Lulu Series: Norman Armour

Norman Armour
Mapping a City

The arts can be a powerful and affecting means of mapping the historical and cultural, the private and public, the social and political realms of a city and its inhabitants. For over ten years, Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival has been presenting and animating contemporary works for the stage and public spaces that explore and reflect upon civic history and identity. Innovative, trendsetting, provocative, experiential and thought-provoking are words commonly used to describe a “PuSh show.” The festival’s artistic and executive director, Norman Armour, will survey a group of stand-out projects to show how the arts,and in particular festivals, can be a central player in expressing and shaping a city’s evolving sense of itself.

Norman Armour is a curator, director, actor and producer. He co-founded Vancouver’s PuSh Festival in 2005. In 1990, he co-founded Rumble Productions, an interdisciplinary theatre company that continues to be a mainstay of the city’s independent theatre scene. A graduate of SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, he has collaborated on over 120 works for the stage and other media. He is a recipient of a Jessie Richardson Award, the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Awards and the Vancouver Civic Merit Award. The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is one of Vancouver’s signature events, presenting groundbreaking work in the live performing arts.

More at pushfestival.ca

This talk will be preceded by a short performance by Veda Hille. Veda has been writing music, making records, and performing since 1992. She is a classically trained pianist, art school drop-out, performance curator, self-taught singer, theatre interloper, and independent artist with 13 albums to her credit. A recent success is the musical Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata, written with Bill Richardson and Amiel Gladstone. Other collaborations have resulted in video and music performances, electro acoustic experiments, rock songs for children, and an opera about pine trees. She is currently working on an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and recording her new album of love songs written in Berlin.

More at vedahille.com