Those who may have arrived here wanting to read a review of the opening night performance (this last Wednesday evening) of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s presentation of Tara Cheyenne Performance (Vancouver) How to Be will have to be patient. That will eventually be found somewhere below.

I have just returned from my native city of Buenos Aires where I went for a two week visit (spring break) with my wife Rosemary and granddaughter Lauren, 14. We left a city, a very large on that I would define as one of orderly chaos but full of Latin passion and have found ourselves into a smaller city of efficiency in which as I have always stated its inhabitants are as cold as the city’s tapwater.

Currently I am reading everything I can find (bought many books) of Argentine author Julio Cortázar. In his book of poetry, Salvo el crepúsculo where he alternates poetry with pose he writes (my translation):

In any case the only thing that counts today in Latin America is to swim against the current of conformism, received ideas, and those sacrosanct established respects, which even in their highest forms just play along with the Great System.

After last night’s opening performance of Tara Cheyenne’s How To Be in which I was familiar with 3 performers (Susan Elliott, Josh Martin, Marcus Youssef) of the 7 ( Justine A. Chambers, Kate Franklin, Bevin Poole and Kimberly Stevenson) and with the creator of the performance, Tara Cheyenne, I was overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed by the idea that in our staid and sometimes boring (for those who don’t look around hard enough) Vancouver the Vancouver East Cultural Centre has always been in the vanguard of the edgy and the unexpected. 

You might not like everything they offer but what you always get at the Cultch is a challenge to help you remove yourself from banality.

And there to help the vision of Artistic Director Heather Redfern is a long, very talented bench of performers who have been around  for years but have managed to remain exciting and not obsolete-redundant & retired like this former magazine photographer waiting to  “live out my days” as it was so eloquently put by our moribund Vancouver Sun in citing the extension of the lease on a home for the elderly.

Heather Redfern

It is the vanquishing of our existing conventional media that is killing our memory of all the wonderful stuff that our city has given us for years.

It was Donna Flor that seemed to set a pattern for many years at the Cultch where at least one show a year would have full nudity! A special performance for me was Chick Snipper’s Slab.

Kathleen McDonagh - Ann Cooper & Susan Elliott

And so we arrive almost to our review (but not quite) where I would like to point  out that those two dancers, Susan Elliott and Josh Martin excelled Wednesday night. Elliott danced with Lola MacLaughlin. I was also witness to a couple of very strange solo performances by Elliot. One was choreography that involved many tall cans of the one brand of tomato juice that Produce City (now gone) used to sell! The second performance was a photographic nightmare for me. I was assigned by the Georgia Straight to photograph Elliott for a production of hers based on the geodesic dome of R. Buckminster Fuller!

Of Josh Martin there is little that I can add after having seen him take over the floor of the Cultch on Wednesday.

Josh Martin

Of Youssef I can assert that I have gone to many of his productions at the Arts Club Theatre Company and I can attest to his fine sense of humour but also to his particular talent of going into his personal life with pathos and never ever showing his family in bad light.

Marcus Youssef & Camyar Chai

Of Tara Cheyenne I can inform you all that my first glimpse of her performance as a mermaid in Dances for a Small Stage was spectacular. With her fish tale she could only move from the waist up! I remember her coming to my studio in part of her outfit and me telling her to put some (gaffer tape it was!) on her chest so as to pass muster with the “standards” of that art weekly.

Of the performance on Wednesday I can see (because I remember) how theatre, music and dance are now a more usual combination of what used to be three different and distinct disciplines. My wife particularly liked that the performance had no intermission so that we were able to get home early.

For me it was a sheer delight to see all those faces I knew at one time so well and to see them again having fun and doing an excellent job of showing us the banality of social media while questioning our own participation in it all.

Last year was a very significant transition year for me.  Despite my health challenges, I had my first solo exhibition last April at the Visual Space Gallery in Vancouver.  As part of the week-long exhibition, I delivered two well-received artist talks.  The experience transformed me from a photographer to an artist.  I’ve long believed that exhibiting your work to the public is an integral part of being a complete artist.

Participating in this year’s festival was the logical follow-up to last year’s success.  However, being the ‘yes’ person that I am, I tend to be in self-denial about my health.  In reality, I have late stage Parkinson’s Disease and my health is not in the same state as it was last year.  I have come to realize that it is important to myself as an artist to continue showing and speaking about my work, but there are no guarantees.

Therefore I have been making the most of the time I have preparing my work for this year’s festival.  I have been working on my newest project 1972: Rediscovered Photographs of Vancouver from the early Seventies.  As well, I have been improving and completely updating my Evolution of a Photographer artist talk.

I would like to invite you to one of the talks previewing my latest collection either on Wednesday, April 19th or Tuesday, April 25th at the HR MacMillan Space Center.  (The Planetarium).  Also on display will be highlights from my Paris and Vancouver collections.  Please see the flyer below for more details and sample photographs.

As you may know, I spent a number of years as a public speaker, and while I can’t guarantee it will be my smoothest presentation, I can guarantee it will truly be the best I can deliver.

I hope to see you there!