PuSh Play Podcast Episode 37 Transcript – A New Aesthetic of Participation (2024)

Gabrielle Martin 00:02
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I’m Gabrielle Martin, Push’s Director of Programming, and in this special series of Push Play, we’re revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.

Gabrielle Martin 00:23
Today’s episode features Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim and the 2024 Push Festival. Patrick and Milton are conceptual artists whose collaborations include video games, participatory installations, and card games, exploring urgent questions around social value of art, digital labor, and the political and artistic potential of games.

Gabrielle Martin 00:43
Here’s my conversation with Patrick and Milton. My name is Gabrielle, I’m the Director of Programming with Push, and today I have the pleasure of being in conversation with Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim.

Gabrielle Martin 00:56
Thank you for joining me.

Patrick Blenkarn 00:58
Hello, very happy to be here. Bye. Bye.

Gabrielle Martin 01:00
And we are here in Jojage, or Montreal, which has long been the meeting place of many First Nations, including the Kanyan -Kahaka, the Abenaki, the Anishinaabe, and the Wendat. And we’re also in front of the Festival Transamerique headquarters for Festival…

Gabrielle Martin 01:16
Croix des Generals, Festival Hub, because Patrick and Milton were just presenting us as masses, which was presented in Push 2024, so we’re going to be talking about that. But first, I just want to have some context of understanding how your relationship began with Push and how it’s evolved.

Gabrielle Martin 01:34
So, Milton, I know that you have a history with Push, with your work with Hong Kong Exile, you were artist in residency, your work was presented at the Push, numerous times for that company. Can you just give us a bit of that context?

Milton Lim 01:48
Yeah, I guess to start off, I’d kind of known about Push when I was a student at Simon Fraser University. It was like the thing that we all saved up our money for every year just to like splurge and see all the shows that we could because it was bringing in the most exciting international work.

Milton Lim 02:05
We could see it very visibly kind of changed the kind of formal and aesthetic conversations that we were having as artists. And I think by far like it’s done one of the most important kind of jobs of helping Vancouver artists not only be seen on the international stage, but also draw from the international stage back into our own local aesthetics.

Milton Lim 02:25
And so as a student, I remember just like being in awe every year of the shows that we wouldn’t always agree upon coming out. And that always felt really strong in terms of like having work that was taking a risk, trying to be innovative in some form or another.

Milton Lim 02:39
And then I had started a company called Hong Kong Exile with Natalie Tinyan Ghan and Remy Su. And we were very fortunate under the tenureship of George Cesario and Norman Armour to have been asked as local artists to be the artists in residence for two years.

Milton Lim 02:54
What years were those? That was kind of 2016 -2018. We got to present in Club Push the first year, and then we got to present Foxconn Frequency as part of the main series in 2018. Was there precedence for the residency before you?

Milton Lim 03:10
I think there was, but it wasn’t formalized and it also wasn’t a local artist. Yeah.

Patrick Blenkarn 03:14
I feel like that was a big ache.

Milton Lim 03:15
deal. Yes.

Gabrielle Martin 03:16
And what did that residency, what was that comprised of? What’s that, that was a commitment to present you?

Milton Lim 03:22
Pretty much. More than once. It was the commitment to present us in Club Push and then to present us again on the Wayne stage which came with some funding, which was very nice as emerging artists. But especially as people who were starting to get to, I guess, some modicum of being established in a community, we were also asked to run the youth program, which you and I engaged in together.

Milton Lim 03:47
So Natalie ran the larger youth program and I was in charge of the Young Ambassadors program, which was about kind of pairing mentorships with touring artists and emerging artists in the city.

Gabrielle Martin 03:59
And how did you meet Norman and Joyce, how did that come about?

Milton Lim 04:05
Yeah, it’s a pretty small community. So we kind of see each other around, but I think Norman and Joyce are really good about seeing, or having seen lots of different works and trying to keep eyes on what’s happening.

Milton Lim 04:20
And I know that Joyce had supported some of the works of Hong Kong XL before, especially through some of the dance programming. And Norman had seen some of the works that we had done at the Far Hall Arts Center, and just like other kind of small things we were doing at the time, because we truly were just like putting out as much kind of ragtag work as we could at the time.

Milton Lim 04:40
Yeah.

Gabrielle Martin 04:41
And so you had actually been, I didn’t know that you were coordinating, visioning, leading the youth ambassador program, which shows how Patrick’s relationship with push started, if I’m not mistaken.

Patrick Blenkarn 04:55
It is, but I’m trying to remember if I did the book dance piece the year before at the youth program or whether those were the same years. I was a big, I feel like I’ve been a big, I’ve been very privileged to participate in a lot of the youth programs that have existed across the big festivals of Canada.

Patrick Blenkarn 05:20
So, Magnetic North used to run one, Summerworks used to run one, Push had one. Push’s was the best of course. Push’s was the best. Those were contexts where young artists would come together and you would see each other.

Patrick Blenkarn 05:34
You would see who else was interested in making work that was intellectually rigorous, aesthetically provocative, which is actually not that easy to find in a lot of spaces in Canada. So, these were sort of like bastions of shit disturbers and people who want to change things.

Patrick Blenkarn 05:56
So, I had participated in, either it was the year before, it was exactly the same year, but Push would have this big day where we’d all come together and we would meet each other and we would test things out.

Patrick Blenkarn 06:06
I had got a chance to test out a dance piece that I was prototyping and then I was invited or I had applied and accepted to be in the Young Ambassadors program, which was literally like all of our friends.

Milton Lim 06:23
I don’t think there was an application. There wasn’t an application. I used to say that. It was fair. It was fair, but when you look at the people who were in it…

Patrick Blenkarn 06:34
There are all the people who are still transforming, I would say Vancouver, I think we’re all in our early thirties now, and we all would have been in our mid -twenties, and there are all the people who are, you know, it’s like Sofia Wolf has started a massive festival that’s sort of changing how people are thinking about dance and film.

Patrick Blenkarn 06:50
Ario and Arash and the Biting School. Wolf was in that group, I mean, there was a huge, there was a number of us who were in this, and we were all paired up with a different artist who was in the festival, and you would get a chance to hang out.

Patrick Blenkarn 07:01
And so my buddy was Tiago Rodriguez, who was just here at Eptea with Katerina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.

Gabrielle Martin 07:08
I’m now the director of Festival Abigail.

Patrick Blenkarn 07:10
Yep, so every once in a while when we like cross paths and I’m like, hey, you remember me? You know, whether or not your activity is something like being invited into their tech rehearsal or, you know, something more substantial.

Patrick Blenkarn 07:25
Get in your coffee. Or literally just writing emails because that’s what it’s like actually when you’re on tour. Like Tiago and myself and Magda, his partner, you know, we just spend the day writing emails and doing things together.

Patrick Blenkarn 07:37
But, you know, being around in a way that you’re like, oh, this is what it’s actually gonna be like. And I can confirm, eight years later, that’s what it’s like when you’re on tour. You’re like, all right, let’s all sit down at the cafe and like figure out where we’re going next.

Patrick Blenkarn 07:49
So, yeah, I mean, I’m a big fan, I would say, of making sure that these types of festivals, FTR has one as well called Conversations on Performance or Con Contre. And, you know, it’s like we need these spaces because they are, I think, a bridge to where we’re going or, you know, to being in the festival themselves, right?

Milton Lim 08:15
If I can clarify on the application front, we were given the list of touring artists and I felt like my task for the Young Ambassadors was to find the young artists who were most complementary in terms of their art practices.

Milton Lim 08:28
So it wasn’t just like I’m choosing friends, it was actually a big challenge.

Patrick Blenkarn 08:32
And let’s just keep going down the tunnel of your curation. Tiago was there with By Heart, which is a show about books, and what happens if we lose books? And I was spending my entire graduate studies at Summer Fraser University making a dance show about books.

Patrick Blenkarn 08:52
And the relationship we had with books and what it meant if we lost them, or what do we do with them after they become useless? So the curation was just.

Gabrielle Martin 09:06
Okay, 2024, Assa’s Massas was presented, pushed, big festival hit, people didn’t know what to expect. Can you just talk to us about what the show is for those who didn’t get the chance to attend and also what was the process of realizing it from festival?

Patrick Blenkarn 09:21
Yeah. So in a nutshell, Asses Masses is a video game that is played in a live context inside of a theater from beginning to end over the course of seven and a half -ish hours.

Milton Lim 09:34
It’s a narrative epic that unfolds over ten episodes about a herd of donkeys that are trying to get their jobs back amidst industrialization in their region.

Patrick Blenkarn 09:44
And, you know, but really what it feels like is if you ever played video games in a living room or a basement with your friends or family, and you were passing controllers around, you were criticizing someone for not being maybe as good at the platformer sections as they could be, or, you know, taking turns to, you know, accomplish or beat the next level.

Patrick Blenkarn 10:02
It’s that, but with 200 people in the room with you.

Gabrielle Martin 10:05
And even if that does not sound like a good time to you, and you haven’t done that before, it is surprisingly engaging, and it’s designed in a way that invites people, and that for whom that might not sound like a good time.

Patrick Blenkarn 10:18
For sure. It’s a great time and I think the thing that we arrived at that project as well as our other project because we were interested in works that felt really alive and we had seen a lot of participatory work at Push over the years.

Patrick Blenkarn 10:33
Really thoughtful. Why are we participating? How are we participating? And we were seeing places where people participate in types of performance that just hadn’t yet had their time on stage or in the spotlight.

Patrick Blenkarn 10:46
And we’ve been doing us as masses now for almost a year. And every single time, it’s really exciting to see just how alive it can feel in that room as people share the responsibility of completing the story.

Milton Lim 11:03
Yeah, there are some people who would say like, oh, this is not like live theater or live performance, but for us, there are so many components of understanding what contemporary spectatorship looks like that we did want to encounter some of those ideas about things that are not being included in the arts sector as kind of serious art.

Milton Lim 11:21
And so, Asa’s Masses became one of the main avenues for us to kind of say like, actually this is another way we can think about social gathering and as an extension as part of the thematic content of the show, this is another way to think about like politicized action, politicized space inside the theater.

Patrick Blenkarn 11:36
So, Vancouver was, we were very excited to come back to Vancouver, we premiered the show in Buenos Aires in Spanish, and then we had some other stops in Kingston and Dartmouth and then Toronto, sort of getting it, you know, ready and figuring out really what it’s going to be, and we knew that Vancouver was a, you know, it’s a pretty major hub in Canada for game development.

Patrick Blenkarn 11:58
We actually went and visited the sort of independent game developers community to share the project with them, and a number of them came out to see the show, which was really exciting because it really did mean that we were successful in making something that was both exciting for gamers who were, you know, self -identified as such, or theatre, you know, art, high culture, like high art kind of focused individuals,

Patrick Blenkarn 12:24
and we’ve always been interested in how that project can be accessible both as a high conceptual art experience, but also a very lowbrow, like, you know, it’s for the people, it’s full of ass puns.

Milton Lim 12:39
Aspans and donkeys and donkeys.

Gabrielle Martin 12:43
and it posed some creative fun challenges for our team, specifically our hospitality coordinator, Jenny Lee Craig. Thank you. How do we feed the masses on a budget? We did, and we did. You were very creative about, you know, trying to figure out how…

Patrick Blenkarn 13:04
She was wheeling soup from one building to the next, and we should say that if you’re watching this and you haven’t seen Ass’s Masses, there’s food at all these intermissions because the best way to make people feel like they can relax and kick off their shoes and hang out with you for eight hours is to make sure they don’t have to leave to go and get some sustenance.

Patrick Blenkarn 13:25
I think what we learned how to do at Push has become the model that we’ve used and it’s the model that we’re going to use in Germany, in Italy, and all the places that we’re now, thanks to these opportunities, we’re getting to go.

Milton Lim 13:41
And because it was Hometown Crowd, we were able to try something we’d never done before, which is do a show every week of the festival, which was massive. Because previously we had done the show like three days in a row, which really, it’s a long show for us as well, so it really drained us.

Milton Lim 13:57
And it also didn’t allow us to do the snowball effect for people to say like, hey, to all their friends, like, you should be here.

Gabrielle Martin 14:03
eight -hour show sounds like way too much of a It’s not that long

Milton Lim 14:06
Say it along.

Gabrielle Martin 14:06
Actually, it’s worth it

Milton Lim 14:09
This show on Netflix the day before so it’s actually like the same thing, but I think that

Patrick Blenkarn 14:13
openness is, you know, I think we’re at a time where we need to be rethinking when shows start, where they happen, and who’s there, right? We want live performance to be a space that is sought by the public for, you know, engaging with ideas, engaging with each other, and what we were, you know, what we collaborated on and then were able to test out at Push has shown that there are other, maybe, patterns or ways of showing work.

Patrick Blenkarn 14:42
And we were, I think we were largely inspired by the collaborators we have in Argentina for whom that’s a fairly normal structure to run a show once a week for months just because of their economic situation or what’s available to them.

Milton Lim 14:56
And also the cultural standards that they’ve acclimatized to around that.

Patrick Blenkarn 15:00
So, you know, those types of experiments, I think, are really, really cool and exciting.

Gabrielle Martin 15:05
So now I just, I would love you to tell me about how your artistic practice has evolved from first working with PUSH as a youth in the youth ambassador project or program for you, Patrick, Milton, when you first started as an artist in residency with Hong Kong exile, maybe we’ll start with you, Milton, can you just talk about how your interests or experiments with form have evolved over that period to up until assets masses now and your projects,

Gabrielle Martin 15:32
other projects.

Milton Lim 15:33
There are quite a few components and I would say largely our projects together have molded a lot of the thoughts that I have and I would say probably both of us have about like performance and the directions that we kind of want to go in and also the standards of like rigorous thought that we hold ourselves to especially around like what does it mean politically and conceptually to have someone stand and do something that’s already fixed and finite versus something that is open and like there’s agency to move around and discover what that is.

Patrick Blenkarn 16:04
to stand on stage or like be a participant in some way, yeah.

Milton Lim 16:08
Yeah, so I think a lot of the works that I was doing at the time of like the Arts in Residence program were at the beginnings of thinking about like where does digital media interface with the live body on stage.

Milton Lim 16:19
And I think since then, maybe just to like to have a shortened version of it, that now I think the question of the live body on stage has become one of like who is the live body on stage. And that’s very clear in the works that we’re doing in Culture Capital, our trading card game about the arts economy and assets masses where the audience becomes that body and it’s either one body or the whole body of the mass.

Milton Lim 16:42
And so those conversations I think continue into our role -playing game with Laurel Green, Fars, which is tabletop role -playing game for industry series events or has been used in industry series events.

Patrick Blenkarn 16:54
I feel like I see in the works that you guys were doing with Hong Kong XL though, there was already an interest in the body being specific, thinking about how Foxconn framed the pianists as visibly Chinese performers, and we were talking about that a lot even in the pre -phase.

Patrick Blenkarn 17:12
So I think that’s a question for all of us artists, I think right now, who’s on stage and why, and when it comes to making games or making participatory work, I think the question that we’ve asked ourselves before and now is, okay, well, we can either cast the players, that’s one version, or it’s open, and anyone can become a player.

Patrick Blenkarn 17:38
Both of those are equally valid strategies towards asking important questions about whatever you’re interested in. But that’s something we keep coming back to as, okay, is this for specific people to play it that we’ve curated, or is it for the public and that’s a big fork in the road?

Patrick Blenkarn 18:00
I would say I’m not making any dance theater shows at the moment, which is what my focus was at that time when I first came to Vancouver. But I also was very interested in participation. So seeing the evolution, I think, of an aesthetic in Canada.

Patrick Blenkarn 18:21
There was an aesthetic in Canada that was heavily influenced, I think, by Forest Fringe and a kind of participatory work that Push and Eftaya and other festivals, by bringing other works to the table, you’re like, oh, right, there are other versions of it.

Patrick Blenkarn 18:38
It doesn’t have to always be quaint or calm. There was a lot of calm participation, which makes sense. It’s a space where people maybe feel insecure because they’re put on the spot or in the spotlight.

Patrick Blenkarn 18:58
But I felt like that was a real strong theme, and I feel like my own work has participated in that in the past. There was an evolution through from that time, and we’re now entering a new era of, as everyone is participating more and more for digital culture and whatnot, I think there’s a different aesthetic theme.

Patrick Blenkarn 19:14
Welcomed for participation, whatever that’s going to be. And I think ASOS Masses is probably in that new next generation.

Milton Lim 19:23
I did see today on a side note, I saw that someone, I think Major Matt Mason is doing a prototyping of a narrative card game. Oh yeah. I would love to chat with him about that, but I feel like this is part of a larger movement that’s happening and we’re happy to be part of it.

Patrick Blenkarn 19:39
it. And maybe in 20 years everyone will be like, can we just get back to something else? Or it’s going to be one of those things where there’s the game series, the dance series and the circus series.

Patrick Blenkarn 19:51
They all have a place within the context of our international festivals. And I think that if some young person or older person or anybody person saw Assas Massas and thought, oh, I never thought I could pitch my game to push.

Patrick Blenkarn 20:12
Maybe you’re going to get a phone call or an email at some point. And because now those people maybe feel a little bit more welcome to a space that in the past, it wasn’t seen as for them.

Milton Lim 20:24
And maybe not even in the festival capacity but just to have the imaginative boundaries of what is performance, what is an artistic practice, especially in a city like Vancouver that is so expensive.

Milton Lim 20:34
One of the movements into digital media that’s really useful is that it doesn’t necessarily need to wait on having a workshop with actors all the time but that can start to imagine in ways that previously weren’t necessarily at my disposal.

Gabrielle Martin 20:49
Which segues nicely into my question about how you perceive the cultural context, but I guess also the relevancy of push and how that space has been important for your work. So I’m hearing, you know, the fact that festivals like push have brought in works like yours, works that just open up, you know, how we perceive the possibilities of participation, etc.

Gabrielle Martin 21:14
Can you expand on that?

Patrick Blenkarn 21:16
Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve been very lucky to hear audience members come to Assas Masters and say, I’ve never seen, I never thought this would be here in a theater. I’ve never come to the theater before, but I haven’t been in the theater since I was a kid.

Patrick Blenkarn 21:30
Those types of things. People said that to us in Vancouver at Push, and I would hope that that’s, I mean, that to me is kind of what a festival like Push is for. It’s for reminding people that what you thought was normal or traditional or whatever doesn’t have to be the case.

Patrick Blenkarn 21:46
There’s always new possibilities pushing into, trying to make a pun, pushing into new, pushing beyond the boundaries or whatever it is. I feel like it has been, for aesthetic purposes, for artists, it’s a place where you discover that what you thought was your form or what was solid is actually can melt into air very, very quickly and destabilize you in the best possible ways.

Milton Lim 22:16
I think there’s a question there for me of like, what is a festival, especially like what is a festival right now, in a time, especially coming out of the height of COVID, where like everyone has been so segmented and conversations were attempted to have online festival still remain one of the most important places where aesthetic conversations can be shared across international boundaries and pushes one of the few places in Canada where that happens.

Milton Lim 22:38
So to be part of push really meant a lot, and it continues to be like a kind of signposting when we travel abroad, or like, people recognize that we’ve been part of push. And to be to be blunt like we were only really programmed at FTR because they saw that we were at push, and they were like, okay, now we’ve seen that push.

Milton Lim 22:56
Now we know that it’s, it’s something that can be in the space and these discussions with all these other shows. So, so yeah, these these kind of boundaries that seem like they can be porous are really bridged by these kind of relational components of like talking across festivals, talking with people other artists as well.

Milton Lim 23:19
And I feel like we’ve been really bolstered by the conversations that we’ve had across not only push but because of push and tell these other festivals that we’ve been so lucky to be part of.

Gabrielle Martin 23:28
Stevenson’s Push, you’ve been to Mayfest, you’re here, and just update us about your tour days. Where can we find Ass’s Masses? We are going.

Patrick Blenkarn 23:38
to be in Italy at the end of June. So if you’re watching this in the future, you’ve already missed it. But June 18 and 20, we’re in Ancona at Inteatro festival. We’ll be in Germany in the fall and the winter.

Patrick Blenkarn 23:53
We’ll be in Quebec City in the winter as well.

Gabrielle Martin 23:59
You weren’t supposed to say that, were you?

Patrick Blenkarn 24:01
But they don’t, you know, we’ll be around.

Gabrielle Martin 24:03
Yeah, by the time this is public.

Patrick Blenkarn 24:07
And then we’ll be in, we’re talking to some new friends in the United States, been receiving some phone calls from people in, not phone calls, emails, and Instagram people don’t do that anymore. Call me from Japan, from Japan, which is amazing, Instagram messages from Japan.

Patrick Blenkarn 24:26
And one of that is that the work is translated, and we work with these different translators from around the world to make the work available to as broad an audience as possible. And I think that that is, you know, that’s part of the work that we are always going to keep trying to support.

Patrick Blenkarn 24:45
So if we have to make a new translation for, I don’t know, another context, we’ll do it. Like, that’s what makes it best.

Milton Lim 24:53
We’re in the midst of confirming what the future of Ass’s Masses looks like, but if you do want to know more, follow us on Instagram at Asses .Masses and our website is AssesMasses .work. But truly that is where we’ll update things most regularly.

Milton Lim 25:12
And you’ll see the list of festivals that we’ve gone to. We’ve done that for other artists as well, like where have they traveled to.

Patrick Blenkarn 25:19
You know, how do you do this? How do you tour work through festivals like Push or Eftaya? I had no experience in it. This is gonna be the first time I’ve had a tour of this type of scale. But what we did is we did read artists.

Patrick Blenkarn 25:34
We would go to artists’ websites, or they’re friends of ours too. We would look at and talk to them, but where did they go? Where does someone go with a work that’s long like ours or has this extra amount of audience care required?

Patrick Blenkarn 25:47
Because not every institution or not every festival or theater is set up in a way to provide that kind of extra audience care, which Push did so well. So, you know, when we look at that list, we would see, ah, Push is on like the record as some place that some of our peers have gone who have these types of shows.

Patrick Blenkarn 26:06
And we would have been following actually who is that community who’s interested in work of this scale, of this kind of community meets experience like integration. And so that’s been a…

Gabrielle Martin 26:21
Thank you for closing this with a tip for those emerging young artists, the artists of our future, tips for packaging mountain, inspiration, how to create a world tour. No, it’s really been so nice to hear about your history with Kosh.

Gabrielle Martin 26:37
Thank you so much for having been in the festival and having created this important work and for chatting with me today. Cool. And thank you for that.

Milton Lim 26:45
Stewardship and for all the work that you’ve been putting into push, like, it’s phenomenal.

Tricia Knowles 26:51
That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.

Tricia Knowles 27:12
And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Tricia Knowles, and Ben Charland. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabrielle Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.