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Bogotá at the PuSh Festival plays Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Photo by Felixe Godbout Delavaud.
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Why Art Should Mess with You

And what it’s all for. A dive into this year’s PuSh fest, the death of David Lynch, and more.

An assembly of bare-chested actors move together across a dark stage floor against a black background.
Bogotá at the PuSh Festival plays Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 at the Vancouver Playhouse. Photo by Felixe Godbout Delavaud.
Dorothy Woodend 24 Jan 2025The Tyee

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

It’s time to get your experimental theatre and dance on at Vancouver’s 20th anniversary PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

The fest hasn’t scaled back on its offerings this year — it’s arriving in full flight, following a challenging 2024 season marked by the controversial cancellation of a theatre production days before its opening night. The previous year was also darkened by the death of Norman Armour, one of the festival founders.

But the old saying about how the show must go on still applies.

The usual collection of what audiences have come to expect from the festival — strange, wondrous stuff — are again in bountiful supply. Although to be perfectly frank, it’s always a bit challenging to assess exactly what they will entail.

Sometimes you just need to see it in the flesh, as it were.

I get that festivals need to sell tickets. Artists must be paid. Venues, staff and just about everything involved in mounting a major festival like PuSH gets more and more expensive every year. In promoting different shows, the superlatives get laid on thick and fast.

I don’t begrudge all the efforts of the public relations teams, but sometimes the torrent of marketing can obscure the heart of the thing itself.

At the very core of the creative impulse is the desire and need to make something that has never existed come into being. A bit of a godlike experience, even on the most minor level.

So, pay your money and to take your chances. That’s what art is for, after all: to mess with you. Discombobulate, disorient, even bring on a wee bit of disassociation. There’s a time and place for more comforting fare, but PuSh exists to celebrate art on the edge.

Two actors face each other on a darkened stage. The person in the foreground wears a black corset, fetish gear, fishnets and red high-top sneakers. The person facing them is in partial darkness, similarly attired.
Out at the PuSh Festival. Photo by Rosie Powell.

A week after the death of American auteur David Lynch, this essay feels strangely fitting.

Since he burst onto the scene with 1977’s Eraserhead, Lynch carved out one of the most fascinating career arcs in American film history. In addition to creating some of the wildest stuff that ever garnered mainstream success (the cult-classic television series Twin Peaks or the 2001 movie Mulholland Drive), Lynch was also a painter, a musician and a dedicated practitioner of transcendental meditation.

The man was a channel, a conduit to the universe itself in all its curiosity, horror and staggering beauty. In watching the tributes file in for Lynch and his work, it feels like a good moment to think more deeply about what art is really for.

It’s never been easy to be an artist. Even Lynch, for all his magnitude, struggled to bring projects to fruition.

But things might get harder still in the years to come with touring organizations, both Canadian and American. Tariffs loom on the horizon. How exactly this will impact performing and presenting arts organizations is yet to be understood.

Even the mere act of existing in the arts feels strangely fraught these days.

So, why do it?

An apocryphal quote attributed erroneously to Winston Churchill about cutting funding to the arts to support the efforts of the Second World War resulted in the famous statement: “Then what would we be fighting for?”

It still holds true.

Since it feels like we’re about to enter something of a wartime footing, at least in the culture sector, it’s worth revisiting the idea.

A person in a dark updo, backless dress and flesh-coloured high heels walks down a runway, their right arm raised to the crowd. Their left hand holds a pink wing-like train of their jewel-toned skirt. They are walking towards a chandelier and a crowded audience of young adults in casual streetwear raises their arms aloft in applause on either side of the runway.
Dune Wars Kiki Ball at the PuSh Festival. Photo by Simone Chnarakis.

Never forget how fortifying art can be

Every loss — whether it’s the book section in the local paper, or the end of a publishing house, or the death of great filmmaker — makes you realize all over again what we’re fighting for.

I thought about this while in the middle of watching A Complete Unknown, the recent biopic of Bob Dylan. The film is entertaining enough, but hearing Dylan’s most famous work again made my synapses leap to attention.

Every moment of great historical shift needs an anthem, a song to sew together all the surging forces. Songs needs to be experienced in the flesh, but also as a collective. This kind of fusing of people into a united events impacts us biologically, even physiologically. In a theatre, audience heart rates often sync up.

Four performers stand with their backs to the camera on a darkened stage, holding an assortment of large fabrics and props. White lights shine at them, illuminating them in silhouette.
All That Remains at the PuSh Festival. Photo courtesy of the PuSh Festival.

It doesn’t matter if it’s something as mainstream as a Taylor Swift concert or a freaky-deaky experimental theatre production: the point is to be together.

Taylor Swift’s December 2024 Eras Tour in Vancouver was interesting to witness. As people from all corners of the planet poured into the city, I was struck by the number of families who attended the shows together. It was impossible to deny the incredible sweetness of watching a gaggle of little girls, dressed in sparkles, skipping down the street. The parents, usually only a step behind, seemed a little blearier, but still blissed out.

This kind of sharing surpasses all difference: age, time, taste. I might occasionally rage at my mother, but I will always be immensely grateful for her sharing art, music and books with us, her cadre of small cantankerous children.

However many years later, whenever I hear the tympani thunder of Antonìn Dvořák’s New World Symphony, I am shot like a cannonball backwards in time to our tiny trailer home, parked across the yard from my grandparents’ farmhouse in the Kootenays.

We had a record player and a selection of battered old albums, one of which was Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9. I was beyond obsessed with it, and the many narratives and stories that the music could hold.

When I think about my mother and this moment in time, I am just so thankful that she did what she did, showing us, her children, the deep magic of the arts.

In an age of isolation, fracture and loneliness, the arts can still bring people together quite unlike anything else. It’s little wonder that artists are among the first groups of people to be targeted in authoritarian regimes.

They offer not only a deeper understanding of the world, but the capacity to envision new worlds and new ways of being. A channel again, or maybe more critically, a reminder that everything is bigger, stranger and more fascinating than one can imagine, imagination being the key enterprise of the arts.

The bare arm and leg of an actor is visible beneath an illuminated fabric cover in seafoam that resembles the scales of a dragon or large reptile. They are on the floor of a stage against a black background.
Habitat at the PuSh Festival. Photo by Denis Martin.

If you want to fight the power, feel more hopeful, meet and talk to your fellow humans and be catapulted once more into the state of wonder that we get to exist in at this moment, go see art.

The PuSh Festival, the symphony, the local gallery — it doesn’t matter where or how.

David Lynch put it this way.

“I get ideas and I want to put them on film because they thrill me. You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don’t.

“They’ve got life going on around them, but they don’t look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie.”

In honour of Lynch, find the most challenging, experimental production you can find at the PuSh Festival. There’s a bevy of them: contemporary dance, theatre and film.

Crack open your mind and let the universe pour in.


The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival runs Jan. 23 to Feb. 9 in Vancouver.  [Tyee]

Read more: Art, Theatre, Film

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