Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut played the 2009 PuSh Festival.
Each year, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival inspires fewer of those wary smiles that fringe festivals tend to elicit. While it remains doggedly interdisciplinary and while its program is so promiscuous in its interests that many works are difficult to categorize, PuSh has become so loved since it launched in 2003 that it's in very real danger of becoming one of those respectable festivals that even your less-clued-in friends know about. Fourteen main shows play rooms around town through Feb. 6. Here we touch on the best works on offer. For full program details, visit Pushfestival.ca. Tickets are at 604-684-2787 or Ticketstonight.ca.
Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut
Easily one of the best things I've seen Vancouver produce in several years. James Long discovered a set of photo albums and travel journals - documenting an enormous family history - in an alley by his East Vancouver home. When he turned the discarded records into a story of his own, copyright infringements and the ethics of storytelling were called into question. Long performs the 90-minute work alone onstage, in a bunny suit. Sounds like a simple conceit, perhaps, but the emotional intelligence and sweet humour of this production blew me away both times I saw it. And, yes, I'm going again. Performance Works, Jan. 28 to 30.
Jerk
Back in the 1990s, the controversial (and usually excellent) author Dennis Cooper wrote a semi-fictional account of David Brooks, the real-life man who was an accomplice to Texas serial killer Dean Corll (killer of 25 teenage boys in the early-seventies). The story, violent and traumatizing to many who absorbed it, became a radio play and, about a year ago, a stage play. Jonathan Capdevielle stars as Corll, serving his life sentence in prison, with the audience filling the shoes of a psychology class looking in on his harrowing puppet-show recreations of sexually charged murders. For mature audiences only. Vivo Media Arts Centre, tonight to Jan. 24.
Nevermore
We saw Edmonton-based Catalyst Theatre last when it brought its visually stunning Frankenstein to the 2008 PuSh Festival. This year's rumination on the life and death of Edgar Allen Poe promises to be equally stylized and pleasingly dark. Seven performers spin a musical fable based on the myths and tales surrounding literature's master of the macabre. Granville Island Stage, tonight to Feb. 6.
The Edward Curtis Project
Edward Curtis was a turn-of-the-century photographer who believed he was documenting a dying race when he made soft-focus, highly staged images of First Nations peoples. His romanticized photos serve as backdrop for Métis writer Marie Clements's investigation into the ways historical photography has informed a "dying race" that never quite got around to dying. Part history lesson, part dramatic dialogue between Clements and Angeline, a Métis woman who fears she may, indeed, be vanishing after all. Presentation House Theatre, tonight to Jan. 31.
White Cabin
The Akhe theatre troupe is a force of nature in their native Russia (the PuSh festival has made a habit of importing artists we really ought to know). In their multimedia work White Cabin , 70 minutes of absurdist scenes build into a kind of sensual experience, bereft of narrative through-line. Give over to dream-like impressions and macabre, baffling scenarios. If it sounds like work, keep in mind that Akhe is so ceaselessly creative in its dance-like choreography and magical stagings that audiences often feel as thrilled as they are confused. Performance Works, tonight to Jan. 23.
Special to the Globe and Mail