being written on a Frank Zappa Mothers of Invention album. It's written there. And then I found out that that was a quote from the avant -garde composer, Edgard Varese, who was active in, originally from France, but active from the 1920s in New York and in the US.   Owen Underhill 08:32 And Frank Zappa, even as a teenager, was really interested in contemporary music and he really appreciated Edgard Varese, who was really an adventurer in sound. And so that quote always stuck in my head and so because Turning Point Ensemble works towards making connections with the past to the present day, we often would like to pair maybe a composer or some innovative music of the first half of the 20th century with something much more recent.   Owen Underhill 09:16 So that was an idea we had and actually started talking with Norman about that in 2014. So we worked on that one for a while together. And is that...   Gabrielle Martin 09:29 because Push was involved as a co -producer or because you were just like developing the concept and keeping Norman in the loop.   Owen Underhill 09:37 Push was, well Norman really liked the idea of Res from the start, but he was very interested in getting a new work written for that show by a Canadian composer, and so we developed that one actually as a co -commission project.   Owen Underhill 10:01 So we discussed who to include in that, and eventually proposed John Oswald to him from Toronto, who worked a lot on his plunder phonics, where he sort of plundered the work of Michael Jackson even, he had to withdraw that because Michael Jackson thought about him, and he did Grateful Dead, so he was very involved in pop music as well as contemporary music, and when I threw that out to Norman, he said,   Owen Underhill 10:49 ah, killer suggestion, and John Oswald, so it was a go, so that became a really exciting program for us and for Push, and we also commissioned some dance for a couple of those pieces because we did the sort of large arrangements of Zappa that were done by Ensemble Muldern in Munich while Zappa was still alive, like in the last years before he passed away, and Edward Locke, the dancer, had actually done some dance,   Owen Underhill 11:35 which they did on those productions, so we decided that we would also bring some dance element to it, and so that's what we did also.   Gabrielle Martin 11:50 Do you remember who were the dancers or who supported choreography?   Owen Underhill 11:55 Yeah, it was Rob at my colleague at SFU. Oh yeah, okay, Rob Kitsos? Rob Kitsos, yes. And so he did, you know, it was sort of set up as a concert, but he had the dancers in the front, which is the way Edward Locke had done it, and they were actually right behind me and going very quickly, and right, I could feel the wind of them when they were performing.   Owen Underhill 12:22 So we did that as well, and that was a very popular show. It brought out all the Zappa fanatics, which there are many. Okay. So we did three shows, and I don't know what it was. What venue was this? You're right.   Owen Underhill 12:40 It was in the Wong Theatre at SFU Woodward, so there were about 350 people at each of those shows, but it was a good show for Bush, and it was certainly a good show for us.   Gabrielle Martin 12:54 Great, and did you, um, did Question, Turning Point, Ensemble, Commission, other projects of all the ones that were presented in the push years? No.   Owen Underhill 13:03 We talked about it, but that was, I think, the one time that Norman really wanted to get involved with a sort of commission that we would jointly do.   Gabrielle Martin 13:16 Great. And then, yeah, as mentioned there, after that project, Radio Rewrite was presented Flying White with One Way Dance. How would you reflect on the evolution of the company, like let's say from Dual Eclipse in 2008 right up to Flying White in 2020?   Gabrielle Martin 13:38 And then now, has there been an evolution in terms of process, practice, points of interest for projects?   Owen Underhill 13:49 Yes, I mean, we got more and more adventurous over the years in doing ambitious interdisciplinary projects, for one thing, and so Push certainly helped us with that because we always knew that if we were part of the Push Festival that it was a great way to bring in theater, dance, film, you know, a much more diverse audience, I guess.   Owen Underhill 14:27 And another thing we did, which was in the Flying White Project, was we worked with Chinese traditional instruments, and so some of the performers that are here in Vancouver. So we also became a little more cross -cultural in the projects that we have done, you know, when we saw the opportunity and the partners approached us as well.   Owen Underhill 14:59 So those were some of the things that we were able to explore more fully with the support of Push.   Gabrielle Martin 15:08 And your role in the projects, is it, are you sometimes composer, sometimes more producer? Does your role shift across these projects?   Owen Underhill 15:20 Well, I'm the conductor of the ensemble, so I am a member of the ensemble, but I did compose Flying White.   Speaker 3 15:29 project because I'm a personal and pristine body for Chinese traditional instruments and   Owen Underhill 15:36 And so I was, and also Dorothy Chang was involved with that as a composer. So sometimes I'm involved as a creator as well, but the projects that we've done like that are tend to be so original that, you know, you feel a little bit like an artistic director of the project as a whole.   Gabrielle Martin 16:02 Yeah, yeah. And so you kind of mentioned that one of the benefits of partnering with Push was to bring in different audiences and that it was kind of a good home for those more interdisciplinary projects.   Gabrielle Martin 16:20 Yeah, how do you see, I'm curious, you know, having had a relationship with the festival since the early days, how you see the cultural context of the festival and its significance in Vancouver.   Owen Underhill 16:31 Yeah, well I mean push brought in from around the world like leading innovative cutting -edge projects that otherwise would never have come to Vancouver. But they also had a role with local artists and helped, you know, integrate them with other artists from around the world.   Owen Underhill 16:58 So it was, push has definitely had a fantastic impact over the   Speaker 3 17:08 you know, past 20 years or so.   Gabrielle Martin 17:11 What are you what are you excited about now with a turning point ensemble?   Owen Underhill 17:15 Working next year, we're doing a production of Kaya Sarajajo's music. She just passed away of a Finnish composer and her music is so colorful and beautiful and hardly ever done in Vancouver because it's for very large ensembles and so that's the kind of thing we'd like to present up close to Vancouver audiences and we're always working on recording projects so we just did a recording project of Nova Han who's a local composer of some large work she wrote for us and so that's just been released and we're trying to dream up some more dance projects but usually those take two or three years to   Gabrielle Martin 18:13 Okay.   Owen Underhill 18:14 put in the hopper. Yeah.   Gabrielle Martin 18:16 It sounds like you're very busy, which is exciting, working on all sorts of collaborations and new projects. Of all the projects that were train point ensemble projects that were presented at Push, what would you say is like your most dear project, the one that you have the fondest memories of?   Owen Underhill 18:38 Well, I have fond memories of several of them. Definitely the Zappa, Varese, and John Oswald projects, one of them. The Radio Rewrite was some ways a similar project because it involved the music of Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead, who most people know that he's written for film and so on.   Owen Underhill 19:03 But he also is interested in unusual instruments like the And Martineau. It's a bit like the Theremin and the music of Olivier Messiaen. The similar way that Zappa was interested in Varese, so that Radio Rewrite project included Johnny Greenwood's music and so we were able to have a bit of a connection with him through his publisher and also we had on that program a couple of newer works involving And Martineau and a big piece by Steve Reich.   Owen Underhill 19:50 Which is called Radio Rewrite, which is actually based on a couple of Radio Ants songs. And I guess the sort of genre busting, if you could say, projects like that, where it seemed a really natural ones to do with Push.   Owen Underhill 20:14 And those generally did very well also with audience and interest, local interest.   Gabrielle Martin 20:24 Thanks so much, Ellen. Oh, you're welcome.   Ben Charland 20:30 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.   Ben Charland 20:51 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.  

Gabrielle Martin chats with Dana Gingras of Animals of Distinction. Show Notes Gabrielle and Dana discuss:  How did the relationship with PuSh start and develop? The personal meaning of Dana Gingras's work for Gabrielle How was "Monumental" a culmination of previous work? What does it mean to have a performing band's live energy in rehearsals? How did these collaborations evolve with artists in different media? How do you make dance like going to see a concert? How do we deal with and manage progress in our artistic practice? How is the process of research changing? How do you perceive the cultural context of PuSh and what has that meant for your work? What is the power of being a creator on the outside of things? What is liminality and why is it a powerful feature of your work? Why is messiness an important part of developing work and the creative process? Why was Monumental such a big step for PuSh? About Dana Gingras and Animals of Distinction Animals of Distinction (AOD) is the multimedia dance company of renowned choreographer and dancer Dana Gingras. Through AOD, Gingras has fostered the creation of numerous cutting-edge works that have involved innovative collaborations across diverse mediums and artistic practices, all shaped by the possibilities of new technologies and cultural shifts. At the centre of the work is a belief that we can obtain critical knowledge from engagingwith the physical and emotional risks inherent to dance andmovement. It is through thebody and choreography that this element of risk can be employed to explore a vision ofthe world that is larger than our individual isolated experiences. The goal is to stimulateaudiences to become more aware of the elements ofcomplexity, connectivity, andcomplicity within our physical, social, and emotional lives. AOD's work has been presented nationally and internationally across diverse platformsincluding live performance, film, design, visual art, and new media. In 2016,under thedirection of Gingras, AOD produced The Holy Body Tattoo's last work, monumental(2005), with Godspeed You! BlackEmperor playing live. This expanded version of thepiece premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver as part of the PuShFestival in January 2016. Since then, monumental has been performed at the AdelaideFestival in Australia, Montreal's Place des Arts, Grand Théâtre du Québec, as part ofLuminato at The Hearn Generating Station in Toronto, the Edinburgh InternationalFestival in Scotland, BAM's NEXT WAVE Festival in New York, theROMAEUROPAFestival in Italy, MONA FOMA in Tasmania, Australia and, mostrecently, at London's Barbican Centre. In 2018 Gingras joined forces with group A, a Berlin-based Japanese avant-gradesynthwave duo, and Sonya Stefan, a Montreal-based media artist. Together, theycreated anOther—a hybrid production, with performance, installation, and a liveconcert. anOther premiered at Agora de la Danse and made its international debut atMONA FOMA in 2019. Free Fall/Chute Libre, her new immersive dance film, was created through a residency at the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT). Using the Satosphère's full-dome theatre, the work focuses on stimulating viewers' senses in unexpected ways. 
 In 2017 Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction was granted a long-term residency at the Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV) in Montreal's Place des Arts. Through this residency, Gingras/AOD produced a new large-scale work entitled FRONTERA with scenography by London based United Visual Artists and a live score by newly reformed Fly Pan Am. Recipient of support from the National Arts Centre's National Creation Fund, FRONTERA premiered in Quebec City in November 2019 and has since been performed as a part of the Danse Danse season at Place des Arts in Montreal, at the Sydney Festival, Berlin's CTM Festival, the PuSh Festival in Vancouver and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Dana Gingras has collaborated with cultural icons like William Gibson and Jenny Holzer . Musical collaborators include underground legends like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Tindersticks , Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three , The Tiger Lillies , Roger Tellier-Craig (Fly Pan Am) , Le Révélateur , and Steven Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Multimedia works have been co-created with 3D animator Josh Sherrett, with animators and programmers James Paterson and Amit Pitaru , and, for her work on Arcade Fire's award-winning Sprawl II video , with directors William Morrison and Vincent Morriset. A registered non-profit society, The Animals of Distinction Arts Society is directed (in its activities and mandate) by artistic director Dana Gingras. AOD is produced and represented by international agent Sarah Rogers. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded on ton 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.  Gabrielle Martin 00:22 Today's episode features Dana Jenkra and is anchored around the 2016 Push Festival. Dana Jenkra is a choreographer, filmmaker, performer, and teacher. Her 30 -year career has moved across mediums and artistic practices and has established her as a game -changing, boundary -pushing artist.  Gabrielle Martin 00:39 As the co -founder of the Holy Body Tattoo in 1993, Jenkra and company changed the landscape of Canadian dance and earned numerous awards and honors for their stage and film work. In 2006, Jenkra established Animals of Distinction in Montreal, a cutting -edge company working at the intersection of dance, film, music, installation, and technology.  Gabrielle Martin 01:01 Through the direction of Jenkra, Animals of Distinction has premiered innovative collaborations with artists and performers such as Group A, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am, and United Visual Artists.  Gabrielle Martin 01:13 Here's my conversation with Dana.  Gabrielle Martin 01:18 Hi, I'm Gabrielle. I'm the director of programming at the Push Festival, and I am here with Dana Gengras today. Thank you for joining me in conversation. No, of course.  Dana Gingras 01:26 such a pleasure so good  Gabrielle Martin 01:27 see you again. Yeah, and we are in Montreal, Giorgé, and this has long been a meeting place of First Nations, including the Kanyan Kahaka, the Anishinaabe, the Wendat, and the Abenaki. And this is also your patio.  Gabrielle Martin 01:46 It is, yes. And here today we're gonna talk about your work with Push Festival, and its place within your wider practice, and so I just want to start by understanding your, your, how the relationship with Push started and how it developed.  Gabrielle Martin 02:02 Yeah.  Dana Gingras 02:02 The agent that I've worked with for many many years and is the managing producer of Animals of Distinction, Sarah Rogers, has a very long relationship with push and Norman. Norman presented, I believe it was Marie Broussard's peep show in the first festival and Sarah was working on that.  Dana Gingras 02:28 So she's had this long relationship with push that way and I guess we premiered this expanded version of Monumental in 2016 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre with push and that came into being many conversations with Norman.  Dana Gingras 02:56 It was actually David Sefton from UCLA at the time when we presented the original Monumental choreography with Noam Ganyon and myself for Holy Buddy Tattoo. David's dream was to see Monumental with live music and at the time Godspeed You Black Emperor were not together so it was just not going to be possible.  Dana Gingras 03:21 And so they got back together I forget what year maybe 2011 and David Sefton showed up again and by now I think he had moved on to the Adelaide Festival and was like okay the band's together what about this version of Monumental with the band?  Gabrielle Martin 03:39 Yeah, can you just take us back a little bit when was monumental first premiere the original version?  Dana Gingras 03:44 2005. Yeah, yeah. Stayed here.  Gabrielle Martin 03:46 Her push officially started.  Dana Gingras 03:48 Oh yeah, it toured Canada and then the final show of it was in 2006 at UCLA.  Gabrielle Martin 03:54 and Godspeed You Black Emperor was a Vancouver -based.  Dana Gingras 03:57 No, they're Montreal -based band. Very, very Montreal, yes. So there was like years of conversation, and Norman was part of those conversations about getting this show up and running again with Godspeed You Black Emperors.  Dana Gingras 04:18 So eventually there was an agreement. The band was like, okay, we're in, and everything started to move very quickly. So Adelaide was on board, and then Norman came along and said, how about we do a residency at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre?  Dana Gingras 04:36 Wow, okay. So he offered us, I think it was three or four days at the Queenie to get the piece up and running, and then Animals of Distinction produced this expanded version of the piece with live music.  Dana Gingras 04:51 So the band composed more music for the show, visuals were expanded, we had a whole new cast of dancers. And it was really that piece, being able to have that residency at the Queenie, thanks to Norman, that made it all possible.  Gabrielle Martin 05:10 I didn't know that piece of history, that's really nice, because I didn't actually share my relationship with your work, and your work has been very profound for me as an artist. And also, just speaking about your work in the context of Push, both Monumental and Frontera, which we'll talk about in a moment, were Queenie projects, which are like feature Push projects.  Gabrielle Martin 05:33 Push usually would only do one of that a year in the Queenie, so it's really exciting the scale of those projects and what that meant for Push. And I know that that different or newly imagined version of Monumental was really anticipated for many people like myself, it was an original version, and it was just incredible to see that piece, that profound piece, come back with these additional elements.  Gabrielle Martin 05:59 And I will add one more personal anecdote, which is that taking your contemporary dance workshop at the Cult as a youth is really what started my lifelong passion. Oh, that's so great, that's so great, you're probably rolling.  Dana Gingras 06:18 around on the floor a lot and falling  Gabrielle Martin 06:20 a lot. It was great. And I remember you also shared the video of our brief eternity with the students or you know the youth participants at that point and it just blew my mind as I know it did for many people.  Gabrielle Martin 06:31 Super exciting for me to be talking about that and I figured I should definitely mention that. But just yeah getting back to your work and it's so nice to know that Push was also able to support that realization and then went on to tour.  Dana Gingras 06:45 Yes, yes. I think it was the first time there was a push show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, so that was kind of the launching of that, which I think continued for the next five years. And then we were back in 2020 with Frontera, so Norman had been part of those conversations, and then by 2020 he wasn't part of the festival anymore, but Joyce saw it through and we presented Frontera then at the Queen Elizabeth.  Dana Gingras 07:16 Yeah, 2020, yeah.  Gabrielle Martin 07:18 And so you've spoken a bit about monumental and the process of realizing for the festival which involved this technical residency and getting the band on board and waiting for the perfect timing to do that.  Gabrielle Martin 07:31 And then with Frontera, can you talk a little bit about that project and then maybe also how your practice evolved in that period? Well, if you want to start with monumental version 1 or 2, it's up to you.  Dana Gingras 07:51 Well, Monday Mental, when we premiered that in 2005, for Noam and I, that was really a culmination of, I think, a decade, you know, decade's worth of work. And it was really a culmination of our partnership and, you know, all of these intense pieces we made together, like our Brief Eternity, Poetry and Apocalypse, Circa, Running Wild.  Dana Gingras 08:15 So it was really the first time that we had both stepped out of work, we weren't in Monumental, and worked as choreographers, directors on the outside. The expanded version of Monumental, the choreography wasn't really altered at all, there was like some little details maybe that were, you know, fleshed out, but really it was more about making it a Godspeed, You Black Emperor project so that the music beginning to end was all Godspeed because the original version had some sequences in it that was using found sound as well,  Dana Gingras 08:55 so it was like a real collage. So I felt like the expanded version really became, I don't know, it really became something else with this fully realized, fully performed score by the band and having the band's energy there.  Dana Gingras 09:14 I remember the first rehearsals at Taplaste Czar here with the band and the dancers and when the band started to play, the dancers who were all on these pedestals for three quarters of the work, the live music almost knocked them off the blocks.  Dana Gingras 09:30 Like they had such a jolt of energy, I was like, like I was so worried because you could just see how it kind of like it, it just ignited this energy that is so different than having a kind of pre -recorded soundtrack.  Dana Gingras 09:45 So and I think for the audience receiving it at the Queenie and other places that we perform just having that, you know.  Gabrielle Martin 09:54 I experienced it at Place des Arts and like I remember I remember the show very vividly. It was very powerful Yeah, incredible experience. Yeah  Dana Gingras 10:04 So that, I think that viscerality is something that's kind of continued through into my work. And with Frontera, that was created through a long -term residency. It was the first one at CCOB from 2017, yeah, 2019 Central Vertigo.  Dana Gingras 10:22 So that was created at that residency. And that was my first partnership with United Visual Artists. And so they did a sonography with lighting. And I've gone on to make two more projects with them, Creation Destruction and Ensemble, which is an installation that was part of their 20th anniversary show last year in London.  Dana Gingras 10:46 So that started a whole new kind of, I think, phase of work.  Gabrielle Martin 10:52 Yeah. I mean, I know your work with the Holy Body of Tattoo was very visual and you use things like projections. And but I was reading about how you describe your work with Animals of Distinction and this, you know, commitment to the possibility of new technology and cultural shifts.  Gabrielle Martin 11:11 It's really makes sense for the work of Animals of Distinction that I've seen. And is that, did that kind of evolve also from this different, the second version of monumental and that collaboration, closer collaboration with artists of a different medium?  Gabrielle Martin 11:30 Is that, or had you already been working in a really cross -disciplinary way?  Dana Gingras 11:37 I think since the beginning of my career, I've been working in a cross -disciplinary way because I was always interested in being able to bring dance to audiences maybe outside of the dance milieu because to me the dance milieu is very small and I didn't want to just make work for For people that already loved dance.  Dana Gingras 11:58 I wanted to try and draw people in from You know like say people that were more interested in music or film you know digital cultures, so And that was the interesting thing with with monumental and with many of the works Is that we had people coming to see dance for the first time at the Queenie?  Dana Gingras 12:21 Because they were coming to see Godspeed and then we had dance audiences that discovered Godspeed for the first time because they came to see a dance show. So I like that kind of the electricity the the kind of energy that kind of happens when audiences come together that are you know, just more there's more cross kind of pollination and Yeah that's all this excited me and Like going to see music shows has always been my passion So I'm like,  Dana Gingras 12:55 I want to make dance like going to see a concert from from day one That was like my my interest so I think with animals, I've just put a little bit more emphasis because now we're more in a technological age and Everything's advancing so quickly that these questions about progress Which were always there since our brief eternity with Noam and I like where are we going?  Dana Gingras 13:21 How how are we changing? What is the speed of progress? How do we keep up with this? Where is it taking us which is really? kind of post capitalistic You know Inquiries like it's like really like what are what are we doing?  Dana Gingras 13:36 Like, you know, we're all running so fast You know and here we are come out of the pandemic. We all had time and boom It's like faster than ever and it's just exponentials. So it's a theme. I think that Continues to to inspire me and even with new work.  Dana Gingras 13:54 I'm researching it's all around AI and just going through The process of research in the last eight months. It's like changing all the time. It's crazy how fast it's happening I'm just like, okay Lots of material for research Translate yeah.  Dana Gingras 14:12 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah  Gabrielle Martin 14:15 I'm interested also in how you perceive the cultural context of PUSH and how that context, you know, how that was meaningful for the presentation of your work. I know you were based in Vancouver for a long time.  Gabrielle Martin 14:27 So I think you have more insight than a lot of artists who came to PUSH to present their work. Just, I'm just curious about, yeah, maybe your relationship with Vancouver, your relationship with PUSH in that sense.  Gabrielle Martin 14:39 Did you know Norman when you lived in Vancouver?  Dana Gingras 14:44 Oh yeah, I've known Norman, I mean, you know, from the time, yeah, he was in, just started Rumble. I remember the taxi piece he did with Harvey Mellor. Oh wow, okay. Because Noam and I were in Vancouver in the late 80s, we were dancing with Edam, that's where we met.  Dana Gingras 15:06 So, you know, I had some history already, late 80s with Vancouver, and yeah, I knew Norman, like then I knew of him. He was quite, you know, the figure in the community. And then I moved to Montreal for a while, then I moved back to Vancouver, and Noam and I started Holy Body Tattoo there in 93.  Dana Gingras 15:28 And thing, what Push did is like Vancouver, we always felt isolated in Vancouver. Like we always felt cut off by the mountains. And so we'd come out to Montreal and we'd perform, you know, at the time it was called the FIND Festival, the Festival Internationale de Nouvelle Dance.  Dana Gingras 15:45 And that.  Gabrielle Martin 15:47 Actually, is that the root of Festival Transamerique? No, Transamerique.  Dana Gingras 15:51 was a whole other festival, but fine finished and then the FDA ended up kind of programming dance. And so I think that what Norman did with Push was he started to bring Vancouver into a relationship with international artists coming in, but then international presenters coming in and I felt like he put Vancouver on the map that way and that was really exciting.  Dana Gingras 16:21 Because it felt like there was just this possibility, like things were becoming more porous, you know people were coming to the city to see work, to present work and you know that's it's great like Push continues and now there's other sources of that happening in Vancouver like Dancehouse, but at the time there was there was nothing so yeah it was exciting.  Gabrielle Martin 16:47 And you maintain you've maintained a relationship with Vancouver I know at least for many years you're working with some of the artists or Vancouver based dance artists. Yeah in your projects Yeah, so I guess I just interpret your work as being very your collaborations being you know working at a national or international level and Why has that been important to you and continue to work with artists that aren't just where you're based?  Dana Gingras 17:16 Yeah, I don't like borders and I don't like being contained or I don't like identities that are fixed. I like fluidity and so for me, it was always important to kind of, you know, keep my connection with Vancouver and have this fluidity between Vancouver and Montreal and yeah, I like being a little bit more on the outside of things.  Dana Gingras 17:44 So, that kind of keeps me in movement, keeps things harder to define. Same thing with what I do as a creator or collaborations, you know, they're harder to define sometimes than just this is a dance show and again, I like that just kind of, liminality is really interesting to me because it's kind of like where you can be the most creative where you can kind of, you know, break rules and, you know,  Dana Gingras 18:16 have a little bit of what I call an unruly attitude towards, I don't know, the forces that want to create, you know, status quo. So, I like to push against that a little bit and, you know, I was born in Canada but I never grew up in Canada so I came back after high school so for me also, Canada, I'm not kind of bogged down with the history of Canada in the same way.  Dana Gingras 18:48 I mean, my grandparents, great grandparents were Quebecois and they moved out west and so I just like this kind of messiness that allows for a kind of communication to flow back and forth and get across those mountains.  Dana Gingras 19:12 Yeah, so, yeah, really nice relationships with Vancouver dancers over the years, specifically 605 Collective and yeah, I just worked with Josh recently on a new piece. Last year, he was a duo and yeah, so that was, it was great to have that connection again.  Gabrielle Martin 19:32 nice to have that piece of history to understand just how significant monumental was and Frontera, you know, but monumental being that first like Queenie piece. Yeah. That's a big step for the festival.  Dana Gingras 19:44 Yeah, it was a big step. But really, you know, these conversations go on for years. And so the conversation to get it to that place was, you know, a lot of toil and staying in contact with how things were developing.  Dana Gingras 20:01 And so I know Sarah Rogers and Norman really, you know, kind of kept at it. I think they would keep finding each other in different parts of the world. And it was like, hey, so what's happening with Monumental?  Dana Gingras 20:13 But really, Norman, the piece that he brought to it, this residency at the Queenie is what clinched it and actually really pushed it over the edge in order to make it happen. Because otherwise, we couldn't have remounted that piece without having time in a theater and bringing all the visual elements, the video that William Morrison created for the work, the live sounds, the staging, because it was a new staging as well with the band.  Dana Gingras 20:41 It was just so many details, new cast and, you know, the lighting, as you've seen, like the lights are coming through these podiums, the dancers are standing on it so they're blind half the time, turning.  Dana Gingras 20:54 You know, the risk is there. Yeah, the risk is there. You know, we had some, you know, few dancers. It was like their first real professional show. And this was like their debut. And I was like, okay, please, please, we'll all be good.  Dana Gingras 21:09 We'll all be good. It was amazing. It was like a night to remember.  Ben Charland 21:17 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run from January 23rd to February 9th, 2025. Push Play is produced by myself, Ben Charland, and Tricia Knowles.  Ben Charland 21:34 A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.  Ben Charland 21:53 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. 

Gabrielle Martin chats with Sylvain Émard of Sylvain Émard Danse. Show Notes Gabrielle and Sylvain discuss:  How did your relationship with PuSh begin? What was the impact and legacy of the show, Le Grand Continental? How do you organize and prepare for a truly large project like Le Grand Continental? How does line dancing fit into the origins and creation of the show? How does a challenging project translate into a rewarding production for creators, crew and audiences? What is the result of the fusion of popular and contemporary art? How do you succeed in having the right representation of the community in the cast? How is the context of PuSh and Vancouver significant to the work when brought to that community? Why was the interaction of people in each cast of Le Grand Continental like a dream in its encapsulation of the world? How has your artistic practice evolved over the past ten years? Reconnecting with the sheer pleasure of dancing What happens when the spectator is in the choreography, not outside? About Sylvain Émard A prolific and internationally respected artist, Sylvain Émard created his own dance company Sylvain Émard Danse in 1990, quickly establishing a reputation for a very original style. Highly theatrical at first, his work soon evolved into a more formal approach to dance. Ever since Ozone, Ozone (1987), his first solo, up to Rhapsodie (2022), he has been exploring the territory of human nature through the force and strength of the body. His repertoire now includes over thirty original pieces that have had a resounding impact all over the world. Renowned for his refined style and precise movement, his presentation in 2009 of Le Grand Continental® at the Festival TransAmériques must have come to some as a surprise. Inspired by line dancing, this unique piece has featured 3,000 non-dancers in several performances across Canada, the United States, Mexico, South Korea, New Zealand, Chile, Germany and Austria, attracting some 125,000 spectators. In September 2017, Le Super Méga Continental boasted 375 dancers in Montréal to celebrate the city's 375th anniversary in a monumental fashion. Sylvain Émard's unique style has led to invitations to work as guest choreographer in theatre, opera and cinema. These collaborations include his joining forces with Robert Lepage in 2005 to work on the opera 1984 by Lorin Maazel, presented namely at Covent Garden in London and at La Scala in Milan. At the behest of theater director René-Richard Cyr, Sylvain Émard is creating the choreographies for the musical Demain matin, Montréal m'attend at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. Sylvain Émard has received numerous prestigious awards, such as the Jean A. Chalmers Choreographic Award (1996). He is also co-founder of the Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded in 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. Show Transcript Gabrielle Martin 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 in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.  Gabrielle Martin 00:22 Today's episode features Sylvain Emmer and the 2015 Push Festival. Internationally celebrated Montreal -based choreographer Sylvain Emmer created his own dance company, Sylvain Emmer Dance, in 1990, quickly establishing a reputation for a very original style.  Gabrielle Martin 00:39 His repertoire of more than 30 unique pieces has been praised for the diversity of its choreographic vocabulary, which swings between extremes of generous fluidity and taut control. Renowned for his refined style and precise movement, his presentation in 2009 of Grand Continental at the Festival Transamerique must have come to some as a surprise.  Gabrielle Martin 01:02 Since then, this skillful blend of line dancing and contemporary dance has won over amateur dancers and audiences around the world. Here's my conversation with Sylvain.  Gabrielle Martin 01:15 I just want to start by acknowledging that we are gathered here in Jojage, or Montreal, which has long been a historic meeting place of different First Nations peoples, including the Konyan Kahake, the Wendat, the Abenaki, and the Anishinaabe.  Gabrielle Martin 01:31 And we're also in front of the Festival of Trans -American Headquarters, which is really nice. We're a festival hub, because we're gathered during the festival here in Montreal, Jojage. And I would love to ask you about your relationship with Push.  Gabrielle Martin 01:44 And how that started, how did you end up in conversation, and what was the beginning?  Sylvain Émard 01:50 Well, the beginning was, well, we knew Norma, who was directing the festival at the time, and also Joyce, and we just happened to, I mean, we just happened to run into Joyce once, here at the FTA, actually, and we started to talk about the Grand Continental because she's been hearing about it, because we've been doing it, we had like four different editions at the FTA of the Gallant Council.  Sylvain Émard 02:22 Yes.  Gabrielle Martin 02:23 it premiered, I didn't say this, but just to give more context even, it premiered in 2009 here. And it was maybe a surprise to some because it differed a little bit from your previous work for its kind of skillful blend of line dancing and contemporary dance.  Gabrielle Martin 02:38 And then since then, you know, amateur dancers and audiences have just loved it across the world. But okay, so did Joyce or Norman see it?  Sylvain Émard 02:46 no they didn't see it at that time at that time they didn't and then we well we had videos so we sent them videos and they got really interested and i was really uh excited about the idea of doing it in vancouver which i mean it's a city i really like but i don't have many opportunities to go to go there so that i was really happy of the invitation but it took a while to organize everything because those are i mean the gun concern of that is a big project to organize i mean you have to be really well prepared ahead  Gabrielle Martin 03:24 So can you get into that now, just for our public, to really understand what is Ligon Contenta and how was it realized for the Push Festival?  Sylvain Émard 03:32 So Le Grand Constantin is, I'd say, a fusion of line dancing and contemporary dance. So it's kind of, the source of it is probably my obsession about line dancing, because as a kid, that's the very first form of dance that I did.  Sylvain Émard 03:52 Okay. In a basement of the church of my parish at this part of Montreal.  Gabrielle Martin 03:58 Was that popular? It was popular. As a part of a faith practice at the time?  Sylvain Émard 04:08 had nothing to do with religion. Okay. No. It was just like, it was very popular. Line dancing was everywhere in the 60s, 70s. And so I thought, you know, I don't know why, but I always was interested in watching people doing line dancing, even when it's boring.  Sylvain Émard 04:32 I don't know, park, public places that really touches me. Yeah. And I don't know, I always like stop and stare and watch for, you know, long.  Gabrielle Martin 04:47 period of time. Just was this the first piece that you'd done out of a conventional theater space? In a public space?  Sylvain Émard 04:56 I think so. I think it's, yeah, I come from a theater background also, so we did theater, you know, out in public spaces, but then snow. And so, and I decided that, you know, I would share that dream with the director of the FDA, Marie -Anne Falcon, just like that.  Sylvain Émard 05:19 And she said, oh, I love the idea, let's do that. I said, wow, are you serious? This is like a big thing, you know. First edition, with 65 people, and then it kept growing.  Gabrielle Martin 05:29 So, and this is not just professional dancers.  Sylvain Émard 05:34 Oh no, it's mainly on professional platforms. So we recruit people in the community. So we do like auditions, which actually are like information sessions. So we explain to the people, you know, what the project is about.  Sylvain Émard 05:51 So we kind of select people, but actually we kind of accept almost everyone because we know that at the beginning of the process, many people are going to withdraw because they're.  Gabrielle Martin 06:05 so hard on them to get everything exact.  Sylvain Émard 06:09 It is a very demanding project because it's kind of a three -month  Gabrielle Martin 06:13 I was joking, but maybe it's closer to the truth.  Sylvain Émard 06:17 it is even for that because there's a team of professional dancers that help to teach and to support the non -professional and even the professional dancers things it's difficult so um yeah the so this you know the the it's it's a challenge for everyone  Gabrielle Martin 06:37 We want and this is the challenge is because of the amount of material to memorize or because it all has to be a you Know information with everybody and  Sylvain Émard 06:46 It's a 30 -minute choreography to remember.  Gabrielle Martin 06:50 It's a lot for amateur dances.  Sylvain Émard 06:54 People do work a lot during those rehearsals, but we also provide them with learning videos so that they can work at home, and they do work at home day. And so it's a very intense, but fun project. So the idea is to give the people, as much as possible, a glimpse of what is a professional dance experience.  Sylvain Émard 07:21 And so the standards are high for them, and it's a challenge. So, and I think this is why the project works so well. It's because it's challenging.  Gabrielle Martin 07:36 Yeah, I was going to say, I think it's nice when you assume people can do more than they even think they can do. And I think people, it's very rewarding for people when they have that challenge and then they're in a supportive environment and they rise to that challenge.  Sylvain Émard 07:51 Yeah, they're very, I mean, proud of themselves to achieve those challenges. And, but there's always, you know, it's a 30 -minute choreography. We use like popular music of different style, but every music is being remixed or reworked by a contemporary composer, because even in the music I want that fusion with popular art and contemporary art, so that the people can see that popular, being popular and contemporary,  Sylvain Émard 08:27 I mean, there's a fine line sometimes, and it depends on how you approach it. And so, so, yeah, so, but the thing is that, yeah, you were... No, no, no, no, no. Because I can't, I can't speak for hours about this project, so you just stop me.  Sylvain Émard 08:46 And so we're using a different style of music. So sometimes in different cities, because this project has traveled a lot on four continents, so sometimes we do like specific sections for a host city.  Gabrielle Martin 09:10 So can you tell me about realizing it for Vancouver? Because it came a year after premiering here at FDI, it came to push. And was there anything unique about realizing it there? Did it also have 65 people in it?  Gabrielle Martin 09:24 Did you go to Montreal for months of rehearsals? Or how did that process go?  Sylvain Émard 09:30 So, for Vancouver, what we did, it had 65 people in the cast, and what was interesting about the cast in Vancouver is that it was very diverse. We had a very, and that's what I like about that, is when we succeed in having the right representation of the community in the cast, and I found that was the case.  Sylvain Émard 09:59 For the very first time, I was content with the result of that, so that was great. So 65 people, but the project works, so I'm the only one travelling. So I go to the city, in this case Vancouver, I go there, and then I choose a team of local professional dancers, and I teach them all the material, and I do the audition, then I leave, and the professional dancers keep rehearsing with the non -professional,  Sylvain Émard 10:36 then I come back in the middle, because at first we start with two groups, so that the people are not getting too overwhelmed by the size of the thing, so at one point we merge the two groups, I come back and then do some rehearsal, then I leave, and then I come back at the end.  Sylvain Émard 10:57 So it's kind of a, I try to give as much as possible the whole thing to the community, professional and non -professional, so that they take it, and they make it happen.  Gabrielle Martin 11:10 And what space did it end up being performed at in Vancouver?  Sylvain Émard 11:13 It was performed in Queen Elizabeth, in front of the Queen Elizabeth theater. The Playhouse, Queen Elizabeth, yeah, yeah, yeah.  Gabrielle Martin 11:23 right by the push offices. Yes! Those are your dates. That is impressive. I've yet to really, you know, I shy away from the outdoor performances but they're so impactful because you also get the public that just, you know, stumbles upon the performance which is really nice.  Gabrielle Martin 11:39 Did it rain during the performance?  Sylvain Émard 11:42 it rains so much  Gabrielle Martin 11:44 Unsurprisingly, but, unfortunately.  Sylvain Émard 11:48 cold actually but it really rained and actually for me those are the best performances when it rains and and the the dancers you know when they saw the rain they were you know waiting inside I said are we going to dance are we gonna I said for sure you're going to you're a professional  Gabrielle Martin 12:08 I couldn't be better than that.  Sylvain Émard 12:10 So, and I told them, after this, you always want to be dancing in the rain. And they said, come on, come on. And after they said, are you right? You're right. It was so much fun. You know, it's like dancing in the rain.  Sylvain Émard 12:25 And the audience gets really excited about that. You know, about seeing those brave people dancing in the rain, no matter what. So, we did dance in the rain, and then the last day, it was so beautiful.  Sylvain Émard 12:38 That sunshine, really warm. So, we had, we were just missing the snow. It was a nice arc. Yeah, yeah. We had everything.  Gabrielle Martin 12:48 And so I'm curious about the how you perceive the cultural context of Vancouver and well of the push festival Which is in Vancouver on the? unceded squamish Musqueam and say with tooth patient land and How that context is significant for?  Gabrielle Martin 13:07 Your own your own work or for the presentation of this work So being a Montreal based artist and bringing the work to push. What does it mean? What does that mean and how is it to realize this work in that community?  Sylvain Émard 13:20 Well, this is a good question because the interest for me is since the project is being re -created with the local people, for me the interest is to see how the work is going to be transformed by the fact that it's going to be like a different community, a different culture.  Sylvain Émard 13:55 But I mean, it's more in the process than in the result of the work. The result is the same as you have like Vancouver people, Montreal people, New York people. The result at the end is like a beautiful human being dancing and sharing and it's good.  Sylvain Émard 14:18 It's more in the process that I learned from the people. I learned, like for instance, as I said, this cast was very diverse and so for me it was interesting to see and encourage to the dance the interaction between the people and it was for me a real kind of a dream.  Sylvain Émard 14:56 It looked like you had, among the 65 people, you had a representation of the whole planet, almost, you know. So it was very special for that. And also there's, of course, there is, which I didn't realize at the beginning of the origin of the project, that that project will impact people so much.  Sylvain Émard 15:24 And as Vancouver was no exception. We had like people coming to me and saying to me, you know, this experience made me realize that I should quit my job. So I quit my job.  Gabrielle Martin 15:47 life -changing yeah  Sylvain Émard 15:49 And because, again, we don't realize how much, you know, because we, as artists, we're in that world since, you know, so many years, so that we take it for granted that this is normal, what we're doing is, you know, that's our life and we don't see how privileged we are.  Sylvain Émard 16:16 Even though sometimes it's kind of a tough life, but we're still, I mean, privileged to be doing what we're doing. And those people, they discover that work and it's, for some of them, it's life changing because they see that, you know, there's other things than the day to day routine that they're being kept in for so many years.  Sylvain Émard 16:45 With no nothing ahead, or I don't know. And, but, you know, I could write a book about all the Tim Wang Ash.  Gabrielle Martin 16:59 testimonials. Yeah and I think there's also something really powerful about the relationships or the social experience of a creative process of going through that journey together and especially as you talked about if it's something that invites them to step into their bodies or onto the stage in a way that they haven't been able to do before that that empowering experience I think can really transfer to other areas of people's lives and it sounds like it did.  Gabrielle Martin 17:26 Has your work been presented in Vancouver outside of the push festival?  Sylvain Émard 17:33 Before or after yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been Maybe three or four times before that I presented to my work in Vancouver. Yeah  Gabrielle Martin 17:44 Can you talk about your artistic practice and how it's evolved since then in the last 10 years?  Sylvain Émard 17:53 Well, since we're going to the continent...  Gabrielle Martin 17:57 Since this moment in time, yeah.  Sylvain Émard 18:00 Well, what I can say that it's always difficult to tell exactly how something has impacted you or influenced you. But for sure, I knew that Le Grand Consonantel was something special because it has, as you mentioned at the beginning, you know, like people didn't expect me there because, you know, I'm more known as being like a very, I don't know, contempt.  Gabrielle Martin 18:32 ...precise movement, vocabulary...  Sylvain Émard 18:37 to have an approach more, I sometimes experimental at some point, and the fact that I was going with non -professional, using popular music, line dancing, but that's me. So I just shared that with the people, and I think what it had done to my work is that it reconnected me with this very mere pleasure of dancing.  Sylvain Émard 19:16 And this is something we lose track of as professional dancers because we're searching or being very serious about things, which is okay. And so you're thinking technique, blah, blah, and you know, when I proposed to the professional dancers to assist me for the project, I thought, you know, they're going to go like line dancing, they'll probably do it because they need money.  Sylvain Émard 19:49 But then they kept saying, if you do it again, I want to do this again. I want to do this. This is so much fun. And they all said that to me too, is that while just being there and seeing the people reacting to this, to the fact that they are simply dancing and they're so happy and joyful and so communicative, that's so nourishing.  Sylvain Émard 20:13 So I thought, you know, that's true. This is like, you know, the strength of that piece. And I think that the last piece I did with professionals, with the cast of 20 dancers, which is called Habsudzi, is the result of all that.  Sylvain Émard 20:35 It's like, it's a piece about ritual, the ritual that surrounds dancing. Why do we gather to dance? Why do we gather to see people dance? Simply that. And so that the piece was, I think, very much influenced by the whole experience.  Gabrielle Martin 20:54 piece that has also evolved into a digital form or an immersive digital and like because I think I saw you talking about the project at Parkwood Reynolds last fall.  Sylvain Émard 21:05 Rhapsody was first started, the process started before the pandemic, and then pandemic arrived, so everything was stopped. And so I didn't want to have the dancers, the 20 dancers, without work. So I found some money to keep dancing and do a piece, an outside piece, with two meters between the dancers.  Sylvain Émard 21:35 And for me, the challenge was to, despite the fact that we're not allowed to meet together, we're going to do a piece about gathering with two meters between people. So let's see what will come out of that.  Sylvain Émard 21:50 And so I did a piece, the piece you're talking about is a circular choreography, because the gathering form, natural, organic, is when you gather, you make a circle, so you see everyone. So the whole choreography is in circle.  Sylvain Émard 22:13 So, and then we presented in different cities. And then I decided that it would be a good piece to transform it into an immersive experience. So it's called Natka Choir, and it's a big, big structure, circular structure, quite big, that you get in as a spectator, you get in, and you're being surrounded by 12 dancers doing this circular choreography for 15 minutes in loop.  Sylvain Émard 22:56 And I like it very much.  Gabrielle Martin 22:59 And I hear the theme of Grassemblumont gathering in both Le Grand Continental and Rhapsody.  Sylvain Émard 23:08 again and and what it provides to the spectator is a very particular point of view because spectator is in the choreography not outside so it's kind of anyway so Rhapsody has given birth to a different I'd say version of different pieces  Tricia Knowles 23:37 That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.  Tricia Knowles 23:58 And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.