An evening of musical performances and readings
reflecting on collective responsibility in an age of ecological uncertainty
Helena Gutteridge Plaza at City Hall
Saturday, August 9, from 6 to 9 PM
Gamelan trio
Gamelan Kembang Telang
Singers
Vanessa Richards & Martin Reisle
Percussion ensemble
Woojae Kim
with Ben Bennett, Khan Lee, and Rahul Nair
Readers
Karina Irvine
Michael Turner
All welcome
Supported by the City of Vancouver Community Placemaking Program
More information
Helena Gutteridge Plaza is located on the north side of City Hall at Yukon Street and 11th Avenue (map).
Low-impact and shared transportation is encouraged. The plaza is just below the 10th Avenue Corridor, and close to Broadway-City Hall Station, with Canada Line Skytrain, and 99 B-line, 15, and 9 buses; the 17 also stops nearby.
There is limited street parking and pay parking nearby due to Skytrain construction, but accessible parking remains available at City Hall (enter from 12th Avenue westbound lane or Yukon Street). Underground pay parking (open 24/7) is available at City Square Mall (enter from Cambie southbound lane between 11th and 12th Avenues).
The plaza is paved with with accessible paths, and has two ping-pong tables and moveable picnic table seating, which will be arranged for the event. Please bring your own blanket if you wish to spread out.
Water and 보리차 will be served during the event, and fruit at the end. If you wish to bring your own food, please do.
This is what the city calls a "low-complexity event" so there are no washrooms on-site; City Square Mall, across the street, closes at 6pm. The closest open and accessible washrooms during the event can be found at London Drugs (left of the check-outs, 525 West Broadway; closes 10pm) and The Home Depot (clearly marked, 2388 Cambie Street; closes 9pm). Washrooms can also be accessed with purchase at Joti's No Frills (ask for access, 310 West Broadway; closes 11pm) and fast food locations at Cambie and Broadway. Alternately, one block south, you could support small(er) businesses 101Boba (2828 Cambie Street; closes 10:30pm) and The Golden Horn Turkish Bakery & Cafe (2857 Cambie Street; closes 9:30pm).
About the artists
Photo: Yohei Shimomae
Based in Vancouver, Gamelan Kembang Telang performs traditional and contemporary Balinese gamelan music. The ensemble's unique instruments are associated with the instrumental music used to accompany Wayang Kulit, the art of Indonesian shadow puppetry. Recently, the popularity of this genre has extended beyond its origins in the shadow theatre and is now a focal point for some of the most compact and innovative forms of Balinese gamelan music. The group's repertoire features contemporary works by Ryan Swaryandana and I Made Subandi which showcase bold new directions in techniques and styles. The ensemble's name refers to the blossoming of the blue telang flower, a vibrant and medicinal plant which adorned the gamelan studio of I Made Subandi, the group's late mentor.
Photo: Grady Mitchell
Vanessa Richards is a transdisciplinary artist, facilitator and educator, whose wide-ranging practice over more than thirty years has been nourished by social change communities across the UK and the beautiful, ancestral, occupied and unceded traditional homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Martin Reisle practices Calligraphy and Music in equal measure, and participates in a number of projects, including community singing. Vanessa offers these words for August 9:
May soft song rain upon the parched heart.
May strong song escort the fire seeds.
May controlled burns be crackling music to the listening land.
May rain, fire and song know their time and pace in the days at hand.
Song steam powered for now.
Photo: Woojae Kim
Led by artist Woojae Kim, a percussion ensemble with Ben Bennett, Khan Lee, and Rahul Nair, re-interprets 농악, Korean "farm music" traditionally performed not by professional musicians, but by farmers themselves, who, with little spare time, make their own instruments and practice songs to support their own communities' ceremonial needs. Expanding to think about inter-community relations in an age of new ecological responsibility, as artist-collaborators from different cultural backgrounds, the ensemble will offer an avant-garde 기우제 ("prayer for rain") to summer, our now-annual wildfire season.
Woojae Kim is an artist and writer whose works explore rituals of interdependency and listening to inaudible frequencies of relationships with non-humans and the land. Ben Bennett is an improvising percussionist who plays drums, membranes, and self-made instruments, which are combined with each other in various mutable arrangements, and played by striking, friction, breath, and other techniques. Khan Lee's practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content; he works across performance, media, sculpture and drawing, and in collaboration with Instant Coffee artist collective. Rahul Nair is a musician and composer, whose practice draws from post-Cagean traditions of experimental music, relating dualities of self-control and social control, confinement and freedom, and composition and improvisation. The artists met at the low-residency MFA at Bard College, a three-summer interdisciplinary program in Annandale-on-Hudson.
Photo: Jordan Lypkie
Karina Irvine is a writer and cultural worker who has held publishing and programming roles for various public and non-profit organizations and galleries. She's currently at work on a collection of writing that dwells on the nature of reality through cultural histories and stories about the sea and its marine communities, both human and non-human, real and imagined. This research is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Karina will read from "Goats, still," a new work that follows a decade-long return to the same site on a gulf island, where the elusive goats act as a metaphor for ecological change and uncertainty.
Photo: Corinne Lea
A writer of variegated settler ancestry living on unceded Coast Salish territory, Michael Turner is interested in lyric and narrative forms, in image systems as much as those pictured in writing, and in critical appropriation strategies. Critical writings have appeared in Art Papers, Art on Paper, Canadian Art, Duchamp's Socks, Modern Painters, and Mousse, and in exhibition catalogues on artists Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Kasper Feyrer, Brian Jungen, Ken Lum. Collaborations include screenplays with Stan Douglas, poems with Geoffrey Farmer, and songs with cub, Dream Warriors, Fishbone and Kinnie Starr. Curatorial projects include "to show, to give, to make it be there": Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver: 1954-1969 (SFU Galleries, 2010) and with Allison Collins, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982 (grunt gallery and Polygon Gallery, 2015). Books include Hard Core Logo (1993), Kingsway (1995), The Pornographer's Poem (1999), 8x10 (2009), 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven (2018) and Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems (2024). Michael will read selections from his first book, Company Town (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1991), the poetic record of the last year in the life of a fictional salmon cannery on the northern coast of British Columbia.
Resonance through the haze is co-organized by Woojae Kim and Khan Lee, with readings organized by Francesca Bennett.
