OR CHANNEL

Over the course the early summer of 2019, Guadalupe Martinez lead a series of collaborative workshops at the Or Gallery with CUERPO, a group of her former visual arts students, with guest mentors from the Vancouver performance community. These workshops culminated in a public performance at Cathedral Square park in downtown Vancouver, in the evening of June 12th.

Eleven emerging artists formed the cohort for the CUERPO performance*, applying what they had learned in the workshops. The performance was separated into different zones; each performer presented at a particular time and contributed something distinct. 

The artists used basic human movements, for instance, walking, lying, and sitting as the presentation transformed from tranquil to agitated, slow to fast, and collective to personal. They explored various elements of their surroundings in their choreography through six distinct sections. In the first section, two artists swirled around a tree’s trunk, and touched the tree. In another part of the park, two artists sat on a bench and entangled their heads and arms with each other. Meanwhile, three more artists performed along the path between the benches and the pond. They stretched and twisted their bodies on the rough ground, or stood on the bench. In a fourth section, an artist waved a long stick in front of two  other artists. While one stood still, the other moved along with the flow of the wooden stick. Elsewhere, one artist stood at the south side of the park with another  stood far away across the pond at the north side. They were facing each other, and having the same movements simultaneously. Finally, a single artist walked across a narrow curved road through the middle of the pond, swinging her body from top to bottom, left to right. After she walked to the edge on the south side of the park, she stepped into the pond. Continuing her previous body movements in the pond, she started to make some noise from soft to loud.  To me, these six sections suggested a narrative: that while people understood and respected nature in the past. Over time effects of modernization beyond the power of the individual, affected people’s behaviour and attitudes to nature, causing them to destroy the calm natural world. Each section seemed to demonstrate this theme differently and connect with one another to unite the piece.

The artists dressed casually and looked like passersby in the park. However, they surprised the public once they started to perform. Some audience members were not expecting to see a live performance at the park, but the presentation attracted their attention. One of the audience members was really interested in the show and walked closely to the artists, documenting the whole presentation with his video camera. Also, some passersby stopped by to look and take photos of the performance. The artists focused on their work and were not distracted by the surrounding elements such as birds, vehicles, and people. This performance did not have any speakers to announce the starting time and was not surrounded by any frames. In this way, The dancers got rids of the theatrical stage, and incorporated the public context of Cathedral Square into their performance.

Through their public performance, CUERPO drew awareness to the details of the Cathedral Square site. Built over North America’s first-ever underground substation, the park has flowers, ginkgo trees, benches, and a flowing fountain fills. It is easily accessible, as it is in the middle of downtown Vancouver. Also, Cathedral Square presented an artificial natural environment in the urban district. This location resonated with the transformative theme of the performance. Different kinds of events, festivals and filming have taken place at Cathedral Square. Furthermore, a collaboration between the Vancouver Park Board, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) and Hives for Humanity is providing environmental education about honeybees, pollinator plants and other animals in the urban area. The artists’ gentle body movements showed their intimate connection with the natural environment and drew attention to its close relationship to humans’ living habits.  

With this performance, CUERPO investigated healing, poetics, and activism. The artists created their own language through movement, decoding their contemporary experiences into direct expressions. They presented the inner self and human habits in public space, and challenged their audience’s perspective of performance by exploring the natural world in a bold way. This show attempted to break the common perception of performance that should be presented on the stage. The artists expressed themselves in a mode not usually seen in the urban environment, inviting others to understand their interpretation of space.

Cindy Chan SFU Student Intern at Or Gallery, June - August 2019

Photography by Dennis Ha

‘Actor Boy: Travels in Birdsong’ is a performance and sound installation by interdisciplinary artist Charles Campbell, presented at FLOTILLA 2017 in Charlottetown, PE, Canada.

Actor Boy is a character from an alternate future - a six-dimensional being capable of folding and travelling time. Here, he investigates memories around the Bog, Charlottetown’s oft-forgotten African Islander and mixed-race community that emerged in the early 1800s, and dispersed within a century. Interviewing collected birdsong and memories, he asks: what forces led to the historical erasures of communities, and to their reappearances? How can we find continuities within these disruptions?

— Co-presented by Or Gallery, Confederation Centre Art Gallery and FLOTILLA Curator: Joni Low Camera: Oakar Myint   http://oakarmyint.com/

Documentation of a performance on Sept 9, 2016 for an exhibition at Or Gallery Vancouver.

Choreography by Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau Performed by Alexa Mardon, Erika Mitsuhashi and Lexi Vajda. Score by Alexander Moksos. Video by Ian Barbour.

For more information: orgallery.org/chloe-lum-and-yannick-desranleau-5-tableaux