` 14th Annual PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

Jan 16 – Feb 4, 2018 Theatre | Dance | Multimedia | Music

pushfestival.ca @pushfestival The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is Vancouver's mid-winter festival featuring acclaimed local, national and international artists. The PuSh Festival presents ground-breaking work in the live performing arts: theatre, dance, music, and various forms of multimedia and hybrid performance. This year’s Festival includes works by artists and companies from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Northern Ireland, and USA. This flyer provides information regarding shows accessible to the blind and low vision community. In our efforts to make the festival accessible to all we provide:

• Live description for selected shows • Shows that are auditory and do not require description • Introductions providing additional context for shows without live description • Sighted guides can be requested for pick you up from the nearest transit stop (for any show) • We are part of the Access2 program and offer complimentary companion tickets

If we can support you in any other way, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

NEWORLD THEATRE (CANADA) KING ARTHUR’S NIGHT Jan 31 – Feb 4 | Frederic Wood Theatre | $39 | Group rate $28 This production is a work of radical upheaval, in which the King Arthur legend is made fresh for our eyes. New to us are the live band, the 20-person choir and, most of all, the radically inclusive cast. The players in this drama, all professional, include people whose life experience includes Down syndrome. They stand on stage defined by their extraordinary perspectives.

• Live description on Saturday 3rd February at 7:30 pm • A touch tour before the show

PI THEATRE (CANADA) THE EVENTS Presented with Fearless Theatre January 17–28 | Russian Hall | from $29 | Group rates: from $26 The Events is a moving play about a faith-shattering act of violence. This gutsy work sets the pain of a mass-shooting survivor against the stolid, consoling presence of a community choir. While The Events struggles with violence, it also explores how we find empathy and common ground inside a tragedy.

• Live description on Saturday 27h January at 2pm & 8 pm

BRITT HATZIUS (ENGLAND/GERMANY) BLIND CINEMA Jan 24 – Feb 1 | Vancity Theatre| $28 | Group Rate $20.50 Here’s a chance to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Audience members are seated in a theatre, with a row of children behind them, and together they experience a movie. The film has no dialogue and audience members are blindfolded, with the children describing to them in whispers. It’s a mischievous experiment in storytelling, reversing the traditional power dynamic between adults and children.

• Each show will be described live

SHANNON YEE (NORTHERN IRELAND) REASSEMBLED, SLIGHTLY ASKEW Jan 17– Feb 4 | Culture Lab, The Cultch | $35 Supported by the British Council. Presented with the Cultch An audacious melding of art and science, this multidisciplinary adventure is a head-trip in the literal sense. The survivor of a medically induced coma and acquired brain injury, creator Shannon Yee presents a chance for us to live through her medical journey. In this radically immersive production, audience members lie on hospital beds, put on headphones and enter her mind. It’s an audio experience like no other: re-enactment, internal monologue, evocative aural textures and more.

• This show does not require any description as it is purely auditory

ANNIE DORSEN (USA) SPOKAOKE Feb 2 | The Fox Cabaret (19+) | $25 | Group Rate $18.40 Spokaoke features Socrates, Muammar Gaddafi, Ronald Reagan and more. Their speeches have helped make the world as we know it, and on this occasion audiences do their own covers of them. Participants choose from a selection of over 90 classics. To recite these golden oldies is to recognize them for what they are: pieces of popular art.

• This show will not have live description but is accessible without it

ANDY FIELD (ENGLAND) LOOKOUT Jan 20-21 | Vancouver Lookout | Free Supported by Vancouver Lookout, Seedlings Foundation, British council Here is a work by UK artist bridges generations and offers a look into our city’s future through the people who will inherit it. Participants arrive at a location with a wide city vista. There, they listen to recordings from local children speaking as their older selves. The kids describe the future as they imagine it; they then arrive to talk with their listener in person. The cycle repeats itself, with the speakers casting further into the future each time.

• This is a FREE event. • This show does not require description

NEWORLD THEATRE (CANADA) INSIDE/OUT Jan 17 - 21 | Performance Works | $39 | Group Rate $28.20 Presented with Touchstone Theatre, Talkbacks hosted by PIVOT Legal Society & West Coast Prison Justice Society This is a show in the finest tradition of the prison memoir—as riveting as fiction, but with the authenticity of documentary. Your notions of criminality will be shaken, perhaps broken altogether: with humility and integrity, Keating stands before us as the violation of a stereotype. Whether romanticized or vilified, lawbreakers play a central role in our social narrative, but rarely do we get to hear them speak for themselves. This is one chance you shouldn’t miss.

• An introduction is available upon request

NICOLA GUNN (AUSTRALIA) PIECE FOR PERSON AND GHETTO BLASTER Jan 17-19 | scotiabank Dance Centre | $36 Presented with the Dance centre A furious thinker and a born entertainer, Gunn leaps and poses onstage while firing off anecdotes, philosophical asides and more. Movement and monologue are the tools here, employed to galvanizing effect. This performer can shake up an audience with the best of them—her work has the verbal density of a great podcast, but it’s a live, physical experience if there ever was one to be had.

• An introduction is available upon request

TAMARA SAULWICK (AUSTRALIA) ENDINGS Jan 26-28 | Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre $39 | Group Rate $28.20 With candour and warmth, these recorded voices speak about mortality and loss. To hear them is a deeply touching experience, not least because of the artistry with which they’re brought to the stage. Cut, warped and refracted through old technologies, the recordings form a richly textured sound-world from which myriad stories emerge. In this digital age, the analog elements are especially resonant, with voices emerging from the hiss and crackle of vinyl. It’s the material and the intangible, meeting in the shared space of live performance.

• An introduction is available upon request

EMMET KIRWAN (IRELAND) DUBLIN OLDSCHOOL Jan 30-Feb 3 | Historic Theatre, The Cultch | From $22 Two estranged brothers from Dublin: Jason is a would-be DJ, Daniel a washed-up junkie. After years apart, they meet during a long, wild weekend. Their tentative bonding is set against the backdrop of memories: of the music they raved to, the drugs they thrilled to and the city of their birth and, perhaps, rebirth. Kirwan and Anderson play multiple roles throughout, and mix spoken word slang-talk with naturalistic dialogue and poetic reflections. It’s speech as music—a feast for the ears.

• An introduction is available upon request

QUIPTAKE & PANDEMIC THEATRE (CANADA) DAUGHTER Feb 1 | The Fox Cabaret (19+) | $25 | Group Rate $18.40 As a new dad, Lazarus found himself facing all the usual challenges—and some that are, perhaps, unique to a particular type of man. He loved his daughter, and he tried to be gentle, to be kind, to be good with her… but somehow things went wrong. Looking back on his life, the comedian presents a story of rage, regret and reckoning that will both amuse and shock. Smart, incisive and sincerely remorseful, this is a performer who has learned his lesson—and earned the right to impart a few of his own.

• An introduction is available upon request

For music lovers, there are three music performances:

• Accessible seating can be reserved online for most performances • Sighted guides to provide support getting from local transit to and from the venues are

available for all shows and events, they need to be requested one week in advance • Complimentary tickets for companions are available to Acces2 cardholders

We have great offers available for group bookings saving up to 30%

For full details and to discuss accessibility needs contact:

Accessible PuSh Coordinator Anika Vervecken access@pushfestival.ca | 604.605.8284 ext .204

RADIO REWRITE TURNING POINT ENSEMBLE

(CANADA)

Jan 19-20 Norman Rothstein Theatre | $34

CRIS DERKSEN TRIO CRIS DERKSEN (CANADA)

Feb 2 | Anvil Centre (New West) Feb 3 | The Fox Cabaret (19+)

From $25

SONGS OF INSURRECTION FREDERIC RZEWSKI (USA) & DAAN

VANDEWALLE (BELGIUM)

Jan 22-23 The Fox Cabaret (19+) | $29