arts and culture
Vancouver sanctions underground arts events
Originally published on TheThunderbird.ca on March 27, 2013
They tuck themselves away in warehouses and back alleys. They spring up in art galleries late at night. Sometimes they can even be found in the back of a retail store.
They’re Vancouver artists desperate to find affordable, intimate places to present their work. Vancouver has the highest number of artists per capita in Canada. But these performers say there aren’t enough suitable spaces to showcase their talents.
The China Cloud is an underground arts venue in East Vancouver.
The problem has been exacerbated by the closure of the Waldorf in January and the eviction notice of W2 in the Woodward’s building in December. Both venues earned a reputation as cheap spaces that readily accommodated arts groups.
Some artists have taken matters in their own hands and created their own performances spaces tucked away in the city’s nooks and crannies, flouting local bylaws. According to the City of Vancouver, there are 250 to 500 such illicit events per year.
But the people running makeshift venues now have a way to go legit. Vancouver city council approved a pilot program March 12 that will allow cultural events in spaces like warehouses, art galleries and stores.
Bringing underground arts venues into the fold
The city hopes the program will resolve the need for more performance spaces and possibly kindle an outburst of creative activity.
“It has long been recognized that it is difficult to find places for live performance in Vancouver,” says Coun. Heather Deal. “As a result, many events happen ‘underground’ and therefore are in constant threat of being shut down due to complaints.”
But although many artists applaud the new effort from the city, they say that it is only a baby step. They’re still hobbled by two other significant barriers.
The city’s pilot program for small-venue licensing is an experiment that will run for up to two years.
The program is trying to encourage people who run the city’s off-grid spaces — quirky operations with names like the Dental Lab, 1067, China Cloud or the Emergency Room, frequently on the city’s east side – to do two things. First, apply for a licence and, secondly, abide by the city’s new, modified bylaws. During that time, performance organizers will have access to a much cheaper and more simplified licensing system.
Event organizers can now submit a single application for a licence for as little as $25. In the past, they had to apply separately to the fire, engineering, and police departments and spend nearly $1,000 in the process.
They’ll still have to comply with some safety requirements, but a list that’s lower than the one for the Orpheum or the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
City staff will collect information, while doing random checks at the venues, to evaluate the program.
City’s ‘baby steps’ fall short of demand
Colin Cowan runs the China Cloud, an underground arts venue in east Vancouver.
One of the spaces that will be trying to work with the new rules is China Cloud. The artist-run space is currently licensed as artist studios and an art gallery. On weekends, though, it hosts intimate performances by some of Vancouver’s and Canada’s best musicians. Its operators try to keep the location quiet.
Originally a cockroach-infested dive, the China Cloud has blossomed. The walls showcase hand-carved, wood-based art. Kitschy decorations adorn the tables. Comfortable couches surround the stage. The main room has a warm, welcoming feel to it.
The self-professed “Mr. Mother Goose” of the China Cloud is Colin Cowan.
Smiling readily under a mop of thinning red hair, Cowan sees the change as “a good start.” But like many artists who spoke at the council meeting, he was disappointed by the pilot program’s ceiling of two events a month.
“It’s nice to have a baby step,” he says, “but you want to make sure it’s at least a worthwhile baby step.”
City staff recommended a cap of two events a month per location so they could cope with the influx of applications. The venues will need to have concrete flooring and be at street level.
Like other underground venues, Cowan is hesitant to give out too much information about the China Cloud for fear of being shut down. The space doesn’t have a website or a Facebook page. Events are rarely advertised. People hear about shows by word of mouth.
Despite his reservations, Cowan is planning to apply for a licence for his two bigger monthly events.
But that still leaves another six unlicensed shows a month — one of the difficulties the new city program hasn’t addressed. Those shows will just stay under the radar, as they always have been. Many of them barely meet the minimum 25-person threshold that requires a licence in the first place.
Cowan doesn’t want to skirt the law. He’d like to see the program expand to eight events a month so that he could host musicians and other art without the constant fear of getting shut down.
“What would change is that we could legitimately put on shows and get licensing,” he says. “We could confidently run a business the way we want.”
The city estimates that it will receive up to 336 applications a year. If its assessment that there are up to 500 such events annually is correct, that leaves a shortfall of almost 14 events a month that will remain underground.
The two-events-a-month limit happens to coincide with the rules around another major issue in the underground arts scene: liquor.
Mixing arts, alcohol and business
Andrew Volk (bottom left) is working on a new underground arts space in Vancouver.
The reason the city limited events to two, in part, is that it’s only possible for event organizers to get two temporary “special-occasion” liquor licences a month. The B.C. liquor control control and licensing branch rarely distributes “liquor primary” licences, which allow venues to operate more like a club.
Although selling alcohol isn’t the primary objective of these underground venues, many see liquor and the arts as a natural combination.
Patrons get to have a drink. Proceeds from the bar help subsidize the cost of hosting a show.
City officials recognize this. In the policy report they presented to council, they warned that events with alcohol can pose safety risks. But they recognized that “alcohol is also an integral part of many arts events” and that “audiences at arts and culture performances do not typically have problems with binge drinking or troublemaking.”
But it still kept the limit to two.
The bigger-picture restrictions around liquor-primary licences are what Andrew Volk believes is keeping Vancouver from its potential as a creative city.
An energetic guy with pale skin and crystal blue eyes, Volk has been running unlicensed parties and events for over a decade. He is working on a new space in east Vancouver. It will house artist studios, a printing press for a monthly arts and culture magazine, a recording studio, and an open room with a stage. So far, he has invested almost $10,000 into the space.
Volk looks to Berlin, where he lived for six months, as a model for innovation. “In Berlin, you can have the hippest shit going on,” he says. “You’ve got kids owning clubs and then making huge amazing things.”
For Volk, the regulations, costs and red tape associated with primary liquor licenses means that only well-established, middle-of-the-road businesses can pursue them. “It means that nobody young and cool is going to open anything,” he says.
Supporting the arts or stifling creativity
Vancouver’s underground arts scene has been around for a long time. While some artists are knowingly defying the rules, many more may not even be aware of them in the first place.
Jess Hill is a singer-songwriter who recently performed at a haberdashery in Yaletown.
Jess Hill is one such artist. A local singer-songwriter, Hill had no idea she needed a licence for her last event. For the release party for her latest CD, she packed just over 70 people in her living room in east Vancouver. Hill has also performed in art galleries, tattoo shops, and grocery stores. Recently, she even performed in a haberdashery in Yaletown.
For Hill, performing in her home was as much about creating a memorable performance as it was convenient and cost-effective. “When you make an experience that’s more sharable and that people feel more connected to,” she says, “then the word of mouth builds for the next thing.”
Events in residential areas are not included in the city’s new licensing program. But events like house concerts have long been popular across Canada. Home Routes is a Winnipeg-based organization that organizes cross-country house concert tours. Old Crow in North Vancouver hosts monthly home-based events. And artists often use house concerts as fodder for fundraising their next album with IndieGoGo.
When Hill found out about the new licensing program, her first thought was concern that it might stifle the city’s creativity. “There’s such a burgeoning vibrancy that’s already here and it could go one way or the other,” she says.
“I feel like we’re at that fork in the road where it could continue to thrive and grow or it could get killed by the paper trail.”
Monte Jones
Artists “pushed out” of building meant to provide a permanent home
Originally published in The Thunderbird October 19, 2012
Artists say they’re being squeezed out of a building that was created specially to provide affordable live-work space for artists.
The Artist Resource Centre is one of few affordable live-work building for artists in Vancouver.
That’s something they say demonstrates a flaw in early efforts to create low-cost housing and work space for the city’s arts community — and that they hope won’t happen again.
Photographer Wendy D lived in the Artist Resource Centre building in Vancouver’s port-area industrial zone for 10 years. Last year, she was forced out because of rising rent, as well as what looked like management’s lack of concern for people trying to run art businesses. In her case, the landlord didn’t fix a broken elevator for weeks — a serious problem for someone in a seventh-floor unit who sells her art by having clients visit her studio.
She said most of the original group that moved into the 80-unit building in the late ’90s — attracted to one of the few places that allowed artists to both live and do work that is often loud or semi-industrial — left in the last five years as rents began to increase more than in the past.
“They didn’t care about artists any more,” she said, “it was all about the money.”
That’s a disturbing end to what was a laudable effort from the city to find space for artists as they were forced out of downtown warehouses in the post-Expo downtown boom, as city inspectors cracked down on fire and safety hazards in then-derelict buildings.
The ARC is zoned industrial and as a result does not fall under the purview of the B.C. Residential Tenancy Branch, which restricts rent increases for units that are used for residential purposes only.
Vancouver council granted special zoning for the ARC in 1993, as a way to create new affordable artist live-work spaces. The city continues to struggle with that issue.
In June, the city announced it would lease out 26,000 square feet of new creative space on two city-owned properties. The new studios will be rented out at $7.5 to $15 per square foot, but are only intended for work.
Those spaces will likely be managed by a non-profit, which should forestall drastic rent increases. But, says Vision Vancouver Coun. Heather Deal, that doesn’t give the city any power to dictate what happens in the earlier generation of private buildings that got zoning dispensations.
“There are a few different models of live-work and there are limits to how much the city can impose price controls in privately owned buildings,” said Deal. “We have made this a high priority so are working to use all of the limited tools available to us as a municipal government.”
The city tools include operating its own live-work studios, using community amenity contributions from developers to generate new spaces, and using zoning or taxation to encourage the construction of artist spaces.
The ARC, at Commercial Drive and Powell Street, is one the few live-work buildings in Vancouver that allows industrial activity like welding and woodworking, as well as amplified music and dance. It is one of five live-work buildings owned and operated by Reliance Holdings Ltd., which owns and manages a wide variety of commercial and residential properties in the city.
Roy Mackey, a current resident and former manager of the ARC, said when he first moved into the building over 10 years ago, “rents wouldn’t go up until tenants moved out.”
Over the past 10 years, studios similar to the one he first moved into have increased 65 per cent, rising to $1,300 a month from $850. The smallest and most affordable studios in the building now cost $1,000 a month, while some of the larger suites cost around $2,000.
Doris Siu, a staff member in accounts receivable at Reliance Holdings, said the company is “not aware of any prevailing pattern of complaints related to rents,” adding “the building remains full of artists.”
History of live-work studios
The ARC studios are part of almost 1,500 live-work spaces approved at a time when many Vancouver artists were being pushed out of the cheap warehouse spaces because of fire and safety violations. “In the mid ‘80s and early ‘90s, we were all being evicted from our studio spaces,” said Esther Rausenberg, former president of Artists for Creative Spaces, a group that came together to lobby the municipal government in response to the evictions.
The average artist in Vancouver makes $27,000 a year, compared to $36,123 for the average Vancouverite. Affordable housing is usually defined as housing that doesn’t cost more than about a third of household income. For the average artist, that would be $675 a month.
Erica Babins, an ARC resident, shares a studio with a roommate to keep her rent affordable.
Although live-work studios were meant to provide affordable space for artists, they have attracted other residents over the years, according to a University of Toronto report on creative spaces in Vancouver and other cities. As a result, artists say competition from other creative sectors is increasingly squeezing them out of these trendy spaces.
Rausenberg said it tried to work with the city to develop spaces specifically designated for artists, but instead it zoned studios as live-work, without specifying the type of creative work.
‘Economic necessity’
Erica Babins, an ARC resident.
Despite the rent increases, many artists still live in the building. Erica Babins, a 22-year-old actor and singer who has been living in the ARC for almost a year, shares a $1,300 open studio apartment with a roommate.
For privacy, the two roommates erected a plywood divider to separate their sleeping areas. Babins said that although she couldn’t afford to live in the space on her own, the arrangement is still cost-effective because her rent gives her access to the building’s shared workshops. “I rehearsed my entire Fringe Festival show here for free.”
Watching the Mountains Dance
Plank Magazine, March 11th, 2010
Seven people are preparing to jump off the south side of the Vancouver Public Library. About 300 people have begun to gather, watching in anticipation. There are no paramedics on site, no safety nets have been deployed. Tension mounts. Children fidget and start to cry. Groups of friends huddle, clutching their daily dose of Starbucks.
Finally, the music starts and the dancers begin to saunter across the face of the library, held safely in place, mid-air, by rock climbing gear rigged to the top of the building. The dancers’ majestic movements are choreographed by Julia Taffe, artistic director and founder of Aeriosa Dance Company. Occasionally, the performers push off the building, dangling above ground and causing a collective sharp intake of breath. The gravity-defying dancers bounce gracefully off the façade, like a band of ninjas in frilly costumes.
Since its creation in 2001, thousands of Vancouverites have seen Aeriosa perform. They may have caught a show at the Scotiabank Dance Centre (at one of several events off the north or south side of the venue, in its theatre, or in its lobby), off of the Hudson House building in Gastown (during the Vancouver International Jazz Festival), at the Plaza of Nations (during the annual Dragon Boat Festival), in the Vancouver Art Galley (at one of its quarterly FUSE event), or in the Roundhouse Community Centre (as part of the Dance Allsorts series). Most performances are free, and assemble crowds of astonished passers-by.
Different forms of aerial dance exist. Some dancers suspend themselves wrapped in bands of silk; Julia Taffe’s dancers dangle with the support of rock climbing ropes and harnesses, the equipment rigged to the tops of any hard, straight ledges. When Taffe examines a city, she doesn’t just see, say, a park where someone could sit and read a book – she sees a performance space surrounded by sturdy ridges that dancers could rehearse or perform off of. The company portrays the boldness and beauty of the West Coast as an innovative contemporary art that blends the creativity of dance with the power and practicality of rock climbing.
Which is why the Vancouver Organizing Committee for 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games chose Aeriosa to perform as part of this year’s Cultural Olympiad. For this task, Taffe has commissioned aerial dance artist Amelia Rudolf, artistic director of San Francisco’s Project Bandaloop, to choreograph a full evening piece for 12 dancers at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. The work, In Situ, will be accompanied by live music composed by site-specific artists Jocelyn Murdoch and Jordan Nobles of Redshift Music.
“It’s a huge deal for us,” says Taffe. She is poised and elegant, dressed in a sporty fuchsia top, loose black lycra pants, and hiking shoes. Her immaculate olive skin is free of make-up, her shoulder-length tight black curls, stemming from her Jamaican heritage, are loose but not messy. She is 40 years old, but she looks 10 years younger.
To create a work of the scale of In Situ, Taffe received $108,000 of the coveted Arts Partners in Creative Development funding, which is supported by VANOC, 2010 Legacies Now, and municipal, provincial, and federal government bodies. Currently, the future of APCD is undetermined. The funding was set up in 2007 to support the creation of large-scale projects to potentially be presented at the 2010 Games.
“Right from 2003 when they were doing the Celebration 2010 events, I had a sense of the potential for Aeriosa to grow,” she explains, sipping chamomile tea. Knowing that the Winter Games would be showcasing local artists, Taffe has focused Aeriosa on BC-based sites and themes, rather than turning her attention internationally. The local arts community has hotly debated working with VANOC, citing reasons from lack of artistic freedom to sponsorship conflicts. But Taffe refuses to budge on her optimistic outlook. “I’m very, very pleased to be working with VANOC to present In Situ. They’re one of the few organizations that are able to produce a work of this size.” And present it for free, no less.
Taffe’s dance training began at the age of five, when her mother enrolled her in dance, gymnastics, swimming and music lessons to quell the constant energy of her daughter. “There’s a part of me that’s really physical, and I just always had the need to move, and move successfully.”
She grew up across Canada, eventually landing in Winnipeg with her family, and began training with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers. Taffe’s energy, physicality and drive led to a serious commitment to dance. “I was one of those people who never wanted to miss a class,” she says. Her determination was enough to land her permission to take the men’s class, in the professional division of the ballet. “That’s when I was such a jock dancer. I would dance all day, then I would take the men’s ballet class, and then I would go to the Y and lift weights… and then I would ride my bike home.”
As she progressed to a professional dance career, the years of discipline and sacrifice became cumbersome and overwhelming. Dancing and training – every day, without fail – became oppressive, and the pressure to take any dance job that came up was stressful. She became drawn to climbing as a less structured way to explore her physicality. Although at first she was concerned about the risks, she gave in to her desire to be in nature. Climbing came to benefit her dancing in unexpected ways: she realized there was much more to lose in climbing than in performance, which led her to develop a new sense of freedom on stage. “Being able to work through my issues as a climber,” she explains, “steadied me and gave me a strength and a calmness that I was able to take back into the studio and on stage, and find that sense of abandonment I was missing.”
Climbing soon became a secondary occupation during the off-season months of her dance career. Taffe began spending the summer climbing season in Vancouver. Her two worlds, dancing and climbing, remained separate until, curious to bring them together, she applied to train with aerial dance choreographer Amelia Rudolph in San Francisco. “It was this really interesting collision of worlds for me.”
Rudolf got Taffe acquainted with the scene in San Francisco, while teaching her about dancing with repelling devices and ropes, occasionally performing off cliffs over the ocean. One of the Taffe’s most memorable experiences working with Rudolf was dancing off the Medlicot Dome, a sheer rock face in the Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite Park. There, in the middle of the wilderness, 20 dancers climbed a gulley through the woods, set up their gear and staged a performance with the park as their backdrop. “That was really good. It was my first experience with Amelia, learning different choreography, checking out different natural sites.”
The next time she saw Rudolph, Taffe was “retired” from dance and working as a guide in Banff, Alberta. Rudolph was at the Banff Centre staging a vertical dance workshop with two French choreographers; delighted to see each other again, she asked Taffe to join the company. She accepted, and worked with Project Bandaloop for the next two years, touring internationally.
In 2001, The Dance Centre issued a call for proposals as part of the opening of its new facilities on the corner of Granville and Davie streets. Taffe pulled together some dancers and climbers, and submitted a successful proposal. Aeriosa was born. Afterwards, Taffe continued to find opportunities to perform. Over the years, she has trained a stable of dancers, a challenging task given the specificity of her work. “The difficulty with pretty much every single dancer is I have to train them from scratch with the safety equipment, and they also have to figure out if they’re the type of person who wants to hang off a building.”
Besides the work itself being very physically challenging (“It’s like Pilates on crack”), dancers have to discover whether or not they’re physically suited to the work. For Aeriosa, the requirements and perception of safety is paramount. “We don’t want to be doing a rescue off a building because someone has a shoulder that dislocates easily,” she explains, “I really want to avoid the perception that we’re doing stunts.” To establish a culture of safety, Aeriosa’s riggers are trained in improvised rescue, and the company spends much of its time researching preventative measures. The safety preparedness is ritualistic – protecting edges, building proper anchors, creating a fall protection plan, and providing special training for the dancers.
In Situ will be performed by a mix of local dancers and Aeriosa alumni, strengthening Taffe’s vision of offering Aeriosa’s performers employment over longer periods of time. “The more I can keep them employed and training, the better the work’s going to be,” says Taffe. Like most BC-based dance companies, Aeriosa only receives project-based funding, and is not capable of retaining dancers on a regular basis. Every time she wants to mount a show, she hopes that previously trained dancers will be available, or else finds new ones and starts from scratch.
As a mountaineer, and an artist, Taffe is ready for any catastrophe, including the imminent cuts to the provincial arts budget. She considers herself an educated risk-taker in her professional and personal life. “I’m not worried about it, because if I were I wouldn’t be able to function. I’m totally prepared at anytime for everything to come crashing down around me. I’ll just come up with another plan,” she states. “Say the funding gets cut off and there are no more grants to explore in the studio. Well, there’s a big world out there.”
The dancers float above the audience, thrusting themselves into the ether. The sky is clear, and the North Shore Mountains are mirroring the north face of the towering library. The dancers sway, and we watch them, amazed at their seemingly effortless movement on this cold, crisp day.
Maryse Zeidler 