Pancho Lopez performs at VIVO, September 23, 2011. video by Elisha Burrows

re-LIVE feat. Raymond Boisjoly, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Curtis Grahauer, Brian Lye, Elizabeth Milton, Ron Tran. Curated by Jesse Birch.

An imaginative approach to addressing the ephemerality of performance, re-LIVE was a warm and intelligent wind-down to the LIVE festivities. Using not only performance, but also drawing, installation, video, and fashion, six young artists reinterpreted important performance works created in Vancouver. Bringing new insight to the originals, the exhibition also served as a loving tribute to local art history.

Perhaps the loosest response in the exhibition was by Raymond Boisjoly. Rather than looking at a specific performance piece, Boisjoly took a cue from the practice of Warren Arcan. Drinking steadily through the night, Boisjoly used the aluminum of his beer cans to draw on the wall of the bar at VIVO. Beginning with "UNEASY WITH THE COMFORT" he later added "OF COMPLEXITY" to complete the phrase.

Franciso-Fernando Granados' inspiration was a single moment from the first LIVE Biennale, a performance of Margaret Dragu's Eine Kleine Nacht Radio. In this moment, Dragu applied lipstick from her mouth to a wall while wearing a black dress. Granados, also in black, did not use just his lips. Instead, pressing his cheek against the wall, he traced a red sharpie marker along the profile of his face, repeating this gesture to create a long landscape of silhouettes.

Curtis Granhauer's 4x8 was a tribute to the eight members of U-J3RK5 and the four songs off their original eponymous album. Using microphones as markers for Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Kitty Byrne, Colin Griffiths, Danice McLeod, Frank Ramirez, and David Wisdom, Granhauer created four U-J3RK5 karaoke tracks, elevating the band from underground punk heroes to solid gold pop fame. Visitors were also invited for a karaoke party at the end of the night.

Rodney Graham's classic Vexation Island got a rework by Brian Lye, transporting the video's the original desert island setting to a South Vancouver backyard. Instead of a coconut perpetually knocking out a hapless pirate, in Training a Fool is Not a Joke we have a bumbling tree pruner forever sawing himself off a tree and getting hit by a ladder. The two films share the same language; short, slow-motion cuts hilariously elaborate upon every detail of the disaster. However, the playful and fantastic setting of Graham's film is replaced with the reality of our own city, a comment on "the adverse effects of Vancouver real estate speculation".

Elizabeth Milton's video installation consisted of two face-to-face monitors displaying a vast collection of leopard print clothes. On one screen, the camera, up close and personal, roams across every detail of the wardrobe. The other screen shows a wide, still shot. All leopard finery is displayed at once, neatly ordered. Someone, I'm guessing this is Milton, inhabits this frame, barely moving. She wears a leopard print costume after Kate Craig's Lady Brute character. Held for the duration of Kate Craig's lively Skins, Milton's piece operates in contrast to the original, a comment on the stultifying effect of historicization upon art.

Recreating the costumes of Mr. Peanut, Flakey Rosehips, and Lady Brute, in Peanut, Leopard, Sharks, Ron Tran re-animated the playful personas of Vincent Trasov, Glenn Lewis, and Kate Craig, but in miniature. Modeled by three year olds, the cute factor was a definite hit. One could not help but feel that the past was being revitalized as the kids modeled, tore off, and ran all over their lovingly tailored outfits, dashing manically around the gallery space until it was time for bed.

- stacey ho

Arti Grabowski

Preparatory Remarks

• Spray your face with paint. White face, red mouth. Spray your eyes black.


• Sharpen your knives. Or at least test them out on your foot.


• Try not to step on the floor. Maybe nail your foot to something comfortable, like a stool. Or tape your foot to a big rock.


• Spray mystery fluid when prepping, fixing, cleaning, or to add flavour and emphasis to important remarks.


• Video self for the memories. Your face look good on big screen.


• Soundtrack is your own amazement at the wonders and trials of life. Repeat after me:
  AI YAI YAI YAI YAI YAI YAI YAI
  OI YOI YOI YOI YOI YOI YOI YOI
  TSK TSK TSK TSK TSK TSK TSK
  WOW. WOW.

  WOW!!!

  OUCH.


• Life is black. Humour is also black. Dress accordingly.


• Drink.

Congratulations. You are now raving bumbling beast idiot.


Pilgrimage/Procedure

In many countries we like to flavour our liquors with exotic ingredients to add some pizazz. Try these recipes to take a trip around the world, or at least across the performance space. If good drink more whiskey. If not good drink more whiskey.

• Some say vodka is better when flavoured with paint. Spray paint your finger red until it tastes good. (Sometimes it tastes better if you also spray paint your face.) Swirl finger around in a glass of vodka and fellate until satisfied. Crush glass with rock foot.


• Pull out your hair and examine closely. Make sure it's really good hair. Get excited about it! Soak your hair in vodka and suck it down. Slurp slurp. If you cough it up, don't worry. It is even more delectable the second time around. Finally, crush glass with rock foot.


• Finger your armpit 'til it tickles. Maybe there's a little hole in there. Hook that finger right in and rip your sleeve off. It's like skinning a fish. Don't worry about the tailor, you can tape it back on anytime. Soak sleeve in glass of vodka. Stick sleeve in your mouth, sucking out every last drop. Sometimes it helps if you pull the sleeve out bit by bit, wringing it out with your teeth. Mmmm. Crush your vodka glass with your rock foot.


• God is in the details. Find a tiny piece of paper, like a label from a bottle. Float it in some vodka. Pour it out. Eat the paper. Smash thing with other thing.


• Grind a cut apple into a glass of vodka and tip it upside down, letting the liquid drip out slowly. Lick the apple, or better yet, rub it all over your disgusting, paint smeared face. Don't forget to smash that glass when you're done.

Feast/Finale

Finally you have arrived at the table. The table makes a good noise that could be defined as a "hellish jangling". It is a special place. Climb up on it, or stab it with your knife. Pour booze and drip paint on it and rub it all over. Hack the stool off your foot. You can still use it as you move across the room like a grotesque inchworm, grinding glass into the floor as you go along.

It is the end. You may sit at the table now, both feet firmly on the ground. But you can also stand on it, bleeding and gasping, while hacking off a table leg with your big scary knife. Best of all, you can just throw the table across the room. Yes, that would be best.


Lessons?/Conclusions?

It takes a whole lot of work and a lot of smarts to make yourself look like a fool. I am terrified. Good job, Arti!

- stacey ho

Day ??: Fiat lux

I arrived at the courtyard of the Firehall Arts Centre around 11:20 Saturday morning. The four-hour durational performance by Margaret Dragu, Grace Salez, Judith Price and Sinéad O’Donnell had begun at 11 and was already in full swing.

The performance of these four women was quite different from those of Pancho Lopez or Christian Messier, which had taken place earlier in the festival program. The performances of both Lopez and Messier led their audience toward a single climactic moment, a surprise that revealed the logic and beauty of their action. Lopez smashed the vase full of Coca-Cola with his baseball bat; Messier opened his mouth and from it billowed a cloud of white dust.

The whole arc of their respective performances had led to that one moment. The actualization of these poetic images completed their pieces. Once revealed, any further performance was pointless.

The actions of the four women were of a different order. There was no arc towards climax. Composed of hundreds of actions and images, their performance continued throughout the afternoon. They worked through a few simple actions, which were repeated constantly, always with a slight variation, with a few new events occurring throughout the day.

Four hours is a long time to create a performance with a coherent conceptual framework. For this slow organic process of creation to succeed in engaging the public, the performers must work with an intense focus. Their individual acts throughout the period must have a poetic resonance, they must be coherent within a concept, and they must show some development. It’s a very difficult act to pull off.

Their show was called “Chaos”. Though the women worked in disparate realms, interacting only rarely, the over all feeling of the piece was, for me, not one of the world out-of-order. There was no violence, no anxiety or terror that I associate with a world gone amok. On the contrary I felt that these women were working to create some kind of order from a primeval and formless state.

Throughout the day Grace Salez remained blindfolded. She alternatively pushed and pulled a wheelbarrow full of rotten apples, walking a few halting steps from one side the courtyard to the other. Judith Price lay on a picnic table and struggled to climb out from a felt bag. Sinéad O’Donnell with a painted face, her dress stained red and covered with Vaseline and flour, walked dazed around the central tree placing small black ravens here and there. A whole dead fish lay on a bed of ice. Margaret Dragu sat ensconced on the deck over looking the courtyard. On a small table she had set-up her mending station with a tin of buttons, her sewing supplies, a few articles of clothing that needed care.

Each of the women created a unique space with a separate gravity and logic, which she developed throughout the day with a hundred slight variations. Turning your head from one performer to another, the eye was constantly caught anew by striking images: Judith cutting her toenails and covering her bare feet with band aids, Dragu singing karaoke version of “The Days of Wine and Roses” with her clients, O’Donnell, her hand stuffed into a loaf of bread biting off chunks and eating, and Grace always moving gingerly, her hands searching the space before her seeking something solid.

It is unfortunate that so few members of the Live audience came by to see this performance. It was a solid cascade of poetic images that rained down without cease. In one short afternoon, a lucky few witnessed absurd, tragic, motherly forces wrest form from nothingness.

FA

UJ3RK5 karaoke at re-LIVE

Suvi

First off, I'd like to thank Suvi, since through her piece, I got to lock lips with two very handsome strangers. I hope I didn't give them my cold. Beginning her performance by kissing a member of the audience, Suvi requests that this kiss be passed around the room from person to person as she performs. Later this kiss circles back to me as a kiss on the hand. The whole piece dances around kissing and desire, its manifestation and construction in capital culture, in fairy tales, family, crime, psychology, and history, to name a few.

Projected large, oscillating pink lips glow seductively to a sexy downtempo beat. Presented before us are a set of four cots and a table with some apples and booze. Suvi begins to list a wide variety of kisses: the kiss of Saddam Hussein, the kiss of Liz Taylor, Charles Bronson, a tree, a mother, a schizophrenic. "You may kiss the bride now." In the meantime, pop images both holy and monstrous, as well as images of cash, mix with the pulsating video lips.

Suvi approaches the cots, where tucked underneath are three very different dolls: a CPR dummy, a blow-up doll, and a life-like children's doll. She begins to read out what sounds like crime reports, advertising jingles, historical accounts, news items: an encyclopedic barrage of fact and trivia. A doll was left in a high school washroom; a doll internalizes our conception of normality in sexuality, in ethnicity; the face of a doll taken from the image of a dead girl, drowned with no evidence of violence. With each doll, she reads out a prepared speech and then asks "Question. How does a little girl kiss her doll to say goodnight? How does a man kiss another man to save his life? Question. How is sex doll kissed?" Then, she proceeds to make out with the children's doll, perform CPR on the blow up doll, mix things up entirely.

Suvi tells us that in Finland, you are not allowed to bring alcohol into festivals. She shows us a way that people sneak it in. Removing a syringe that is strapped to her leg, she fills it up with hard liquor, and injects this into the apple. Taking a bite from the fruit, she gags, feigning the most painful of deaths. Casting about, she finally tumbles to the floor, awaiting a sweet prince to save her life and bring her out of slumber with a kiss.

- stacey ho

Day 10 -- The smashing finale

It was the last instant of Pancho Lopez’s piece Friday night that transformed it from a banal repetitive action to a powerful act of gratuitous poetry. Without that moment when the baseball bat slammed into the overflowing glass vase of Coca-Cola, shattering it into countless pieces sending umpteen liters of coke spilling onto the gallery floor, what would the performance have been?

A man pours liters of coke into a clear glass vase. He arranges the empty bottles in a line and carefully places the red plastic bottle caps along the front edge of the white plinth where the vase sits. Canned music forms the soundtrack. If Lopez had stopped his action before he had filled the vase, taking his bow and walking off stage, I would be writing this post about his commentary on consumption and branding in a modern capitalist society, or perhaps about the ironic and playful gestures he used as he filled the vase with the ugly brown liquid.

At the conclusion of such a hypothetical truncated spectacle, we would have applauded the work nonetheless. If we felt any lingering insatisfaction, we would have attributed it to our incapacity to understand the work’s deeper meanings.

Certainly, the simple act of filling the vase with coke meant something. If we couldn’t we see what it really meant, the cause of our uncertainty would certainly have been our own blindness, our own incapacity to see.

Thankfully, Lopez concluded his piece with an act of irrevocable finality. We no longer need to search for a rational set of meanings to invest within the piece, to explain it or contextualize it, because the beauty and completeness of his act overwhelms those considerations.

Speculations become superfluous and absurd confronted with the poetic act. Of course, its nice to pass the time talking about this and that in relation to a work of performance, but one hopes that during an evening the crystal palace of our rationality will be, for one instant, smashed as an incomprehensible beauty that seizes us by the throat reminding us that life is always something greater than our capacity to understand.

That said, even after such acts of gratuitous poetry, the tech crew still has to come clean up the sticky mess.

Kurt Johannessen : The Almost Secret

We enter a room with chairs placed in a circle around a big stack of papers and a large glass vessel filled with something beige that could be sand. Theatre lights are on, but someone switches them to the overhead fluorescents. The effect is much less spectacular. Kurt Johannessen enters, tall and barefoot. Affectionately, he touches the lip of the glass and turns his attention to the tower of paper. It is so, so quiet. You can hear the voices of people in the bar down the hall, the sound of the street from an open door.

With great deliberation, Johannessen begins a construction built upon a queerly absurd and subtle logic. Single sheets of paper are placed precisely in random positions on the floor, adjusted this way and that until they are just perfectly so. Tiny objects emerge from Johannessen's pocket. A glass jar that looks like the top of a test tube. A tiny glass vessel filled with black-eyed peas. Tiny pieces of paper become little tents that populate the edges of the 8.5"x11". Each sheet, each object, is the focus of Johannessen's rapt interest. He is holding something so small, so thin, I must squint to make it out. It looks like two thin wires, held in the curve of thumb and forefinger so that they form a delicate cross. One is placed in the world of meticulously arranged paper, another is slipped somewhere between the pages of the giant stack. Some detritus, a tiny speck of paper, is discovered in a corner of the performance space and brought to rest at the corner of a sheet of white paper.

Amidst this order, chaos is introduced. Johannessen picks up a small stack of papers. Walking slowly around the space, he lifts a sheet up in the air and lets it flutter to the ground. A gentle expression of awe as he observes the individual trajectories of each falling sheet of paper. He pauses to examine a bit of fluff on the floor. Papers scatter across the room. He, we, are transfixed. The fluff is re-found and given a special place at the top of the paper tower.

When a sufficient number of papers have been distributed, he places the remaining papers in his hand on the floor and stands on them. Not enough. He takes perhaps ten sheets more off the big stack to raise himself up a few millimeters. This seems acceptable. On this tiny platform he takes out another two very thin wires. Upon later examination, I discover that these are leads for a mechanical pencil. One in each hand, he tentatively spreads his arms out, lifting the lead up a few times before finally dropping them into the tiny glass tube on the floor.

Johannessen takes up a paper tent and approaches a group of people. He is showing them what is inside. More dust, perhaps nothing at all. He walks up to a friend and myself, holding another little tent. We peek inside to view its inhabitant, a single dead fly. Most of the people in the room do not know what we have seen. Like the other elements of this performance, the fly operates at a hidden level. We are aware that something is happening before us, but the details are too minute to see.

The most dramatic gesture of the performance is when Johannessen approaches the glass jar of tiny beige particles and places his hand inside. Twisting his arm slowly, the contents of the jar are displaced, raining quietly on the floor. With a grunt of great effort, he sinks deeper into the jar, emerges with his hand plastered with tiny things. Bent with great concentration over a sheet of paper, he slowly cups, straightens, and turns his hand, causing the grains to fall upon and around the paper. As he repeats this action, I finally can see that these tiny grains are sesame seeds.

Johannessen's focus upon the pattern of fallen seeds and the trajectories of fallen paper belies an interest in the arbitrary patterns created by his own hand. Speaking later with him, I am delighted to discover that he is interested in chaos theory, which tries to explain such random movements, trajectories, and patterns. Chaos also links large and small movements together, for example the swirling movements of a weather system and the swirling convection in a hot cup of coffee. Similarly, from Johannessen's world of the very small, one can extrapolate a greater logic that is at once strange, natural, and beautiful.

- stacey

Kurt Johannessen at Vivo, September 24, 2011, video by Elisha Burrows

Moe Satt at Vivo September 23 2011, video by Elisha Burrows

Pancho Lopez: Anger

It looks like the beginning of a magic show. Black velvety curtains surround an immaculate white plinth, on top of which rests a voluminous glass fish bowl. Pancho emerges, looking a bit like a game show host: red tie, white shirt, and black pants. Some game show-type music comes on the sound system. A water bottle emerges from behind the plinth, he takes a sip.

The show begins. One after another, Coca-Cola bottles emerge from behind the plinth, are opened and emptied into the fishbowl. Empty bottles are neatly lined up in front of the plinth, labels facing forward, and bottle caps are placed on top with equal precision. Lopez is just pouring Coke into a glass bowl, but there is something hilarious about the whole debacle. As yet another bottle appears from behind the plinth, you just have to laugh. Maybe it's the samba covers of "Smooth Operator" and Prince's "Kiss" that animate the performance. Maybe it's the way in which Lopez, completely straight-faced, coyly finds yet another way to pour Coke into the vessel, now over the shoulder, now two at once.

Twenty bottles of Coke transforms the fishbowl into an enigmatic black orb with a pulsing meniscus, threatening to spill at any moment. Twenty-one sends the liquid fizzing over the glass, spilling over the edges of the plinth and onto the floor. Lopez takes a break, pointedly finishing his bottled water as he surveys the squandered bottles of Coke. The final bars of "Smooth Operator" play out. On the last beat of the song, he pulls a baseball bat out of nowhere like a rabbit from a hat and smashes it into the black globe. Glass shards and Coke spatter everywhere. In the heat of the moment, someone throws a chair, barely missing LIVE's director, Randy Gledhill. Brilliant.

- stacey ho

Anna Syczewska

A pyramid of rotten tomatoes and a motorized wheelchair greet us as a sample of music, like tortured cows over an industrial beat, loops over the sound system. The wheelchair slowly turns and we are under the indifferent gaze of Anna Syczewska. She sits on her throne in aviators, white gloves, with a bottle of wine, and cigarettes. She surveys the crowd or perhaps nothing at all. A man dressed in work clothes begins bringing out equipment: boards, bags, buckets, hardshell cases, and finally a large Y-shaped contraption that looks like it's made of steel chains. In a most friendly voice, this man informs us that there will be some welding happening during the performance. We should not stare directly at the light, and if the fumes are too much for us, he suggests that we leave the room. Syczewska lights a smoke and the 'music' is amped up, increasing in speed.

What follows is gloriously unwatchable. Syczewska's feet are lifted onto the Y-shaped sculpture so that her legs are spread above her head. She is wearing a pair of serious pumps, with soles of steel. Worker-man reveals a TIG welder. He proceeds to meticulously attach six long spikes to the bottom of each pump, a time-consuming process that eventually drives most of the audience out of the room. Meanwhile, the sound loop speeds up incrementally, from a D+B break to a dance pop beat, singing something like "LOVE DANCE, LOVE DANCE, LOVE DANCE, LOVE DANCE". The repetition is maddening, and also the sample is infuriatingly out of sync. We are all bored to tears, sick of the noise, sick from fumes, waiting for the process to be over. People leave, chat, read, nap, and text message. Syczewska is impassive. The Duchess is getting her pedicure, and she doesn't care how long it's going to take. We wait.

I go outside for some air, and someone shouts out that the last spike is being welded. Assistants quickly clear away all the welding gear and the music fades out. In the wheelchair, Sychzewska inches up to us and does a little spin. Approaching the tomatoes, she runs over a few, selects one from the top of the pile. Music fades in and thank god it's something different. Really happy, exciting music, maybe Spanish. With great effort, she begins to stand. Her legs are shaking from strain. Precariously, she runs the tomato along her thigh down to her ankle. We all expect her to somehow stomp through the pile, but no. She tries to ease herself back into the wheelchair, falls, twists her foot. The fall looks really painful.

Again donning her spiky heels, Syczewska returns to the wheelchair, backs up, and indicates to us that we should clear the way. We quickly make a passage, moving aside our chairs. Joyful music pumping through the air, Syczewska guns it down the aisle, driving her feet straight into the wall. Her shoes are embedded there, left to remain for the rest of the festival, ominous, glamourous.

- stacey ho

Arti Grabowski (Krakow, Poland)

Day 10: Crunch time

At the end of the evening, one of Anna Syczewska’s high-heeled shoes, the ones with the 10-inch spikes welded to their soles, remained impaled in the wall. The other lay at the base of the wall where it fell, under the gouged drywall. Her electric wheelchair stood empty, its wheels covered in crushed tomato, the result of its passage over the pile of rotten tomatoes. The tech team had put away the arc-welding equipment and the homemade gynecological stirrups that had held her feet as the professional welded the spikes to the soles of her shoes.

Nothing much clears a room quite as effectively as a 45-minute session of electric arc welding in an enclosed space. The blinding light, the noxious fumes, and the bludgeoning soundtrack pushed the majority of the audience back into the bar or onto the street for some fresh air. Syczewska in her sunglasses sat impassively in her wheelchair tippling from a wine bottle waiting for the slow industrial process to finish.

By the time the spikes on both shoes had been welded in place, it was evident that she had trouble moving her legs. They had remained splayed apart, held in place in her stirrups which would have looked right at home in a clinic run by motor-heads. It was constructed out of three lengths of welded chain, which formed the “Y” and a couple of pieces of bent re-bar that held her feet.

Once the welder completed his painstaking work, the crowd re-entered the gallery space and the show entered another phase. Syczewska stood upright momentarily with the modified shoes. As she balanced precariously, she rubbed a tomato over her legs. Unable to maintain the pose, she collapsed back into the motorized chair.

She maneuvered her chair back away from the audience. Motioning with her hands, she indicated to us that she wanted a path cleared in the rows of chairs. As a way parted in front of her, she revved the chair and moving forward at speed she hit the wall. One shoe remains impaled to this day.


Moe Satt from Yangor Myanmar, presented a simple understated piece. His set consisted of a chair set before a screen. A camera captured both he and the set, and it its image on the screen behind Satt. The positioning of the camera and the video projector were such that it created an infinite repetition of images of Satt on screen, similar to the infinite series of images created by two facing mirrors. In this video version however, the images grew rather than decreasing in size and only the first couple of iterations were visible.

Satt began the show by removing his jacket and shirt. Bare-chested he adjusted the wrap covering his legs, taking care to tie it, in what I imagined to be the traditional manner. Having tied it at the waist he then gathered it up and tied it again to that it covered his genitals and buttocks leaving his legs bare.

He continued by making a number of stylized and symmetric gestures with his hands, positioning them over his eyes, on his face, or over his head. In the audience, we saw these in flesh and blood, as a black shadow projected on to the screen and in the cascading series of video images projected on the screen behind him.

Walking up to the audience he indicated that certain members should mimic him. Satt accompanied these gestures with a whistling of single tones.

At a certain moment, Satt closed the action by walking to the back of the stage, kneeling and bowing.


In analysis Freud spoke of the screen memory. This was a memory, which served to protect the ego from the effects of trauma. It accomplished this by covering the memory of the original trauma with the memory of something else, usually another anodyne event. During analysis the analysand, would return to this harmless memory and to a certain extent this screen memory would come to stand in for original difficult and painful memory.

Anne-Sophie Turion piece recounted a series of childhood memories; a car drive around a lake with the family, a the fragment of a conversation on a telephone, the music her father played on their car drives, the banal exchanges at the family supper table.

The piece began at dinner table set for a party of seven. On the wall behind the set, the Turion’s text and simple stage directions were projected onto the wall. In her halting English, Turion began by telling us that she wished to share a memory with us, but that it was difficult to find the precise memory.

This opened the way to her fragmentary, repetitive and partial description of a number of childhood memories. Interspersed with her narrative she presented the lush musical excerpts that her father enjoyed listening to in some distant past. These included the theme music from the film Jurassic Park, David Bowie, the Doors, and the Hall of the Mountain King.

We never learn of the hidden trauma, or indeed if there were such a thing. There are repeated mentions of her brother and mother but everything is banal to an extreme.
The piece climaxes with Turion climbing up onto the dinner table to lip-sing a song, one of her father’s greatest hits.

It ends as it began with the table reset for seven and Turion repeating her introductory phrases.

We are caught in a neurotic return; never capable of escape from the terrible gravities of a childhood we can never fully recognize and never escape.

FA

Moe Satt : F+F (Fingers and Face)

There is only a chair, a light shining on it, as well as a video projector and camera. Projector and camera feedback to produce an infinite number of Moe Satts as Moe Satt shows us an infinite number of gestures using his fingers and face. He takes off a sweater, a coat and sandals, hangs them neatly on the back of the chair. Wearing only a wrap, he kneels on the chair and bows over, massaging his face. Raising up, he reveals the first of what he later tells me is one hundred and eight finger and face positions. I foolishly attempt to record these positions. Here is as far as I got:

Prayer hands over nose
Open to the side of face
Rooster comb on head
Mask over face in bars
Camera frame with hands as begin whistle
Closes frame to cover mouth, silence
Slide thumbs to temples to reveal whistling mouth
Make ears, slowly waggle them
Over eyes and over mouth, silence
Trees curl around nose with fingers
Scrunches hands into earmuffs
Clasp over head
Slide to slide of face
Roll to other side
Hat
Points hands then guns at eyes

Softly whistling, Satt slowly transitions from one stance to the next. A continuous sound throughout the performance, like a bird in a forest. He stands, and, moving towards us, continues to make faces. Approaching individuals, he asks them to copy him. He asks me to make a very funny Finger and Face where the nose juts out like a strange nub between thumbs and index fingers. I feel as if I am a small child, constantly bewildered and enthralled by a shapeshifting creature who entertains me with an elaborate game of peekaboo.

With his back towards us, legs wide, Satt rolls his wrap up, making his skirt into a pair of shorts. Still whistling, finger-faces emerge from between his legs. He crouches up against a wall as if he's about to do a headstand against it. Again, upside down, he continues with the different positions. Finally, Satt faces us, a pair of elaborate finger-goggles over his eyes. Holding this over his face, he raises his elbows up, up, and out, then thanks us with a short bow.

- stacey ho

Anne-Sophie Turion : Original Soundtrack for Blank Tape

We see a banquet table, immaculately set for seven with red napkins and white flowers. In a stunning red dress, Anne-Sophie Turion walks to the front of the stage. Well, technically it's the back. The usual seating and staging of VIVO has been flipped around so we are staring at the window of the tech booth like it's a movie screen. The technician Bobby, like Turion, is dressed in red. The top and bottom of the window are flanked by two sets of projected text. Top: "Before I begin"; bottom: "The end." This should be warning enough of the twists and turns to come, but everything starts so innocuously. Turion addresses us like the emcee at an important family reunion. She's just so glad that we could be gathered here together. She wishes she could find just one memory to share with all of us for such a special occasion, but there are so many... The farce of this address is heightened by the mirroring of her speech by text projected on the wall.

A series of ordinary family scenes begin to unfold. Sitting around a table for a family meal. Driving around a lake on a road trip. Birthday parties and birthday cakes. Going dancing with her family. Every scene is happy. Banal and pleasant phrases repeat. "Isn't that nice?" "Do you remember..." "And then she would say..." "Does that remind you of something?" The stories mix together. Was it in the dining room or the car where Dad used to play that song? There was a family trip to a lake, but it's unclear who was there, and what happened. The image of circling around and around comes up in Turion's text and indeed the course of her narrative loops around and over. Like a Robbe-Grillet novel, our minds begin to search for a darker or more meaningful underlying narrative amid the confusion of mundane and happy memories. What is this eagle that keeps coming up in the story? Why is her mother only referred to in text and not speech? And what indeed happened at that lake?

In the meantime, formal aspects of Turion's presentation are theatrically played off each other, creating small surprises and heightening the piece's self-reflexivity. When she stumbles in her speech, the video text runs on to tell a memory of mom hiding in her room with a birthday cake. Music is integral. A soundtrack ranging from the Doors to Grieg to the theme from Jurassic Park animate stories of a visit to a village night club, a night of karaoke. Music relates especially to the narrative of her father's music playing over dinner, during car rides, or perhaps to veil some sort of past trauma. At one point, Turion leaves the stage proper and joins Bobby to view us in the technician booth as "Let's Dance" blasts over the stereo. Lights and disco ball suddenly switch on at the climax of Pink Floyd's "Great Gig in the Sky". Turion is on the table lip-synching her heart out. Other complexities include Turion clearing the table of four place settings. Bobby in a matching red dress later comes out to reset the table. As we circle towards some sort of conclusion, Turion repeats her speech from the opening of the piece, "Good evening. Before I begin..." but the speech is interspersed by recorded audio of the narrator's thoughts. She disappears offstage though her voice is still heard. The top text reads, "Before I begin". The bottom says, "The end."

- stacey ho

Arti Grabowski (Krakow, Poland)

Moe Satt's performance at Vivo September 23, 2011, video by Elisha Burrows

Margaret Dragu and friends - Part of CHAOS

Excerpt from Pancho Lopez's performance