Curatorial Statement – La Marea
January 07, 2011
It seems strange that less than a year has passed since the 2010 Winter Olympics and yet it also seems fitting that 2011 marks Vancouver’s 125th anniversary as a city. In the wake of the games we often find ourselves reflecting on notions of “citiness” and asking ourselves how Vancouver fits into the spectrum of remarkable cities throughout the world. One thing that seems clear is that we need to enter into a broader international dialogue and one way of doing this is through meaningful artistic exchange. La Marea and co-productions like it represents a new direction in international collaboration that emphasizes a locally based creative team working in concert with foreign artists to adapt existing projects to a local context and local audiences.
Recreating La Marea in Vancouver represents a convergence of several of Boca del Lupo’s lines of artistic inquiry: new media, site specific, free, outdoor, urban and accessible. When we first heard about this remarkable concept we felt an immediate affinity with the artists involved in its creation as well as an urgent need to collaborate with these kindred spirits from another continent. While the project follows in Boca del Lupo’s tradition of free, outdoor, site specific performance, Mariano Pensotti and his creative team bring a thematically associative and non-sequential method to unfolding narrative, along with a more technology-focused approach to spectacle. This is enormously exciting to us as it encompasses many ideas we have explored separately and brings them together in a single, albeit multifaceted, performance experience.
Crucial to the artistic merit of the project is the creative exchange and dialogue that is taking place between the team from Argentina and the team in Vancouver as we work together to redefine and envision the piece to fit with the personality of our city and its inhabitants. To me, La Marea shines a light into the very heart of our city and is filled with the kind of rich dramatic imagery you might catch in an unexpected glimpse through a private window while walking alone late at night bathed in the light of neon signs reflecting off of rainy pavement.
Visit Boca del Lupo’s website
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Read Mariano Pensotti’s interview
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