Norman Armour didn’t anticipate how powerful the intimate performances would be when he co-created Club PuSh, an informal social hub for the PuSh festival five years ago.
“I didn’t perhaps imagine or understand the energy that would be in the room for an evening,” said Armour, artistic and executive director of the 10-year-old international performing arts festival. “You could hear a pin drop in that place and there’s a kind of excitement and anticipation for the work. I don’t think Tim [Carlson] or Veda [Hille] or I appreciated how intense that might be.”
This year’s Club PuSh at Performance Works on Granville Island kicks off Jan. 16 with a collaboration between writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and singer-songwriter Rae Spoon. With humour and heartache, the two expose their failed attempts to fit in and explore the limitations of traditional notions of gender with Gender Failure.
New to Club PuSh is its first all-ages show. The celebrated Coastal Sounds Youth Choir is working with Woodpigeon, a.k.a. musician Mark Andrew Hamilton, to perform a show of indie rock, classical and avant-garde choral music and a joint set of original Woodpigeon songs in an early and a later show.
The local Eye of Newt Ensemble returns to the festival to accompany a screening of the 1980s cult classic Japanese cyberpunk film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, with an experimental soundscape drawn from Japanese noise and electronics. Eye of Newt previously collaborated with the PuSh festival on The Passion of Joan of Arc, The General, Dreams, Beauty and the Beast and Go West.
For the first time, the festival includes an artist from Los Angeles — animator, designer and multimedia artist Miwa Matreyek who performs as a shadow in the magical worlds she creates with animation.
“There’s an interesting generation of artists who’ve come out of CalArts and are doing very intriguing performance that involve multimedia elements and text and movement and other things,” said Armour, noting Matreyek created an animated backdrop for 605 Collective’s PuSh mainstage dance show Inheritor Album.
Club PuSh’s other shows include Tucked & Plucked, about the history of the drag queen movement in Vancouver, cat-themed tunes in Swan Song (For Cats), Ethiopian power trio Krar Collective, another instalment of Ryeberg Live, Duet for One, and a piece called Huff about Indian residential schools that’s received much acclaim.
This year’s Club PuSh lacks the big names of Hawksley Workman and Mary Margaret O’Hara as seen in previous years, but Armour doesn’t see that as a problem. He contends Club PuSh appears to be gaining the same level of trust as the main festival.
“That you could look at an idea and say that sounds intriguing, I think I’ll go to see that,” Armour said.
The popular Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata got its start at Club PuSh as a 20-minute musical commissioned by Theatre Replacement and now it’s touring as an Arts Club production.
Placing ideas front and centre with high-concept, low-cost shows has always been at the heart of Club PuSh, and Armour, who two years ago suffered a heart attack in the intermission of an O’Hara Club PuSh show, says its pulse has only grown stronger.
“The festival and particularly the Club, has become more and more assured of what it is,” he said.
Club PuSh runs Jan. 16 to Feb. 1. For more information about its marquee acts and late night events, see pushfestival.ca/clubpush.
