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Arts and Culture

PuSh Is So Good, Why Pretend Journalistic Objectivity?

The groundbreaking theatre festival exemplifies Vancouver's cultural growth. (Or your money back.)

Charles Campbell 2 Feb 2011TheTyee.ca

Tyee contributing editor Charles Campbell edited the Georgia Straight for a decade and also worked at the Vancouver Sun for five years as entertainment editor and an editorial board member. This is his first money-back guarantee.

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Scene from '100% Vancouver', a PuSh Festival production.

There was a police car blocking the foot of Water Street on a Saturday night late last month. A few yards away, a crowd gathered around a man crawling in pain from his downed motorcycle toward his lost helmet. They were looking at the words -- the thoughts of the injured man -- projected on the roadway beneath his feet.

From the sidewalk, someone shouted, "What's going on? Is this a film set?" Once again, the seven-year-old PuSh International Performing Arts Festival intrigued, provoked and confounded its audiences, of both the intentional and accidental kind.

La Marea, a set of nine 10-minute performance pieces, promised intimacy with the inner thoughts of its characters: two lonely people waiting in vain to meet each other on a street corner; a man at the window of a downtown rave; a relationship held together by mysterious (metaphorical?) "beatings".

La Marea's intimacy was often alienating and the reviews were mixed, but several thousand people came to witness it, and Water Street at night in January was alive in an entirely new and intriguing way. Which by PuSh's standards is just fine. When your artistic mission is to test boundaries, when you dare the gods to rain on you, sometimes things don't entirely work out. Cozy Vancouver could use a little more of that sort of risk-taking (along with the patience to stop whining about "the rain" when it's really just a Scotch mist).

(Re)defining Vancouver

What PuSh is and does says a lot about Vancouver as a city, and this year it's particularly true, as the festival is the first big event to mark Vancouver's 125th anniversary. At a Club PuSh cabaret night called Happy Birthday, Teenage City, host Charlie Demers called it our Quatchicentennial. At a Roundhouse, City of Dreams offered the languid spectacle of people creating a city map that traced our place's development. Sticks defined the shores, bricks the downtown core, and a gumball machine and a tin of Spam marked the Pacific National Exhibition.

At the SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, 100% Vancouver brought together 100 citizens who represent the city's complex demographics. They came with personal treasures, told a few quietly revealing stories, formed various groupings onstage as they were polled about their lives, and moved a few audience members to tears. How many people came to Vancouver to escape something? Far more than you might expect.

To understand why PuSh really matters, it's worth considering Vancouver's unique cultural geography and history. The history is short. Is there a big city on the continent that can claim to be younger? Well, there's Las Vegas...

Most of Vancouver's cultural institutions have been around for less than half a lifetime. Yet the city I call home has enjoyed quite a bit of smart cultural development. Festivals have been a big part of that. The (now struggling) Vancouver Children's Festival was once a unique and important template for cities around the world. The Vancouver Folk Music Festival's anti-commercial approach built a devoted following for roots music from around the world. The Vancouver International Jazz Festival, which deftly launched itself as a major event during Expo 86, is the peer of the very best jazz festivals in North America. Our Cultural Olympiad raised the bar for future Olympic Games.

PuSh connects to the world

When PuSh arrived seven years ago, it filled one of the obvious gaps in Vancouver's festival landscape. In the last 25 years, there has been an explosion of new and talent-rich theatre companies in Vancouver. In the theatre world, our location up the coast on the edge of the rainforest is particularly isolating. Touring is expensive and audiences are small. Our artists didn't often go "there" and theirs rarely came here. Toronto is a million miles away. In Europe, Calgary or Edmonton would be a continent apart from us. Our psychographic cousin, Seattle, is closer, but the border creates an invisible wall that is not often transgressed.

We needed -- both our artists and our theatergoers -- a way to see work that is breaking ground elsewhere. We needed an umbrella under which both can take a chance on something unknown. Other Vancouver festivals have done this brilliantly. Now PuSh is doing that for theatre, as well as any festival before it. This year, PuSh features work from Buenos Aires, Antwerp, Brisbane, Kielce, Anglesey, Paris, Zurich, Edmonton and Montreal, alongside some fabulous local shows.

PuSh may well be exceeding other festivals in creating an audience elsewhere for work from here. This weekend's PuSh Assembly brings theatre presenters to Vancouver from around the world. Last year, Berlin's Rimini Protokoll came to Vancouver to create Best Before, in which local theatre pros and first-time stage performers collaborated on a giant participatory video game based on the performers' and the audience's real lives. The show has toured to Seattle, Cork, London, Toronto, Brighton, Berlin, Aarhus, Geneva, and Torino. Paris and Warwick are in its future.

PuSh may, in fact, be the city's most collaborative festival. Its executive director, Norman Armour, understands that if we're going to build something that matters and lasts, we must do it together. Armour takes a long view: we are in the unique and blessed position of creating our teenage city's cultural foundations, and when we do that we must look to the future.

A confession and a guarantee

I say all these things as a journalist who has spent 30 years covering this city and its culture. Yet as I sell the virtues of PuSh, it's necessary that I acknowledge some personal bias. Norman Armour is my friend. I am on the board of the theatre company that co-produces Club PuSh. My wife is on the PuSh board, and first proposed the PuSh festival name. Why have theatre and the PuSh festival caused me to violate that semi-sacred principle that journalists should not be involved in the things that they write about? Why have I not recused myself from offering my opinion on PuSh's place in the city?

Well, it's because I love theatre's potential for invention, and I love it most when it has a clear sense of place and purpose. When the house lights go down and the show begins, good theatre's ability to bring all those present together in some sort of shared understanding -- or lively disagreement -- is unique. And when others champion that sort of theatre, I feel obliged to speak up on its behalf.

So go to PuSh, if you haven't already. Go to Floating, about the Welsh island of Anglesey breaking away after an earthquake and drifting like a ship into the mid-Atlantic, or Peter Panties, in which Vancouver's Neworld Theatre and Leaky Heaven Circus offer a decidedly adult take on Neverland, or Club PuSh's The Good Gets Better & Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors, in which Winnipeg's remarkable Daniel Barrow brings the graphic novel to life with smart narration and inventive use of an overhead projector. If you don't think it was worth your risk, I will personally -- having transgressed the conflict-of-interest rules that should generally govern journalism -- give you your money back.

This money-back guarantee is good only for face value of tickets to 'Floating', until Saturday at the Arts Club Review Stage, 'Peter Panties', until Saturday at the The Cultch, and 'The Good Gets Better', this Friday and Saturday, February 4 and 5, at Club PuSh at Performance Works. Refund requests may be directed to the author at [email protected].  [Tyee]

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