Exquisite Pressure
October 29th & 30th 2022
7:30pm, 7pm doors
$10
No one turned away for lack of $
tickets online or at the door
Lo-Fi Spectacle Club and What Lab are very excited to welcome you to the first Exquisite Pressure! ExP is a night for artists to share their new works in progress in front of an audience, gather feedback, and put their investigations to the test.
Featuring :
Samantha Walters
Falcon Trainers
Francisco Berlanga & Natalie Chan
Hosted by Lo-Fi Spectacle Club
A few words from Lo-Fi Spectacle Club, about the evening
We’ve curated these three pieces because they ask exciting questions about form and content, and how to to stretch and bend the definition of performance. They all, in their own ways, are curious about taking the long way around a question in order to find the answer, or even something more interesting than just an answer. As an emerging art and performance collective ourselves, we have found it so valuable to have had the opportunity to peak inside their processes and work alongside Jarin to out this event together.
ExP #1 is a night for costumes if you happen to be wearing one, though they are neither encouraged nor are they discouraged. It is a night for laughter (but don’t expect any jokes). It is a night to experience new work in a beautiful, brave, and vulnerable early stage.
Questions? Email us at studio@whatlab.ca
Demoviction Tarot
By Samantha Walters
Demoviction Tarot is an intimate participatory performance that spiritualises the Vancouver housing crisis. An individual is invited into a modified tarot reading that asks them to reflect on their housing experience and imagine a new future. Conversations around housing are often overwhelmed by worry and despair, but what exists in that layer of myth and humour underneath?
The veil is thin and heavy here
By Francisco Berlanga and Natalie Chan
This work explores “Vancouver” as a site for speculative distance. The land can paradoxically create distance and connections from our respective cultural roots of Hong Kong and Mexico. “Vancouver” has a way of whittling down our origins, but the longer we’ve stayed, the deeper our roots impregnate the soil. We are ingrained in a land we now call home, yet still yearning for our inherited understanding of it.
However, there are sites of connection here where the veil runs thin. Our longing for them can redefine our distances and perhaps even summon them.
We approach our explorations of place as specters, our spirits roaming the land we live on, trying to settle the unfinished and uneasy histories of our pasts.
We haunt this realm by: climbing mountains to spot a potential horizon of Mexico, entering the sea to embody passage from here to Hong Kong, braiding grass into handles and pulling north on the continent to bring Mexico closer, reassembling found fragments left by Chinese workers on Canadian beaches into new vessels. We are uneasy silhouettes perched on the vanishing point waiting for an understanding that may never give us peace.
What can we discover when we become a part of the landscape? What knowledge can we glean from the past to bring as wisdom for the future?
What do you become when you allow yourself to be haunted?
everything i heard over the course of the day all at once
By Falcon Trainers
A discourse of clarified sounds, the resonant vibration of harmonic thoughts, a simultaneous discovery and exploration of the Physics of sound. Part informative lecture, part immersive concert, the Falcon Trainers test the creative/destructive nature of active and passive auditory practices. Leading with a deep appreciation for all things pedestrian and a playful desire to lower the bar of extraordinary to include everything and everyone, we ask ourselves the following:
Who are we as makers of sound? As takers in of sound? What is our responsibility to our aural environment? To the collective experience of sound?
Falcon Trainers consists of ilvs strauss, June Hsu, Megan Lane, and Colin Williscroft. We are a mix of performers, technicians, and designers with a penchant for process based work that investigates and integrates the use of technology in live performance.
Exquisite Pressure is funded in part by
About the Artists
Samantha Walters
Samantha is an emerging interdisciplinary performer, writer, and creator based on xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) lands. She mostly works between contemporary performance, directing, and video making. Their most recent works examine ecological relationships and post-human spiritualities, with a heavy favour towards the weird, the dark, and the camp. Collaboration within communities and alongside the non-human lies at the heart of her process. She holds a BFA honours in Theatre Performance from Simon Fraser University School of Contemporary Arts where she performed and collaborated on multiple mainstage productions, as well as directed work for the LIVE ACTS Festival. Her work has been featured by the Or Festival, the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen, and UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness. samantha-walters.com
Natalie Chan and Francisco Berlanga
On a sunny morning September 18th, 1997, two settlers were born in so-called Vancouver – both from newly immigrant families, they experienced living on a land distant from their perceived place of origin; their lives have woven together through artistic collaboration.
Natalie’s practice untangles her relationship with herself, community, and the land, negotiating with reality by re-weaving the same ties to find new perspectives that offer tangible possibilities of healing and reconciliation. Her trauma-born work exposes her vulnerability as an invitational transformative space, a site to envision brighter futures together.
Francisco’s practice is based on deciphering identity, particularly his connection to Mexico and how he inhabits a culture while being absent from it. He explores Mexican crafts, the acts of making become mimetic and allow him insights through material exploration. His practice becomes a cloth of memories held together with twine.
“Vancouver” is the weft of estrangement that situates their practices.
Falcon Trainers
ilvs strauss
ilvs is an interdisciplinary performer, visual artist and writer who has always lived within reasonable driving distance from the Pacific Ocean (save for that one sabbatical where she literally/figuratively hugged the Rockies). RE her education, she followed up her BA in Chemistry with an MFA in Performance. In the decade plus gap between those, she began her career in technical theatre. To this day she finds herself pushing buttons in dark theatres (for ACT and Kidd Pivot, amongst others). She is delighted to be bringing the backstage on stage again with the Falcon Trainers and is grateful to be doing so on the unceded and traditional territories of xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
June Hsu
June is an artist, musician, and theatre production designer passionate in all aspects of sound, set, and video. In 2019, she graduated from the Douglas College Stagecraft and Event Technology program and is currently studying in Simon Fraser University working towards her BFA in Theatre Production and Design. Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada –the unceded and stolen territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, June has been surrounded by the colourful sounds and sights from the cities to the mountains; sparking an interest in exploring the interrelations between sounds and their unique personalities.
With over 15 years of practice in classical music and composition, her sound design works include “7 Stories” (Douglas College), “Selfie” (FOLDA), and “The Tempest” (Carousel Theatre for Young People).
Megan Lane
Megan is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Vancouver area with experience in theatre as a technician, a designer, a performer, and as a puppet maker and puppeteer. Megan graduated from the Stagecraft and Event Technology program at Douglas College in 2019, and is now at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in pursuit of her degree in Theatre Production and Design. Currently, she is exploring subjects such as design-led creation, devised theatre, the intersection between design and performance, interdisciplinarity, and non hierarchical collaboration.
Megan’s upcoming projects include set and props design for “The Frontliners” at the Fringe Festival, and a design-led performance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
Megan is grateful to be living, learning, working, and creating on unceded scə̓ waθenaɁɬtəməxw (Tsawwassen), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Kwantlen, Stz’uminus, šxwməθkwəyə̓ maɁɬ təməxw (Musqueam), səlil ̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) territory.
Colin Williscroft
Colin (b.1992) is a filmmaker, projection designer and sound artist born in Calgary AB, currently based in Vancouver, BC. With a focus on sound and its personal connection to time, Colin’s work focuses on blending formats through experimental films and expanded cinema. During his time at Simon Fraser University, his work became characterized by the process of altering form to push the boundaries of the filmic language. His work and collaborations have appeared in such festivals as Prague International Film Festival, VIFF, Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, Small File Media Festival, Tangente Gallery, Scumdance, and the Festival of Live Digital Art. Beyond his own work and collaborations, he engages with the Vancouver independent community as the Facility and Equipment Manager at Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. He hopes to continue creating and helping the community experiment with film, not only as a way to tell stories but to also foster a new wave of cinema. He is grateful to be living and working on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil ̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Accessibility Info
What Lab is located at 1814 Pandora Street. There is no dedicated parking, only street parking. The venue is located on the second floor up one flight of stairs, but there is a ground level accessible entrance through the back of the building. Seating is typically informal, and will include some combination of chairs, floor seating, couches, and cushions. There is one single-occupancy, gender-inclusive washroom. The washroom is not big enough for larger style wheelchairs to completely turn around in while the door is open. We are a trans-inclusive space.