PuSh International Performing Arts Festival announces PuSh Play podcast, now streaming across platforms
Gabrielle Martin converses with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form ahead of the festival’s run from January 18 to February 4
SPONSORED POST BY PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
Pli. Photo by Loïc Nys
For two decades, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival has been known for delivering radical, innovative, contemporary works of live art by acclaimed local, national, and international artists.
In celebration of these artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form, the festival’s director of programming Gabrielle Martin hosts PuSh Play, a freshly pressed podcast where she is joined in conversation by artists appearing at Vancouver’s premier winter festival from January 18 to February 4. The podcast has been streaming since the festival announced its 2024 lineup—17 new original works from 15 countries, including four world premieres and seven Canadian debuts—which is dedicated to inspired risk-taking and dynamic interdisciplinary collaboration.
On the PuSh Play podcast, Martin sits down with artists who are showing work at the festival this winter. “Our festival artists are visionaries with unique, trans-cultural perspectives,” Martin says in a release. “These artists are smiths of the unknown—they navigate plurality and invite us to participate in meaning-making.” The podcast allows the audience to become more intimate with an artist’s process and work, prior to seeing it at PuSh.
The Runner. Photo by Lyon Smith
In the podcast, Ben Target talks about the radical potential of entertainment in LORENZO; Gaby Saranouffi and Simona Deaconescu of Ramanenjana (co-presented with The Dance Centre) highlight how dance can serve as an act of protest; Christopher Morris delves into the humanizing power of narrative in advance of bringing his piece The Runner (co-presented with Touchstone Theatre) to PuSh; Inbal Ben Haim discusses the theatrical power of creating danger onstage in Pli (co-presented with Chutzpah! Festival PLUS); David Mesiha and Gavan Cheema dissect the fluid boundary between witnessing and participating in performance in Same Difference; and Cherish Menzo discusses the “chopped and screwed” remix technique, the Black body in the context of post-humanism, and the equal roles of the beauty and the grotesque in the context of the work DARKMATTER (co-presented with SFU Woodward’s).
Eighteen episodes will be presented in the series, with new interviews each Monday and Thursday until the opening of the 2024 festival on January 18, available across various platforms.
Transcripts of each episode, previews of the works being shown at this year’s festival, and tickets and passes can be found at PuShFestival.ca.
Post sponsored by PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Ramanenjana. Photo by Adi Bulboacå