TERMINAL CITY WEEKLY

atest Composer in the World was bril••. In a series of blackouts the composer
eposes, miniscule vignettes. It's an old old
„g, but on the last one he strums once a
uitar then rears up and in one blow demolles the guitar. The whole audience jumps
id chokes on gurgled laughter. And Kerry
Davidson as his client who commissioned
i e song ("That was the most beautiful song
vc ever heard!""I know") his muse, and his
ie true love—a houseplant—well, Kerry
uldn't be boring if you encased her in
•ncrete. Hell, everybody those two nights
s gorgeous.
O t O Mask are the biggest revelation for
in a weekend of belly-clutching revelas. The number of times I've whined
- is no decent mask work going on in
city, I am now obliged to shut my face.
Ie Fox's show, a gothic comedy that
mands it be done at least once more for
ristmas somewhere, anywhere, hell you
4
do it at my place. I live alone with my
set of photographs and some fish, but
/ have excellent attention spans for goldand I've trained them to clap. A brilliant
t for a promising venture, and Andrew
xNee's hair alone deserves its own TV
ecial.
I could go on and on. Seventeenth Floors
weet little number about two people
rapped down by their humdrum if frantic
s meeting each other for the first time in
wears suicide pact on the train tracks is to
rworked, I believe, and shown again.
h, the thing I didn't like? Aw, fuck it,
.itever. Why spoil a perfect weekend with
uicism? Next year will be the seventh
nder The Gun. Dear Reader, I am going to
>und you to see this next time 'round.

OCT 17-23, 2003 11

WDgQJML IMM
LIVE BIENNIDL
IF PERFORMONCE I f f
LIVE Biennial of Performance Art is a monumental, international-standard festival of possibly the most marginalised
of art forms. While there are still larger events of this nature
in Europe, none are growing as fast as Vancouver's, and the
stature and quality of artists from Vancouver and around the
world performing for such a young festival is nothing short
of stupendous. Dick Averns, Andre Stitt, Hester Reeve,
Rodney Graham, Kristine Stiles, Julianna Barabas, Boris
Nieslony who founded the Black Market International. The
list goes on.Vancouver desperately needs a serious consideration of cutting edge theory and practice, something with a
bit of meat for the brain. We don't even have a museum of
modern art like other so-called "world class" cities.
Artropolis? Uh huh. The LIVE Biennial will fill a huge gap in
the local scene. Originally a creation of the Grunt Gallery,
LIVE has become its own evolving, expanding entity, and
David Yonge, a local artist of matching repute has been
handed the directorship.
W w : This is a pretty stellar line-up you've got here.
David Yonge: Yeah! This has been in the works now for
almost a year and a half.
TCW: These are some big names. Did you approach them
or they you?
DY: Most of the international stars were approached by the

UNTED PLAYS AT the Waterfront theatre,

pired by Japanese anime. I'm not familiar
h the stylistic language of anime, but I
•gnise Urban Ink Productions are trying
create a physical interpretation of its
ts. The set is constructed with a bridge
Ing through the audience so the charcan be in "close-up", and there are
scenes in series of tableaux much like
murai in the cartoons. Without quite
lysical skills to make it so dazzling,
ented philosophy and poetry create
>earance of depth with only a few lin"marks to make out what the story
Roughly, it's about a girl who's
3.d by a bad baddie, a near god, or
s God, and she, though a great
t be saved or at least helped by
nerdy wet sidekick of the evil
- I've got it all wrong. Some
k,Well, ok, no easy ride here,
my brain. And I tried, really I
lest anyone think this show
and pretentious, and my
far makes it seem so, to their
Ink make it quite funny in
know perfectly well how
11 seems, they have a ball with
aes are kitsch knowing knockhero costumes. All the bits are
1
experiment in performance,
/ith its tongue too deep in the
first time round.

galleries, who also paid for or organised the funding to bring
these people over. I organised the schedule to ensure there
were never two performances going on at the same time.
Also, getting people like Andre Stitt from the UKTCW: Yeah, yeah! This is huge!
DY: I know! Getting him to take a month out of his schedule to do this is pretty amazing. The festival is not entirely
platform-based, either. There's stuff going on people won't
necessarily see unless they happen to bump into it on the
street. So that's going to be very interesting.
TCW: I'm not sure I quite understand the theme:
Performance Art and the Academy. Is this sort of a gag on the
fact that performance art is so marginalised within the general arts community?
DY: [Laughing] Sort of, yeah. Performance art is so
ephemeral, it's ignored in the classroom in Vancouver. Talk in
academic circles tends to be a bit derogatory. It's sometimes
seen as just really bad theatre. And some of the stuff going
on in the seventies—like Chris Burden shooting himself—
contributed to that. But to have an institution like the
Vancouver Art Gallery acting as a fountainhead, having them
host these talks, means folks will hopefully start looking at
performance art in a more serious way.
TCW: And your plans are ambitious. You're aiming to
become the biggest such festival in the world.
DY: This is only our third time out. We have that potential,

last week, mea poopa, mea frigVincent Gale was the co-star
Paul in Vancouver Playhouse's
Pockets, not Alan Brodie, who
..ting designer. My apologies to
\Vhattami, on crack?
neatre Under the Gun was at the Vancouver
ui Centre, check out what else they got going at
oc.ca Loads ot stuff, they have a packed season
o.
ty Urban Ink Productions at the Waterfront Theatre
••fth, fix and info at 604 257 0366
alan@terminalcity.ca

because six weeks gives us a lot of room to move and our
funding keeps doubling every time. Galleries keep putting in
more interest and money. I was just in Germany talking with
folks there and they could not believe we have six weeks to
work with and enough material to fill it.
Terminal City Weekly will be covering one artist a week
. (there is just too much going on to give comprehensive coverage in this space) but check out the website www.livevancouver.bc.ca and choke on your own amazement.
ALAN

HINDLE