2022 in review: A few of the year's most memorable moments in Vancouver performing and visual arts
Cyborg ballet, multisensory percussion, and a chorus of singing ghosts were just some of 2022’s highlights
Jesse Lipscombe, Emerjade Simms, Kwesi Ameyaw, Sebastien Archibald, and Emma Slipp in Redbone Coonhoundat the Arts Club’s BMO Theatre Centre. Photo by Moonrider Productions
Ballet BC dancers Sarah Pippin and Justin Rapaport in the eerie, sci-fi-tinged RELIC. Photo by Michael Slobodian
THE BEST MOMENTS on the Vancouver arts scene in 2022 came with added power: for many audience members, these were some of the first shows they’d experienced since the pandemic. The year started off with Omicron hitting, leading several organizations choosing to put off performances—delaying to spring instead of trying to break even with 50-percent capacity rules.
From there we saw a lot of online experiments and solo and two-hander plays until things started to open up wide again. With full-sized productions returning this fall, the arts scene has come a lo-o-o-ng way in 12 months, with more rebuilding to do.
It’s been quite a ride—and a small miracle that so much innovation, celebration, and provocation happened on stages in 2022.
Here are just some—but by no means all—of the moments on stage and in galleries that we’ll remember well into 2023 and beyond.
RELIC
Queen Elizabeth Theatre
One by one, cyllindrical spotlights illuminated replicant-like creatures coming to life: that was the eerie, indelible opening moment of emerging choreographer Dorothy Saykaly’s first work for Ballet BC, in its spring program What If. From this striking start, it was clear something was unsettlingly off: the beautiful creatures couldn’t quite move like humans, glitching, rocking, and falling, arms refusing to prop them up when they moved on all fours, their legs wrapping in on themselves. The first minutes of the piece made it thrillingly clear we were in the presence of a bold, distinct, and cinematic new voice in Canadian contemporary dance.
KINKY BOOTS
Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage
The Arts Club Theatre’s energized rendition of the Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper musical had its fair share of dazzling, high-heel-kicking song-and-dance numbers, but peak power ballad hit near the end, when star Stewart Adam McKensy belted out Lola’s “Hold Me in Your Heart”. It practically blew the first two rows of the Stanley backwards. The best part? In a show that never took itself too seriously, the hilarious punchline was she was actually performing her glam showstopper in an old folks’ home.
UNINVITED: CANADIAN WOMEN IN THE MODERN MOMENT
Vancouver Art Gallery
This massive exhibition, organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, was a revelation—completely recasting this country’s art history to include women. Amid the hundreds of pieces to take in was the unmissable, large-scale The Bather, a 1930 painting by Montreal’s Prudence Heward: a flapper-era swimmer staring intently off into the distance, as inscrutable as Mona Lisa. Her shoulders hunched, bathing suit sagging, she was no traditional, idealized bathing beauty. As McMichael Canadian Art Collection chief curator Sarah Milroy commented at the VAG opening: “Her body is anything but erotic; she’s as hard as Teflon.” In other words, a woman far before her time.
KISISKACIWAN
The Dance Centre
Jeanette Kotowich’s striking new ode to her home territory opened with a breathtaking sequence: the dance artist hidden under a large metallic tarp, becoming a shape-shifting presence that evoked the ancient glaciers melting and carving the deep Kah-tep-was Valley. It was as if the very universe was being born as the magnetic performer gradually emerged from that silvery covering, her hands clasped, head down, long hair falling, back muscles rippling in a slow, sinewy build to standing.
WHITE NOISE
Firehall Arts Centre
“Do you want the truth or the reconciliation?” asked Tse’kwi, the matriarch played by Columpa Bobb in this critically lauded Savage Society production. Those words marked one of the most powerful scenes in late young playwright Taran Kootenhayoo’s irreverently funny play about the great divide between Canadian First Nations and white settler culture, but also between the generations. The question, from a climactic point of a dinner party gone awry, crystallized the complex, deeper Indigenous truths that lie beneath political rhetoric—and “white noise”.
ARCHITEK PERCUSSION
Heritage Hall
The highlight of the Montreal drum mavericks’ surround-sound concert here with Music on Main was a performance of Sabrina Schroeder’s epic new Stircrazer I—music you didn’t just hear, but felt. The percussionists sat at kits in four corners of the historic room, feet rumbling their bass-drum pedals—the sound vibrating viscerally through the space, thanks to the use of transducers. The multisensory concert-installation also looked cool, with Kyla Gardiner’s lighting design of standing, fluorescent-glowing rods across the floor. The show was filmed, so you can experience it on video above—though probably not in quite the same tactile way.
REDBONE COONHOUND
BMO Theatre Centre
Married playwrights Amy Lee Lavoie (who’s white) and Omari Newton (who’s Black) mined all sorts of loaded material, from racism to misogyny, in their play for Arts Club Theatre Company. There was no more hilariously hard-hitting moment, however, than when actor Emerjade Simms brought a modern-day rapper version of escaped-slave-turned-1850s-Underground Railroad-conductor to life. Simms introduced the character with a mighty “Choo-choo, motherfuckers!” before belting out a series of brilliant rhymes. Saweetie’s got nothin’ on this stunning force.
Clean/Espejos.
CLEAN/ESPEJOS
Historic Theatre
Powerhouse actors Alexandra Lainfiesta (as Adriana, a housekeeping manager at a Cancun resort) and Genevieve Fleming (as Sarah, a guest there for her sister’s wedding) delivered gripping performances in this complex story rooted in themes of race and class. Lainfiesta wowed in the club scene: wearing a purple-sequinned mini dress, she Latin-danced up a storm while acting as narrator, rocking her rolling Rs, only to come full-stop upon laying eyes on Nicolas. It was a moment that took viewers ever deeper into the multilayered script and into the two women’s complicated lives. (A Cultch/Neworld Theatre coproduction in association with Western Canada Theatre.)
OLD STOCK: A REFUGEE LOVE STORY
SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
Witnessing the tour de force that is actor-singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Ben Caplan was reason alone to catch this show that was part of SFU Woodward’s 10th-anniversary celebrations. So was the number where Caplan sang a Yiddish prayer. Following so many songs where he tore like a Tasmanian devil through everything from klezmer to rock music, he captured viewers here with his calming presence, the scene an illustration of the sheer breadth of his artistic range. He’s a wild talent who deserves celebrity.
STATIONS
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
The reigning wild child of Canadian dance, Montreal’s Louise Lecavalier performed her first solo show featuring her own choreography at the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, to the thrill of local fans (in a DanceHouse/SFU Woodward’s copresentation). The scene where she pogoed all across the stage may not have featured the most intricate footwork of the night, but it was one example of just how much explosive energy the 63-year-old icon has, her signature platinum-blond hair flying. It was as if she was possessed, to electric effect.
Play.
PLAY
Online
It was a virtual experience but still such a treat to catch Paris Opera Ballet perform this large-scale work choreographed by Swedish wunderkind Alexander Ekman at Palais Garnier, streaming here via DanceHouse in partnership with Digidance. We loved the moment when thousands of green plastic balls began falling from the rafters like giant raindrops. It was the start of one of the most playful and inventive dance sequences all year, the performers tossing—and tossing themselves into—so many emerald orbs.
GHOSTS OF THE MACHINE
Polygon Gallery
It was a trip experiencing Singapore artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s No Man II, an eerie single-channel projection on a police-interrogation-style one-way mirror at June’s ambitious Ghosts of the Machine—curator Elliott Ramsey’s exploration of fluid binaries in the digital world. The piece featured a rotating crowd of digitally generated figures drawn from mythological, medical, video-game, and pop-cultural realms—cyborgs, minotaurs, zombies, anatomical figures, skeletons, and bikini’d body builders. Their mouths moved as they sang a haunting chorus drawing from John Dunne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (the “No Man Is an Island” poem), falling in and out of unison, phrases trailing off. When viewers stepped into a spotlight, they were reflected amid the life-sized ghostly gathering. Unsettling and deeply thought-provoking in an ultrawired, just-out-of-pandemic-isolation world.
TREASURES FROM BYZANTIUM MANUSCRIPTS
BlueShore Financial Centre for the Arts
This collaborative Early Music Vancouver presentation between Thessaloniki’s En Chordais and Montreal’s Constantinople was a heady escape to the Byzantine world, with its mix of instruments including the violin, the zither-esque kanun, and fluttery hand drums. But it was the husky, quivering notes of Kianoush Khalilian’s haunting ney—a cane-like flute that’s notoriously difficult to play—that made such an surprisingly memorable solo: a haunting wind blowing in softly from ancient Arabia.
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