Vancouver | Sad Mag

Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber are the creative brains behind Pendula, an interactive art installation that uses the movement of swings to create music and projections, which premiered at Vancouver’s 2015 Jazz Festival. Nancy, the swing set builder, is a VJ, filmmaker and new media artist. Kiran, the music programmer, is a composer and performer whose artistic interests lay at the intersection of technology and music. Below, Sad Mag’s Shannon Tien talks to the duo about agency in art, teamwork, and the community value of swing sets.

Pendula2 — Still from Pendula by Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber

Shannon Tien: Tell me about Pendula.

Nancy Lee: Pendula is a multimedia, audio-visual, interactive installation. We use both hardware and software to take the swinging motion and turn them into audio or visual parameters, which means their effects that can be seen and heard during our installation. Using swing sets.

ST: How did this idea come together? What was the inspiration behind it?

NL: I started building outdoor swing sets as a public interactive installation piece. And then I did an event where I installed 8 swing sets indoors during an electronic music night that I organized. And there I met Kiran for the first time–Kiran was there swinging on the swings. And at that time she thought, “Hey, maybe we could make this swing into an interactive piece.” I’d also had projections installed. At that time it wasn’t an interactive piece, I just had projections over the swing area.

And then we later met again at New Forms festival working as production assistant volunteers. And that’s when we had time to sit down and talk about the project and our vision for it. The swing set I had at the event wasn’t my full vision that I had for it in my mind. I wanted the projections to reflect the social interactions that happened within the swinging area.

Kiran Bhumber: Having seen the swings at Nancy’s party, not interactive, I was very inspired by the idea of making the visuals interactive and also adding audio elements [and a] musical performance element, which was amalgamated into the installation at Jazz Fest. We had a musical performance at the top of every hour where I played clarinet and we had a cellist and I programmed the swings to be an actual instrument and act as an effects pedal. We had the swings changing the sounds of these acoustic instruments.

Pendula4 — Still from Pendula by Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber

ST: What was the timeline for this project to come to total fruition?

NL: About 8 months on and off.

ST: Can you tell me about the experience of performing it at Jazz Fest? Was anyone allowed to go in and swing?

NL: Yeah, after every performance, we invited people to come use the swing sets. And it was interesting, during the performance, because I’m playing the swings, it was interesting to see people’s facial expressions, how they reacted to the piece. You could see their “aha!” moments when they figured out what the swings were actually doing. I enjoyed seeing that moment.

ST: And how did you start working with swings? I’m just wondering because there used to be a public installation by my bus stop in Montreal where swings played different musical tones.

NL: Oh yeah I’ve heard of that! I started working with swings because I like climbing trees and I like building things out doors. Swings are kind of an easy thing to build. You just need rope. And I was dumpster diving and salvaging construction wood that I would use for swing seats. It costs very little to build a swing and the kind of return you get for the community or user is so much greater than the financial cost of building it. It is a really great investment for the community to build swing sets. You generate so much joy from it.

Usually we’re used to art installations being behind glass or a “do not touch area”. There’s a very definitive boundary between the observer and the art piece. And with this swing set, people do come up to us and ask, “Are we allowed to touch it?” But when people can play on the swing set they kind of become the piece. And some of the people who were using the swing sets, they kind of understood that, you know, “I’m becoming a part of the installation.”

KB: And also the addition of individuals on each swing. The piece is going to be different depending how many people are on the swings. So, the social adaptation and amalgamation of their swinging motion to create more aspects of the piece.

NL: We have three swing sets, so they’re kind of a three-piece ensemble. And [the people] all play the swings in a different way so the collective audio-visual output is different every single time.

ST: Did anybody get really into it at Jazz Fest?

NL: I think at the Jazz Fest, because of the setting, people were into figuring out the swings. People tested out different things. I think with public art installations, people are still pretty shy. People were more into figuring out how it worked than playing it as an instrument.

Pendula1 — Still from Pendula by Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber

ST: Is this the first time you’ve set this piece up?

NL: It’s the first time that we’ve done the three swing sets with the audio and visual.

KB: It’s been challenging incorporating the audio into a space that will allow it. So there’s no sound bleed. That’s an issue we had with Jazz Fest as well. The previous installs have been just visual because of that.

ST: How did you overcome that challenge at Jazz Fest?

KB: We got bigger speakers.
ST: Have you two collaborated before?

NL: This is our first collaboration together, but this is just the beginning of something. We plan to do more interactive musical pieces and performance pieces as well. We have so many ideas in our head that we would definitely like to explore in the future.

ST: Do you have any upcoming events?

KB: I just had my upcoming event today actually. I curated a show for Jazz Fest that was all based on interactive works. So technology and music. But at this moment Nancy and I are going to Kamploops in a couple days to start working on a new project. It’s kind of more vague now. We’re just going to check out the site.

NL: It’ll also be interactive, but more on the exhibition side of things, rather than a performance.

Watch: Pendula by Nancy Lee and Kiran Bumber

Pendula was on exhibition in Vancouver June 20 and 21st as a part of the Vancouver Jazz Festival. Visit www.swingwithpendula.com for further information on the Pendula Exhibit, and www.coastaljazz.ca for more information on the festival.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Thank you to Jelissa at Classics Agency.

“It’s time for men to step up and play a bigger game,” says Dwayne Klassen from centre stage at the Imperial last weekend. “We must own our authentic masculine power and be Champions to women, heroes to children and brothers to each other.”

In all honesty, I had no idea what to expect from Vancouver’s BIL Conference, an alternative and more accessible spin-off of the increasingly popular TED events. Klassen’s presentation on “Man Champions and Woman Heroes,” was just one of more than 60 to grace the stage at Vancouver’s second ever BIL Conference, which took place March 21 – 22. In under two hours, I watched presentations by a scientist, an entrepreneur, a politician and even an ex-monk. The best part? As a by-donation event, attending BIL was completely affordable.

“Unlike TED, our event is open to the public, widely accessible and fully participant driven. When participants arrive at the venue, they help with the creation of the event from setting up chairs to organizing the day’s schedule and everything in between,” says Michael Cummings, co-founder of BIL. “Everyone at the event actively shapes its outcome. It’s about building community and taking ownership of the event as their own.” Founded in 2007, this “unconference” has been hosted across the globe, in countries as far as Afghanistan, India, England, France, and Tunisia.

The schedule for BIL was as flexible as the admission price; speakers could sign up to participate as late as the day itself. In theory, says Cummings, anyone “knowledgeable or incredibly passionate about a certain topic” could opt to speak. Not that this diminishes the quality of the line-up; Luke Nosek (Founder of Paypal), George Whitesides (CEO of Virgin Galactic) and Blake Mycoskie (TOMS Shoes) are just three former speakers to have participated in a BIL conference. Highlights from this year’s conference include Beauty Night Founder and Executive Director Caroline MacGillivray on building a community around a cause; Green Party candidate Lynne Quarmby on science and activism; and General Fusion Founder Michael Delage on fusion energy.

Emily Molnar, artistic director of Ballet BC, chats with us about the company’s upcoming triple-bill program, Trace. This evening of works includes the Canadian premiere of William Forsythe’s workwithinwork, a world premiere by Walter Matteini, and the return of audience favourite Petite Cérémonie by Medhi Walerski. Trace plays at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from March 26 to 28.

SAD Mag: How does the term “Trace” relate to each of the three pieces?

Emily Molnar: Every time I’m given the beautiful problem of solving how to put three very distinct pieces together on a program and give them a title, I try to find an overarching theme. Most of the time the works that are on a program are related in the sense that they come from very distinct choreographers in the world of contemporary ballet, but they are very unique pieces in that they don’t look the same—they’re not necessarily working with the same theme. Sometimes our full-length evenings do have a thematic concept, but in most cases I try to keep it very diverse.

Trace came up in the sense that there are many different lineages, many different choreographers who have worked with various companies. On this evening there is an enormous amount of lineage between the history of dance, the future of dance, the styles of dance within contemporary ballet—so I thought of the idea of tracing or making a trace of these different time periods.

SM: We know world-renowned choreographer William Forsythe has a special place in your heart from your own time as a performer. What do you hope your dancers will learn from working with him on his piece for Trace?

EM: I think the most important thing is probably the idea of individuality, of courage, of daringness, of taking the classical idiom and really pushing the boundaries and limits of how one interprets and investigates that. Bill’s work—it’s such a sophisticated score—you feel like you’re getting smarter and developing each moment you dance his work. I love watching the dancers take more and more risks and accomplishments through each run-through and each day. The work is just so rich, and there’s so much attachment to musicality and the use of space. It’s just a really beautiful score to challenge the intelligence of an artist.

SM: The arts climate is difficult in B.C.; funding is low despite a thriving local scene. That said, Ballet BC has overcome some substantial financial hardships. How do you keep going?

EM: I think we keep our eye very closely geared toward the making of the art and the creation of an experience for our audience. Through that we try to bring people in who believe in what we do and try not to make the lack of money a means for lowering our standards. We try to do something with everything that we have and to make the most of it. That doesn’t mean we don’t wish we had more, but we’re also very aware that there are many artists in this country. Another way we deal with it is that we make sure that we speak about what it means to be an artist and to be a company that is making art—to make sure that we are educating our local and our national community about dance. We do this by supporting a number of different choreographers and by creating a global conversation about the making of dance and why dance is important.

SM: What does dance mean to you?

EM: It’s an art form that requires every part of you as a human being; it requires your physical body, your emotional body, and your spiritual sensibility. It really calls all of that into action. The moment you are dancing, you cannot lie. When you dance, everything about you is exposed, but there is something very beautiful about that because it challenges you to the deepest part of your being to put all of those things into alignment and to speak with them. As an art form, as a form of expression, it is so fully encompassing that I feel it really is one of the most beautiful journeys that we can make as human beings.

SM: How do you make dance accessible for an audience?

EM: We talk about the fact that all of us are dancers, even if it’s in our living room with a piece of music while we’re doing your dishes or brushing our teeth. It is an innate form for us as human beings. It is a form of expression that we can all touch on. What a lot of people don’t know is that a great dancer is like a great athlete and a great artist all put into one—like a painter and a soccer player. And it’s those two worlds that come together that I think makes dance so appealing. You see these physical impossibilities taking place, but then you have this form of expression, you have emotions being described and a narrative about what it means to be alive inside of the body.

SM: If you had to describe what it’s like to be a dancer, what would you say?

EM: It’s the hardest thing you could do and the most wonderful thing you could do. The life of a dancer is one that requires an enormous amount of dedication and commitment, and for that alone it’s a wonderful career. I’ve traveled the world, I’ve learned about the world by doing it. It’s not a career that many people get to do, so it’s a precious and very special thing to be able to say that you are a dancer.

SM: You were nominated as a YWCA Woman of Distinction. What does it mean for you to be a female leader in the arts?

EM: It’s something I take very seriously and try to honour. I feel very grateful for the nomination. There are many wonderful women of distinction around me who have been nominated as well, so I feel a bit out of place. I don’t see myself belonging to that group, but I take it with a huge amount of gratitude and gratefulness. I think that leadership is a very important thing for us to look at…for females as well as for males.

One of the things that interests me most in this world is human potential, and I just happen to be using dance as a vehicle to discuss that. But I think that leadership—people feeling empowered to speak and to be who they are—is the most beautiful thing, and the thing that we need to give a lot of attention to in this world. If I can be in a position of leadership where I get to create an environment that empowers people to excel and be the most that they can be, then that is a huge gift.

This interview has been edited and condensed.
Showtimes and ticket information available on Ballet BC’s website.

I’m painfully on time for everything, so I arrive at Yuk Yuks for Yo! Vancity Laughs Vol.9 with a friend at 7pm sharp. Which is great, except it turns out that it doesn’t actually start until 8pm. So we grab a seat and chat as we watch the night’s comics filter in.

Two of the comics, who turn out to be the show’s MCs (and who will later transform into their glib hip hop alter egos, Game Genies, complete with literal money bags, a Tupac mask, and a comically large watch that I could have used earlier…) come over and introduce themselves.

Gracious and welcoming, they joke that they want to say hello because, in a minute, we’re going to think they’re “really ignorant.”

And in a minute the show does start, but they don’t start it – because no proper hip hop show starts without a hype man. As I learn the minute the show starts. Then, once we’re all hyped up, Game Genies take the stage.

“If you’re here tonight this means you must love comedy, and you must love hip hop,” they exclaim. “Who is your all time favourite hip hop artist?”

With their pick of people who look like they hail from Kitsilano, they choose a young woman who doesn’t manage to dart her eyes away fast enough.

“I like musicals?” She says, in the kind of adorable upspeak that gets the other guy the job.

But the hosts are charming and adept at loosening up a crowd, and the diverse pool of talented comics doesn’t hurt, either: Devon Alexander, Kwasi Thomas, Jonny Paul (who is never more charming than in those improvisational moments brought on by “helpful” audience members), Brendan Bourque, and headliner, Patrick Maliha (who does one dope urban impression that is as natural as me typing dope – but it was hilarious).

By the end, the audience is as comfortable screaming “How old school iz you” as they are asking if that loaf of bread is gluten free. The only thing the show was wrong about is that you have to love hip hop to have a great time – you don’t. You just have to love comedy and let yourself get swept up in the hype.

For information about upcoming shows, visit: yukyuks.com

Mandy-Lyn photo http://www.mandy-lyn.com/sons-and-daughters — Mandy-Lyn photo

Presented by Visual College of Art and Design (VCAD) fashion marketing students, Tara Jean McTavish, Stephanie Martin, Eugenia To, and Jaspreet Johal–Showcasing Sons + Daughters Eyewear–CITY KIDS will be held at Make Studios on Saturday, October 25, from 12-6PM. Make will be transformed into a mini, child-friendly NYC (cotton-candy included). Food and drinks will be available, as well as entertainment from a live Lady Liberty statue. The students have created installations that will probably blow your mind, so we naturally wanted to chat with their creative team about their process.

Who is involved in the project?

Tara Jean McTavish: The four of us [Tara Jean McTavish, Stephanie Martin, Eugenia To, and Jaspreet Johal], Natasha Campbell, Calvin Yu and Shiva Shabani, the Sons + Daughters team, Kari Gundersen, Fentimans, VCAD, Arts Umbrella, PetitePuf, and Parallel 49.

What can people expect to see when they come to Make?

TJM: A big city for kids, which they can play in and they can engage with.

Eugenia To: Lots of interactions, fun times, activities for both parents and kids, so it’s really a fun family event.

How did the idea for CITY KIDS come about?

TJM: It’s a project for our Fashion Promotion class. Stephanie had the idea, she researched that September was a month for kids’ and it was a month to recognize this and donate money. So she was researching charities that we could donate to, and make a kid-based event.

Can you describe the process of creating the event?

TJM: First we started coming up with ideas of how we could make it work, and then we started thinking of companies we could involve with this, specifically companies that work with kids. Natasha [Campbell] came up with the idea that we could work with Sons + Daughters Eyewear (http://wearesonsanddaughters.com/), then a person in our class had the idea that we could do a gallery type setting. We then started thinking about the clientele that Sons + Daughters is based around, and that New York and kind of a city-kid event would be more suiting towards their target customer.

Which sections of NYC did you choose to focus on? And why did you choose them?

TJM: The first one you will see when you walk in is Time Square, and we also have Brooklyn, which has a graffiti wall that kids get to express their creativity and paint on it in any way that they want. Then next to that we will have Central Park, which is based off of the John Lennon memorial that is painted in chalk paint, so kids can actually be on the ground in the “grass” surrounding, and they can play with chalk on the memorial. Then it is Soho, that will have steps up to it, kind of an art space that is full of bricks, with a door that opens to a mural that kids can take photos in front of. This will also have a “tickle trunk”, provided by Arts Umbrella, so they can wear different things for the pictures. Then there is the Upper East Side, which has more of a Gossip Girl feel, with dress up items for both boys and girls. And lastly, there is going to be a live statue of the Statue of Liberty to engage with the kids and a live video playing clips of Sons + Daughters and some NYC imagery. Oh and free balloons for the kids!

Have you run into ay challenges?

TJM: Well the installations are just very large, so making them takes a very long time, it’s just time consuming and there is a lot of space that is needed. So getting the boxes, making sure that everything is where it should be, and getting everything done on time. Its more waiting for the paint to dry that takes a long time, there’s like eighteen layers of paint on these things to be honest.

Lastly, what was the best thing about putting together CITY KIDS?

ET: I think just experiencing this as a group, doing team work and just planning everything and coming together with ideas. Painting together, gathering at TJ’s place, and just relaxing but also working hard together.

TJM: Yeah, nice team bonding! We all work well together. I’m also just excited for the creativity, I love arts and crafts, so it’s just fun to be making it on a grand scale. People actually will get to look at it and enjoy it! Also, I love kids so it’s nice that we get to work with them one on one during the event. I also love Sons + Daughters, I think their eyewear is just so gorgeous. I want my kids wearing it.

ET: And on the other side, were making connections. Obviously we wouldn’t have any reasons to reach out to these people if it wasn’t for this project.

All in all, a mini NYC sounds like a nice Saturday afternoon to us. If you’re interested in a quick vacation this weekend, head down to Make this weekend, details can be found on the event page here.

Interview by Cianda Bourrel

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Order before December 18, and a copy of issue #5 will be delivered to the gift recipient in time for Christmas. Meanwhile, generous Vancouverites that place an order before December 18 will also earn an entry into a draw for a $100 gift certificate to Burcu’s Angels vintage clothing store. Visions of vintage furs and sequins dance in our heads!

To sign up for yourself or a friend, visit our subscription page. If you’re ordering for a friend, submit the recipient’s address as the shipping address.

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Sad Mag celebrates one year of publishing magic on Saturday, October 9 with SAD MAG LIVE!

We’re bringing the magazine to life on stage, spotlighting some of Vancouver’s most innovative young artists, organizers and performers.

Hosted by CBC Radio 3‘s Lana Gay, SAD MAG LIVE features live, on-stage interviews with:

CAMERON REED (Director, Music Waste)
GRAEME BERGLUND (Founder and Creative Director, The Cheaper Show)
LIZZY KARP (Co-Founder, Rain City Chronicles)
DAVE DEVEAU (Managing Director, Zee Zee Theatre)

With performances by:

BARBARA ADLER (Accordion, stories, poems)
JASPER SLOAN YIP (Singer-songwriter)
SAMMY CHIEN (With guests—New media artist)
ISOLDE N. BARRON (Drag sensation)

This event is a fundraiser benefiting the Sad Mag Writers & Artists Fund. Tickets are $18 and can be purchased from www.thecultch.com or at the box office. The cost of your ticket includes a copy of Sad Mag issue 5.

SAD MAG LIVE is generously sponsored by The Cultch and CBC Radio 3.

Sad Mag profiles local trailblazers in art and culture at Granville Magazine’s Secret City blog twice per month. Read the latest post about Malcolm Levy, head curator of the New Forms Festival.

“It allows people to think about participating in the art,” says Levy of the New Forms Festival. “It allows people to think about creating their own little piece for that moment in time.”

Tag Archives: Vancouver

Interview // Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber

Who Needs Ted When There’s Bil?

Interview with Ballet bc’s Emily Molnar

Review / Yo! Vancity Laughs Vol. 9

City Kids

Something good to read!

Sad Mag Live

Vancouver Culture Informs New Forms Festival