The Dance Centre's popular noon hour series presents Metis dance companies Compaigni V'ni Dansi and the Louis Riel Metis Dancers, led by champion jigger Yvonne Chartrand. Info 604 606 6400 www.thedancecentre.ca; tickets from www.ticketstonight.ca.
small metal objects
Back to Back Theatre (Australia)
For small metal objects, the venue is the city. Audience members equipped with headphones become an installation for the general public; the general public becomes the extras within a dramatic narrative. It is a theatrical masterpiece that examines the role spectator and spectacle.
January 30-February 1, 5pm; February 2-3 1pm & 3:30pm
Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch Promenade
Tickets $28/$22 Tickets Tonight www.pushfestival.ca
A show to please your ears, tickle your funny bones and haunt your soul. Instructions for Modern Living is a dark and witty exploration of the hidden life of late-night dwellers. In the tradition of artists like Laurie Anderson and Marie Brassard, Instructions for Modern Living is a time capsule of the ‘wee small hours.’ Music and dialogue combine to create a tragicomic sound-montage of what goes on behind closed doors in urban and suburban society. Video images of nocturnal surveillance footage create a deliciously hypnotic backdrop to the tales of people who find it difficult to sleep at night.
“McGowan’s music really amplifies the impact of the dialogue. Sarkies is not just a skilled writer, but a fine actor as well... it’s a bloody good show.”—Sunday Star Times
Duncan Sarkies is an award-winning short story writer, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for writing one of New Zealand’s highest grossing films, Scarfies and nominated for Writer's Guild Award for Flight of the Conchords.
Nic McGowan has achieved critical acclaim for his work as a prolific composer, producer and engineer. A multi-talented recording and performing artist, his audio designs extend across the mediums of music, theatre, radio drama, film and television.
January 30-February 2, 9pm
Vancouver East Cultural Centre
In the summer of 2005 actor/writer James Long salvaged a collection of seven photo albums and travel journals from an alley near his East Vancouver home. What started as a simple trip to the country carried the creators on narrative jags across propriety, oceans, and beyond.
Palace Grand is a unique solo show which takes place in a theatre within the theatre: a miniature vaudeville stage which floats in space, inhabited by a single oppressed actor. An utterly physical evocation of an ill-fated expedition and a reliquary of sublimely beautiful and iconic artifacts from a mythic northern terrain, the play investigates a uniquely human condition: cacoethes scribendi—the incurable passion for writing. A sort of Yukon Heart of Darkness, Palace Grand cuts deep into the northernmost reaches of Canada on the trail of two men: Walker, a writer who disappears into the wilderness and The Tracker, a bounty hunter hired to find him. Together the two represent separate halves of a single narrative. What remains of this narrative is brought to life by a third man, The Operator of a remote transmitting station whose presence has little to do with their story, but without whom it would be lost.
Caught somewhere between Beckett and Chaplin and taking the mythic Klondike gold rush as its setting, this delirious snowbound fantasy reminds us of our frightening ever present quest for self. The play won three Jessie Awards for Performance, Set Design and Lighting in 2004. This PuSh-commissioned presentation reimagines the critically acclaimed original production.
Chunky Move Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and German interactive software engineer Frieder Weiß have together created an intimate interactive solo performance in which the motion of the human body is used to trigger and control music, lighting and animation. A digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement, with the body’s gestures extended by and in turn manipulating the surrounding video world.
The relationship between the light and graphics and the human body changes throughout Glow. At first the dancer seems to control the magical display of light and geometric patterns, but gradually it becomes difficult to separate the elements of body and light, as movement, graphics and sound powerfully meld into a single entity. Then eerily, projected shadows take on a dramatic form of their own and begin to impact on the dancer’s behaviour.