Last March, Barbara Bourget’s mother passed away. In the midst of her pain and the chaos, the acclaimed Vancouver-based choreographer, dancer and co-founder of Kokoro Dance started thinking about love and death. A few months later, two of her grandchildren were born.

 “I wanted to explore this in the context of this incredible loss that I suffered personally. Love is so many things. It can be bitter, sweet, it can be profound, banal, it can be all sorts of things,” she says. “What is it that makes you feel that feeling in your centre? What is it that moves you to tears, or to laughter?”

The resulting work is Kokoro Dance: L.S.D. (Love, Sex and Death), a 24-minute three-section dance piece that explores these themes using butoh dance as the medium. Butoh, which is literally “dance step” in Japanese, is a post-World War II style that was first performed in 1959. (For an example of butoh, watch this video)

While western audiences may not be familiar with butoh, Bourget says it is starting to “infect” dancers around the world with its philosophy of mind-body-soul connection.

“For me, butoh investigates the authentic dance that is you. Whether that incorporates ballet, tap, circus arts, whatever, butoh is big enough to encompass everything that makes you an individual,” she says.

“I’m almost 60, and I’ve danced for 56 years. All of who I am, what I am, what I’ve done, what my experiences have been, are greatly informed by this idea of authenticity.”

Despite the turbulent emotions she experienced while working on the love section, Bourget says the first part is surprisingly calm and serene. The second section, sex, is slightly more chaotic, while the last, death, tries to evoke the chaos she felt with her mother at the hospital.

“The second section is really full of movement and it’s full of beautiful women flying and climaxing and all sorts of wonderful stuff,” she says. ““Because of my own losses, I think of death as chaos. Feelings came, feelings went. It was just chaos. [In the third part], I’ve tried to evoke that.”

As part of the L.S.D. series, which is being presented by the Vancouver International Dance Festival (VIDF) along with the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, dance companies Rosario Flamenco and Out Innerspace Dance Theatre will also be tackling these three universal themes in their own respective art forms: flamenco and contemporary dance. All three events can be seen, for free, at Vancouver’s historic Roundhouse.

As the VIDF enters its tenth anniversary year, Bourget says she and Kokoro Dance co-founder Jay Hirabayashi are looking forward to what the festival, which starts March 12, has to offer.

“We really look to produce things we like, and we’ve both been in the business a long time. We want to present what moves us, modern dance, butoh, post-modern,” she says. “It’s very exciting.”

Kokoro Dance: L.S.D. (Love, Sex and Death) runs March 12 and 13 at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver. Tickets are free (no reservations required).

More information on Kokoro Dance: L.S.D. (Love, Sex and Death)

What happens when a group of theatre people decides to throw the mother of all parties?

Meet Hive.

What started as a series of informal get-togethers for Vancouver-based playwrights, actors, directors and other theatre types is now in its third official year, except this time it will be taking over the warehouse space of the Centre for Digital Media from 7 p.m. “’til late” starting March 11.

Featuring 14 mini-plays, or what playwright and director Amiel Gladstone calls “installations,” Hive 3 will be exactly that: a hive of activity. One of the main goals is to keep the evening fun, which is something that Gladstone says theatre sometimes forgets to do.

 “We’re really trying to make it worthwhile for people to come out of their houses, because it really is so much easier to stay at home and watch television,” he says. “We’d better be at the top of our game and doing as much as we can to make that experience as unique and exciting as possible.”

While organizers are still trying to figure out how hundreds of people will be able to move through the Hive space —some plays are just for one audience member, while some take place in a moving vehicle — Gladstone says the Hive experience is about having a good time and building good relationships, not about trying to see every piece.

“I think being part of the event and hanging out, feeling the energy at the event and seeing people really excited to be there, and to be together, and going to the different shows,” he says. “The Hive energy is exciting, and people are really, really happy to be there.”

The collective energy of the night also adds to the risks that certain playwrights and directors are willing to take with their pieces, says Gladstone. Because there are so many shows, there’s a sense of healthy competition, but also of mutual support.

“It really is a playing-around-in-the-sandbox feeling,” he says. “We know that everyone has our back. You feel free to try things that you wouldn’t try normally. If you fail horribly, the event itself has enough going for it that it’ll be fine.”

The ability of the event to capture this do-it-yourself “hey-we’re-putting-on-a-show” feeling is one of its most precious aspects, but Gladstone says at least one thing is changing this year. Encouraged and inspired by the Paralympic Winter Games, this year’s Hive will be entirely wheelchair accessible and is hosting an audio description and American Sign Language night.

Hive 3 runs March 11 to 20 at The Centre for Digital Media, 577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver. Tickets are $20/students and seniors, $25/adults.

Tickets and more information on Hive 3

The beat goes on for the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad throughout the Paralympic Winter Games, which will fill 10 exciting days with athletic and artistic firsts starting March 12.

The Cultural Olympiad kicks off its Paralympic programming with the world premieres of two highly anticipated plays. Spine, which debuts March 12 at the new SFU Woodward’s complex on West Hastings Street, is a mind-blowing piece of multimedia theatre from the creative team behind the comedy hit Skydive. The play follows Realwheels Theatre founder and actor James Sanders as he flies away from his body and wheelchair — perhaps from his whole identity — into a virtual reality world.

Reinvention of another kind is at the heart of Rick: The Rick Hansen Story, which opens on March 13. Written by British Columbia playwright Dennis Foon, it starts with young friends on a fishing trip and a car accident that leaves none of them untouched. In real life, Hansen went on to become a Paralympic medallist and activist, bringing accessibility and spinal-cord research to the world’s attention with his Man In Motion tour. And his role with the Winter Games goes beyond serving as an inspiration for this Manitoba Theatre for Young People project; he is the honorary mayor of Vancouver’s Olympic Village.

For dance aficionados and newcomers alike, March promises to be a special month. There is Canada’s reigning queen of contemporary dance, Marie Chouinard, unveiling a brand new work on March 12 and 13, and a jam-packed edition of the Vancouver International Dance Festival (VIDF), which will see 12 Canadian and international companies taking to stages across the city from March 12 to 21.

The VIDF closes with two nights of performances presented by Vancouver’s Kickstart (Disability Arts & Culture). Configurations (March 20 and 21) features performers Bill Shannon, who uses his crutches as an extension of his body to display a remarkable array of movements, and contemporary dancer/choreographer Peggy Baker, one of the best movers of her generation. She will present a special solo piece — set on a tilted platform — at Kickstart’s March 21 gala.

Many of the Cultural Olympiad’s visual arts exhibitions continue through March, and several events return after post-Olympic breaks: The Miss Guides’ history-filled GOLD RUSH! walkabouts and World Tea Party, with interactive events scattered across the Downtown Eastside — in the Centre A gallery, local parks and community gathering places — will both run throughout the Paralympic Games.

Across town, in Robson Square, the lauded exhibition, Out from Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember, will make its Vancouver debut on March 7. The award-winning exhibition innovatively displays 13 everyday objects that tell moving stories about living in Canada with a disability.

There is no shortage of music on offer, from Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra to Israeli party band Balkan Beat Box and Hilario Duran’s Latin Jazz Big Band. On March 15, acclaimed violinist Adrian Anantawan will join the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (VSO). In addition to playing with the world’s best orchestras and conductors, this young virtuoso, who was born without a right hand, is a spokesperson for the Child Amputee Program of the War Amps. Anantawan will perform Gustav Holst’s challenging and thrilling The Planets Suite, among other works, with the VSO at Surrey’s Bell Performing Arts Centre.

All this and we haven’t even mentioned one of the world’s most artistically gifted circuses — Montreal’s Cirque Eloize — or theatre happenings Body & Soul and Hive 3, or even an amazing two-night tribute to one of the best bands of the 1930s, the Mississippi Sheiks. Check the Cultural Olympiad’s online listings for these and other must-experience events during the Paralympic Winter Games.

Sometimes a guy in a mid-life crisis is just that: a guy in a mid-life crisis. That’s true even if he’s in a wheelchair, according to quadriplegic actor James Sanders.

Sanders, who suffered a spinal cord injury in 1990, is part of the creative team behind Spine, a new play that explores our relationships to our bodies and to technology. It debuts March 10 as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. While it does deal with issues of disability, Sanders says they intentionally kept the themes universal.

“For Spine, we wanted a main character who was complex, who was trying to figure out his relationship with his wife, with himself. He’s making all these mistakes, and it’s not his disability that’s the problem. It’s his personality,” says Sanders, who is the founding artistic director of Realwheels, a Vancouver-based professional theatre whose mandate is to deepen an audience's understanding of the disability experience.

“On one level or another, we all make horrible mistakes. It’s what we do to try to make them right — that’s the human journey,” he adds. “That’s something everybody can relate to.”

The play, which will be performed in the new Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at Simon Fraser University, makes heavy use of new multimedia technologies, including three-dimensional projections and actor-influenced soundscapes, says Sanders. The actors will also wear Wii video-game controllers on their arms to operate their able-bodied virtual reality avatars.

In real life, many people with disabilities use video games to temporarily escape from their bodies, he says, which was an interesting and universal basis for the piece. The play is also trying to portray disability through a more realistic lens.

According to Sanders, the mainstream media frequently perpetuates what he calls “triumph over adversity” stories. “A character may be unable to walk, or unable to speak, but they’re really good at mathematics, or track and field, or something that’s superhuman so the community accepts them,” he says.

“They’re able to do things that normal people wouldn’t be able to do. That’s a horrible way to represent it,” he says. “People with disabilities just don’t have these superhuman qualities. We’re just regular people.”

The end result is a play that everyone, disabled and fully able, is able to think about, laugh with and appreciate, he says.

“It’s a full-on comedy,” he says. “That’s one of the brilliant things about [playwright] Kevin Kerr’s writing. He writes really deep, complex characters who have a lot of flaws, but he exposes that through comedy. We do have a dramatic story, but it’s humour that lets us into the hearts of the characters.”

Spine runs March 10 to 20 at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at Simon Fraser University Woodward’s, 149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver. Tickets are $25/students, $35/adults.

Tickets and more information on Spine

Less than a year after releasing its last album, English indie-rock band Gomez is heading back to the studio — except this time the group has a musical roadmap.

“Our last album started off in, for lack of a better description, 70s rock fashion,” says drummer Olly Peacock,on his way home to Brooklyn from a ski trip in Massachusetts. “It was five of us hanging out on a porch with acoustic guitars, sounding like Crosby, Stills and Nash.”

Although the band doesn’t usually have any hard-and-fast rules about how each album should sound, Peacock says this next one has started with a blueprint. Their main goal this time around is to “write 10, 11 songs that are just killer from start to finish.”

But before heading into the studio, Gomez is hitting the road for a mini-tour of the United States, with one Canadian stop at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

“A lot of the material we’ll be playing we haven’t done [in Vancouver] and some of our old stuff we’ve reconfigured. So, if you’re a fan, it should be new and if you’re not, it should be a great show.”

With a sound that’s part Pearl Jam and part Beck, with a pinch of Tom Waits and a dash of the Grateful Dead, Gomez has been making consistent records since its 1998 debut album Bring It On, which won the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize for the best album of the year.

Winning that award a mere two years after forming the band was surreal, says Peacock.

“We had the sense it was all one big joke or a happy accident. We were getting some money for pretending to be a band and then started selling records. If we had sold 15 or even 500, I would have thought this is amazing. And then it started snowballing.”

Since then, the band has released six records, sold music to television shows and commercials and played gigs across the globe.

“Our style just became five guys all over the place. I think that’s why our music has become so sentimental.”

“Gomez with Luke Doucet & The White Falcon” plays March 12 at 8:00 pm at the Orpheum, Smithe at Seymour Street, Vancouver. Tickets are $32.50 to $37.50.

Tickets and more information on “Gomez with Luke Doucet & The White Falcon”

“If I was king, I’d rule that everyone must have a band,” jokes Keri Latimer, lead vocalist for Juno Award-winning indie-folk band Nathan.

Hailing from a town known for its strong arts community, the Winnipeg-based four-piece band embodies a prairie mindset.

“Out on the Prairies, it’s flat and if you go out of the city you can see for miles and miles in all directions. It’s just a real sense of space and the sky is just massive — there just aren’t any boundaries,” Latimer says from her Winnipeg home. “In our music, we don’t want to fill up every part of the song with things; there’s just a sense of space and isolation.”

After leaving Winnipeg several years ago for Vancouver, Latimer says there was something about the city that drew her back.

“I met an incredible group of creative people who are into supporting you and joining you. It’s not very competitive,” says Latimer who, despite her dark lyrics, speaks positively about the band, the city, family life and heading on tour.  “We still like playing together and haven’t gotten sick of ourselves yet.”

The band, which Latimer founded with Shelly Marshall 10 years ago while listening to PJ Harvey and drinking wine in Marshall’s basement, now includes Latimer’s husband, bassist Devin Latimer; drummer Damon Mitchell; singer, accordion player, banjoist, guitarist Marshall; and singer, guitarist, and theremin player Latimer.

Conceding that the theremin, an electronic instrument that looks like a radio with two antennas and makes a tinny pitch, isn’t a typical instrument for a folk band, Latimer says they don’t really pay attention to conventional musical boundaries.

“We just draw from all kinds of genres. Our sound has elements from roots, pop, cabaret, klezmer. Shelly and I are both quilters, so I think we basically quilt our songs together with scraps of everything.”

Those scraps garnered the band a Juno Award in 2008 for roots and traditional album of the year, as well as several Western Canadian Music Awards, Canadian Folk Music Awards and a Prairie Music Award in 2004 for its debut album Stranger.

Nathan brings its introspective lyrics and twangy, indie-pop sounds to Vancouver for the 2010 Cultural Olympiad on March 12, the first day of the Paralympic Games.

“It’s great to be playing as part of the Olympics, especially the Paralympics, which to me seems amazing,” Latimer says. “I’m amazed by Olympians, but I’m amazed by people that have already other challenges to face. It’s really good to be a part of it.”

“Nathan and the Deep Dark Woods” play March 12 at 9:00 pm at Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver; Tickets are $12.

Tickets and more information on “Nathan and the Deep Dark Woods”

It’s engineered to withstand strong winds, but artist Reece Terris says he’s always relieved when the Western Front’s new (and second) false front survives a blustery Vancouver night. After all, when seen from the side, the giant architectural piece is leaning a bit.

According to Terris, it’s the two-dimensional nature of his new installation The Western Front Front – Another False Front — which went up in December 2009 and will remain in place until March 27 — that’s the most interesting part.

The piece, which he calls an “architectural intervention,” is a massive moss-green headpiece that sits above the building’s original 1900s-era plywood façade. It was built at one-and-a-half times scale, and was balanced out at a slight (and very secure) angle.

“During the gold rush, mining towns and industry towns sprung up from the Midwest to the West. What you had was a bunch of tents and shacks and boardwalks, fronted by these four-storey façades,” he says.

“It was a psychological cue that you were downtown, when you were really just walking down a muddy street with these tents behind facades . . .  They were trying to signify that you weren’t in the wilderness anymore.”

This concept of façade-ism, which is one that is getting a lot of attention these days in the contemporary art world, is one that Terris says he wanted to explore in this work. Below its distinctive green mouldings, a saloon-style boardwalk of recycled wooden planks surrounds the building.

The second false front is poking fun at, and drawing attention to, Vancouver’s notorious real estate market, he adds. In this city, housing values appear to be going nowhere but up.

“Vancouver’s real estate boom keeps going up and up and up,” he says. “You can go away for a year and there will be 10 new high-rises. The skyline has changed, and your memory has changed. There’s this weird play between what you remember and what exists.”

Terris’s mammoth façade, which weighs about 2,000 kilograms and is about 16 metres long, was commissioned by the Western Front last year, and was installed over one afternoon with a crane and some effort from eight burly helpers.

“It’s a little risky because it’s a heritage building, and putting it up there you never know what’s going to happen,” says the artist with a chuckle. “I’ve never really built anything to be lifted like that. But it all worked out.”

“Reece Terris: The Western Front – Another False Front” is up until March 27 at The Western Front Gallery, hours Tuesday to Saturday from 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm at 303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver. Admission is free.

More information on “Reece Terris: The Western Front – Another False Front”

When the Gordon Grdina Trio plays, the audience never really knows what it’s going to get.

There’s a chance there will be a long passage of gentle Arabic-flavoured guitar riffs, sourced directly from Grdina’s extensive background as a classical oud player. There’s also a good chance they’ll hear some drumming from Kenton Loewen that’s reminiscent of a teenager’s heavy punk-rock phase, or elaborate bass improvisations by Tommy Babin that would be at home in any prestigious international jazz club.

But the trio isn’t out to make a certain kind of music. In fact, that’s exactly why the eclectic group of musicians, whose backgrounds are as diverse as the music they play, gets along so well.

“It may have to do with us being part of the TV generation, but we don’t like everything being the same all the time. We like massive changes and big dynamics,” says Grdina from his Vancouver home.

“We want to take you on a journey where you’re listening to something that actually speaks to you. You can tell that the person behind it has something to say; they’re not just talking about how they need to make cash. They’re telling you how they view the world, what it means to live, what it means to make art.”

This strategy has worked well for the group so far as they’ve caught the ears of experimental jazz fans across Europe, touring there four times in the past two years. They were even asked to be the artists-in-residence at an anarchist writer’s festival in Slovenia. Twice.

“The biggest thing that we have that works with the three of us is that nothing is off limits,” says Grdina. “We’re hard to categorize stylistically because we’ll go from straight-up Arabic classical songs to full-on punk screaming. There’s this massive range that ends up happening because that’s what we’re into.”

In some ways, it’s the three musicians’ outlook on life that influences their genre-bending, pressing-forward style of music, according to drummer Kenton Loewen. “It comes from an intention to create a beautiful setting of art that has never been done before,” he explains. “From an improvising perspective, my intention is to play with a sense of fire and a sense of intensity.”

“This is about learning the rules and breaking them. It’s taking original forms and breaking them,” he adds. “It starts from a position of allowing yourself to make a mistake, to make yourself that vulnerable. It gives you the opportunity to really go for it and to not apologize for the outcome.”

For the group’s upcoming late-night February 24 gig on Granville Island (following virtuoso bassist AndréLachance) as part of the Cultural Olympiad and Winterruption Winter Jazz Festival, Grdina has a suggestion:

“Just let the music come to you,” he says. “Connect with whatever is going on, whether you like it or not, and be in a space that will allow the music to change your life. If you let yourself be a part of what‘s going on, your life can change in one concert.”

Gordon Grdina Trio plays February 24, 11:45 pm at Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street, Vancouver; (604) 872-5200. Admission is $10 for two shows, starting at 10:00 pm.

More information on “Club 2010: Gordon Grdina Trio”

With the Iron Curtain drawn tightly over Russia and Soviet-North America relations on rocky ground, the Moscow State Chamber Choir gave an unforgettable performance to a Vancouver audience.

“We still keep in our memories the tours in Canada and our concerts in Vancouver in 1978,” says the choir’s maestro, Vladimir Minin, from his home in Russia. “But that was last century!”

More than 30 years later, the acappella choir is staging its return to Vancouver as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and will perform classics such as Mozart, Handel and Verdi, as well as classics by American-Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.

“These are songs familiar to any audience in any county and everyone can enjoy them.”

“I think it’s the beauty of the melodies, the bright, open emotions peculiar to the Russian mentality and melodious beautiful language. The songs give people the idea of the richness of Russian soul,” says the maestro, who has led the choir since its inception nearly 40 years ago.

As Russia prepares to host the next Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Minin says the performance is a glimmer of what’s to come during 2014’s cultural celebrations.

“This will be a preview, because in Sochi the cultural program will be extensive and really varied.”

The last time the choir played on Canada’s Pacific coast, the Soviet Union was still united and Moscow was preparing to host the 1980 Olympic Games.

Along with the Grammy Award-winning Moscow Soloists and prima ballerina Uliana Lopatkina, Minin says he’s honoured to represent Russian culture to the world through the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. 

“I feel a sense of responsibility and pride. I want to be sure that after this concert the public has felt pleasure from meeting with this art, with this choir.”

“Moscow State Chamber Choir” plays February 24 at 7:30 pm at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church, 1022 Nelson Street, Vancouver; 1-800-TICKETS; Tickets are $20.

Tickets and more information on the “Moscow State Chamber Choir”