Pushing Performance Brands in Vancouver1

ARTICLES PuShing Performance Brands in Vancouver1 PETER DICKINSON What happens when a performing arts institution’s and a producing partner’s mutual desire to attract audiences to intelligent work that speaks to the diverse urban community each claims to represent comes up against a competing corporate brand? I explore this question by investigating the evolving relationship between Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and SFU Woodward’s, home to Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and a lightning rod for public debate following a controversial corporate rebranding in the fall of 2010. That rebranding, I argue, also exposes some of the materialist faultlines (cultural, economic, urban) subtending both PuSh’s programming at SFU Woodward’s and the latter’s placed-based identity within Vancouver’s economically depressed and socially marginal Downtown Eastside. The paper is divided into three sections. First, I provide some contextual background on PuSh and SFU Woodward’s, and on the development of their respective performance brands. Next, I draw on interviews with PuSh Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour and Woodward’s Director of Cultural Programming Michael Boucher to assess the benefits and challenges that have so far accrued as a result of their partnership. Finally, I conclude with readings of three productions staged by PuSh at Woodward’s, arguing that their content helps to fore- ground competing ideologies of urban sustainability versus gentrification, and the role of non-profits (cultural and educational) in the rebranding of inner-city neighbourhoods. Que se passe-t-il quand un projet de collaboration entre une institution œuvrant dans le secteur des arts de la scène et un organisme partenaire qui veulent offrir des productions intelligentes à une communauté urbaine diversifiée se heurte à une image de marque concurrentielle ? C’est ce que cherche à savoir Dickinson dans cet article sur l’évolution des rapports entre le PuSh, un festival international des arts de la scène, et SFU Woodward’s, l’école d’arts contemporains de l’Université Simon Fraser, qui se sont attiré les critiques du public après une tentative d’adopter une nouvelle image de marque à l’automne 2010. Dickinson démontre que cette démarche a révélé certaines failles matérialistes (cultu- relles, économiques, urbaines) qui sous-tendaient à la fois la programmation du festival PuSh à SFU Woodward’s et l’identité même de SFU Woodward’s, inspirée de son emplacement dans le Downtown Eastside de Vancouver, un quartier défavorisé et marginalisé. L’article commence par une mise en contexte du festival PuSh et de SFU Woodward’s pour éclairer le processus qui a mené à la création de leurs images de marque respectives. Ensuite, l’auteur propose des extraits d’entretiens avec Norman Amour, directeur général du festival PuSh, et Michael Boucher, directeur de la programmation et des partenariats culturels à Woodward’s, dans lesquels ces derniers exposent les avantages et les défis résultant de leur partenariat. Pour conclure, Dickinson analyse trois pièces mises en scène au festival PuSh à Woodward’s et fait valoir que leur contenu met en relief le débat idéologique qui oppose le développement urbain durable et l’embourgeoisement et soulève la question du rôle que jouent les organismes sans but lucratif (culturels et éducatifs) dans la transformation de l’image associée aux quartiers du centre-ville. 130 PuShing Performance Brands in Vancouver • PP 130-150 • 2014 / 35.2 • TRIC / RTAC PETER DICKINSON S In retail industry parlance, it was the equivalent of a soft opening. Two weeks before Robert Lepage would officially inaugurate the space with the Vancouver premiere of The Blue Dragon, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival opened the new SFU Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre to its first paying audience. On 20 January 2010, the sixth installment of the festival kicked off with Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On, in many ways the antithesis of Lepage’s spectacular style. Hoarding partially obscured the main atrium entrance, the last of the theatre’s seats had just been installed, and crews were busy at work in other parts of the complex, which was slated to become the new home of Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts later that fall. Still, there was palpable excitement in the air as PuSh Executive Director Norman Armour and Woodward’s Director of Cultural Programming, Michael Boucher, took to the stage to welcome us not just to this new experimental theatre space, but to what those who had been following the progress of the Woodward’s development in Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside (DTES) hoped would be an equally successful experiment in community engagement and social action. Both had been key planks of the Woodward’s brand ever since the project was announced in 2003, and all the public and private stakeholders and funders—including the city, the province of British Columbia, SFU, developer Ian Gillespie, and individual business- men and philanthropists like Milton Wong—had bought into it. Armour, a SFU Contemporary Arts alumnus, worked hard to ensure that PuSh was one of the first cultural organizations to get in on the ground floor.2 And to hear Armour and Boucher tell it that night, it was going to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Certainly from their first conversations, Armour and Boucher recognized what each could give the other in terms of brand identity. PuSh, whose mission is in part to present adventurous new work by international, national and local artists “in a spirit of innovation and dialogue” with the communities who inspire and receive it (PuSh, “Mission”), would gain access to SFU Woodward’s state-of-the-art facilities, and in so doing have a recognizable downtown anchor for an important strain of its programming that spoke to the social and cultural complexities of urban living. SFU Woodward’s, under immediate pressure to start paying for itself, could in turn tap into PuSh’s growing audience base, one that tends to be younger, “hipper,” and more receptive to interdisciplinary work—itself a key component of SFU Woodward’s marketability as the newest one-stop performance hub in the city. However, a year after Armour and Boucher stood side-by-side welcoming audiences to The Show Must Go On, their business relationship faced its first big test—at least from an outside perspective. I refer to the fact that in the interim SFU had accepted a $10,000,000 donation from mining corporation Goldcorp for naming rights to the Contemporary Arts complex. The resulting furor over Goldcorp’s less-than-stellar human rights record, combined with the inevitable chatter of gentrification that increased as residents and businesses moved into the complex’s condominium towers and retail spaces, might have meant that the glow around the Woodward’s—and by extension PuSh’s—brand would have been tarnished. By and large that has not happened. At the same time, the years since 2010 have brought other challenges for both organizations in terms of encouraging brand buy-in—from patrons, funders and area residents. TRIC / RTAC • 35.2 / 2014 • PP 130-150 • PuShing Performance Brands in Vancouver 131 PETER DICKINSON Using PuSh and SFU Woodward’s as case studies, I ask: what happens when a performing arts institution’s and a producing partner’s mutual desire to produce intelligent work that speaks to the diverse urban community each claims to represent comes up against a competing corporate brand? How does this expose some of the complexities and faultlines in the “materialist geography” (McKinnie 13) that necessarily—and constitutively—informs both PuSh’s programming at SFU Woodward’s and the latter’s placed-based identity within the DTES? I explore these and related questions by investigating the evolving relationship between PuSh, an annual curated showcase of theatre, dance, music, and multimedia performance, and SFU Woodward’s, not just as a flagship cultural venue that has hosted several of PuSh’s mainstage shows over the past four years, but as a lightning rod for public debate in Vancouver over social sustainability versus gentrification, and the role of non-profits (cultural and educational) in the re-branding of economically depressed and publicly marginal inner-city neighbourhoods. I do so over three inter-related sections. First, I provide some contextual background on each organization, and on the development of their respective performance brands in a city and province that, in addi- tion to chronically underfunding culture, have long spun their wheels in relation to the issues of poverty, homelessness, and addiction facing the DTES. Next, I draw on interviews with Armour and Boucher to assess the benefits and challenges that have so far accrued as a result of the partnership between PuSh and SFU Woodward’s. Finally, I conclude with readings of three productions staged by PuSh on the Wong Theatre stage between 2010-2012, arguing that the content of these performances foregrounds—and frequently comments on—the ideologies and signi- fying systems (cultural, economic, urban) subsumed within as seemingly innocuous a tagline as “a PuSh presentation at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU Woodward’s.” To that end, in each section I also attempt to frame and supplement my analysis of what it means for a PuSh show to play in this venue, in this part of Vancouver, with scholarship in materialist theatre crit- icism, performance and the city, and theories of cultural branding. My motivation in writing this paper is far from disinterested, and so in the spirit of full disclosure I should clarify that as a Performance Studies scholar based in the English Department at SFU, I collaborate frequently with colleagues in Contemporary Arts and in January 2013 began teaching half-time in the School.

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