Scenes of isolation: 10 Vancouver shows and artworks that best expressed this pandemic moment in 2020

Isolation Commissions, one-on-one concerts, and dancers in boxes expressed life in lockdown

A video still of Company 605’s Josh Martin (by Zabra Shahab) in Brimming captures what we’ve all felt at one time or other after the past seven months. — A video still of Company 605’s Josh Martin (by Zabra Shahab) in *Brimming* captures what we’ve all felt at one time or other after the past seven months.

AS ONE OF the many joke T-shirts circulating this holiday season said in the ultimate understatement, below “2020” and a one-out-of-five-stars ranking: “Very bad, would not recommend.”

But as horribilus as this annus has been, there have been some five-star experiences to come out of it—most of them to do with the arts.

Artists were among the hardest hit by pandemic lockdown. Unable to collaborate or use stages for most of the year, many found themselves out of work and unable to practise their art as they had in the past. And yet innovators in Vancouver’s arts scene found ways to continue to create, expressing the pandemic and its social distancing in ways that helped all of us to reflect and work through the kind of insanity usually reserved for Stephen King novels.

Here are a few of the the most affecting works to explore the unique experience of 2020’s pandemic purgatory—or to find an uplifting way to transcend it. Together they form an unforgettable archive of a surreal time.

John Korsrud performs one of Little Chamber Music’s Isolation Commissions.

THE ISOLATION COMMISSIONS

Right out of the gates of the COVID crisis in the spring, Little Chamber Music’s Mark Haney set up an ambitious project to keep musicians working. And he couldn’t possibly have known at the time how it would take off.

For $200, donors could choose any local musician (literally any: Haney would track them down) to film a four-minute video of themselves performing at home. Meant to reflect the impact of social isolation on their artistic practice, the works, chosen by each artist, ranged from improvisations to favourite pieces to the musical equivalent of comfort food.

In a staggering accomplishment, the project resulted in 130 intimate videos—many commissioned as birthday presents, others paid for by friends or die-hard fans.

There were too many highlights to name, but here are just a few, should you find yourself perusing the collection here during holiday downtime: #87’s Jeremy Vint’s retro-cool solo on flugelhorn, featuring him improvising over his own music recorded on a 1984-vintage Roland Juno-10; oboist Lauris Davis performing with an invisible quartet and an audience of stuffies in her back yard in #36 and #120; and #6’s stirring horn piece by John Korsrud, blasting out an apartment window, made all the more moving for being commissioned for someone “near the end of his journey”

Sarah Hutton dances with Odile-Amélie Peters in MOI, by Radical System Art’s Shay Kuebler. — Sarah Hutton dances with Odile-Amélie Peters in *MOI,* by Radical System Art’s Shay Kuebler.

MOI (MOMENT OF ISOLATION) AND BRIMMING AT DANCING ON THE EDGE

At the summer’s mostly digital Dancing on the Edge fest at the Firehall Arts Centre, two works managed to embody the full range of feelings around quarantine.

Radical System Art’s MOI (Moment of Isolation) opened with an intro video by Keiran Bohay that played hilariously with ideas of #workfromhome. Bohay cavorted around condo furniture while wearing a Zoom-ready suit jacket and tie—only to reveal he was wearing just boxers and socks on his bottom half (a running COVID joke). Elsewhere in choreographer Shay Kuebler’s series of short works, Sarah Hutton danced a mesmerizing duet with a projection of Odile-Amélie Peters, synthesizing 2020’s unique state of disconnect.

Elsewhere at the fest, 605’s Josh Martin caught this era’s eerie limbo in the video Brimming, an intense work set in a confining plywood container, lit by dangling light bulbs. As Martin convulsed, the forces started to “brim” over and Martin pulled into a silent scream that anyone holed up for months could relate to.

SOCIAL DISTANCING PORTRAITS

Adad Hannah’s compelling 20-second-video portraits have the apt effect of making time stand still; sometimes you don’t even know his subjects are filmed until they blink, or a breeze catches the leaves around them.

Faced with spring’s pandemic lockdown, Hannah grabbed his camera and started roaming the streets around his home in Burnaby, shooting everyone from listless kids in skateboard parks and empty sports fields to couples having happy hour on alleyway lawn chairs. The result is a fascinating collection of people just trying to pass the time as best they can.

Check out a gallery of the images on the Capture Photography Festival site or Hannah’s Vimeo channel.

AS DREAMS ARE MADE

In the fall, Music on Main hosted this series of intimate concerts for precisely one musician and one audience member—and the results were profound.

Artistic director David Pay took his inspiration from the 1:1 Concerts born in Germany, then added Katie Findlay’s recorded reading of some of Prospero’s most famous lines from The Tempest, as well as Adrian Muir’s lighting. The result? You entered a dark, empty Vancity Culture Lab following a spotlight to a single chair. There, you would meet a surprise artist—a flutist, a cellist, a santour player, or someone else—who would pick a piece to play on the spot.

It was a transcendent, 15-minute reprieve from the madness outside, a chance to see virtuosity up-close (though socially distanced), and a deeply moving reminder of why live music and connection are so vital to our existence. Spine-tingling.

PLAYS2PERFORM@HOME

Takeout food saw a surge in 2020, and one Vancouver stage company saw a chance to try out takeout theatre as well. The ever-innovative Boca del Lupo, offered up Plays2Perform@Home, a box set of beautifully packaged mail-order scripts by a Canadian playwright. Arriving at your door, the 10-to-20-minute plays were meant to be acted out by the members of your “bubble”—”around the dinner table, picnic blanket or campfire”, the troupe encouraged.

The playwrights were impressive, writing in an array of genres: Hiro Kanagawa, Jovanni Sy, Karen Hines, and Tara Beagan. At last check there were still box sets available for 30 bucks here.

PEOPLE AND MASK

In her simple black-and-white sketch series shown in Taiwanfest’s virtual gallery this fall, Lady Hao Hao somehow managed to capture all the loaded feelings we have around wearing masks and facing a pandemic. In some images, the mask covers the wearer’s eyes, the mouth distorted in a silent scream. In others, the mask sits over the mouth and nose, the brow line furrowed deeply in worry, or the eyes streaming tears.

Part of a larger series called “Behind the Masks”, created with local 3-D artist Walter Kao / Yani-X, the portraits also seemed to speak to the mental-health crisis that COVID is causing—the way screams go unheard and panic swells up uncontrollably, yet how we try to “mask” it.

#CORONACOVERS & ISOLATION DUETS

Singer, pianist, and music director Kerry O’Donovan started posting his “corona covers” on Facebook for each day of early lockdown as a way to stay busy while live performance was off-limits. But soon, his unadorned but beautiful covers of everyone from Nick Cave and the Police to Stephen Sondheim became his raison d’etre—and something to look forward to for his growing legion of followers.

No introductions, no dressing up, nothing fancy: there O’Donovan was, reliably, seated at the keyboard in his home, belting out a tune. Highlights included a killer “Piano Man” and a few kickass duets-by-remote, notably a fiery “Volcano” with Jill Raymond, and a to-die-for rendition of “Shallow” with Madeleine Suddaby. And we haven’t even mentioned the Glass Tiger or the Muppets medleys. See these and others on O'Donovan's YouTube channel dedicated to the project.

UNACCOMPANIED

Another regular concert series that gave music fans a reliable fix during lockdown was this inspired spring project by the Canadian Music Centre BC and Redshift Music Society.

Every second Thursday at noon, they’d post a new Unaccompanied video recording— live performances of Canadian works written specifically for solo instruments. In each, an artist would emerge from the dark set to serve up adventurous, sonic treats—violinist Müge Büyükçelen taking on the layered, looping strings of Michael Oesterle’s “Stand Still”; zheng player Dai Lin Hsieh capturing the cascading notes of Dorothy Chang’s “breath/balance”; or Colin MacDonald giving wonderfully warped expression to the title of John Oliver’s “Fifth Hour at the Dance Party”. You can scroll through the amazing array of pieces here.

MY THOUGHTS I’LL CHARACTER

Reeling from the cancellation of its massive Vanier Park summer festival, Bard on the Beach switched gears to commission theatre artists to create Shakespeare-inspired video features, “in their own voice”. The resulting film works of artists performing solo, outdoors, and even on cellphones, was a lesson in how relevant the Bard is in 2020—and how well his words can speak to these dark times.

One of the most striking pieces was the finale, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s “Titania in 5”, which matches the whispering words of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fairy queen to Olivia C. Davies, Jasper Friedenberg Stewart, AJ Simmons, and Raina von Waldenburg communing with trees. Fingers clawed across bark moss, painted faces emerged from branches, connecting with nature in a way everyone’s rediscovering now.

Episode 8’s Marci T. House also pulled off a cool "Aufidius and the World" Coriolanus speech against Jeff Gladstone’s standup bass; “Let me twine/Mine arms about that body, where against/My grained ash an hundred times hath broke.” Okay, but just make sure you don your PPE first.

REFRAMED

On one of those surreal Vancouver days in October, where the sunlight cuts through an eerie fog, dozens of actors performed a poetic ode to the way online cancel culture has become its own pandemic during lockdown. Electric Company Theatre staged the work on the beach at Ambleside Park, and it was moving not just due to the atmospheric weather pattern, but because the filmed show brought together dozens of socially-distanced actors who had not been able to take the stage for months. Created by ECT’s Carmen Aguirre, Kim Collier, Kevin Kerr, and Jonathon Young, it captures so much of what our lives on social media have been about this year—all through the shorthand of emoji-speak.

We won’t tell you any more about the project because Reframed finally airs in its film form on January 7 as part of the National Arts Centre’s Grand Acts of Theatre initiative. Consider that broadcast a sign that there will be many more works expressing our collective limbo well into 2021.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.