The 20th edition of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival begins today! Here’s a quick primer on what you need to know to kick off the festival and get set up for three weeks of audacious live art.
All That Remains
Choreographer Miriko Guido’s work All That Remains travels to PuSh from Denmark and Italy to bring a unique blend of dance, installation and sound performance to the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Guido describes the performance as a “call to consciousness,” coming from an artist's need to pay attention to the environmental, social and political conditions impacting our environment. Less about specified dance styles, and more about the movement of performer bodies in similar relation to sound and the environment, All That Remains asks the audience how we, as a species that has fallen out of sync with our natural environment, can open up new potentialities of relation and becoming.
Special sculptural pieces from visual artist Søren Engsted play the role of the environment, reimagined with local Vancouver SFU support from Jaeden Walton and Taha Saraei using local industrial debris and organic matter. The version of All That Remains for PuSh will fundamentally differ from any other version performed elsewhere.
All That Remains plays on Jan. 23 and 24 at 7:30 p.m., with a public post-show talkback on Jan. 24. More info and tickets are available on the PuSh Festival website.
The History of Korean Western Theatre
“What happens when a nation’s artistic spirit is undermined by the weight of western influence?”
Jaha Koo is back with The History of Korean Western Theatre, the concluding piece to the trilogy of works that also includes Cuckoo and Lolling and Rolling. You won’t need to have seen the other two works to enjoy Koo’s newest multimedia projection work that blends archival material with narrative and analysis.
The History of Korean Western Theatre is a look at the far-reaching repercussions of imperialism — past and present — while uncovering subtle ruptures in the Confucian moral framework of South Korea and its intergenerational relationships.
Music and the spoken Korean word (with English surtitles) form an immersive experience where Koo is right with the audience. Unlike Lolling and Rolling, Koo does not DJ the show but instead speaks from personal narratives. Breaking from traditions of self-censorship, he sits on stage and offers a deeply authentic perspective on the past and defiantly imagines a future free from cultural erasure.
Like the prior works in Koo’s Hamartia Trilogy (hamartia meaning “tragic error” in Greek), Koo provides analysis and contemplation on Western assimilation and how it has shaped Korean theatre, and by extension the national identity of South Korea through whimsy and provocation.
The fusion of sound, visuals and Koo’s own irreverent personal humour offers an enchanting way to learn about the Korean struggle with identity.
The History of Western Korean Theatre plays Jan. 23 and Jan. 24 at 7:30 p.m. at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. There will also be a public post-show talkback on Jan. 23. More info and tickets are available on the PuSh website.
Transpofagic Manifesto
Renata Carvalho brings her work to the stage at a time when trans voices are being silenced globally. She invites the public to behold her, stripped of gender-enforcing constraints, and engage in a conversation on how harmful perceptions of trans people are constructed and reproduced. Her work reclaims the term “travesti” to describe a distinct transfeminine identity with a history of marginalization and resilience in Latin America.
Carvalho offers herself and her story in a radical expression of empowerment that subverts the obsessive scrutiny and hypersexualization of trans bodies, distilling this gaze and transforming it into art, literature and education.
Transpofagic Manifesto plays on Feb. 7 at 8 p.m. and and Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island. More info and tickets are available at the PuSh website.
PuSh runs for three weeks from Jan. 23 to Feb. 9 with installations, dance pieces, spoken word, theatre, film and more. Visit the website to check out what’s playing and get ready to take in audacious live art.
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