- Push International Performing Arts Festival, until Feb. 4, various venues. For more information visit www.pushfestival.ca.
THE eighth annual PuSh Festival takes over Vancouver stages for the next three weeks with a continuous flow of cutting edge performances.
This year events are scheduled at 14 different venues including SFU Woodwards' Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, The Roundhouse and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.
PuSh Festival executive director Norman Armour talked to the North Shore News about what's in store for Vancouver audiences.
North Shore News: A number of Vancouver's major arts festivals have been around for awhile but the PuSh festival is still relatively new - how did it get started?
Norman Armour: It started as an idea between two theatre companies, Rumble Productions, where I at the time was artistic producer and Touchstone Theatre, where Katrina Dunn was the artistic director and still is. The two of us had been presenting on our own, mostly Canadian work, but we both felt there was a real need and opportunity to create an international festival - curated festival - that would involve Canadian work. We had both come out of the Simon Fraser School for Contemporary Arts, studying dance and film and music as well as theatre, in the long run we were interested in a multidisciplinary festival that would blur the boundaries and invite people to go on an adventure out of their comfort zone - if they only went to theatre to perhaps consider going to contemporary music or if they only went to dance to consider going to a theatre piece.
North Shore News: How has the festival evolved over the years? Norman Armour: I'm not really sure in its core it has changed at all. I think the identity of the festival has become richer in the sense that it has become more of itself what lay as a possibility within the idea of the festival. You know this idea of creating dialogue in an exchange between Vancouver artists and artists from elsewhere. Introducing Vancouver audiences to new trends that perhaps reflect upon, or mirror some of the things that are happening within the city, or perhaps even challenge notions. I think partnership is very big right from the beginning, I mean just even the notion of the festival emerging out of two theatre companies. It became its own separate organization in 2005 so the idea of partnerships is right there from the beginning. I think if anything the idea has just come more into focus and its become more detailed and richer and taken a variety of forms that perhaps if not imagined certainly were conceived as a possibility within the original idea of the festival.
North Shore News: What types of things are involved in getting a particular performer involved in PuSh?
Norman Armour: The curatorial process generally goes anywhere from 12 to 24 months. Sometimes it can be a very collaborative thing in terms of seeing it work somewhere or sharing an idea we seem to be a part of it. Sometimes it can be a longstanding relationship - as you become acquainted with somebody's work and you understand where they're going and how it might perhaps fit into the festival and sometimes it's an idea you start from a curatorial perspective. We have a number of people working at the festival on the curatorial side of things - myself of course but also senior curators Sherrie Johnson who is based out of Toronto. We have associate curator Dani Fecko who works with a lot of engagement notions within the city. For the Club there are three curators: Tim Carlson of Theatre Conspiracy, Veda Hille, an artist about town who has a piece in the festival this year at the Arts Club and myself so there's a lot of people feeding into what notions and what ideas and what artists might be involved in any given festival.
Last year with the 125th we were very proactive in reflecting on the city's anniversary and a lot of programming had to do with this reflection on urban experience and the history of Vancouver. This year we wanted to step back a little bit and invite other people's experiences so for the first time we have something from Mexico, for the first time we have something from Lebanon, we have work from Spain from the Netherlands, we have an artist back from Argentina (Mariano Pensotti) and we were sort of looking out to the world in a way to speak to us about what to think about or reflect upon, sometimes you swing from different kinds of focuses or energies from year to year.
North Shore News: In 2010 you did co-partnerships with the Cultural Olympiad. Norman Armour: There was a two-year lead up to the Cultural Olympiad. It was a momentous time in the city, whichever side of the fence you sat, and culturally the opportunity to commission new work to perhaps reach a larger audience (was impossible to ignore). The Cultural Olympiad and the Olympics itself is a massive brand internationally. If the festival was in July we might have thought about it differently but we were in January so there was no wondering whether should we or shouldn't we consider that it might not have impact on us and should we or should we not work with them.
We worked very hard and spent years preparing for it in terms of marketing, preparing logistically with venues but also artistically thinking about what would be unique and special. We had the opening of SFU Woodwards and the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. We really focussed ourselves as what kind of message we were going to send out, certainly for people who were visiting the city, but also locally about what the festival stood for. In the midst of all this other circus that was happening our houses were 84 per cent. We came out of it very strong financially, we came out of it solid as a brand - even though we had compressed the festival a little bit people thought the festival was larger and there was kind of a theamtic scale to it. There was a piece about Auschwitz involving 3,000 tiny puppets, we commissioned a new score for The Passion of Joan of Arc, the silent film version directed by Danish director Carl Dreyer, and premiered that at Christ Church Cathedral. We did things that had a kind of scale to it that I think people really gravitated towards and reappreciated what the value of the festival was on its own terms.
North Shore News: You mentioned the time of year January to early February. The PuSh festival is the first major arts event in Vancouver every year.
Norman Armour: There were two periods of the year that we were looking at way back when Katrina and I were thinking of when to do it. One would have been May/June that's sort of the summertime cycle of festivals - back east you've got Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, the Carrefour festival in Quebec City, you've got the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, which moves around but every second year is in Ottawa, Illuminato in Toronto it's all around that May/June time. On the other side you've got a group of independent presenters across the country and also in the United States that line up in this January/February time. We've got High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, Canoe Festival in Edmonton, Nakai in the Yukon, Under the Radar in New York hosted by the Public Theatre. A number of interesting presenters that at the time for Katrina and I felt a little more in tune with us, a little more on the scale we thought we could achieve successfully initially. And then locally we looked around and went, 'Well here there is a gap.' We felt there was a space within this community that we could make a positive impact as opposed to cannibalizing somebody else's audience.
North Shore News: There's a lot of pre-show and post-show activity associated with the PuSh fest productions.
Norman Armour: Dialogue, artistic exchange, creating meaningful connections between the work on stage and the audience and providing opportunities to connect with artists and vice-versa has been key for the festival. We really believe in the talkbacks. There are people who chart their journey at the festival through the talkbacks.
North Shore News: There's a huge wow factor each winter when the PuSh Festival announces who will be coming. What's your take on this year's mix.
Norman Armour: A personal favourite of mine is the one from Argentina - Mariano Pensotti's El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal). It's a very, confident assured work of theatre that looks at four characters over 10 years of their lives and how they interweave with the history of the country and events in the world and their own personal ambitions and desires. It's a beautiful, beautiful work and it will be at SFU Woodwards. There's a lot happening in the world these days and a lot of it is happening over in the Middle East and Looking for a Missing Employee by Rabih Mroué is a rare opportunity to see and hear his reflections on what is happening in that part of the world. I think that's something to not miss out on.
Craigslist Cantata with Bill Richardson and Veda Hille is hilarious. That is a piece we originally played a role in commissioning. The last one I will mention is The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. This is a major undertaking and an extraordinary premiere of an artistic notion that goes back quite a few years to an adaptation of Crime and Punishment by the same artists, the same company (Neworld Theatre/Vancouver Moving Theatre). This year it will be out at UBC, there will be more than 20 people on stage. It's a remarkable artistic vision. When we did Crime and Punishment it took people's breath away. That production was for me a real turning point in the sense that the audiences went thought 'this is as good as probably something in London.' And it was in stature, excellence, in breadth, in vision. That one I look forward to with a huge amount of anticipation.
