PuSh Play

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 li

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.

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. 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

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. 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 audie

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. 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

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. 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 thinki

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. 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 y

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. 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 k

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. 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

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. 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 rehearsal

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. 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

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. 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 a

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. 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

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. 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 spea

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. 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

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. 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 authent