#visualeyez

Pest Control: “Success!!!!”

Two wooden folding chairs sit abreast and encircled by a collection of six space heaters. An audience faces them, waiting.

Kai Villneff and Sarah Ormandy—Pest Control—enter upstage left. They each turn on three heaters before taking their seats, Ormandy on our right and Villneff our left. A low, barely audible hum drones out of the now-energized heating coils, and several fans innocuously whirr. The reflector of the centremost heater glows a pale orange, but its heat does not quite reach the back rows of the audience. The artists both wear blue jeans and boots, and Villneff has a grey sweater while Ormandy wears a blue blouse with white polka dots. They sit placidly facing us, hands folded quietly in their laps or placed on their thighs, with glasses of water resting on the floor next to their feet. We wait.

Ivan Lupi "Bench"

The whining buzz of quivering needles penetrates the air. It reverberates in my skull someplace behind my eyes and between my ears. Meanwhile, fall leaves, impelled by a cool wind, skitter across the concrete in a staccato arrhythmic rush, and the warmish sun cuts between the surrounding buildings and projects lengthening shadows. People around, passing by, waiting for busses, or maybe eating a hotdog, seem to pretend not to notice. This scene, unfolding before them on that wooden park bench, might as well be the most banal thing they’ve seen. But, some people do take care to notice, sit down, perplexed, intrigued, or curious, and start asking questions or telling stories of their own.

Festival Animator Michael Woolley continues his reflections on this September's Visualeyez with Ray Fenwick's “How to talk to plants”:

Ray Fenwick is that human. He stands, hands clasped around the microphone he holds close to his mouth, staring at one of the houseplants sitting in front of him. The sound of his breath rushing over the microphone distorts and shudders through the space like indecisive gusts of wind. It is a wet and meaty sound, accentuated by other noises escaping his mouth: lips clapping together or tongue sliding around, along, and between his teeth and gums. Meanwhile, the microphone doesn’t register anything at all from his plant compatriots.

“Hello, I am a kind of meat, and I have feelings and sometimes I try to share those feelings.”

Still, the plants do not seem to care enough to respond.

Julianne Chapple sits in the blue chair. But ‘sits’ isn’t the right word. Chapple is sprawled across the chair, her limbs hanging toward the floor, in a way that carefully toes the line between languid and luxuriating. She is wearing high-waist tweed slacks and a loose-fitting white blouse. Her mousey hair completely obscures her face. Picking up the tumbler, Chapple pours it several fingers full of whiskey and takes a long sip. Her fingers take delicate purchase on the glass, and it seems rather that her hand and arm dangle from it instead.

An indeterminate amount of time passes, but at least one or two songs play that seem to long for less complicated times or the elusive love of a coy woman. Chapple sips at her whiskey from underneath her long hair, and we all sit and stare at her and each other. With nearly imperceptible slowness, the artist falls from the chair and onto the floor. But ‘falls’ isn’t the right word. Chapple slumps, almost melting, moving like a glob of treacle pouring itself onto and across the floor. There is a wallowing, indulgent viscosity to her movement as she makes her way around the space, whiskey ever in hand and face rarely seen.

Folamh is first up in a series of reviews of Visualeyez 2017. Festival animator Michael Wooley will review all performances from the festival celebrating Awkwardness this year. Find them on the Visualeyez 2017 blog.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” 

In “Ways of Seeing” art critic John Berger captured what would later be defined as the male gaze. Sympathetic to the feminist movement and its second wave Berger managed to encapsulate not just a lack of representation but an objectification and subjugation. And its message remains relevant today. 

BC artist Julianne Chapple takes inspiration from the message and creates a performance piece that explores the idea of self-image and the perception of women. 

Women Appear (and sometimes they learn how to disappear) will be performed at Visualeyez 2017 on Wednesday and Saturday. 

Latitude 53 chatted with Chapple about her work and inspiration. 

L53: How has this performance evolved? 

JC: It started with a series of self-portraits in my home. Being a performance artist and coming from a dance background these photos were an attempt to capture these micro performances I was doing alone. I had a chance to perform in a series here in Vancouver where I brought the living room into a theatre and performed them for an audience. It will be an extension from a domestic space and move through these movement phrases from the history of images of women. It explores the baggage that comes with the way women are portrayed and how they have been created by men. 

I’m really excited about this performance as it will be set up as an installation because the viewers will be in the same environment. I’m hoping to create a dynamic where everyone in the space can inhabit the role of watcher and watched throughout the evening. I think that will open up new possibilities for me. 

L53: Why is this piece important to you? 

JC: For me as a performer it’s all kind of an exploration of attempting to take control of a viewers perception and trying to use all the baggage that comes with representing a female body in a playful way. It looks at utilizing things like depersonalization and objectification and how you could maybe move in and out of this state of objecthood and take control of that transformation of the subject with an audience. 

Visualeyez 2017 explores awkwardness. The works presented reflect on our interactions with situations where we feel uncomfortable or marginalized and how we react in these changing environments, according to the festival’s curatorial statement. 

American theatre artist Josh Clendenin explores the awkwardness of language in his performance Folamh. The American theatre artist speaks multiple languages, and often feels uncomfortable using each one, especially when in conversation with a native speaker. To heighten the situation Clendenin has centered his performance as a date. 

“I’m fascinated by the potential of connection and the awkwardness that is a date and meeting people and to up that ante in a multilingual situation,” says Clendenin. 

Latitude 53 spoke to Clendenin about his show Folamh, which translates to “blank” or “empty” in Irish. 

Clendenin will perform Folamh Thursday at 3pm and Friday at 8pm as part of Visualeyez. 

L53: What prompted the exploration of language as a form of awkwardness? 

JC: I speak multiple languages, but I have this anxiety when I need to speak to a native speaker. English is my native language but there’s always a space where if I’m speaking French or Irish for a native speaker, I can’t seem to express myself. I wanted to show that the human brain, as you’re trying to find those words, they’re all stored in the same place in the brain, so if you’re trying to access one word in one language you have to access them all at once. You’re literally trying to filter through all of the words that you know.