2015 PuSh Festival Curatorial Message from Associate Curator Joyce Rosario

November 12, 2014

A note on making your list for this year’s PuSh Festival:

Choose a thread and follow it through the 2015 programming. Be delighted, astonished and disarmed by ideas and artists that defy expectation and shift your notion of what performance means and its wider potential.

Dance is tightly woven through Week One of the Festival. Starting off with fierce, virtuosic women in So Blue and It’s going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend and capping off the week with 75 of your fellow citizens moving their hearts out in Le Grand Continental out at the Queen Elizabeth Plaza. Not enough dance? Check out documentaries about Mark Morris and Pina Bausch in the PuSh Free Film Series.

Iva Bittová, Marie Clements, Lisbeth Gruwez, Louise Lecavalier, Kate McIntosh, Anita Majumdar, Alanna Mitchell, Lotte Van Den Berg: strikingly diverse, each a powerhouse in their own right – add to that Ivan Coyote and Christeene – it’s a statement of finally tipping the gender balance and a testament to who’s pushing performance forward. (Yes, pun intended.)

Every year PuSh invites artists new to Vancouver but who are making a scene in their own cities—whether in Canada or internationally. We make introductions between artists, presenters and the audience through curation and create an ongoing conversation.

As a born-and-bred Vancouverite, I crave work that that challenges me to see the city in new ways, to look closer and consider my place in it more deeply. These are the works that make me fall in love with Vancouver all over again. This city is young and changing at breakneck pace. Just blink, and things are gone and replaced. Our Dis/Appearing City thematic encompasses two Dutch works that consider this notion: Cinema Imaginaire and Fare Thee Well.

Keep your eyes out for Experiences Spheres, our first collaboration with the interactive design wizards at Tangible Interaction. These temporary public art installations will in equal measure transport you to another place and remind you of where you are. Find them across our city each weekend of the Festival.

In performance, we experience “liveness.” We are together in witnessing each other, having the potential of being transformed. In ways great and small, live performance creates shifts in understanding to bring us closer. It’s an honour and a privilege to be able to connect people and place, artists and audience in this place we call home.

Joyce Rosario
Associate Curator