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Idealverein is a new performance conceived by Mike Bourscheid. The work unfolds as a set of considered improvised movements, a game of gestures, actions, relationships, commitments, questions and moods played by six. The stage is a field of play and the rules are dictated by the costumes which determine how the players can move and with whom they are allied, working together to form allegiances or switching sides at a whim!
Performers: Alison Denham, Ralph Escamillan, Ed Spence, Kate Franklin, Germaine Koh, Erika Mitsuhashi; Costumes and Direction: Mike Bourscheid
Choreography: Justine Chambers; Presented in partnership with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Jan 22-24 at Western Front, Vancouver
Working with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Guadalupe Martinez has invited artist Jay White and poet Rita Wong to contribute to the ‘Spill: Response’ research process. We visited Kwekwecnewtxw, the Coast Salish Watch House and then walked along the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline with Stream-keeper John Preissl.
Performative talk by Nelly César, curated by Guadalupe Martinez as part of the Spill exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (September 3–December 1, 2019). Response is a live research and performance component that brings together activists, performance artists and educators whose practices consider relationships between the body, the land and forms of pedagogy that engage with healing, love and sustainability as core to their methodologies.
A facet of campus life that has changed significantly with the pandemic is one that most of us never noticed before but would be struck by now: the sounds of campus. The whir of students moving between classes, the hum of vehicles on the road and the ripples of classroom discussion were all familiar noises, so much so that we grew inured to them. But they are gone now. In their place, a hush has emerged. The stillness is at once eerie, peaceful and captivating. It calls out to be pondered and explored. Sonic Responses answers that call. As heard in the works of R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax, sound offers a way of entering a soundscape and hearing in new ways the sounds encountered there. So it is with the quiet soundscape that has emerged on campus. The responses in this project take the form of performers playing in campus locations claimed by silence and composers transforming sounds recorded across UBC. Their music-making confronts and enters into a dialogue with the quiet that now resides on campus.
Lou Sheppard, A Strong Desire: Syntactic Movement, performance documentation at Audain Gallery, October 9, 2019.
This performance prefaced the opening of Relations of Responsibility, at the Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University.
Lou Sheppard translates the criteria for gender dysphoria from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders into dance. A Strong Desire: Syntactic Movement moves between languages — that of the diagnostic text and that of the movement score — foregrounding Sheppard's capacity to exert agency, through performance, on these otherwise static forms.
Lou Sheppard is a Canadian artist working in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation-based practice. Sheppard was raised on unceded Mi'Kmaq territory / Nova Scotia.
Ledgers (2019) is a vocal music composition based on contemporary madrigals as a response to Erwin Wurm’s sculptural installation called Big Disobedience at the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite.
Commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ledgers is choreographed by Mike Bourscheid and composed by Robyn Jacob. Lyrics are written by Vanessa Brown and Mike Bourscheid and performed by Emily Cheung, Hilary Ison and Emily Millard.
Costume fabrication: Malika Montague; Steel frame fabrication: Rob Turriff; Song Lyrics: Vanessa Brown and Mike Bourscheid; Costume design and fabrication: Mike Bourscheid
Ayumi Goto, Tarah Hogue and Peter Morin performed this is not us at the Vancouver Art Gallery on July 21, 2018. The two artists and curator activated three portrait masks carved by Haida artist Corey Bulpitt; during the performance, they roamed the gallery from top to bottom, exploring both public and private spaces.
Trisha Brown and Trisha Brown Dance Company, Accumulation, 1971, choreography for 1 performer, “Uncle John’s Band” by The Grateful Dead (1970), 4 minutes, 46 seconds. Installation view, Unexplained Parade, Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver, February 9, 2019
Final installation of “Spill:Response”; ‘curated by Guadalupe Martinez, the live research and performance component brings together activists, performance artists and educators whose practices deeply consider relationships between the body, the land and forms of pedagogy that engage with healing, love and sustainability as collaborative methodologies. Visiting artist Nelly César will collaborate with Maria Thereza Alves, Anne Riley and Cease Wyss within the Belkin Gallery and surrounding locations on the unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories. Extending their activities into local sites such as the UBC Farm, the Fraser River and sites of protest, the artists will present talks, workshops and performances over the course of the visit.’
Wade Baker and Sierra Tasi Baker create their mural “The Waters are Rising” under the Granville Street Bridge.
Garry Neill Kennedy, Remembering Names, CSA Space, October, 2018
Installation of the public art work, “Koco, Brewers Park, August 11, 2019” by artist Peter Gazendam at The Victoria
Jan. 10, 2019, the Dzawada’enuxw Nation filed a lawsuit against the government of Canada, upholding their traditional legal obligations and asserting their constitutionally-protected aboriginal rights; documented in conjunction with the exhibition “Hexsa'a̱m: To Be Here Always” at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.