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VANCOUVER GOES LIVE FOR PERFORMANCE-ART FEST > »
^^w The funny thing about or^ r ganizing a performance-art
festival is you're never quite sure
what you're going to get. That's
the position Glenn Alteen finds
himself in as he prepares for the
latest installment of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art (which
runs Saturday [October 15] to
November 26)—or prepares as
much as can be expected. "I was
in theatre years ago, and if all
goes well there, you know exactly
what's going to happen, whereas
with performance art you only
have a vague parameter," the
chair of the event says over the
phone from the grunt gallery,
where he is director.
Adding to the element of surprise is the fact that performance

art can take so many forms. In
this, the biggest biennial yet,
there are 50 acts—almost double
the number of the event's first
year in 1999—and they span everything from music to processions to reading rooms. They
range from big touring productions like Mexican cabaret singer
Astrid Hadad and American musician and interdisciplinary artist
Meredith Monk to smaller, sitespecific and interactive projects.
The latter includes Irene Loughlin's November 16 presentation
of Nadia, where she and the Renfrew Gymnastics Club, in the Waterfront Station lobby, explore the
darker side of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci's life. Then
there's the Hal Winkler Project's

The Nova Library at the Vancouver Public Library's downtown
branch: a public reading room of
books, chosen by addicts from the
Downtown Eastside, that opens
October 17. In contrast to that relatively small setting, visitors are
taking over the cemetery grounds
at East 41st Avenue and Fraser
Street for Paula Jardine's A Night
for All Souls on October 29. (See
story on page 41.) And all month,
LIVE celebrates Vancouver jazz,
performance, writing, and visualart innovator Al Neil as a father
of the form; he takes the stage at
the Western Front (October 15)
and the Roundhouse Community
Arts & Recreation Centre (November 10).
Believe it or not, there is a link-

ing theme to all the work. The
last fest was called Performance
Art and the Academy, and it centred around pieces that helped
legitimize the form. This year,
LIVE dubs itself Altered States
and takes a swing in the opposite
direction: the curatorial statement declared that the fourth
installment would centre on
"performance art incorporating
the irrational, the subversive, the
spiritual, the intuitive, the confrontational and the traumatic. It
focuses on the artist as prophet,
as shaman, as masochist, as addict, as anarchist."
In other words, the lineup promises to shake things up around town.
Still, Alteen expects the fest's turnout to continue to grow: "Vancouver

is such a performance-art town. It
has a role in the cultural life of the
city that you just don't see anywhere
else, and there's always been a lot of
it," he says. "A lot of other art forms
are envious of performance art because of its freedom."
LIVE has played a big role in
bringing performance art, if not
exactly into the mainstream,
then out from the under-underground. "What's exciting is that,
for a lot of traditional venues, they
wouldn't look at performance art
as a form that would be viable to
present," Alteen says. "But when
LIVE comes in, it becomes more
of an event."
View the entire schedule at
www.livevancouver.bc.ca/.

OCTOBER 13 - 20 / 2005

> JANET SMITH
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT

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