The Life Aquatic

The green mountains
Tell me
To live silently.
The blue skies
Tell me
To live flawlessly.
Cast away your greed
And remove your anger,
And live like water
And like wind,
And go.

--Master Naong (1320-1376)


We are saying our good-byes and letting go of each other, but we each contain residues of one another in our streams of consciousness. I began with bottles of water and so shall I end. I will be wrapping up and taking home two souvenir water bottles from Rita Kamacho's performance. One says "love" and the other "gratitude". We were encouraged to take them home and fill them up, meditate on those words and use the water in our daily lives--to drink, to wash, to bathe. I have two other souvenir bottles I keep on my bathroom shelf. One is a bottle of spring water from a tiny hamlet called Springwater Saskatchewan, and the other is from a performance artist named "nation" in Glasgow. That bottle is filled with water from the river Clyde, and reminds me of my love for that vital city.

Surprisingly, Rita Kamacho's piece, as described by Todd Janes below reminded me of death, and how our bodies are constantly being renewed by the water cycle, right down to the cellular level. I was thinking how that instead of ashes being the main concern of a funeral as the remains of a beloved, it should really be the image of water.

Shall we gather at the virtual river? I don't enter the hot tub of Face Book, fearing it might all go viral. I eschew the chatter of Twitterfalls. Performance artists do need a home at the Canada Council as Todd stated below and I think it's time we did develop some kind of online forum that works as a gathering place and gets us working towards the sustainability of the art form. I also hope for an online performance journal of some kind so that more people have opportunities to write about performance.

Finally, I want to thank everyone at Latitude 53 for working so hard to create such a wonderful festival. I hope you all get some spa time soon!

T.L. Cowan: The Twisted She Project

What a swell party we had! The audience piled into the gallery and just kept on coming. The audience was presented with a choice of Evian mineral water or a large shot of vodka with a wedge of lemon or lime. The glasses were identical. One knew upon tasting the liquid in the glasses placed in front of the Belvedere vodka bottles, it was the real thing. (Apparently those shots disappeared quickly.) What you choose to hydrate your body with can make all the difference.

The stage was set up as in the installation, with video projections on two walls and a vanity dresser painted white in the far corner. The pink lacy dress that had hung in the corner was missing. After the crowd stuffed itself into the venue and Todd gave the artist and her collaborators a lovely introduction, T.L. Cowan appeared in the strapless pale coral dress. She told me that it was unusual for her to wear something that didn't immediately identify her as a queer artist. She often wears punk-influenced boots, nylon stockings, or something that is different from a "tall skinny white woman in a dress". She said that this dress and her lack of heavy makeup made her feel "naked."

Cowan writes from a queer feminist perspective about the fluidity of gender and sexual orientation, the life of a "Twisted She." The first poem Cowen reads called "Ballad of She" is based loosely on a Dorothy Livesay poem "Ballad of Me" from The Unquiet Bed (Toronto Ryerson Press, 1967). Cowan's poem is about a girl who looks like a boy and keeps running away from home which stigmatizes her as being abnormal. We admire the child who has the bravodo to test the boundaries of her existence, just as we admire the way Cowan as an adult pushes the limits of limitations and definitions contemporary society tries to delineate, set, and fix.


It's hard for me to cherry-pick phrases out of a living body of text like that of TL Cowan's but here I am, choosing a few lines among many that resonate. It's impossible for me to create the artist's line breaks properly here, so my apologies.

How can I encourage you to imagine my wet, hard nipples drenched in fantasy, while I am sitting here without a webcam and you are all the way over there, without my soup to keep you warm.

The "you" and "I" in the poem called "You think I talk like a girl?" are confusing, and they are meant to be open and ready for you to plug in the genders your imagination brings to the poem. Cowan talks about the banal aspects of having sex on a water bed, juxtaposed with questions about what specific sexual gestures the subjects in the poem will choose to perform.

What if I put my leg over here?


Is that better?


She talks about sweat stains, politics, expectations, finances, grammar, and love. It's like an entire relationship or many relationships shrunk and condensed and distilled into into one poem. The tone is sexy, self-deprecating, at times mocking, and sometimes unexpectedly earnest. In this way the audience enters into the poem because there are so many facets to it. It contains us like water.

"Rachel and Amy" describes a tenuous friendship between two childhood friends, one with a conventional family and Rachel, who is a lesbian punk musician in Vancouver. In contrast to "You think I talk like a girl," the gender and sexual orientation lines out drawn out loud and clear. I don't want to give away the ending, but it left me wondering what would have happened if the sexual orientation roles had been reversed.

"Serenity: A twenty-seven step program for class-transitioning women in their thirties who are torn between an attachment to the street cred of being a dirt bag and the desire for beautiful kitchens and nice clothes."

The artist presents a meditation on dealing with the pull towards a higher standard of living as she get older. She fantasizes about a heist or forcing someone to sign over their inheritance to her and ends on a calm note of acceptance. She doesn't pull any punches with the language in this poem:


12.

This is your material existence: your best friend's privilege will sodomize your heart.

13.

na-na-na-na-naa-na


14.

there is a hole in your chest for the purpose,
puckered shyly behind your left nipple.


"Red" is a delicious poem about an almost ménage a trois--two women and one man. A man and a woman are having coffee and their anxieties pop out like thought bubbles in a graphic cartoon. Then to make matters worse, the woman each of them has been having sex with for weeks drops in to join them. The tension builds. Later, the second woman gossips about the original couple, saying that they are "perfect for each other" and "tedious in bed."


Her tampon has dropped and she is probably leaking
and his erection is growing even though he is hot.


"This is a picture of me" is my favorite poem of the night. Cowan presnts us with a blank slide show of pictures from her life. She shows us a picture of the "tights that failed," and reminisces about "ripping out the sagging crotch with my teeth". All the "slides" are blank, but presented as if each one of them were real. She shows us a succession of skating costumes: hoola girl, Christmas tree, Teddy Bear. She shows us the photo of her grade five class photo where she is taller than the teacher.


"These are the pants, white cotton, that were left at our front door one
day."


From baptism and communion to her first photo of a lesbian, we laugh in empathy as a human, fluid and unformed in identity, gradually taking on confidence and wisdom as she gets older, but still with that same sense of mischief, humour, and vulnerablity that mark her as a truly adventurous spirit.


"Helen" is an excruciating poem about a dysfunctional woman. Time slows down and we become painfully aware of a body alone and challenged beyond its capacity to function. It brings alive our worst fears. "I would write you a nature poem" is a satire on poems the poet doesn't quite get around to writing.

The performance ends with "Wash me", a serene erotic poem that ties the performance directly into the aquatic theme of the Visualeyez festival.


Let me float, she said.

Her lover held her naked body in the lake, straightened the bends and tipped her head back, chin towards the sky. Held her steady---cheeks, lips, nipples, ribs, and knees slightly breaking the surface--sure hands just holding her up and then vanishing into the lake, leaving her with water lapping in her ears, a hot sun, a slight breeze blowing goose-bumps on exposed flesh.


The musical soundtrack is composed and performed by the collaborators Jan Olesen (bass), and Mickey Vallee (accordian and electronic) is very successful in that it adds background texture, tension and atmosphere to the performance without overwhelming the text. The imagery created by kellY bollen is subtle and ghost-like with overlapping and dissolving images of hands, hearts, and a young girl. The images on the centre wall created by Elaine Wannechko are ambiguous vegetable/human skin/netting projections. In a feedback session on Sunday the collaborators described how they worked to integrated all the elements of the piece with Kristen Hutchison acting as devisor/third eye.

I can testify that an evening with T.L. Cowan is a good night out and I hope we get to see her performing more often. It made me nostalgic for the women's performance festivals that have been lost along the way. Maybe someone like Cowan can help lead a revival.

Reona Brass: Glossolalia

I read once that barbed wire changed the history of North America. The lives of the First Nations were changed dramatically by fences containing sharp metal barbs that were meant to wound anyone or anything that dared to cross them. A mark of the lines drawn by the executors of the Dominion. A mark of the end of the nomadic way of life. Keeping cattle in, keeping the "noble savages" out.

"...surrendered lands" means a reserve or part of a reserve or any interest therein, the legal title to which remains vested in Her Majesty, that has been released or surrendered by the band for whose use and benefit it was set apart..."


"...surrendered lands" means a reserve or part of a reserve or any interest therein, the legal title to which remains vested in Her Majesty, that has been released or surrendered by the band for whose use and benefit it was set apart..."

As someone who grew up of the prairie, I am familiar with the gesture of searching for the loosest part of a fence, pulling apart the wires and stepping gingerly onto the other side. I wasn't worried about getting caught by the farmer, but I was worried about getting snagged by the wire. It would be painful and there was danger of being infected by the rusty barbs. (One of my friends had a nasty snowmobile accident when he collided with a barbed wire fence.) So when Reona Brass started to unroll a spool of silver barbed wire, I was relieved she was wearing thick leather work gloves. Standing at a music stand in a tailored brown business suit and matching shoes, she named the piece Glossolalia, Speaking in Tongues. Then she began to read selections from the Indian Act.

..."intoxicant" includes alcohol, alcoholic, spirituous, vinous, fermented malt or other intoxicating liquor or combination of liquors and mixed liquor a part of which is spirituous, vinous, fermented or otherwise intoxicating and all drinks, drinkable liquids, preparations or mixtures capable of human consumption that are intoxicating...

The words made me feel ashamed to be Canadian. They are injurious, repulsive, bathed in an acid bath of legal jargon. I was compelled to the Government of Canada website check if the artist had made the text up. She did not. The connection between the text and the image of the barbed wire was shocking.

"...mentally incompetent Indian" means an Indian who, pursuant to the laws of the province in which he resides, has been found to be mentally defective or incompetent for the purposes of any laws of that province providing for the administration of estates of mentally defective or incompetent persons..."

As she read the text her unwrapping action became more intense, she was wrangling physically with the wire and it began to snag on her business suit. She fought with the wire, taking its resistance on as a challenge and becoming more determined and frenzied in her struggle. Finally she stopped and took the time to catch her breath before she lowered herself into the wire, entangling herself in it and crawling through it towards the stage right podium. She stood up and read the words of the Navojo poet, Sherwin Bitsui:


What land have you cast from the blotted out region of your face?

What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth
resembling frost?


Finally, Brass unhooked herself from the wire by shedding her suit to reveal the jeans and a blouse she wore underneath and she stepped free of the wire.


The artist doesn't speak her native Soto language, and performance allows her to escape the vicious traps laid by the words of the Indian Act and other words written in the same spirit. "Performance art is my language," Brass states. It allows her to be hopeful. She is also inspired by the words of her collaborator Navaho poet Sherwin Bitsui. "He thinks in Navajo," she says. It is wonderful to see a performance grounded in experience and intention. Brass has been working with barbed wire for four and a half years, she likes physical nature of it, but has grown wary of its ability to injure. For the past few years she has been teaching on her reservation, and she loves to see young people create pieces of performance art so that they can share in her power to create their own language.

Michael Fernandes: The Water Whisperer

This piece is called "Water is a Word," Michael Fernandes announces in a gentle, resonant voice. He is backlit by pin-holes of light leaking into the gallery through perforated boards in the gallery. "Water," he whispers as he looks into the eyes of each audience member in succession. He says "water" as a benediction, as a mantra, and a blessing. I begin to feel hypnotized by the use of repetition and the tone of his voice. The lights behind him have an other-worldly effect like the lights in a tunnel people describe after a near-death experience. The same word is repeated again and again. Then he looks into my eyes, saying the word again and starts to laugh harshly, jarring me awake from my state of relaxation, Then he gradually calms down and resumes repeated the word in a gentle voice and looking into our eyes until he finally leaves the room.

Everyone seems a bit surprised the piece had been so short (about 10 minutes), including the performer! I had also been looking forward to seeing the pinhole images described in the festival program. Fernandes decided that since his piece was so unexpectedly brief he would hold a question and answer session. He admits that he changed his performance after seeing the work of Reona Brass and Naufus Ramirez-Figeroa. He felt that the images and gestures he had planned to perform would have been too empty in comparison. I disagree. I think that he has a beautiful presence as a performer, and he could have filled his original piece with the content that a transparent soul expresses.


"I didn't know what I was going to do until five minutes before the piece," he said. This work was created out of a desire to pare down his performance to its barest elements to connect to the audience and refresh and ground his practice. Somehow the Q&A led to an discussion of a television show called "The Dog Whisperer." Suddenly Fernandes became very animated and showed us how he'd been coping with an aggressive dog by getting down on all fours and presenting the top of his head. He tells us about a pet psychic in England on television who makes parrots and pythons stand at attention. His friends tell him its all in the editing, but Michael wants to believe. I want to believe too, keeping my mind as open as as a starry Alberta sky where anything is possible. Perhaps that what the ephemeral nature of his piece is really about.

The Twisted She Project Installation is Up!

Here is a sneak peek at the installation up right now for your viewing pleasure at the Latitude 53 gallery during viewing hours (10 am-6 pm) today and tomorrow. T.L. Cowan will be performing with her collaborators this Saturday at 8 pm. If you want to get a tasting sample of what you'll experience, come and have a listen to the soundscape, read the text and a look at some of the evocative imagery. The show is the culmination of many years of the artist's work, so it promises to be something very special.

From Sea to Bloody Sea

Canada, bracketed by two oceans… The maple leaf bracketed by two blood red stripes… Our national motto: From Sea to Sea… The Queen in England; the Queen with her blood red crown; her face and breasts as pale as a Canadian winter.
--Naufús Ramírez-Figueroa

It had just started to rain. The piper wore a striking kilt in the Anderson tartan which features a sky blue background. He played a traditional song called The Haunting and The Sky Boat Song in the parking lot while the Naufús Ramírez-Figueroa listened with his head slightly bowed. After a few minutes, the artist began to strip off his clothes and then cover his shoulders with a white sheet. We followed the piper and the performer in a procession up the stairs to the gallery where Ramirez-Figuera stood between two bowls. One was filled with a creamy white liquid, and one contained a thick red substance which I knew was pig's blood. (It's one of those props you have to order in advance, and so I overheard the staff having few conversations about the logistics of procuring it.) A grotesque rubber mask of the Queen Elizabeth II lay on the floor. Megan Morman handed out maple-leaf shaped cookies.




Ramirez Figueroa poured the white liquid onto the floor in a vertical line, then he donned the mask of the queen and confidently dove into the cream on his belly. He lay in one spot and rubbed the cream onto his breasts, breathing heavily into the rubber mask. At this point the white parts of the mask started to look like a skull. He stood and started a quasi-burlesque dance while the bagpiper played a version of Rod Stewart's hit song "If You Think I'm Sexy." Next the artist took the red bowl and poured it over the front of his body, so he became covered in layers of white and red--the colours of the Canadian flag. The odor of pig's blood overlaid with sickly sweet maple flavouring became overwhelming.


I have never seen the Queen in person but I have felt her stir under the bed covers… I’ve been to Buckingham and waited patiently outside its gates. I was a faithful subject. My blood red: like her royal red: like her red painted lips: like the maple left… I waited outside Buckingham but she never came out, never invited me for tea, never made me feel hers… England likes to eat, eat countries. Its eaten two male members of my family… The Queen has white milk in her breast, she is the mother to all Canadians… She has a comforting smile… One day, I’ll be happy when I can kiss her wrinkly hand.
--Naufús Ramírez-Figueroa

The artist filled the bowl again with blood and dipped one end of the sheet in it and then the other, leaving the center white. He hung the sheet from one end of the room to the other, stopping to get more rope when it turned out the end didn't quite reach. I assume he meant to dip the horizontal edges rather than the vertical edges, but the reference to the Canadian flag was still very clear. It could also have been read as a comment on how discussions on Canada evolve around north-south or east-west paradigms. Ramírez-Figueroa got down on his hands and knees, dipped his hair in a bowl of blood and began to use it to paint the white parts of the flag red. Finally, he threw the rest of the blood on the flag making it thickly soaked in blood and brilliantly scarlet. The piper played "Oh Canada" while Naufus put on the mask again and cut out the face so that his face showed through under the rubber crown--a grotesque form of royal drag.

The performance was focused, dramatic, funny, and shocking. I left feeling a bit dazed and nauseous afterwards, needing to distance myself from the scene. The bagpiper who had been hired for this gig looked a bit shell-shocked himself, so a few of us sat around the water cooler and processed how we felt about the piece. He was fairly new to this king of ritualistic performance art, and Cindy Baker widely advised him to "let the images hit you and decide what they mean to you." The artist's poetic text in the performance program illuminates the powerful imagery in his performance. "Sid Vicious would have loved it!" I told him as I talked about the history of anti-monarchy and anarchy in England itself. There were some tense moments when piper had had a few moments of doubt before the piece began. He wasn't sure if he was ready to participate in the ritual because he was trained to see the bagpipe as an honorific instrument used in patriotic ceremonies. I told him he'd been very brave to collaborate with an artist he hadn't met or rehearsed with before hand, (they'd had a telephone conversation). especially an artist who pushes the limits the way Naufus does. He's been warned about the unconventional nature of the piece and it had been described in detail over the phone. Megan Mormon later told me she thought he was unsettled when he realized the blood in the performance was real, not paint or stage blood.


As a Guatemalan refugee growing up in Vancouver, Naufus was taught to pay allegiance to our queen. However, recent events in parliament and a group of fellow immigrants made him question her authority. When Michaelle Jean held the destiny of Canada in her hands after Stephen Harper suspended parliament in December, 2008, the artist and his friends asked each other why the symbol of colonization still held so much power in a democratic country. Naufus began to feel torn about enjoying the high standard of living , the queen's milk, that a colonized first world country that has a bloody past and present.


The title of the piece, A Mari usque ad Mare ("From Sea to Sea"), is Canada's official motto. It originates from the Latin version of Psalm 72:8, "He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." (King James version). It was not applicable until 1871 when BC joined Confederation and the Dominion of Canada reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Some say the motto should be changed to reflect the third sea that boarders our country in the North, the Arctic Ocean, especially now that climate change has been affected that part of our country so dramatically and Stephen Harper has been raising issues of Arctic Sovereignty. Other people say the paternalistic motto should be scrapped altogether. Naufus pointed out to me that one point "from sea to sea" was visually depicted graphically on a suggested design for the Canadian flag which has become known as "Pearson's Pennant." It had a central image of three maple leaves and two rectangles of sea blue on the edges instead of blood red.

Hug the Chef, Kiss the Bagpiper

This morning Hannah came to work wearing the latest in bicycle helmet fashion. She's a fantastic baker and we love her breakfast cookies!

Megan Mormon lures us to the water cooler with candy corn and all sorts where we sink into the comfy couches and let our guard down while she giggles and takes notes in a tiny book. What she misses, Adam twitters. The walls have ears my friends.

Jason Fielding and his partner chat with us a bit about his piece, setting us straight about some of historical references. He was puzzled that we would be concerned over the question of whether or not he was Métis, and said that in his research he discovered that European traders would marry First Nations women who belonged to tribes along the waterways that the men traded along. "Before there were Métis, there were European fur traders," he says. I think its interesting that we immediately tend to associate the fur trader costume with people of Métis heritage. I love Canada's fascination about which ethnic heritage we all come from and as an artist it's come to the point where you need to choose whether you state your identity out front or deliberately leave it ambiguous. Anyway, I wrote about how I read the piece below without knowing where his family came to Canada from orginally. I also asked his father, whom I happened to meet at the performance, because it's a question I ask almost anyone as a matter of curiousity.

Hugs to the chef, who is cooking up something that is definitely not breakfast cookies.

Anyhoo, please do use the comments function here on this blog, even if you choose to be completely anonymous, or call your self Dirty Sox. Converse! Engage! And if I consider your post offensive or inappropriate I will just trash it. Because I can.

Heads Up! Location Change Alert

Today Jason Fielding will begin his piece at the city hall fountain at noon and walk down to the North Saskatchewan River along 100th street. Bring something to trade for one of his custom-made water bottles.

Portage: The Lost Trader

"Ya gotta be crazy to carry a canoe in this heat," a passerby says as he watches Jason Fielding portage up the steep stairs to the Hotel MacDonald from the river valley below. No kidding. Especially when you're kitted out in full fur-trader duds complete with fur-lined boots and a coonskin cap. Here is our 1970's grade school textbook illustration come to life in the Edmonton city centre at 30 degrees Celsius in the shade. I was one of four paparazzi documenting the event. As I snap photos, a voice in my head creates captions: "the voyageur at rest," "the voyageur snacking on high protein pemmican", and "the fur trader waits for a green light." As Fielding carries the canoe from one body of water to another, he creates a picturesque endurance performance. Jason's piece fits very well into the theme of this year's Visualeyz festival, because it's all about water--travelling from the North Saskatchewan River to the fountain and pool at City Hall illustrates the natural and artificial--the wild and the domesticated in this Albertan city. Much of the city's water system is hidden, and Jason's piece made me very aware of the urban plumbing that is such an integral part of urban life. How many sewer lines did we cross, I wondered in those few blocks we traveled from the hotel MacDonald to City Hall.


The artist performed age-old gestures: opening a leather pouch and wrapping a piece of pemmican pulled from a leather bag, scanning the river bank with one hand shading the eyes. However, the setting was not pure wilderness, but strikingly urbane. Joggers on their lunch break grinned and let him pass or frowned and pushed by, putting their leisure time to "good use" for the working of the body/machine. Women in stilettos and tight business suits snapped photos on cell phones. One man joked about seeing "Mr. Canoe Head" walking down the street. Negotiating pedestrians and traffic was tricky with Fielding's reduced sightlines. His partner, also a paparazzo, worked as a third eye, protecting the artist and the audience from any accidents.


Once at the city hall plaza, Fielding took off his outer layer, and cooled off his body in the fountains. Next, he took water bottles he'd created his own labels for and laid them out on a beaver skin to sell and trade. The festival guide describes the bottles containing 'pure, pristine water from the Canadian Rockies'. The label features a painterly picture of the artist as a romantic figure from Canada's heritage. A little pile of coins and objects accrued as people took bottles of water and Jason ended the performance by sitting in his canoe and giving water to people--in particular a busking break dancer and a man collecting empty bottles and drink containers for change. This image brings up essential issues of around value of water. What is the cost of managing or mismanaging our water resources in the era of climate change?


I assume Fielding's performance is informed by the piece Terrence Houle and Trevor Freeman did at the Live Biennial in Vancouver called Portage. How are the pieces different? Houle is a member of the First Blood nation and Fielding not Métis or native, but is of European descent. As artists/audience members we were all mumbling our worries about appropriation after the performance. Then it struck me later that as a person of European descent I was able to enter the piece and feel implicated in its underlying message, rather than keeping my distance as I may have otherwise. For me, the tone becomes less satirical, more romantic with a dark undertow, like the sewer beneath the fountain. Fielding has an eye for painterly posing and as a result, he create a persona that is romantic, even a bit sexy. However, when you think about the reality of our European ancestors trading small-pox ridden blankets for fur, and the lack of fresh drinking water on a number of reservations, the reality is shameful. In March 2008, there were 53 boil water advisories issued in aboriginal communities in Canada. ( www.watermatters.org)





The very idea of "wilderness" makes us think of an unlimited supply of pure water, but the way our population is growing and using the resources threatens that. As an "upstream province", Alberta in particular carries its burden of responsibility for the management of its water resources. Robert William Sanford explains the concept of banked water as ground water, glacial water, etc. in his book Water, Weather, and the Mountain West, published in 2007 by Rocky Mountain Books. (I reccommend it as a textbook for this festival.) Population growth, irrigation, urban sprawl and other factors are depleting stored water systems, including Alberta's glaciers. There is a tension to Jason's piece about the distance between two particular sources of water that acts as a metaphor to the stress we're becoming aware of in terms of the effect global warming will also have on Alberta's rich stores of "banked" water. Who will control the water, and what will the trade-off be for those who can't afford to buy glacial spring water in plastic bottles? What will happen to those communities, many of them reservations, who don't have access to clean drinking water right now? What does the fur trader torn from the pages of our fading textbooks and lost in the city think of these questions?