Footage flickers from the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots. It looks like everyone is angry and no one knows why. Green and blue jersey wearing rioters cover the backdrop of the stage of the Cultch as six actors lurch, kick, destroy, and vent frustration that we all suspect has very little to do with hockey. It is a jarring start to a play that is ultimately about acceptance, collaboration, and compassion.
Us and Them is a play meant to invoke dialogue that was created from dialogue. It is the culmination of 20+ forums held in community halls and houses over a period of two years.
MOSCOW — Yesterday, members of the Russian artist collective VOINA were arrested without charges by Russian police posing as German television journalists. Natalia Sokol and her two-year old son were detained overnight at a Moscow police station and later released. The same night, plainclothes agents tried to break into VOINA member Leonid Nikolayev’s apartment and interrogated his neighbours.
The harassment comes only weeks after all criminal charges against the group were dropped by an Investigations Committee. Last November, VOINA members Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev were arrested in connection with an art -performance that involved overturning a police car. They were held for three months and released after grafftti artist Banksy paid their bail. According to the Committee’s decision, the group’s actions “do not contain signs of crimes governed by Article 213 [motivated by hatred of a specific social group]” because the police do not constitute a social group.
And here are some artfully assembled videos from ‘occupy’ movements in Canada. Enjoy these, too. More media, testimony, photos and coverage can be found at the Media Coop.
Ecce Homo by Althea Thauberger. (Photo by Jay Black.)
It would be nearly impossible to accuse Vancouver artist Althea Thauberger of being weak or fearful; in fact she is quite the opposite. Not only does she happily invite controversy and criticism, but she willingly flew to Kandahar, Afghanistan as a part of the Canadian War Artist program while Canada was still active at the front. Not an adventure for the light of heart for sure, but one that Thauberger took on with her characteristic aplomb.
Thauberger’s work often revolves around collaborating with a community – from female singer/songwriters in Victoria for Songstress to the Canadian women stationed at Kandahar airbase, highlighting the controls these communities operate and live under.
“I think a lot of it has to do with my personal history and actualities that I’ve lived in, and in living inside of isolated microcultures,” she says of her bravery.
Growing up, her family were fundamentalist Christians who did not allow her to have any friends that weren’t also fundamentalist Christians. At an older age, she worked as a tree planter for a decade. “There’s something kind of similar in [those two communities] about the ways that cultures develop over the course of a short period of time when you are living and working together in extreme conditions,” she recalls of the experience. In her art this translates as sometimes just sharing the experience of being a member of a given social group, other times its about creating a whole new community around that original community.
Going nude on Wall Street may be more risky than insider trading.
Three artists were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct Monday for participating in a site-specific performance designed to protest US and international financial institutions.
Entitled Ocularpation: Wall Street, the five-minute performance was organized by Manhattan artist Zefrey Throwell and included dozens of volunteers acting out various Wall Street occupations before shedding their clothes.
“The idea, Mr. Throwell said, was to expose the realities of working on the nation’s financial artery as a commentary on the state of the economy, though most passers-by simply saw flesh.” (ArtsBeat)
In what will generally be condemned by everyone as a creepy dystopian move, the Chinese government has massively expanded its video surveillance network into supermarkets, schoolrooms, university classrooms, malls – and, in a special post-modern twist, into theaters and cinemas. Over 5 million cameras have been installed throughout the country, and the Chinese government’s video surveillance team has grown to over 4,000 watchers.
Which is exciting news for surveillance camera theater groups, especially those planning tours of the Chinese mainland. Closed-circuit television performance artist and filmmaker Paola Baretto Leblanc hasn’t commented at all, but some have speculated that Leblanc may be considering an anniversary performance installation of Composition for Video Surveillance Circuit, to commemorate such a monumentally creepy achievement.
And rumours are aswirl about a reunion tour by the much loved Surveillance Camera Players of New York to some of the more densely surveilled regions of China. For example, in the Furong district, in the city of Changsha, there is reportedly one video camera for every 10 inhabitants, taking us closer and closer to that ever elusive but enviable goal of one camera for one citizen.
Teesri Duniya Theatre was founded in 1981 as an alternative theatre in Montreal that set out to change the world, as Artistic Director Rahul Varma tells me, “one play at a time.” I ask Varma to describe the theatre in a few words and, pausing for a moment, he offers: “Powerful, personal and provocative.” Having experienced one of the non-profit’s plays, about the 1986 Filipino Revolution (People Power, written by the CBT Collective and directed by Nina Lee Aquino), I would have to agree entirely with Varma’s assessment.
Varma tells me that for 30 years the group of dedicated, inspired and politically-motivated artists have been telling untold histories and supporting multiculturalism and interculturalism that is committed to multiethnic casting and narratives. Decidedly socio-political and cultural, Teesri Duniya’s lineup over the years is a list of provocative titles: Miss Orient(ed), The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axis of Evil, Bhopal, My Name is Rachel Corrie and Truth and Treason.
‘Pakour’, or FreeRunning, is the acrobatic art of running through cities and overcoming obstacles on the fly — or like a fly, because sometimes it seems like traceurs (slang for those who practice pakour) can defy gravity. It is thrilling to watch, and no doubt even more thrilling to do.
I just discovered this great short doc (Free Running Gaza) by the folks who make the Artscape program at Al Jazeera about two young men in Gaza who have been practicing pakour since 2009 and posting videos of their acrobatic feats on Youtube.
It is, of course, about the art of pakour for these occupants of Kan Younis refugee camp, and about survival and inspiration. Check it out.
In an abandoned candy factory in New York, rap music blares as graffiti artists cover the walls with colorful, almost intelligible, designs. It’s February, the 4,000-square-foot-room is cold and the smell of fresh paint is overwhelming, but so is the sense of anticipation. This is where brothers Rodrigo, aka RodStarz, and Gonzalo “G1” Venegas, who make up the hip-hop group Rebel Diaz, are creating a place where they hope to revive the mobilizing power of New York hip-hop.
Toronto’s indie theatre festival SummerWorks has recently reported that core funding from Heritage Canada has been pulled at the last minute. Given the ire the festival drew from the government over last year’s play about terrorism in Canada, those of us working in the arts are feeling a sudden chill in the collective national room. Has funding been cut based on politics and ideology stemming from a top-down castigation from Harper’s majority Conservative “terror-fighting” government? Or is SummerWorks one of many past and future arts institutions in Canada that is being forced to “tighten the belt” as the country’s books are balanced somewhere between new fighter jets and closing literary programs? (as Federal Finance Minister Flaherty has said: Annual funding, don’t count on it.)
Michael Rubenfeld, Artistic Producer of SummerWorks is understandably tight-lipped on these matters below, but one thing is for sure. Whether SummerWorks had $47,000 in federal money pulled out from under them for reasons of censorship or neoliberal economics, the outcome is the same: another robust arts institution in this country—in this case “the largest juried festival in Canada featuring predominantly New Canadian plays”—must lean into the oars of an embattled, creaking ship known as the publicly funded arts, and stave off another sinking.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
‘Pakour’, or FreeRunning, is the acrobatic art of running through cities and overcoming obstacles on the fly — or like a fly, because sometimes it seems like traceurs (slang for those who practice pakour) can defy gravity. It is thrilling to watch, and no doubt even more thrilling to do.
