For 12 years, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival has brought light to dreary Vancouver winters by presenting the best theatre, dance, music and multimedia performances from around the world. The PuSh Festival runs January 19 to February 7, with over 150 events in 18 venues across the city (from The Fox Cabaret to Queen Elizabeth Theatre). The 2016 PuSh Festival features artists and companies from Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Lebanon, and the United States.
As we get rolling this week, we offer three of our top picks of the 2016 PuSh Festival to help you get started.
1) monumental
The Holy Body Tattoo / Godspeed You! Black Emperor (Canada)
Jan 28, 8PM, Queen Elizabeth Theatre
monumental is the big-ticket show of the 2016 PuSh Festival. And if you haven't heard yet, the acclaimed Vancouver dance company The Holy Body Tattoo are reuniting after a 10-year hiatus to launch the world tour of their famed work, monumental, in their hometown. And equally exciting for music fans, is that they will be joined live by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the notoriously enigmatic and cult-status post-rock band from Montreal. This is a collaboration that will leave you reeling.
The show begins with nine human figures, mounted on pedestals. The eight-member band draws us into a trance as the dancers’ movements—equal measure of balletic grace and brutal athleticism—shifts from gestures of our everyday lives to acts of abandon. The result is unlike anything you’ve seen—as violent, beautiful and cathartic as art can get.
Ilbijerri Theatre Company (Australia)
Jan 21-23, 8PM, SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
Jack Charles comes from the Stolen Generation—Aboriginal children who were torn from their families by the Australian government during the 20th century. In this one-man show Jack Charles reflects on his life as an artist, addict and thief; for over 40 years, Charles—a trained Shakespearean actor—has balanced an award-winning career as a television and movie actor with his secret life in petty theft that fueled his drug addiction. When the law finally caught up with him in his sixties and he faced a jail sentence he wouldn't survive, he had to decide if he can go straight for the first time in his life.
3) L’Immédiat
Association Immédiat (France)
Feb 4-6, 8PM, Vancouver Playhouse
French circus come to town! Here the adventurous spirit of the avant-garde meets the crowd-pleasing slapstick of circus comedy. Camille Boitel’s Association Immédiat is a company out to wow us; their raison d’être is to shake up our ideas about performance and movement. In this piece, Boitel and his fellow Immédiats present a dazzling range of physical invention. Physical comedy has rarely seemed so expressive—visual anarchy of the Marx Brothers delivered with a French accent. Bridging low comedy and high art, Boitel has created a truly eccentric work. Expect the unexpected, as they say, and prepare to be astonished.
The 2016 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival runs January 19 to February 7.
