Vancouver’s legendary dance company The Holy Body Tattoo returns to the stage after a 10-year hiatus to perform monumental, accompanied live on stage by Canada’s influential and elusive post-rock giants, Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
This one-night-only performance will take place on January 28 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, as part of the 2016 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (January 19 to February 7). Tickets go on sale Friday, October 2 at 10am at pushfestival.ca.
The Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental
This hometown performance at the 2016 PuSh Festival kick starts the monumental world tour, including performances in Quebec City and the Adelaide Festival in Australia.
The Holy Body Tattoo, co-founded by Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras in 1993, shot to fame as the punk darlings of the international performing arts scene, with searing choreography and seamless multimedia performance. Their singular style of athletic, pummeling, adrenaline-pumping movement that combined cross-discipline collaborations with Canada’s leading visual and graphic artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers catapulted Vancouver dance into the world’s spotlight. Vanguard in shaking up the city’s reputation as a cultural backwater, they set the stage for an exciting new era of contemporary dance in Vancouver. monumental was the company’s fifth and final work, earning rave reviews when it premiered in 2005.
The Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s apocalyptic, ghostly chamber rock invokes devotion and fervor amongst their legion of fans. The instrumental art-rock group, with a penchant for sampling found sounds and soaring, hypnotic compositions, has been, in their own words, “plowing our field on the margins of weird culture for almost 20 years.” Their death grip intent for anonymity, deeply political motivations and sporadic touring has pitched them to cult status. This spring they released their highly anticipated fifth studio album, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress. Their current tour in support of the new album has been selling out venues throughout the US and the UK.
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Godspeed You! Black Emperor
monumental, with nine dancers mounted on pedestals and an eight-piece band, is the expression of the madness of urban life—the repetition, the confinement, the alienation. Movement turns into metaphor, dance into poetry and sound into substance. The result is as violent, beautiful and cathartic as art can get. For fans of the band, lovers of contemporary dance, or anyone open to the most radical possibilities of human creativity, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can’t be missed.
Tickets to monumental go on sale at 10am today at pushfestival.ca. Tickets start at $45.
