Ep. 48 - Seeing Double (A Wake of Vultures)
Gabrielle Martin chats with Nancy Tam, Daniel O’Shea, Conor Wylie of A Wake of Vultures. They are presenting two shows at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival: K Body and Mind and Walking at Night by Myself. Both will be at the Scotiabank Dance Centre as a double feature on February 1 and 2. Show Notes Gabrielle, Nancy, Daniel and Conor discuss: What is the glue that keeps the company moving together and working? Can that be explained with astrology? How do you create devised work and is it similar or different from convention? How do you play around with various layers of performance? What is your shared interest in detachment and “trippiness”? What rituals does your rehearsal practice have? What’s the role and benefits of shorthand? What makes these two works “sister pieces” to be presented together? What is the place of futurism and retro in your work? How did form affect the work and how did video impact the performance? About A Wake of Vultures Formed in 2013, A Wake of Vultures (WOV) is a project-based interdisciplinary performance company. WOV is a research, development, and producing vehicle for the works of its three members: Nancy Tam (music, sound design, theatre), Daniel O’Shea (film, theatre), and Conor Wylie (theatre). Switching between individual and collective project leadership, we connect with local, national, and international communities through collaboration and touring. We began collaborating and bonding as friends over our shared fascination in social rituals, science fiction, anime, and questions of reality and perception. We follow our idiosyncratic curiosities, blending low-brow inspirations with high-concept ideas, creating bizarre convergences that propose hybrid visions of the future. Our work is marked by formal detachment, ritual, unstable perspectives, and a blend of retro and new technologies, taking diverse forms like audio walks, performative installations, and plays. WOV has been presented in Canada, the US, Germany, and Hong Kong. Individually, we are freelance artists thriving inside Vancouver’s independent performance scene through fruitful and ongoing collaborations with Fight with a Stick, Theatre Replacement, Music on Main, Plastic Orchid Factory, MACHiNENOiSY, Radix Theatre, Justine Chambers, Rob Kitsos, Playwrights Theatre Centre, rice&beans theatre, Remy Siu, and many others. Each collaboration provides us with new methodologies, skills, and vocabularies to bring back to A Wake of Vultures. In many ways, we three are hybrid people: we practice a variety of artistic disciplines; we come from a mix of settler backgrounds (Europe + Asia); we have differing relationships to gender and queerness. These notions of identity inform our work, but don’t define it. We prefer to live in the margins. It is natural to us that many of our collaborators come from marginalized or underrepresented communities, with regards to race, queerness, gender, and disability; we value collaborations with artists who are critical, interdisciplinary, and intercultural in their mindsets. WOV is an ongoing, evolving collaboration bonded by an intense friendship: we eat together, dance together, work together. Conor Wylie Conor Wylie is a performer, writer, and director creating experimental theatre. He lives and works in Vancouver, BC, located on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) nations. Conor regularly collaborates with Theatre Replacement, where he is an artistic associate, as well as with many members of Vancouver’s esteemed Progress Lab consortium. In recent years, science-fiction and videogame aesthetics have figured prominently in his works. He co-wrote and performed Visitors from Far Away to the State Machine with Hong Kong Exile, about two aliens on an erotic honeymoon to Earth, performed live on webcams and featuring animations inspired by several generations of videogame graphics. He also collaborated on Theatre Replacement’s MINE, a cinematic performance investigating mythical, pop-culture, and personal stories of mothers and sons, performed in the sandbox videogame Minecraft. His works have played across Canada at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, The Cultch, Music on Main, Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), Uno Festival (Victoria), Summerworks (Toronto), and the Magnetic North Theatre Festival (Yukon), and toured around Iceland, the UK, and Hong Kong. In 2017, he was selected for the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Theatre Artist by Marcus Youssef. In 2019, he was chosen as the Siminovitch Prize Protégé by his dear mentors James Long and Maiko Yamamoto. In 2022, he was named Best Director of a Canadian Feature by the Vancouver Asian Film Festival for his work on K BODY AND MIND. Daniel O’Shea Daniel O’Shea makes theatre, designs projections, and creates films, using technology and design as a keystone to support narrative and deepen dramaturgy. In his own works PKD Workshow (2013) and Are we not drawn onward to new era (2018), Daniel employs a low-fi DYI aesthetic, exposing the guts of the performance machinery in parallel to the convoluting the ideas spectating. In 2020 he completed his first feature length film collaboration centred around pre-extradition bill Hong Kong. His work focuses on states of presence, unbalancing audienceship and novel constructions of light through design and new media. Daniel’s artistic research has explored the ephemeral nature of a ‘self’, interruptions of technology on human processes, and the results cognitive dissonance. Daniel’s work has been seen in Canada and internationally. Daniel is engaged with Vancouver’s thriving contemporary performance scene and often engages in crossover with indie film and the digital arts. Nancy Tam Nancy is a sound artist who works and lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work fuses sound and performance as primary mediums for the collaborative devising of interdisciplinary performances. Nancy is a founding member of the interdisciplinary performance collective A Wake of Vultures as well as the Toronto-based Toy Piano Composers collective. As a performance maker, Nancy works closely with Fight With A Stick performance company, having devised and collaborated on the Critic’s Choice Award winning show Revolutions in 2017. Her compositions, performances, and collaborations have toured in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, the U.S. and throughout Canada. An excerpt of her latest multi-media composition Walking at Night by Myself will be touring to Hong Kong in April 2019. Land Acknowledgement This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver. It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself. Show Transcript 00:01 Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights old school magic, sci-fi prayers, hybridity, and more. 00:18 I'm speaking with Dan, Connor, and Nancy, the artists behind Seeing Double, which is being presented at the Push Festival, February 1st and 2nd, 2025. Seeing Double plays tribute to spooky late night double features with two performances that push pulpy cinematic genres into uncharted conceptual territories. 00:38 Stripping the psychological horror genre down to its bare bones, walking at night by myself undermines the reliability of perception in an audiovisual blitz of surround sound and vivid optical illusion. 00:51 K-Body and Mind is a cyberpunk odyssey channeled through a multimedia experience that reflects on tech-assisted immortality. Nancy Tam experiments with form and practices, dramaturgy to create immersive sonic designs and environmental performances for onstage and on-screen media. 01:09 Her research triangulates between sound, space, and body to examine the uncanny valley of haptics. She was a featured artist at Prague Quadrennial, 2023 for the Canadian Exhibition. Daniel O'Shea makes theater, designs projections, and creates films using technology and design as a keystone to support narrative and deepen dramaturgy. 01:32 Daniel employs a low-fi DIY aesthetic exposing the guts of the performance machinery in parallel to convoluting the idea of spectating. Connor Wiley performs, writes, and directs experimental plays, films, and video games, employing devised and collaborative processes to create fresh and unusual worlds. 01:50 He uses the science fiction genre to explore cultural and societal stories of grief, hope, and transformation. Here is my conversation with Dan, Connor, and Nancy. I just heard that this is the first time you've been in the same room in months. 02:07 It's true. We've just been kind of off in our own little avenues and projects, so getting back together is like a lot of energy, a lot of catching up, a lot of silliness that's working its way out. This is how vultures, the creatures are, right? 02:30 Like they fly off their solo and then they flock when there's something to eat. We're here for the ride of the reunion, the reunion special. Back together at last, now to Dan and Connor. I will just acknowledge that we are all in this conversation on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh. 02:58 I'm a settler here