Mascall Dance's "White Spider" is easily one of the most out-there performance experiences that I have had this year. The stage was equipped with a large revolving disk that was tilted on an angle and moved by a pneumatic lift. Climbing ropes hung from the ceiling, and on the back wall there was a contraption that looked like the ungainly offspring of a lightening rod and a basketball net (it turned out to be a dance/drawing machine). In the second act, a three-sided ladder-like structure was also wheeled onstage for dancers to climb and tumble on.
Seven people are preparing to jump off the south side of the Vancouver Public Library. About 300 people have begun to gather, watching in anticipation. There are no paramedics on site, no safety nets have been deployed. Tension mounts. Children fidget and start to cry. Groups of friends huddle, clutching their daily dose of Starbucks.
Finally, the music starts and the dancers begin to saunter across the face of the library, held safely in place, mid-air, by rock climbing gear rigged to the top of the building. The dancers’ majestic movements are choreographed by Julia Taffe,...
Odysseus Chaoticus indeed. This piece is visually compelling, innovative, surprising, intimate, vulnerable, riotous, bawdy, eloquent and well executed to boot! A liberal dose of nourishing comedy for us heroes of the day-to-day.
Felix Culpa has done an admirable job with a challenging script. Playwright Tom Cone's latest opus, Donald and Lenore, is a surreal journey with two characters going nowhere in a made-up paradise of sorts. Set in a Polynesian-inspired Tiki Room underneath an unnamed airport, ex-con Donald performs nightly in a tiki room act with his boss Lenore. Depending on her mood, she calls him either "Jailbait" or "Donald #7". They seem to have creative differences - Donald wants to share his highly inappropriate stand-up act about his former cellmate Hernando while Lenore insists on pretending it is their big...
Billy Marchenski & Linda Quibell as Donald & Lenore
Strange to say, but the more dance I see, the more I like dance that focuses less on performance and more on transcendence. I suppose I wouldn’t like to see, for example, a Shamanistic ritual onstage at the Playhouse Theatre, where I’d paid a substantial sum for my ticket unless it had really great aesthetics, but I’ll take some kind of soulful, interior journey made aesthetic over the impulse to perform for the sake of performing any day. Cloud Gate Theatre’s Moon Water was the kind of show that was so finely crafted that it seemed to emerge naturally...
Megan: Is Delusion a piece of art you can say to like or dislike? I thought it was more living it than liking it. Maybe that's because I didn't like it very much. I needed more narrative and character to hang on to here.
Kirstie: I guess I was sold on the combination of intimacy and spectacle that Delusion offered. My feeling was "Wow. Why can't I see this every Friday night, instead of going to the latest blockbuster movie or an open mic night?" Anderson seemed wed these unlikely extremes.
Dark Matters is the latest offering by choreographer Crystal Pite, the founder of Kidd Pivot. Influenced by Kabuki and Butoh puppet theatre, Dark Matters is a two part performance that deconstructs it's own dramatic premise, immersing the audience in meditations on creation and destruction as part of a cosmic flux.
Part one is a theatrical narrative told through movement, a dark fable about a puppet maker whose creation comes to life and kills him with a pair of tailor's scissors (think Pinocchio gone terribly wrong). The second part is based in pure movement, but though free of narrative,...
Laurie Anderson's Delusion isn't a theatre piece per say and it's not quite a concert. This will probably result in confusion for anyone going to the Vancouver Playhouse and expecting to see a play. You will be left scratching your head asking yourself "What exactly am I watching?". What you are watching (or not depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing) is a mash-up of experimental rock, spoken word story telling, performance art, and giant projections presented under the moniker of performance art. This sounds a lot cooler than it is and unfortunately the Playhouse is...
Duff Armour walks into the side of a table. He shifts to his right. Does it again. Shifts. Does it again. Again. He’s acting out being a computer game avatar. This is what a game tester does. A computer game is created, then the tester puts an avatar through the game environment making sure he can’t walk through tables and walls when he’s not supposed to.
Yes, BASH'd is a bona fide hit. It played Off-Broadway (in New York City) and has won a bunch of awards. Written and performed by Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow, this fast-paced rhymin' slammin' hip-hop musical love story is told to us by two gay rappers – T-Bag and Feminem. And the near-capacity crowd at the Cultch's opening night was rightfully impressed by their masterful performances.
