2014 PuSh Festival curatorial statement from the Associate Curator

November 07, 2013

“That was living.”

That was the comment an audience member told to a dancer/choreographer after a recent performance.

“Did you say ‘living’?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied,
“Living… I was just so in the moment.”

Live. Living. Liveness.

We can’t change the past, or stop the march of time. We only have this moment, and in live performance we experience it as a collective, connecting as human beings. Since its inception as a series in 2003 and as a festival in 2005, PuSh has brought Vancouver work that is consistently visionary, genre-bending, multi-disciplined, startling and original.

It would be difficult to frame the entirety of the programming of the 2014 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival into a single theme, idea or vision. Each work asks, in some way, very potent yet basic questions that are crucial in considering the world around us today. How do we be together? How do we co-exist? How do we come to understand ourselves and connect with each other?

We strive to present work that inspires, stimulates and perhaps entertains, as much as we seek to challenge and even confound you, the audience. Why do we insist on pushing you? Because this world needs more empathy, more honest conversation, more real connection.

When we confront something new, or something we “don’t get,” with courage and curiosity, our minds and bodies forge new pathways for relating to ourselves, each other, the space around us. Consider these pathways as you experience the performances of this year’s Festival. Our need to relate, to connect, manifests in the art time and time again: across generations, between linguistic and geographic communities, and through social and political change.

Back to that evening after the performance, we—the audience member, choreographer and I —continued talking for hours, about the work, art, life. About that moment of living.

Find those moments in this year’s Festival when you are most alive. And let’s be in it,together.

Joyce Rosario Associate Curator
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

Photo: Andrew Querner