Zero for Conduct

  On June 1, 2011, SunTV broadcast an interview with veteran Canadian dancer and choreographer Margie Gillis see link below, which quickly turned abusive towards the guest. In a message on his facebook page, Canadian dancer Louis Laberge-Côté, currently a teacher at Nationaltheatre Manheim in Germany, offered this assessment. In response to the Sun News Network interview with Margie Gillis By Louis Laberge-Côté Contemporary dancer / choreographer / teacher / arts lover / taxpayer If by attacking dance artist Margie Gillis on the Canada Live show aired on June 1st, Krista Erickson, anchorwoman for the Sun News Network, intended to publicly insult a well-respected artist on a sensationalist broadcast news channel, she certainly achieved her goal. Of course, Miss Erickson is allowed to have her own opinions and she has the right to express them. But when it comes to journalism, shouldn’t it be somewhat of a moral obligation for the reporter to put aside her personal opinions to look at a situation from different perspectives, gather information from different sources and, obviously, allow her guest to express her point of view? Isn’t it ridiculously unprofessional and profoundly inhumane to invite a woman such as Margie Gillis just to publicly bully her, with no possibility for real discourse, in the name of a few minutes of “great television”? via On SunTV and Margie Gillis : Canada's online magazine: Politics, entertainment, technology, media, arts, books: backofthebook.ca.

On June 1, 2011, SunTV broadcast an interview with veteran Canadian dancer and choreographer Margie Gillis see link below, which quickly turned abusive towards the guest. In a message on his facebook page, Canadian dancer Louis Laberge-Côté, currently a teacher at Nationaltheatre Manheim in Germany, offered this assessment.

In response to the Sun News Network interview with Margie Gillis

By Louis Laberge-Côté

Contemporary dancer / choreographer / teacher / arts lover / taxpayer

If by attacking dance artist Margie Gillis on the Canada Live show aired on June 1st, Krista Erickson, anchorwoman for the Sun News Network, intended to publicly insult a well-respected artist on a sensationalist broadcast news channel, she certainly achieved her goal. Of course, Miss Erickson is allowed to have her own opinions and she has the right to express them. But when it comes to journalism, shouldn’t it be somewhat of a moral obligation for the reporter to put aside her personal opinions to look at a situation from different perspectives, gather information from different sources and, obviously, allow her guest to express her point of view? Isn’t it ridiculously unprofessional and profoundly inhumane to invite a woman such as Margie Gillis just to publicly bully her, with no possibility for real discourse, in the name of a few minutes of “great television”?

via On SunTV and Margie Gillis : Canada's online magazine: Politics, entertainment, technology, media, arts, books: backofthebook.ca.

[nggallery id=3 w=2] all images: This month's mass was gettin' bigger, as the sun came out and the DST-change made it brighter.  The weather was threatening as late as 4 pm in my neighbourhood but it ended up being a beautiful day. First surprise of the Mass was the giant American film shoot occupying the Art Gallery square before us.  What made it a little more surprising was that one of the ride veterans led the start of the ride through the film shoot - or so we thought.  It looked like a good bit of fun and a political point well-made when we started passing right in front of the camera.  But then he stopped, took two steps up the Art Gallery stairs, and the guy started explaining why we were going to occupy the gallery steps for 20 minutes until it was time to leave on the ride. Uh-oh!  I signed up to make a statement about bike culture over car culture, not to make a statement against Hollywood Film Productions.  I make plenty of those every day, and while I like the idea of earning everyone on set an extra 20 minutes of pay while slowing down the Hollywood agenda by several nanoseconds, I had no clear reason to throw Critical Mass into a head-on, high-stakes confrontation with max-pressure location managers, whose chief activity all day is cajoling people to  get the hell out of the way and let them get on with their work. Besides, the police on bikes who were waiting around to escort Critical Mass could, at any moment, throw themselves into the dispute with uncertain consequences. I turned my bike around, awkwardly, and left the confrontation behind.  So did everyone else, after a few muddled moments. The film-set walkie-talkies never stopped squawking for a second. The location manager shouted "thanks very kindly!" and told us she would "pay it forward" which she said was the name of the film they were making. The guy who wanted to occupy the steps (don't know his name, but if you've been to the ride, he's the one with the big tall sign on the back of his recumbent) explained that Critical Mass should be something factored into the city's planning around other special events, and therefore the film shoot shouldn't be happening there on the last Friday of the month, and even if it was, we had just as much right to the square as them.  I wasn't sure this was legally true, and checking the City's web site, there's more than a heads-up required for a right to the square. Then again, it says only non-commercial events have a right to be there, and the shoot was definitely commercial. As for the civil society question - does Critical Mass have more moral right to occupy the Art Gallery lawn at that moment than the film production - well, as they say in legal thinking, "Your right to swing your arm ends where your neighbour's nose begins."  There was no benefit to us in gathering our bikes smack dab in front of the camera rather than gathering them off to the side, on the empty part of the square.  So, by doing so, we were just making a nuisance of ourselves, confronting a group of folks who have no obvious allegiance in the battle of the bike.  Sure, you could say Hollywood movies represent big capital and thus inherently fall on the Car Side, but then, I think that's a bit abstract and unfocussed for a monthly event that is already accused of having a cloudy message. I mean, think headlines: "Critical Mass broken up by police after occupying Art Gallery square, blocking film shoot."  Huh?  I thought Critical Mass was that bike thing. In any case, being thrown into a confrontation without any warning is not the best situation in which to make level-headed decisions. So off we went after that, circling the downtown, crossing Granville Bridge, then heading to Kits.  I had some good chats about the upcoming elections, about how to wire a home stereo unit to a car battery and properly maximize the sound volume coming from your bike.  We stopped at the beach for a little party - hackysack and dancing.  It was very odd, and unexpected to me, but fun.  I will stop and dance to Chuck Berry any day of the week. Then back on the road, over the Burrard Bridge, where we met our first hater - a guy in his car yelling "YOU GUYS ARE A JOKE!" but he wasn't laughing, stuck as he was behind the ride. Five minutes of his 2-hour commute wasted on a beautiful sunset bridge with a view of the mountains so beautiful I'm scared to show you a picture. Like a miracle, that was also the moment when the cars in the oncoming lane just generally started honking and tooting their horns, waving and giving us the thumbs-up - one after the other.  Suddenly the scary shouty agro guy was in the minority, and he even got tired of yelling at us. By the time it got dark, my legs were tired and feet cold.  And then we all split up.

all images:

This month's mass was gettin' bigger, as the sun came out and the DST-change made it brighter.  The weather was threatening as late as 4 pm in my neighbourhood but it ended up being a beautiful day.

First surprise of the Mass was the giant American film shoot occupying the Art Gallery square before us.  What made it a little more surprising was that one of the ride veterans led the start of the ride through the film shoot - or so we thought.  It looked like a good bit of fun and a political point well-made when we started passing right in front of the camera.  But then he stopped, took two steps up the Art Gallery stairs, and the guy started explaining why we were going to occupy the gallery steps for 20 minutes until it was time to leave on the ride.

Uh-oh!  I signed up to make a statement about bike culture over car culture, not to make a statement against Hollywood Film Productions.  I make plenty of those every day, and while I like the idea of earning everyone on set an extra 20 minutes of pay while slowing down the Hollywood agenda by several nanoseconds, I had no clear reason to throw Critical Mass into a head-on, high-stakes confrontation with max-pressure location managers, whose chief activity all day is cajoling people to  get the hell out of the way and let them get on with their work.

Read the rest of this entry »

I'm doing the cinematography for a project with Josh Hite and Scott Billings, untitled for now. They are creating a machine to bring a camera up and down the center of the long-closed Burrard Bridge stairwell, in a repeatable spiral pattern.  Then actors will be performing gestures, scenes, and actions on the stairs, drawn from a collection of movies that feature scenes in stairwells. Here's a writeup from Price Tags, which talks more about the project and tells you how you might get involved, if you want...

I'm doing the cinematography for a project with Josh Hite and Scott Billings, untitled for now.

They are creating a machine to bring a camera up and down the center of the long-closed Burrard Bridge stairwell, in a repeatable spiral pattern.  Then actors will be performing gestures, scenes, and actions on the stairs, drawn from a collection of movies that feature scenes in stairwells.

Here's a writeup from Price Tags, which talks more about the project and tells you how you might get involved, if you want...

In case there was any doubt that I really liked Dayna Hanson's Gloria's Cause, here's proof how I was going on about it right after the show. A snippet from Jessie Smith's post-show interview with Flick Harrison at Vancouver, B.C.'s PuSh Festival. Support Improvement Club, the film adaptation of Gloria's Cause.

In case there was any doubt that I really liked Dayna Hanson's Gloria's Cause, here's proof how I was going on about it right after the show.

A snippet from Jessie Smith's post-show interview with Flick Harrison at Vancouver, B.C.'s PuSh Festival.

Support Improvement Club, the film adaptation of Gloria's Cause.

GLORIA'S CAUSE @ the Push Festival 2011 Gloria's Cause is a knock-down drag-out fight between dance, movement, theatre, and rock, and the winner is We the People. If I had to help you get a grip on the show, I could call it a Rock Opera. Or I could say it's as if Frank Zappa dosed the Tea Party with mushrooms, and then jammed with them on Jerry Springer. There were at least two separate moments in the show when I was more moved than I've ever been by dance, and I mean an emotional arrest of the kind that happens seldom in a cynical viewer's lifetime. At first I thought it was just Jessie Smith's dance solo, a whiplashing outburst of dangerous punctuation, throwing herself to the edge of a cliff and then pulling out at the last moment. But then she went over and picked up an electric guitar and the show moved on, and later there was a pantomime American Eagle that confessed its shortcomings, lunged into the audience to sit on some laps, then started writhing and stripping into hot red underwear, making gutteral noises and finally struggling and kicking around on the floor while the rock got louder and louder and it happened again - I had an out-of-body experience, looking down at myself and saying "I'm seeing something right now that will change me forever." Gloria's Cause, created in Seattle by Dayna Hanson, chews on the ideas and emotions surrounding the American Revolution: from the drunken, boorish pique of a George Washington whose indecisiveness has been criticized, to the tremors in the hearts of the founding fathers as their pens signed the declaration of independence. But by starting the Continental Congress with a pouring of tea from a little red tea set, Gloria's Cause reminds us that the dusty doings of the Founding Fathers are front-page news once again, in the form of Palin slogans and Beck rants. Every time I got settled into something or other about the play - oh, I understand this moment, this is a satirical poke at the founding fathers, or whatever, the play would explode like a can of coke in a microwave and go somewhere else. The Congress unravels when Hanson comes in with a Benjamin Franklin action figure and shouts down the discussion, and before I knew it there was dancing and music and fighting and shoving and it kept going and going. The show is finishing its second and last performance as I type but you should definitely keep an eye on all the players in your future audiencing.  Can't find a full credit list on the web... which does make it a little difficult... Check out this Flickr gallery of the show's earlier performances - things seem slightly different, which isn't surprising seeing how loose and freeflowing the whole thing was... (eagle photo: Ian Goodrich, Portland Mercury.  GW photo: dayna hanson . com )

GLORIA'S CAUSE

@ the Push Festival 2011

Gloria's Cause is a knock-down drag-out fight between dance, movement, theatre, and rock, and the winner is We the People. If I had to help you get a grip on the show, I could call it a Rock Opera. Or I could say it's as if Frank Zappa dosed the Tea Party with mushrooms, and then jammed with them on Jerry Springer.

There were at least two separate moments in the show when I was more moved than I've ever been by dance, and I mean an emotional arrest of the kind that happens seldom in a cynical viewer's lifetime. Read the rest of this entry »