The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (PuSh Festival) celebrates its milestone 15th annual edition, January 17 to February 3, 2019, at various venues across the Lower Mainland. Featuring 26 works from 24 companies from 13 countries — including six world premieres — this extraordinary showcase of visionary collaboration and risk-taking is a highlight of the city’s cultural calendar.
The six world premiere performances will be presented by contemporary dance organization Company 605; boundary-breaking dance company MACHiNENOiSY; composer and musical director Joelysa Pankanea; Dora Award-winning dub poet and actor D’BI; the performers of Kimmortal & Immigrant Lessons; and Guatemalan performance artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Almost half of the program — 11 performances — will be Canadian premieres, including a suite of three sound-based works from Japan by ASUNA, Marginal Consort, and Tetsuya Umeda; Dancenorth Australia featuring music from Indonesian band Senyawa; and a piece from Taiwanese choreographer Liu Kuan-Hsiang.
PUSH FESTIVAL PERFORMANCES
Word Sound Have Powah — D’BI (Jamaica/Canada/UK)
Jan 17 | Club PuSh at The Beaumont Studios
World Premiere
D’BI combines early Jamaican dub with dancehall reggae, as well as Afrobeat, punk, hip hop, and performance art.
X Marks the Movement — Kimmortal & Immigrant Lessons (Canada) / OPENING NIGHT PARTY
Jan 17 | Club PuSh at The Beaumont Studios
World Premiere
Queer Filipinx artist Kimmortal and art-fashion-dance collective Immigrant Lessons combine their respective media in selections from X Marks the Movement, a show that plays with the concept of map-making in order to reframe narratives of home and diaspora.
Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow) — Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (Guatemala)
Presented with SFU Galleries
Jan 16–19, Jan 24–25 | SFU Galleries’ Audain Gallery
World Premiere
Visual and performance artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa has created an exhibition at SFU Galleries’ Audain Gallery, which will form the set for an intensely physical live presentation staged over four nights.
Attractor — Dancenorth Australia (Australia)
Jan 18–19 | Vancouver Playhouse
Canadian Premiere
This supremely rousing show begins with two musicians and eight dancers on stage. Indonesian duo Senyawa plays operatic, heavy metal-inflected music spiced with ritual and folk idioms from their native country.
Ringo — Tetsuya Umeda (Japan)
Jan 18 | Performance Works
Canadian Premiere
The wildly inventive Tetsuya Umeda uses tin cans, dry ice, bowls, hot plates, and more to create an experience so beguiling and unique as to redefine those very objects.
Asking For It — Adrienne Truscott (US)
Jan 18 | Club PuSh at the Annex
Western Canadian Premiere
Feisty, funny and very nearly naked, Adrienne Truscott stirs it up in this inventive, outrageous show about…rape. Stand-up comedy, dance, imagery and one very special whistle make up a show that elicits gasps, laughs and — make no mistake — some serious reflection on sexual politics, female agency, and the ethics of humour.
Adrienne Truscott’s A One-Trick Pony — Adrienne Truscott (US)
Jan 18 | Club PuSh at the Annex
Canadian Premiere
This show is about Truscott’s suspicion, following the runaway success of her previous piece, that anything she makes may disappoint.
100 Keyboards — ASUNA (Japan)
Jan 19 | Russian Hall
Canadian Premiere
In this captivating performance, sound artist ASUNA takes battery-powered, analogue keyboards and uses them to create waves of overlapping notes: the Moiré effect of superimposed patterns, here used musically.
Marginal Consort — Marginal Consort (Japan)
Jan 20 | Performance Works
Canadian Premiere
These four musicians come with enough instruments for an orchestra; some are acoustic, some are electronic, and quite a few are of the artists’ own invention.
Loop, Lull — Company 605 (Canada)
Presented with The Dance Centre
Jan 21–22, 28–29 | Scotiabank Dance Centre
World Premiere
This hypnotic work begins with five dancers, each trapped in their own loop of motion and gesture. They change their movements in response to each other, while at the same time manipulating the space around them through control of the lighting and electronic sound score.
PALMYRA — Bertrand Lesca & Nasi Voutsas (France/UK)
Jan 22–24 | Performance Works
Canadian Premiere
In this prizewinning piece, the set is almost bare and broken crockery is the main prop. The situation can be described bluntly and simply: two men are onstage, and one of them has a plate while the other does not.
Prince Hamlet — Why Not Theatre (Canada)
Jan 23–27 | Frederic Wood Theatre
Western Canadian Premiere
Shakespeare’s classic gets the update it needs in Ravi Jain’s wildly inventive, radically inclusive production.
Race Cards — Selina Thompson (UK)
Jan 23–Feb 2 | Roundhouse (Exhibition Hall)
Western Canadian Premiere
“Why do people assume that racism will just passively die out if we wait long enough?” That’s number 307 of 1,000 questions that Selina Thompson has composed and put on cards; in this installation, visitors will enter the site and read as many of them as they wish.
salt. — Selina Thompson (UK)
Jan 24–26 | Roundhouse (Performance Centre)
Canadian Premiere
The Transatlantic Slave Triangle connected Africa with Europe and the Americas; it was the transport route for innocent masses stolen in the name of racism and greed. In this gripping performance, Selina Thompson recounts her journey along one stretch of the route by cargo ship, offering us large-scale history through the prism of one disquieted soul.
Kids — Liu Kuan-Hsiang (Taiwan)
Presented with The Dance Centre
Jan 24–26 | Scotiabank Dance Centre
Canadian Premiere
Liu Kuan-Hsiang goes for broke in this ecstatic tribute to his late mother; the dancer and choreographer’s catharsis is our reward.
Suddenly Slaughter — The Biting School (Canada)
Jan 25–26 | Russian Hall
Artist-In-Residence Work in Development
From PuSh Artists-in-Residence The Biting School comes this take on a major work of Iranian theatre. Abbas Nalbandian’s 1971 Suddenly, This God Lover Died in the Love of God, This God Slain Died by the Sword of God was too radical for acceptance in its home country; bringing it to Vancouver is an act of resurrection. The text is centred on a communal house in one of Tehran’s poor areas, and it’s a trenchant examination of greed, envy, and animus.
Bicycle Thieves — Joelysa Pankanea (Canada)
Jan 26–27 | Performance Works
World Premiere
Composer and musical director Joelysa Pankanea guides a group of six musicians and four actors as they provide live musical and voice accompaniment to the landmark neorealist film Bicycle Thieves.
Muted — Monica Germino (US/Netherlands)
Presented with Music on Main
Jan 28–30 | Annex
Canadian Premiere
Violinist Monica Germino utilizes a number of acoustic instruments and her voice to transport audiences to the very thresholds of audibility.
This is the Point — Ahuri Theatre (Canada)
Presented with The Cultch
Jan 29–Feb 2 | The Cultch Historic
Western Canadian Premiere
This “play about love, sex, and disability” runs the gamut from joyous celebration to unflinching drama as it paints a collective portrait of real-life individuals whose lives have been touched by cerebral palsy.
Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools — Buddies in Bad Times (Canada)
Presented with Touchstone Theatre
Jan 30–Feb 2 | Performance Works
Western Canadian Premiere
A concert, a conversation, and a multimedia performance all in one, the work is a meeting point for two people — Inuk artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and queer theatre-maker Evalyn Parry — and two places: Canada’s North and South.
Copper Promises - Hinemihi Haka — Victoria Hunt (New Zealand/Australia)
Presented with The Dance Centre
Jan 31–Feb 2 | Scotiabank Dance Centre
Western Canadian Premiere
Solo dance artist Victoria Hunt uses movement, sound and image to tell a story.
ZVIZDAL (Chernobyl - so far so close) — BERLIN (Belgium)
Jan 31–Feb 2 | Roundhouse (Performance Centre)
Canadian Premiere
Antwerp-based art collective BERLIN and journalist Cathy Blisson spent five years filming Nadia and Pétro Opanassovitch Lubenoc, an elderly couple living deep within the irradiated Chernobyl exclusion zone in a place called Zvizdal. This deeply affecting documentary-installation is a portrait of loneliness, survival, poverty, hope, and unconditional love.
Pancho Villa From a Safe Distance — Graham Reynolds (US) & Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Mexico)
Jan 31 | The Vogue
Canadian Premiere
This bilingual, cross-border, cross-genre opera about the enigmatic general, legendary bandit and hero of the Mexican Revolution presents a non-linear collage of scenes from, or inspired by, his life.
L’Homme de Hus — Camille Boitel (France)
Feb 1–2 | Vancouver Playhouse
An adventure for performer and audience alike, Camille Boitel’s raucous embodiment of the title character in this amazingly physical performance piece will have you laughing out loud one minute and staring in wonder the next.
Fragile Forms — MACHiNENOiSY (Canada)
Presented with the Anvil Centre
Feb 2–7 | Anvil Centre
World Premiere
Inspired by world-renowned Finnish theorist and architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s writings on architecture and the sensing body, MACHiNENOiSY’s most ambitious work to date is a site-specific, 360-degree contemporary dance performance tailored specifically for its venue.
Triple Threat — Lucy McCormick (UK) / FOLLOWED BY CLOSING NIGHT PARTY
Feb 2 | Club PuSh at the Annex
Get ready for a radical take on the New Testament…Post-Popular Prodigy Lucy McCormick present a trash-punk morality play made for the modern world. Lucy plays all the main roles in this subversive spin on the life of Jesus, which covers everything from the Immaculate Conception to the Resurrection.
TICKETS
Single tickets start at $25. To buy tickets, visit pushfestival.ca or call the PuSh Festival Audience Services info line at 604.449.6000.
MORE INFORMATION
Full schedule and festival information at pushfestival.ca. Pick up the comprehensive 2019 program guide at any location of JJ Bean and other select locations. You can also reach us at pushfestival.ca, info@pushfestival.ca or 604.605.8284.
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