Kick Back at Club PuSh 2022!
February 01, 2022
At Performance Works, FEB 2 at 9:30 PM, FEB 3 & 4 at 9 PM
This year PuSh is featuring three unique and entertaining Club PuSh nights at Performance Works on Granville Island. As usual, Club PuSh is the place where you can enjoy drinks, connect with our artists, and keep the evening going with your fellow PuSh-goers. It’s also the venue for fantastic performances in a relaxed, casual and Covid-safe atmosphere.
On February 2, the frank theatre company takes over Performance Works at 9:30 PM, right after How to Fail as a Popstar, for a celebration of the queer art of failure! This cabaret-style soirée features a One Hit Wonder costume contest, as well as musical acts, a DJ, and some drop-dead-gorgeous drag artists strutting their stuff and doing loving renditions of pop classics. The style is immersive and casual, with performance spaces placed throughout the space to blur the line between audience and artist. It’s the perfect cure for the late-pandemic blues—a chance to laugh, lament, and let loose.
The all-star cast of performers includes Ponyboy, one of Vancouver’s most iconic drag kings and one of the founders of the wildly-popular Man Up multi-gender drag spectacular and queer dance party; non-binary drag stars Rose Butch, PM, and Continental Breakfast as well as House of Rice family members Maiden China and Kara Juku. Music and beats will be provided by Edzi’u, a Two-Spirit Tahltan and Taku River Tlingit sound and text artist, the duo Glow Motive, and DJ Softieshan.
On February 3, The Club PuSh and Talking Stick evening begins at 9 PM, and entails genre-blending madness that mashes the music of Indigenous ancestors with the breaks, cuts, and booming bass of contemporary dance grooves… and also a fun game of bingo to round out the evening. Full Circle Performance’s Rob Thomson and Nimkish Younging have co-curated an excitingly eclectic mix of styles, honouring traditional Indigenous idioms while presenting them in a thoroughly modern context. Full Circle’s Talking Stick Festival, now in its 18th year, began as a way to showcase and celebrate Indigenous art and performance to a wider audience.
The diverse lineup of artists at Club PuSh’s Talking Stick event include Jacob Hoskins, an Indigenous electronic artist known for bending musical boundaries to fit the intensity of his expression, dancing on the brink of a new frequency; DJ O Show, AKA Orene Askew, who remains true to her love for hip hop and R&B, incorporating beats to ensure you never want to leave the dance floor; Mamarudegyal, AKA Diana Hellman, a Calgary-born Vancouver-based Indigenous musician and performance artist, who works in Hip Hop, theatre and dance; Sasha Mark, a Cree-Metís stand up comedian all the way from Treaty 1 territory; and last but not at all least, Sparkle Plenty, a notorious glamedian, weirdlesquer, and word-maker-upper who has been delivering beautifully bizarre burlesque and drag acts throughout the beautiful lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories for over 10 years.
On February 4, Club PuSh closes out our 2022 club nights with a cabaret of edgy and raw works that span theatre dance and circus, with music by ENXI, and atmospheric visuals by Chimerik似不像, who will also be presenting Ritual-Spective, an interdisciplinary act of gratitude that touches on migration, the sacrifices of immigrant parents, and the legacy of culture they pass on to their children. The evening will also include Solo for Orpheus, a Ne.Sans Opera work by choreographer Idan Cohen, which creates a contemporary comment on Orpheus as the mimesis of an artist. Embodied by solo artist Ted Littlemore, this work examines the struggles of the performing artist in a vulnerable, yet witty and generous manner.
Also showing on February 4th, is Nayana Fielkov‘s Underbelly, a fantastical conversation with an inner monster expressed through physical comedy. It reflects on isolation, longing, and unconsciously held beliefs of worthiness through the lens of a clown. The evening is rounded out by a performance of Watermelon, a semi-autobiographical one-woman show/”extended trauma dumping session” by playwright and performer Enxi Erskine Chang. Join her for a standard Tuesday night of a trans girl on the internet, as she unpacks the trials, tribulations and trauma of online discourse, cancel culture and the consumption, commodification and brutalisation of trans bodies of colour both online and IRL…. tl;dr.
Club Push is free for anyone with a PuSh Festival ticket from any 2022 show, or $10 at the door. As it’s first come, first serve, please make sure to get there early! With this vibrant, party-friendly (and covid-safe) environment, we’re thrilled to provide a convivial and comfortable setting for our audiences to gather, and we hope to see you here!