PuSh International Performing Arts Festival scales back, while PuSh Rally takes centre stage
Symposium tackles past controversies and diversity, while four shows mix online and live offerings
Jason Dubois and Maiko Yamamoto
THE PUSH INTERNATIONAL Performing Arts Festival says the pandemic has forced it to dramatically scale back its shows scheduled from January 28 to February 6. However, the PuSh Rally, formerly the PuSh Assembly—an international symposium that’s long been a part of the event—will continue in a big way online.
Today PuSh announced a series of copresentations, which include two live events that will operate more like still-permitted museum or gallery experiences. Violette, copresented with Théâtre la Seizième, is a site-specific story installation to be enjoyed one-by-one at Studio 16. And SANCTUARY: The Dakota Bear Ancient Forest Experience, copresented with the Sunshine Coast Arts Council, is a 360-degree projection at Performance Works, offering viewers a wraparound view of an endangered ancient forest. (A third live copresentation with the Dance Centre will be announced after the provincial health authority announces new pandemic measures on January 8.)
Elsewhere, PuSh copresents two virtual performances: Graveyards & Gardens, a livestream show featuring a mixture of archival and electronic sounds, with Music on Main on January 28 and 29, and Njo Kong Kie’s score for solo voice and piano I swallowed a moon made of iron 我咽下一枚铁做的月亮, with dates and times to be announced.
“We’ve stepped away from using the word ‘festival’,” explains PuSh managing director Jason Dubois, who’s calling the four shows a “series”. “It may be easier to say there will not be a festival like you’ve experienced before.”
Dubois said the cancellation of previously planned live programming started with the tightening of pandemic measures that shut down BC theatres and other venues starting in November.
The PuSh Fest was thrown into a major controversy last spring that threatened its existence. After COVID hit, it cut the jobs of two high-ranking women of Asian descent, and then announced its new artistic director Franco Boni was no longer employed.
Dubois says that the artists who pulled out of the fest in December, causing the reduction in programming, did so not because of that controversy. They did so because of the closure of theatres and the fact that their live works would not translate into filmed format. In addition, artists could no longer travel from other parts of BC and the rest of the country, he says.
The focus this year will instead largely be on the PuSh Rally, a series of free online forums that will delve into the broader questions of diversity and race that embroiled the event in controversy earlier this year. Curated by high-profile local theatre artists Maiko Yamamoto and Marcus Youssef, it includes artist talks with Carmen Aguirre and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and a live discussion about race and the white gaze with the creators of the Fairview, a hard-hitting play about race and prejudice that won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama.
SANCTUARY: The Dakota Bear Ancient Forest Experience.
The Rally has grown largely out of an organizational review at the festival that’s been happening for the last six months. Yamamoto is one of the prominent artists of colour in the city who have stepped onto an advisory board at PuSh to help it change systemically, and ultimately survive the crisis. She told Stir last fall she and others wanted to acknowledge “what an important cultural institution PuSh is. I can't imagine what the city would be without it. So I feel like the Rally is also about community activation.”
“It maintains a couple significant pieces of programming for PuSh,” says Dubois of making the Rally the heart of this year’s event. “First, there’s its importance and connection with the local arts community and the international performing-arts community. With no international programming because of the pandemic, we wanted to maintain connections with our colleagues around the world. The Rally is also an opportunity to explore those issues not just affecting PuSh but the community at large.”
The Rally kicks off with an event that confronts PuSh’s controversy earlier this year head-on: it begins January 28 at 10 am with State of the (PuSh) Union, in which Youssef and Yamamoto will talk candidly about their own experiences of what’s taken place at PuSh over the last six months.
”There’s been a lot of questioning about transparency at PuSh,” says Yamamoto. “For us it was really important because that story about why we became involved is really critical to the context of the rally and why we put it together—and it clearly states, too, that it’s our version of what we’re doing. It is about all these perspectives coming together inside of moments like this.
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory appears at the PuSh Rally
“Marcus has a practice based on this idea of ‘awkward conversations’—and it terrifies me,” she adds laughing, “but I think it’s really important. And if I’ve learned anything during this time, it’s that if you can face those difficult conversations and tough conversations, talk through difference, and figure out how to get to the other side, there’s good release and learning that happens from that.”
A later streamed rally event called Trauma Informed Systems Change (January 30 at noon) speaks to the crisis the organization has endured. In it, artists Vanessa Kwan, Caroline Liffmann, and Justine Chambers look directly at how to work to evolve systems of presentation that have been exclusionary.
Yamamoto says she and Youssef were able to gather an international and local program of guests that they knew personally.
Reports From the Field take place throughout the Rally —11 artists, curators, and presenters from across the globe – all connected to PuSh – answering the question “What are you thinking about most right now, in relationship to your work, the sector, or the world?”
“What’s been happening at PuSh has been happening globally as well. It will be impossible to remove the pandemic when we say ‘How’s everybody doing?’” Yamamoto comments.
Elsewhere, on February 4 at 10 am, Youssef hosts a live talk with American author, playwright, and activist Sarah Schulman about the intersection between art-making and social change.
The Rally, and the performances, find PuSh in flux, reassessing what it is, and for whom. Will it weather the combined storm of systemic overhaul and pandemic shutdowns?
“I circle back to what PuSh has given the community. Not to say it hasn’t made mistakes. I guess I’m willing to take part in that conversation—the community conversation and the national conversation,” says Yamamoto, who says she and Youssef have been heartened by the support they’re getting from local and national artists and organizations for their efforts.
“There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done,” she adds. “There has been a lot of good work and a lot of incredible conversations, but it doesn’t feel like we’re out of the woods per se. That level of trauma really takes time to heal and part of that is rebuilding connections. And that is part of the overall context of pandemic and the arts and how art as a community comes back.”
“It’s early days to try and predict and say what it will look like in the future,” Dubois tells Stir, adding there are plans to postpone any productions cancelled this year to live performances in 2022. “That’s what the PuSh Rally is about: to see what artists and other stakeholders see. I would say there’s great support for this organization from public funders and donors and presentation partners and artists. So I would say PuSh very much has a future. We’re very much looking forward. We’re making plans for how we get to a festival in 2022.”
See more information and full schedule here.
Update: After publication PuSh corrected a reference to a month, changed above. From managing director Jason Dubois:
“I have to apologize for inadvertently misrepresenting the timing of the artist withdrawals from the 2021 PuSh Festival that led to our decision to move away from promoting the program as a complete festival this year. Two significant presentations, Morag: You’re A Long Time Died and How To Fail As A Popstar were both canceled in December due to complications related to the pandemic, leading to this decision. However, on November 29th, Hong Kong Exile notified PuSh that they would not be following through with an engagement as part of the 2021 PuSh Festival. This particular cancelation was not related to COVID, but rather to the PuSh controversy that erupted this past summer (June 2020).”
Related Articles
