^irrf]^
Quebec's Diane Landry
(left) will spin shoes
on record players and
Mexico's Lorena Wolffer
subverts the catwalk at
the upcoming performance-art biennial.

PERFORMANCE ARTISTS FROM VANCOUVER
AND BEYOND GO INTO OVERDRIVE FOR LIVE
BY JANET SMITH
bout the only thing you can predict
about the month-and-a-half-long LIVE
biennial of performance art is that it
will be unpredictable. Descriptions of
the amorphous art form are always hindered by the fact t h a t the audience
I (and in some cases the surroundings)
always changes the end result.
For proof, look no further than local artist Irene Loughlin,
who, as one of many projects she's taking part in for the festival, is planning a site-specific performance on a Downtown
Eastside fire escape on October 27. For her work, Vertigo, she
will attempt to climb the structure, release birds from a cage
there, and then hang from the fire escape, in a memorial to
people who have died in the alley below and an act of hope for
those who have survived. Here are the known quantities: she is
going to wear a dress made out of salmon bones (in part to
symbolize the Native history of the site) and she'll videotape
the piece and screen it live on a monitor at street level. But
there are also a lot of unknowns. For starters, audience members won't know the exact location of Vertigo until they show
up at Gallery Gachet at 4 p.m. to be led to the site. Says Loughlin: "Who knows? Maybe I'll be stopped before I can do it. I
may grasp and hang: I've been rock-climbing and practising,
but I'm not very good at it. I have an idea, but because there's
so many variables and politics and logistics, you don't know
what the outcome will be. That's the exciting thing about performance art." Adding to the uncertainty is that the title of Vertigo was not chosen out of thin air: Loughlin is afraid of heights.
Like Loughlin, Glenn Alteen, curator at the grunt gallery
and organizer of LIVE, has learned to embrace the variables
of performance art—and to deal with the fact that he can't
be quite sure what the pieces presented at galleries around
town between Saturday (October 13) and November 30 will
look like. "With performance art, it's not like producing
theatre or visual-art shows because you really don't know
what you're going to get," he says. "It's one thing to read a
description of it, but when you actually see it, it can be
about a whole range of other things."
Part of the reason performance art is so hard to talk about
specifically is that it takes such wildly diverse forms. The festival's 30 performances will encompass everything from
high-tech multime-

SHIPWRECK
By the time Eric Neighbour put the
finishing touches on a four-piece,
60-fbot-Long public artwork called
Shipwreck at the end of September,
almost 1,400 people had taken a hand
in carving the work. The project, which
took participants four months to chisel
out of red cedar, is on display at the
foot of Broughton Street by Coal
Harbour. Neighbour, who has led
community-art projects across the city,
led the building of Shipwreck as artist
in residence at the Coal Harbour
Community Centre. The Vancouver
Board of Parks and Recreation is set to
install the carved sections in a line in
Harbour Green Park, which is located

dia pieces to low-tech and cabaret-style
happenings. Objects for the Emancipated
Consumer (October 25 to 27 at the Dynamo
gallery) is a multimedia spy drama that
WHAT
invites audience members to activate
LIVE biennial of
sound and video by scanning bar-coded
performance art
objects; pregnant Toronto artist Lisa
Deanne Smith will walk amid audience members and invite them to
Various venues
pick the blooms off her custom-made
costume in Flower Girl (October 19 at
W H E N Saturday (October 13) to
Gallery Gachet); and Quebec City's
November 30
Diane Landry will spin objects like
kitchen implements and shoes on two
I N F O 604-875-9516 or
night of the show, they'll use the
record players, turning the everyday
www.Livevancouver.bc.ca/,
with runway as their stage. Western Front
into abstract art, in La Morue (Cod) (at
schedules at participating
artist Lori W e i d e n h a m m e r invited
t h e g r u n t N o v e m b e r 11). Galleries
galleries
Wolffer here after taking part in a simiaround town were left free to curate their
lar subverted catwalk show in Regina last
own performance works for LIVE. Each puts
year: "I was pregnant at the time, so I did a
its own twist on the art form: Artspeak, a gallery
pregnant Playboy bunny-type waitress and tried
interested in the interaction of text and visual art,
will host Syntax Errors, a series of "performed lectures", at to imagine if one of those waitresses got pregnant," she says.
SFU Harbour Centre, while the Video In is organizing a two- "The idea is to use the catwalk as a performance-art venue."
Wolffer's concept grew out of her own If She Is Mexico, Who
part video screening and lecture called reilive that explores
Beat Her Up?, in which she tackles the effects of the North
the relationship between video and performance art.
LIVE grew out of Live at the End of the Century, a citywide American Free Trade Agreement on Mexico and its women.
event organized two years ago to mark the history of perfor- (It's also to be performed as part of Catwalk Envy.) "The main
mance art in Vancouver. Two events at this year's biennial pay focus of my performances has been to transform the female
tribute to that heritage, too. Radix Theatre marks one of the body into a site in which social and political concerns can be
scene's most infamous episodes—a controversy in which a addressed, into a metaphorical blueprint for the social body
local performance artist publicized, but never pulled off, the of Mexico," says Wolffer from Mexico City, where I've
public execution of a rat on the VAG steps—with the Sniffy reached her by e-mail. "The performance of If She Is Mexico,
the Rat 10th Anniversary Bus Tour on October 21 (with pick- Who Beat Her Up? features me as a 'battered high-fashion
up at the Arts Club Theatre). On opening night (October 13), model'; a battered nation that insists on presenting itself not
Glenn Lewis rounds up a cast of old and new performance only as salubrious but also as 'fashionable' and 'attractive'."
Mexico City's performance-art scene may be more politiartists to play out a retrospective of this city's contributions to
the form. Says Alteen: "It takes place in the VAG rotunda, and cally charged than Vancouver's. Says Wolffer: "I think that,
it's nice to be bringing performance art back to the VAG. because performance art works with/around the body, it can
They've been gung ho on this." But as much as it tips the hat be more 'openly' political than other art forms. Culture is
to the local past, this year's event is bringing in much new inscribed in the body." And although Wolffer admits that
Mexicans still perceive performance art as a marginal form
work from out of town and out of the country.
Toronto's Rebecca Belmore, for example, will use recycled (as many do here in Canada), she used to help run a festival
jars to collect water and stockpile it all day long on October there that drew 400 people a night. The practice seems to be
20 at the grunt gallery, where it will stand as an installation attracting growing attention worldwide, she says, but then
through the next week. "That's more in the style of work she qualifies that with a challenge: "I think now is a turning
that gets done in Toronto and back east," says Alteen. "You point for performance, when we need to redefine it, question
the new directions it can take and find new venues for it."
don't see the durational work as much here."
Among the most ambitious visiting projects is Mexican
If that's true, LIVE is on the right track. The fest is a sign
performance artist Lorena Wolffer's Catwalk Envy: A Subverted that the art form is thriving in Vancouver compared to many
Runway Show, at the Western Front. For two weeks leading up parts of the world, Alteen says; LIVE, in fact, is the biggest
to the performance on November 9 and 10, Wolffer will work festival of its kind on the continent. "It's so everywhere in
with several local artists to create "fashion model" Vancouver that you think it should be that way everywhere
characters that address social and else, but it's not," he says. "Performance art exists here all the
political concerns. On the time in its own little underground, and if anything, LIVE is
just to get other people to realize this goes on." Even if he
can't quite tell them what they'll be seeing. •

WHERE

BEADY TO SAIL

at the north foot of Broughton Street,
sometime in the next few months. The
three horizontal parts of the artwork
represent the rolling waves of the

Att'M'S
ocean, while the fourth, vertical section is an abstract rendering of a
human being: together, they create an
evocative, somewhat eerie, and unmistakably West Coast i ma ge of a person
being swallowed by the sea.
In the early part of the project,

Neighbour encouraged people of all
ages and experience to help carve the
pieces; at the end, he set an age
limit of 12 years and older for the
people finishing the final details. "It
was wonderful and terrible all at the
same time," Neighbour told the
Straight about the project's logistics.
Pointing out that the artwork has
nearly 2,000 linear feet of column
fluting/he said, "It took seven weeks
just to carve that, and that included
more than 800 people."
Getting the downtown community
to literally chisel out a public artwork
on such a scale was a massive undertaking, but also a rewarding one,

Neighbour said. ' 1 guess I got accused
of being a Tom Sawyer on numerous
occasions," he said with a laugh. "But
I think i f s much more than that so
many people are missing tactile experiences of anykind these days. Using
tools you've only heard about on an
enormous piece of public art that wilt
be on-site for many years is a heady
thing: at first they'd say, You don't
want me to ruin your work—I'm not
an artist.' But once you got past that,
they'd say, T i l give it five minutes/
and end up staying there for hours."
T A L L Y H 0 Arts Club Theatre artistic
director Bill Mfllerd is once again lead-

ing a theatre trip to England—and this
time, to Paris as well. On the company's 10th annualLondon Theatre Tour,
November 30 to December 9, Millerd
will host preshow chats. Productions on
this year's roster are The Royal Family,
starring Oudi Dench; the hit ABBA
musical, Mama Mia!; the musical version of Peggy Sue Got Married; and a
new presentation of Car on a Hot Tin
Roof. In addition, travellers will go by
train through the Chunnel to Paris for a
tour of the Paris Opera. Information is
available through Sharon Amos at
Uniglobe Travelex at 604-532-0406 or
by e- mailing wc travelex@amglobe.com.
• JANET SMITH