“My favorite dance move, it really must be in “I Like to Move It” and shaking my thigh fat for four and a half minutes. It makes me crack up every time. I’m not fake laughing—I’m killing myself laughing on stage because I’m shaking my thigh fat for everyone.”

—Heather Lindsay, performer in The Show Must Go On

To listen to an interview with Lindsay click here.

The great strength of The Show Must Go On—other than the shaking of thigh fat—is the way it inspires audience interaction rather than demanding it. The show opens with the technician who sits in front of the audience, turning off the lights and inserting a CD from a large stack sitting to his left. The entirety of Tony and Maria’s duet “Tonight” from West Side Story. Nothing happens.

As the lights slowly rise, the tech ejects the CD, puts it in its case and inserts the next. This punctuation of changing CDs marks the passage of time through the show and seems to never fail to get a laugh. The song ends. The third CD goes in, “Come Together” by the Beatles, and the audience decides that it’s acceptable to sing along. There is no cue that this is what the audience should be doing, it’s just that there is nothing else to do, and The Show Must Go On takes the time it needs to allow the audience to figure it out.

The discomfort created by watching nearly ten minutes of nothing is palpable, as is the delight of the realization that you can sing along. I’m fairly certain I was the youngest audience member, and the crowd looked pretty sedate, but over the course of the show they hooted, hollered, clapped, stomped, sang and sighed. One man even stormed the stage, but was quickly ushered back into the audience. Clearly there was a line of what was and wasn’t acceptable regarding audience participation and it was exciting to see the show get the audience to tread that line with almost no direct communication.

Midway through the third song the actors finally entered and things really got weird with “I Like to Move It.” Thigh fat wasn’t the only thing these actors were moving, and the grotesque sexuality was hilarious and mesmerizing. The show meandered from bizarre humor to intellectual minimalism to sigh inducing pathos as the focus shifts between the dancers, the audience and the songs.

The publicity promises that “fans of last year’s That Night Follows Day will find in Jérôme Bel’s masterpiece a truly kindred spirit,” and like That Night Follows Day, almost nothing happens over the course of the performance, yet I found myself entirely captivated from beginning to end.

A man in a bunny suit. Puppets in a to-scale model of Auschwitz. Eating a slice of pizza as a dance theme. Edgar Allan Poe. Must be  the three-week theatre marathon that is the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival!

Founded by Norman Armour and Katrina Dunn in 2003, the annual festival has hosted some of the most confounding, unrelatable and provocative performances from around the world. Last year’s memorable shows included a comedian who handed out “cum cloths,” and hovering helium balloons which reflected lights onto a projector while the dramaturg spoke about her childhood in tones similar to Bobba Fett. Hey, there’s something for everyone!

All jokes aside, what is PuSh really about? What made Armour and Dunn say, ‘What Vancouver really needs is some freaky shit’? In an interview from New York, where he was making a last-minute pit stop before Wednesday’s opening night, Armour explained that, “At the root of live performance, for me, is the notion of witness. The idea of being in a room, something is happening, and you’re watching it happen…By what lens do you watch something? Do you watch the world around you?”

The festival has evolved, and gained enough respect in the performing arts community that Armour is now one of the voices leading the charge against BC arts funding cuts, and is considered by many to be a powerful spokesperson who can connect with local audiences. Armour spoke to that, saying, “There are things in the festival this year that really speak about values. What do you believe in? What are you willing to fight for?”

This year, far more than in years past, PuSh has to make a stand. The actors, stage managers, costume designers, producers, directors,  and audience all have the same thing at stake: the continued existence of a thriving, sustainable arts community in Vancouver.

The Cultural Olympiad is taking off some of the burn for the present year by funding hundreds of individual shows, but when the Games leave, what will be left? Armour hopes that young artists don’t flee to Toronto in the next few years with the potential arts cuts looming on the horizon.

“It’s a small irony, but not an insignificant one that great work is often created out of adverse conditions.” Thanks, Norman, I’ll remember that.

Daniel MacIvor is no stranger to the West Coast. He has toured one-man shows and even directed a two men show here in the West Coast. Just last year, he performed in the play His Greatness at the Arts Club.

“I like Vancouver,” MacIvor confesses. “I’m from the East Coast. People here call the East Coast Ontario, but there’s no coast in Ontario, so it really isn’t a coast!” MacIvor laughs. “I’m from the actual East Coast—I’m from Nova Scotia, but I’ve lived most of the time in Toronto.”

Ruby Slippers Theatre’s production of MacIvor’s A Beautiful View is, in short, a love story about friendship. “It’s two women, they meet, and kind of just randomly at this camping store in their 20s, and they sort of begin this weird sort of friendship that goes on for 20 years or something, and the play sort of follows that…Their friendship, it has a sexual component that surprises both of them, as neither of them identifies as lesbian.” The two women find themselves in this peculiar situation, which become an ongoing tension in their relationship.

The play was originally done as a commission for Ohio State University, and was written specifically for the actors. “I wrote the play three or four years ago. I directed it at that time with some actors in Toronto and we did a tour.”

The same cast toured the play to South Carolina, Montreal, Ottawa and New York. Soon, MacIvor got calls from Washington and Nova Scotia to direct that same play, only with different actors. “I never really thought of doing it with other people, so I went down, and I did the show with different actors, and I thought, oh, this is very interesting. I didn’t know that [my play] would translate to other actors, because I kind of make it for [the original] actors.”

“So this is now my fourth time directing with different cast, different designers.  It’s been really interesting for me because it started off as something I thought was a very specific thing…and it’s grown into being something quite different.”

“In a lot of ways, this play is about labeling,” MacIvor points out. “Why we label, why we feel like we have to label things, like why does someone have to be a lesbian, or gay man, or whatever, you know? We’re so into labels, hyphenating things. Why can’t we just be people? It does ask that question.” Thankfully, there will be humour that will pull you through these pondering questions.”It’s pretty whimsical in some ways in the play, so it’s got a lightness about it, even though it…asks some serious questions, it’s quite light. It’s funny. It has its humour about these questions.”

With a very specific text set to very specific lighting and sound design, fans may not really be able to tell the difference in the cross continental versions. “What changes in this mix, is the different designers and the actors, who are different, bringing themselves into it, altering things. It probably looks the same, but feels different.”

A Beautiful View is one of the five published in MacIvor’s Governer General’s Award-winning collection, I Still Love You. It runs December 4–13 at Performance Works on Granville Island and December 16–19 at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby at 8pm. For more information, got to rubyslippers.ca.

After 34 years of professional acting, directing and play writing, Nicola Cavendish returns to UBC, her alma mater, to direct The Laramie Project—a play she believes Vancouver needs. On a rainy Saturday, after a tech run and just days before opening night, she sits in the lobby of the Frederick Wood theatre, exhausted, eating a bowl of microwaved soup and explaining, between mouthfuls, her hope for the play.

“I want the audience to be compassionate,” she says. ” I want them to understand because this is a play about homosexuality. The prime rule of theatre is to shake people up from their complacency, to make people look at something dark that exists. This play exists on the streets of Vancouver. In Stanley Park we had Aaron Webster who was beaten to death just like Matthew Shepard. Three weeks ago in Toronto, a young gay man was beaten to death right in downtown Toronto. And Vancouver has its fair share of gay bashing, so we have to shake people up who want to look the other way.”

The Laramie Project does just that. On October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was lured into a car, robbed, beaten, tortured and tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. After 18 hours, he was found in a coma and put on life support. He died six days later.

The event was a watershed moment for gay rights; media coverage was salacious, brutal and brisk, generalizing the residents as hicks and rednecks. The subtext was loud and clear: What do you expect in a place like this?

The Tectonic Theatre Project, headed by Moises Kaufman, set off to Laramie to do the exact opposite. From hundreds of interviews with Laramie residents over the span of a year and half, Kaufman pieced together the resulting play, The Laramie Project. It pieces together the ethos of the town, painting finely tuned portraits of the residents using their verbatim quotes.

We meet the slow-talking cowboy types we’ve come to expect. But one of them is so good-natured we like him instantly, and the other is gay and proclaims, “Don’t fuck with a Wyoming queer ‘cos they’ll kick you in the ass.” Expectations are upended. We meet a self-described “Islamic feminist” and an emergency worker, played beautifully by Barbara Kozicki. She contracts HIV while tending to Matthew Shepard because of shoddy gloves. A fun-loving, straight-talking waitress is handled with such precision by Claire Hesselgrave that the small-town, redneck stereotype all but shatters.

The play that emerges is warm, compassionate and honest. It’s a work of theatrical journalism that is as much about Matthew Shepherd and the residents of Laramie as it is about that giant of philosophical questions: What does it mean to be human?

Evil and our capacity for it is embodied in the wooden fence (made from pine sawbuck, the same wood as the original fence to which Shepard was tied) that sits prominently on the stage and is the mainstay of Ronald Fedoruk’s set design. Like the memory of Matthew Shepard, it never goes away, and characters must move around it, lifting a slab to step over it, putting it back up, using it as a makeshift bar.

As a shy theatre student Jedediah Schults, played spectacularly by Eric Freilich, explains, “Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime. We’ve become Waco, we’ve become Jasper. We’re a noun, a definition, a sign. We may be able to get rid of that, but it’ll sure take a while.”

Nicola Cavendish’s direction moves the play along swiftly, hitting all the right notes and never getting mired in one character for too long. As the play ends, the word ‘hope’ projected onto a backdrop of a night sky filled with stars. Hope and love is the answer, according to Cavendish.

“It sounds simple because it’s a complicated world,” she says, “but when you push the papers off the desk and you open the window and you breathe in some air in what is a tense or tight, stressful time, I think the one thing that flies in the window and sits on your shoulder is love. The bluebird of love, the bluebird of contentment, of happiness, the bluebird of satisfaction. All you need is love, you know.”

The Laramie Project is playing from November 19-28 at 7:30pm  at Frederic Wood Theatre, UBC.