Invoking an Alchemy of Transformation: Gabrielle Martin talks curating with care at this year's PuSh Festival

In a statement ahead of the festival, director of programming reflects on compiling “works that share a sense of cultural urgency”

SPONSORED POST BY PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

BLOT – Body Line of Thought. Photo by Adi Bulboacå

Ahead of this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, director of programming Gabrielle Martin reflects on the transformational ability of the arts in a curatorial statement.

In the written piece, she emphasizes that the lineup of diverse performances on display across Vancouver from January 18 to February 4 are compiled with “care”—a word which, fittingly, is the linguistic root of “curate”.

“The artistic projects of the 2024 PuSh program are all works that share a sense of cultural urgency,” writes Martin in her statement. “They are works that inspire social change through their ‘what’—through content that pushes us to examine contemporary issues and how we situate ourselves in relation to them.”

This reflection takes place across a variety of disciplines and works. Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s poetic performance Sound of the Beast from Theatre Passe Muraille, for instance, uses spoken word, storytelling, and rap to explore people’s connections to oppressive systems and find a path towards empowerment. Elsewhere, Back to Back Theatre’s The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes speculates on how AI might treat humans by looking at society’s treatment of people who are neurodivergent.

The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes. Photo by Jeff Busby

The performances at this year’s festival also prompt inner reflection. “They are works that centre the ‘why’,” Martin explains, “making us feel more alive with personal accounts of resistance and acts of vulnerability in conversation with liberation and mortality.” Of particular note is the cathartic treatment of death by Soho Theatre’s Lorenzo.

She adds that “the festival is also defined by works whose creative risk and interdisciplinarity shift our paradigms for expression, or the ‘how’.” Take for example Action at a Distance and Tangaj Collective’s BLOT – Body Line of Thought, which reimagines interconnectedness using bacteria cultivated from the dancers’ bodies and dunes of salt.

Martin began her position with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in 2021, having previously worked as festival manager of the Vancouver International Dance Festival. As a trained aerial and contemporary dance artist, she is co-artistic director of the Vancouver performance company Corporeal Imago alongside Jeremiah Hughes.

To learn more about this year’s festival, purchase tickets, and read Martin’s complete curatorial statement, visit pushfestival.ca.

Post sponsored by PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

Sound of the Beast. Photo by Michael Cooper