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Ep. 53 - Risk and Empowerment (Inner Sublimity)

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Contenu fourni par PuSh Festival. Tout le contenu du podcast, y compris les épisodes, les graphiques et les descriptions de podcast, est téléchargé et fourni directement par PuSh Festival ou son partenaire de plateforme de podcast. Si vous pensez que quelqu'un utilise votre œuvre protégée sans votre autorisation, vous pouvez suivre le processus décrit ici https://fr.player.fm/legal.

Gabrielle Martin chats with Sammy Chien and Caroline MacCaull of Chimerik. They are presenting Inner Sublimity at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show on February 7, 8 and 9 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Show Notes

Gabrielle, Sammy and Caroline discuss:

  • What does it look like to transcend eastern and western philosophy in your work overall and in “Inner Sublimity” in particular?

  • How does this project exist within a revitalization of Taiwanese culture?

  • Why is it risky, and empowering, to talk about Taiwan?

  • What is mediumship and what is its power in this performance?

  • How does the space influence the design of the experience?

  • What does it mean to use technology as an extension of the body?

  • What was the creation journey for this piece?

About Sammy Chien

Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is a Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist-of-colour, who’s a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, researcher and mentor in film, sound art, new media, performance, movement and spiritual practice. With over 500 collaborative projects, his work has been shared across Canada, Western Europe, and Asia including Centre Pompidou (Paris), the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), National Art Centre (Ottawa), Stratford Festival, Art Night Venezia (Venice Biennale) and Documenta 15. He’s worked with pioneers of digital performance: Troika Ranch and Wong Kar Wai’s Cinematographer Christopher Doyle and hundreds of internationally celebrated artists and companies. Sammy has been featured on magazines, TV and commercials such as Discorder, Keedan, CBC Arts and BenQ. Sammy is currently co-leading dance projects “We Were One” & “Inner Sublimity”; intergenerational media arts project “Ritual-Spective 迴融”; documentary film “Soul Speaking”, funded by Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Sammy is the official instructor of Isadora, Council of MotionDAO, Co-Artistic Director of Third Space Arts Collective and Co-Founder/Co-Artistic Director of Chimerik 似不像, a multi-award winning interdisciplinary non-profit arts organization who’s worked with Google, Microsoft & NIKE, while prioritizing the focus on empowering various underrepresented communities with various sectoral change research and digital community projects such as Chimerik’s Virtual Live Art Database.

Sammy is the winner of the Changemaker Award for BCMA 2022 (BC Museums Association) for creative engagements that increase awareness of underrepresented voices & the 2023/2024 Chrystal Dance Prize. www.sammychien.com

About Caroline MacCaull

Caroline MacCaull (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded and stolen territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First nations. As a dance-technology artist her work often questions reality and our perceptions. She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts and has had her work presented by Shooting Gallery Performance Series, Co.ERASGA’s Salon Series, Gallery Series 258, Vines Arts Festival, New Works, K.Format/documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany), Drink & Draw (Berlin), FOUND festival (Edmonton), Festival International de Danse Animée (Réunion) and the Scotiabank Dance Centre. She has been artist-in-residence at What Lab (Vancouver), LEÑA (Galiano Island), Dance Victoria (Victoria, BC), ArtStarts Ignites (Vancouver), DeerLake (Burnaby), Dance on Fluid (Taiwan) and NKK Dance Centre (Siem Reap, Cambodia). As a movement artist she has had the opportunity to collaborate and interpret movement with Peter Chin/Tribal Crackling Wind, Okams Racer, The Falling Company, Oksana Augustine and Restless Productions. Caroline is currently the Co-Artistic Director of the Chimerik 似不像 which has given her the opportunity to work as a New Media/Projection Artist on various projects with many different artists/organizations. Some of these include: Veronique West(Rumble Theatre), Mily Mumford (PTC), Jasmine Chen(Rice and Beans Theatre), Zahra Shahab, Restless Productions, Affair of Honor, Ralph Escamillan(Van Vogue Jam), Luke Reece(Theatre Passe Muraille), Arts Club, Active / Passive, Indian Summer Festival, Stratford Festival and Mayumi Lashbrook(Aeris Korper). Caroline is very grateful to be one of the 2023/2024 Chrystal Dance Prize recipients.

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 collective healing and overcoming our shadow selves.

00:17

I'm speaking with Sami Chen and Caroline McCall, artists behind Inner Sublimity, which is being presented at the Push Festival February 7th to 9th, 2025. Inner Sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy through dance, creating a dynamic dialogue between traditions preserved across generations.

00:36

Through this synthesis of paradigms, the artists spark new connections between disparate cultural backgrounds, carving an artistic practice that challenges colonial narratives and enriches contemporary explorations of spirituality.

00:50

Sami and Caroline are the co-artistic directors of Chameric, a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary non-profit organization consisting of artists from underrepresented groups, from various age groups, backgrounds, levels of experience and disciplines.

01:05

Chameric has collaborated on over 500 multidisciplinary projects, which have been exhibited internationally. Sami is a first-generation Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist of colour, director, performer, researcher, and mentor who works with film, sound art, new media, performing arts, and spiritual practice.

01:24

Caroline is a femme-identified queer artist with background in movement, dance, new media, and mediumship. Here is my conversation with Caroline and Sami. And I know just before we hit record, you commented that today is the U.S.

01:41

election, so it's an interesting day to be doing this. There's all sorts of other pressures and nerves in the air. Yeah, it feels like you're saying it feels like a pressure cooker. You know, we are all in right now and not knowing what's going to happen next, but we are in here talking about, you know, you know, this exploration, this spirituality, and it just feels like the right time to be, to have those pressure and then something might come out that we don't even know as well.

02:09

So it's kind of exciting. I appreciate that optimism in terms of the unknown, the unknown can still be a positive place. We are on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the settler on these lands, and I continue to try to educate myself on the ongoing legacy of colonization, the ongoing colonialism here, and I often lean on or reach to the Yellowhead Institute for their incredible words and just framing the state that we're living in now.

02:55

So I'm just going to share some words from them on with regard to land back. Land theft is currently driven by an unsustainable undemocratic and fatal rush toward mass extinction through extraction development and capitalist imperatives.

03:10

It is further enabled by a racist erasure of indigenous law and jurisdiction. And as Yellowhead Research Fellow Henderson has noted, this fatal rush functions as a kind of malware released into our ecological system.

03:25

Indigenous legal orders embody critical knowledge that can relink society to a healthy balance within the natural world. This change must begin on the ground. Canada ceding real jurisdiction to indigenous peoples for this transformation to happen.

03:40

So thank you to the Yellowhead Institute's land back resources, specifically the red paper. We're going to shift gears a little bit in just getting right into talking about inner sublimity, which is the work, your work that's going to be realized during the push festival.

04:03

inner sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy. And I would love to hear what that looks like and feels like within this work, and how it relates to your wider practices. First, we want to say we love how you frame the question of look and feel, it just right off the bat for us to want to hear that question and really dive right into the body of the feeling, you know, and I will say that is probably where we will begin the process,

04:35

you know, about integrating the East, Eastern and Western philosophy and culture is through energetic practice. So why I say that because, you know, in dance, you know, and embodiment, it is really based on feeling the sentient, right?

04:50

And this senses our primary faculty of to connect everything together in our research, our journeys and inspiration, how we create work. And a lot of that in multiple different cultures and whether it's Eastern or Western, there is a lot of theories and research around consciousness and energy vibration.

05:12

And then for Eastern, it's quite, there is a lot of more focus in terms of energetic practices, such as qigong, it's one of the form. And it's kind of quite a wildly practiced form that focus on the flow of energy in the body.

05:28

So then, you know, you can gain this intelligence and control over energy through the body, which we all have, but just not paying attention and really cultivate, you know, the control or the embodiment of energy.

05:43

So I want to make it. I want to share that with the audience, you know, like the qigong is not just, you know, a practice that has to be its own form, but almost as a philosophy. And I was an inspiration for people to understand that it's just an entry point for us to access energy through our body and our consciousness, right?

06:04

So our mind activating those pathways and then have energy moving through. And it doesn't not only translate visually, but also by feeling energetically and vibrationally as well. So that I would say that is some of the entry point that we have is that you will actually feel the energy shift in the work, how we connect to each other, how we connect with the audience, how we connect with the space and how we connect with the spirit in the space as well.

06:38

Yeah. And I guess I wanted to just also kind of take a little bit of a side note off of that. But when we're talking about Eastern and Western philosophy within this context of this work and in our larger practice, we also really want to go into the nuances and complexities of those kind of dialogues, rather than thinking, oh, everything is great.

06:58

And, you know, we're able to move in this way together. We really want to dive into some of those shadow places where there's hard conversations, there's different kind of, you know, I think in a broad stroke, there's a lot of appropriation of these different cultures.

07:15

And we want to go into those difficult and challenging subjects so that we can arrive to a place where we have a deeper understanding of each other. And so throughout the work, there's moments of very meditative state.

07:28

When we talk about Eastern culture, we talk about this kind of like time passing, how we're witnessing time is a little bit at a slower pace, perhaps. But we also want to go into those moments of tension, conflict and really feel together what it means.

07:45

to be witnessing and experiencing that as a collective, so that we can also make decisions to kind of arrive to a new place together. So that's kind of some of the feelings that we're trying to wrap up within this work and within some of our broader practices within the context of Sami and myself both being from Eastern and Western kind of places.

08:07

Yeah, Kiran, you're right about like how, I mean, we're just talking about generalizing terms, right? Like how Western sense of time is quite linear based, right? You have the beginning, middle, and you're taught to think about narrative, you know, shapes and form, linear kind of progression.

08:25

And then in Eastern, again, generally speaking, you know, I'm generalizing the kind of overall framework of what holds the foundation of the culture a lot of the time, the sense of time is very different.

08:35

It's more cyclical, you know, there is more sense of meditativeness, which, you know, then the time kind of expands differently in the less linear. sense, you know, but of course, acknowledging the globalization, you know, a lot of people say, when I go to Asia, I don't feel the same way.

08:51

It's like, yes, it's modernization, modernity, globalization that's happening. We are in this big mess together, integrating both cultures from different routes, and that messiness and the shadow work, the conflict, you know, the dilemma is why we're also very interested in talking about that discomfort, what that is, and going deep down so we don't stay on this kind of just the point of like the generalization,

09:15

the superficial way of looking at each culture. And how does this project exist as part of a wider revitalizing movement of ancient wisdom and spirituality, specifically Taiwanese? Well, even talking about Taiwan is a very risky, it's anti-oppression work politically to be even talking about Taiwan.

09:39

So it's, I do want to say that it's very empowering to be in a place where we can even speak about that in this current political climate, because for the audience that doesn't understand the political situation, the history that, you know, there is like complex history, like colonialism that's going on in Taiwan that happened over the last 400 years.

10:03

And there were Dutch people and Spanish and Japanese colonialism that happened. And Taiwan has its own people, like my family has been there over 16 generations in our family book, we can trace back for 16 generations.

10:21

And then, and then another seven generations before they were installed in China to the migration. So when we talk about that, right now, Taiwan is being censored to be called a country with, you know, having its own presidency and currency and different, there's difference in culture as well.

10:43

I'm not here. to advocate Taiwanese independence, but I'm just talking about how it is where we are right now in Canada to be able to talk freely about this kind of discourse is actually a super valuable and progressive thing to actually have that kind of value we have right now.

11:01

And I'm grateful for being able to even speak about that. And the revitalization of spirituality in Taiwan is quite interesting because of the culture itself, you know, growing up, I didn't realize until I came to the West, you know, how we are quite conditioned, you know, in our brain to be very spiritual.

11:24

So ancestral rituals. a very common thing we do, everyday lives, we go to temples and it's not specific religion, it's more a mix and match of different folklore religion together. So it just became a lifestyle, right, growing up.

11:39

And we don't even question, just like something that we do with our parents, our grandparents or aunties, uncles, you know, and big families, we all do that together, even friends, you know, when you need certain things, you go to temple for certain, certain like requests that you have, you know, not, I don't want to advocate greed and all that stuff on spiritual, what we can talk about later, but it's just so ingrained in our culture.

12:00

And so it wasn't never a question, even the phone phrase situation, the direction of the space, how we understand energy, it's already in the culture so much. And I don't think people value that so much because just, you know, it's normalized, right?

12:15

And the globalization, the Westernization, it's been deemed as superstition, you know, and being reduced to lower value or uneducated kind of thinking. So the revitalization is about going back to the empowerment of those roots and history and to our spiritual culture that has been rooted for hundreds of years, tracing back and its mixture with indigenous culture as well, with indigenous people in Taiwan as well,

12:44

there is a lot of crossover sharing knowledge that also happened as much as the, you know, the problem of colonization and racial happiness or just also acknowledge that that happens everywhere. So, but now while talking about integration, revitalization and a lot of ritual practice are kind of integrating together in new ways.

13:05

And the young people are finding a, there's almost like a trend to like go back to the roots of what is Taiwanese ritual, Taiwanese spirituality, the kind of a temple shamans that are seen like from the older generation now are being empowered back, like they'll integrate techno music, electronic music, rave.

13:27

parties, you know, all these really like current underground movement with this grassroots kind of an older generational historic culture. Yeah, so that's interesting. Yeah, when we were there in Taiwan, it was quite interesting because we spent four months in Taiwan this last year doing some research and different kind of yeah, practiced in development with this piece as well.

13:54

And so we spent a lot of time having dialogues with various people from different kind of backgrounds and in various kind of religions, either monks or different kind of shamans or in the temples. And it was so interesting to also hear about this kind of almost this need to come back to this like almost emergent feeling of needing to come back to something much larger than yourself.

14:22

I think when we talk a lot about like Westernization in specifically Taiwan, like Taiwan is very heavily reliant on the US right now for their power dynamics. And I think a lot about the control and different invisible things that we don't always see that are happening behind the scenes and how that is also holding Taiwan in a different way.

14:43

And I think coming back to the people and coming back to these kind of everyday rituals is allowing a new kind of sense of belonging and identity that is kind of been missing over the last little while.

14:54

Oh, yes. And speaking of which, I do want to, because Gabriel, you mentioned about the ancient western. It is one of our research from years ago is, many of you might already know this, the word dance, the Chinese character of dance that we're using language in Taiwan that is the traditional character.

15:20

It's like a lot closer to the Oracle bone script. So I'm talking about this ancient Chinese language that's used across the Chinese speakers around the world. The character of dance, its original form is a shaman with holding spiritual tools like jades and feathers, rotating, basically doing ancestral and ancient rituals.

15:44

That is the character where dance evolved from. So then thinking about how we talk about dance and performance in the common everyday language while looking at a shaman doing rituals. And that is the secret work of what dance is.

16:03

So that is kind of that connection back to this culture and our context of movement practice. So this is a work that's been in development. And so I haven't seen what will be this realization of it, which is really exciting.

16:18

But when we sat down to talk about this work, you know what, I've seen some other pieces of your work. when we sat down to talk about what this piece could be. I mean, I just was really excited in terms of all the research and the intersection of practices that you hold.

16:35

And I would love to hear you speak about what mediumship is and the power, its power in this performance context. Yeah, thank you. So originally, I'll just give a tiny bit of context, but originally when just before I met Sammy in 2019, I was having these experiences Westernly diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis, and I wasn't quite sure where to reach out to in alignment with finding resources beyond beyond just the Western kind of medical approach.

17:14

And shortly after that, I had met Sammy and he had exposed me. and brought me to some of his different spiritual teachers from Taiwan and from various other places in the world and started opening up some of these kind of ideas for me of what this could be in a different context.

17:33

And through that kind of expanding experience and research, we've begun begun to explore how this can also be transcended into a way of sharing this kind of experience through performance. For the audience listening to this, it's in the Western lens, again, generalizing it.

17:55

When we talk about this kind of spiritual experiences, people think about ghost possession. They think about paranormal activity. They think about woo-woo stuff right away. So it's scary, right? Or they think about this person is crazy.

18:08

You are mentally ill, that it is your making stuff out psychologically. So that's usually where people go to in the Western context right away. And for us, again, growing up in the Eastern world, if you would tell my mom or my aunties about, oh, this is what I'm experiencing.

18:27

They will say, well, do you want to go to the temple and ask the shaman to see if there's something going on spiritually that's bugging you about this? So right away, I didn't come in with the prejudice, or around like what her experiences are and actually understand there, we just need to help find the expert, the right expert to figure out what to do.

18:48

And that's where this whole thing unfolds into actually full on, you know, legitimize meditation practice. Yeah. So that was so empowering to have those moments of dialogue and also to have these like intergenerational dialogues with his family and being able to share and not feel judged in these moments and really allowed us to go deeper into what are these experiences and how can we transform them into something that is more current and maybe it could work within our artistic practice.

19:19

So through, I mean now it's been about four years of specifically working on how to integrate this like safely into our performance practice, but we've kind of cultivated a space where we're able to call spirit and go into like a mediumship trance state, on stage performing it live and allowing people to feel what that actually means in that context and maybe receive what they need at that moment without me having to specifically tell them anything.

19:50

Just because I feel like sometimes with a more outdated states of mediumship, it is very much like it can get into states of telling you how you should feel or how you should experience your ancestors in your way and or in the way that I am prescribing to you.

20:08

But I really want to kind of open that up and also kind of decolonize some of that practice in a way of letting it flow and see how it can touch you in the way that. you need to be held in that, in that moment.

20:22

And just for the audience, like this is real stuff we're doing. It's not just performing a mediumship. It's actually doing this for real. So that's what it's, there is a sense of like real stake, you know, real risk.

20:39

And then when I say race, it's like, we are not just pretending and have to hit the marks, you know, the shapes are in shape. It's like, no, we really have to mind body spiritually, like be there and fully channel and connect and practice with the spirits on you, making sure you're, you know, it's the same, you know, building that rapport as well and have that same framework and bring a whole new,

21:00

a kind of experience for the audience, right? Whole new framework. Yes. And this work is being designed for performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is, you know, a very exciting partnership and a very exciting space.

21:15

But I would actually like to hear what excites you about realizing this work in that space. And maybe you can speak a little bit more to, yeah, how the space influences the design of the experience. Because I know that there's a number of performance or aspects to the design of this experience that draw people into a state of presence, embodied space, and also a space of ritual.

21:42

If you're, I don't know if you're actually using that word with regard to your performance. But yeah, love to hear about that, about the excitement around the use of the space and the general design elements to evoke these kinds of effects, yeah.

21:56

For the audience doesn't know the history of Vancouver Art Gallery, right? The VAG, it was built in 1906 as a provincial courthouse. And the basement is actually a prison, you know? So when you go in, there are some parts when the art party or the old fields, you know, when you open up those spaces there, that's a courtroom.

22:12

And this is like, you know, actually a prison. So, and, you know, it's historically, so that. context is very interesting to be in that building. And also it's the it's very iconic, right? It's a capital A kind of art in there.

22:27

Like, you know, people go there to to see what is the most like prestigious art in the city. And at the same time, you know, it's speaking of like that, it's historically a while, sorry, a white male dominated kind of a space, right?

22:44

You know, people think of like, only white men does art in here as I'm watching white men, white men, type painting. So I think to partner up with the VAC, when push festival, you know, and doing this type of work, it's really progressive.

22:57

And it's quite, you know, quite revolutionary to bring in this kind of work to witness something like this. And then we are taking a lot of risks in the way of like, you know, in theater is a different kind of safe space for performers.

23:10

You know, we're taking more risks in a different way. When we are in the gallery setting, you know, I feel like We both feel like the gallery space they set out has a different kind of amplification and resonance of the energy when we perform.

23:24

And also gallery is used to holding space for audience while coming to see stillness, to see still object, still paintings and sculpture close up in fine details. It demands already that kind of attention, right?

23:41

Very different from theater in many different ways. And then imagine this kind of audience is cultivating this kind of a scale of perception quality or coming to see this type of work where it's slow.

23:53

There's a lot of refined slowness movement, a lot of details and shift of vibration that's just slow and refined for them to actually take the time to be in the space to feel that as if you're watching a sculpture, moving, moving slowly, right?

24:09

And that to me, it's quite, it's very exciting. Yeah, totally. It's so exciting. And I also think that we're really grateful for this opportunity to get to spend more time in the Vancouver Art Gallery and think about how the work can really be integrated within that kind of space.

24:25

I mean, there's definitely a lot of creative challenges that come up working in a museum space, just even technically you can't have certain objects in there and you have to be careful of where the art is.

24:37

And so it's also allowing us to re-imagine and rethink how this work can cohesively kind of work with this space. Because a lot of our art and our practices about really that deep integration with either technology or with movement and I think also the space and how that all works together through an experience.

24:59

So we're really grateful to get to have that time. And every Tuesday where it's closed, we get to spend time to really think about how that will work together in the new year. So yeah, very grateful to think about how this can be reimagined in this way.

25:14

And you've been very creative and it's. since it was going to be in this space. And then there was a really large art piece that, I mean, the team at The Vag has been so great with us, you know, but just realistically, I think we had that surprise last week.

25:29

Oh, there's actually a giant art piece that can only go in the space that you were going to have your performance in, so. And now the audience get to go through this gate of heaven before they come to see our work.

25:41

And then it's going to be surrounded by a bunch of paintings that are in similar themes. So almost like when we think of attending churches or temples, they're all sacred kind of architecture. We're all coming to a different type of creative sacred architecture being surrounded by that.

25:56

And it's not something as like, you know, Dan's audience would just get to experience, right? Because you get to then have a totally different experience by the space and then see this, you know, to feel this experience coming out of that as well.

26:11

Yeah. I find that really, really exciting for the audience to actually go through, yeah. And you just referenced it, Caroline, technology in your work. So that's something that you're also really known for, that America is really known for, audiovisual, incredible audiovisual design.

26:30

You speak about using technology as extensions of the body. I would love to know what that looks like in this work. I think because we're really diving into this energetic practice within this work, it only makes sense for us to also continue to expand that through the unseen kind of visualization using technology of what that could be or what that could look like.

26:57

We, of course, don't want to spoon-feed the audience, but we want to allow them to open their mind and not have to worry about having to watch the body so closely in this kind of way, but also thinking about the whole space being the body.

27:15

Yeah. And just to, not to brag, but just like this is something that we've been doing over 15 years in our company is really to give you some audience, some context. This is one of our primary research is to center on the body embodiment sensory with technology, right?

27:39

So dance technology is our center of our research and our work. And we specialize this sense of immediacy, making sure that technology does not overpower the body, overpower the frequency that you animate from the body, the actual performance value and the experience, right?

28:02

The technology is always here to support. It's part of the body. So you won't be like your hands are not going to take over the whole show. Your eyes aren't going to take over the whole show, but the gates is so important.

28:13

your finger articulation, it just is important as your full body's movement, right? So we've got to think of that as part of our technology as well. It's part of our body, and that's something we really advocate and focus on.

28:27

So for this piece, really, we want to make sure that technology really is becoming a channel to kind of continue to open the bandwidth of what our body and spirit and our energy can do. It's continuing to amplify those bandwidth of frequency.

28:44

And so some people are really, really sensitive to that. So some audience might be like, I can feel you without opening my eyes. I can go through the experience, just like just feeling you being on stage, da, da, da, da.

28:56

But somebody says, I don't really see that, but because there's a projection that bridge the gap of those information, now it allows me to be on the same ride with this other person who are, you know, a meditator or a monk, you know?

29:10

So it's just like, they are, it's there to really facilitate the experience. So then help you amplify those channels so you can all be connected in a deeper sense. Yeah, I'm just gonna jump in because I've seen and experienced your work.

29:24

And so I know I feel very clear when you're describing that. I have images and I get that, but I'm wondering if you could give an example. So specifically with this work, we've kind of created a, we'll call it a DIY kind of motion capture setting system.

29:44

Sorry, not setting system. And by using that, we're able to kind of really show the particles that are falling off of the body, thinking of it as like, what if our energy were to expand through the ground?

29:59

What would that feel like? And how would that look? What would that look like? I think specifically thinking of it as a collaborator in this way, as a reflection, as an expansion allows us to really center on thinking about how technology can really support the work versus again, what Sammy was saying, like take away from the experience or compete with the work.

30:26

Yeah, because part of the actual experience is that like, when you work with energy, we in our practice, we call sending the power. And then when you send the power, you can gather energy, energy going through, we conjure the energy.

30:39

And then to expand that, you can imagine your own energy kind of expanding. outside of your skin and then you start to go beyond to like some people might kiss your astral body you know and subtle body and all these turns so you really can feel the shift that happens so the audience that are sensitive they can feel that shift so audience like cannot feel that shift right away you know we have projection to kind of just hint that you know subtly that this energy are actually shifting and going beyond your skin you're on your body and how that it's almost like a vibration that particle lies and comes back and another thing that Caroline does you know i hope it's not spoiled too much but the pendulum you know is another kind of technology we're using working with the spiritual mediumship practice yeah so with the pendulum we're we're using it as a way of actually guiding the movement through the space but also as a way now to expand into the soundscape as well live so we're thinking about how spirit could guide how the sound is changing in real time as well as the movement and the projection.

31:47

So this kind of extension of body, extension of self, extension of sound. Sound, yeah, and power I think is all rooted together in this kind of beautiful way that we're continuing to explore. But just a good, there are so many different example.

32:03

Those are just two that we can pick up. We do want the audience to create their own journey as well to think about how their own technology that this mechanism designed by modern nature, how your technology can also interface with our work as well.

32:19

And that is the most exciting part of why we want to create performance for audience to witness that as well. The continuation of the technology working with the body. And you talk about the creation journey for this piece with regard to research, creative exploration, iterations.

32:35

Yeah, this is a long time research that has kind of shifted through many different iterations and explorations until it's landed into this piece that we're really excited about. When we first were talking about some of this initial research, it was back in 2020 when we were kind of going through a phase where we were both really dealing with our own shadows at that moment and our own biases against each other.

33:04

Meaning like Sammy had dealt with a lot of racism and there was a lot of work that I was highlighting for him to unpack and same with me. And I had a lot of anger towards men were, and there was a lot of unpacking to do with that kind of process.

33:25

Since then, we've done many different residencies kind of across the world, including in Cambodia, working with Peter Chin as a mentor to kind of think about how we can formalize some of these grand ideas.

33:44

Yeah, it's, I just want to say like when we first met each other, it really felt like it's like our worst enemy manifested in what each other stands for in the societal lens, you know, there's like a social in both our social conditioning of like what our worst enemies, you know, this for me, it was like, I didn't trust white people, you know, I did it, I, you know, someone mentor that were racialized mentor that were still traumatized by,

34:11

you know, a lot of racism, they will, I was really conditioning saying that we can't trust white people about doing sharing our culture, you know, what can be tokenized appropriated, you know, there is a lot of fear, there's a lot of like, I would say, you know, there's danger and risk in sharing like deeper spirituality and, and I'm sure a lot of people are still feeling that way, you know, so we want to say that's real,

34:34

you know, that's what it is something that people are going through and we fall through that. We had to go through so much shadow work. There's a lot of pain. At the same time, I feel like what I used to call white people out on, I stand in that power of being seen as a man, which I never really identified myself as man, but on the societal lens, I'm still, I represent men in Caroline's lens.

35:03

So for me, it was interesting. I go through my own fragility, male fragility, be like, no, that's not me. I didn't do all this stuff. And then she's doing the same thing. We're both like, well, innocent, but we hate you, each other.

35:16

And at the same time, that complex, because love really brought us together to really fight through all these stereotypes and stigma and pain that we, it's so ingrained deep down to our psychic and our subconscious level.

35:31

But then a lot of times people would have given up already. I've given up so many times too, just to be safe, right? We need to take care of ourselves. But because our journey being twin flames, having our soul to be reincarnated into this lifetime to meet together, that we felt like we really, it's our purpose to really have to learn and push through those hardship and the shadow, the deeper shadow work.

35:57

And then we really want to share that part of the process and journey. And it really is not easy to face your own fear, discomfort, the darkest part of you. You don't begin healing until you recognize those dark part of you in the shadow.

36:18

But then you can do that by yourself too. You gotta do it with yourself and with people that you trust can help you do those baby steps until you, I wouldn't say you get out of it, but you just grow more muscle, you get more trust and you have more trust in humanity as well in different ways.

36:36

And then, through the process we're like we want to share more of this story because the more we get to know each other the more feel like we can share this connection and love we have for each other and hopefully that will amplify further to just elicit evoke some of the more creative and loving energy around the world a little bit right yeah i think especially globally there's so much divide happening right now and part of the reason why we're so excited by this work and by what we're doing together is kind of trying to think about how we can collectively heal some of these kind of misunderstandings or i mean shadows and really facing those things like i didn't know that that hurt you and really how do we unpack some of these situations together and through a more intersectional kind of lens and so Yeah,

37:26

it's been a lot of work and it's we've arrived in various kind of creative processes and then also personal processes. There's a lot of peers emotionally down in the studio and the journey. Yeah. But then it's still like it's always worth every process at all.

37:45

That was so worth to conjure that to process and to let go and release some of the things that it's not needed anymore as well. Like, oh, the things we really care about, we hold on to this value. It's like, oh, actually, that's not needed in this current time.

37:57

No, that's that's that's that's into something else. And that that feels very healthy and like moving forward. Right. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. When I hear you speak, like, first of all, it's so generous of you to share the real internal processes that, you know, I think creative process is often gets to those deep personal places, especially if you're really if you're going deep, if you're really doing like authentic research.

38:23

And so just to hear kind of the honesty around that and and the root of also, you know, your mediumship practice. It's, I think, really generous to share that with our with me and with the listeners because it's it's honest and because I think it's relatable.

38:43

A lot of these things are, you know, with regard to like the personal work we have to do, understanding. Intersectionality, how we are situated socially given the power constructs we exist in and and also like, you know, how mental health is viewed and and our general Western disconnect from spirituality and all these things.

39:04

So I'm just so excited that that you are bringing this work to push. I'm so excited to experience it in this iteration. I genuinely look forward to discovering it and just being present in the moment to experience it alongside the other audience members.

39:26

participants who will be there on the journey. And I'm so thrilled to follow your practice. Yeah, I think we're very blessed to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much. We are so grateful. And again, I, when we say our gratitude, it's not just, you know, a usual gratitude.

39:49

It's like, there's so many layers as we talk about, you know, how brave you are to pick up, to actually program our work, you know, and how much value you see, because you also are super open-minded person with such a diverse, you know, view on what's going on with the world.

40:05

You understand the complexity and that's needed in this political landscape that's happening right now. I would say some people might not get our work and someone like you, who does, who are, you know, bring us, this project into such a...

40:21

a beautiful and empowering kind of platform to share that in this really, I would say rare, collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery as well. For us, it really amplifies our deep, deep value of our project and our belief and some of the really deep down, so I think the sole value, the sole work that we wanna do for the world.

40:48

So again, thank you so much for having us to talk about the project and also be able to share this for real in the Vancouver Art Gallery Super Push Festival. Yes, thank you so much. We're so grateful.

41:00

It's been such a pleasure to get to talk to you and get to know more about you as well and we're so excited. Thank you. Thank you. You just heard Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Sami Chen and Caroline Rigal of Chamerique.

41:19

Presented with the Vancouver Art Gallery, inner sublimity will show at Push Festival February 7th to 9th. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and the lovely Ben Charland. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

41:33

New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. This year marks the 20th festival for Push International Performing Arts Festival. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the last 20 years, please look for our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play season.

41:52

And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca and follow us on social media.

42:06

Coming up on the next Push Play. How do I use this performance to actively reshape my life? And how do I use this performance to indulge in communities and meet with people that I wouldn't normally meet with?

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Gabrielle Martin chats with Sammy Chien and Caroline MacCaull of Chimerik. They are presenting Inner Sublimity at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show on February 7, 8 and 9 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Show Notes

Gabrielle, Sammy and Caroline discuss:

  • What does it look like to transcend eastern and western philosophy in your work overall and in “Inner Sublimity” in particular?

  • How does this project exist within a revitalization of Taiwanese culture?

  • Why is it risky, and empowering, to talk about Taiwan?

  • What is mediumship and what is its power in this performance?

  • How does the space influence the design of the experience?

  • What does it mean to use technology as an extension of the body?

  • What was the creation journey for this piece?

About Sammy Chien

Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is a Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist-of-colour, who’s a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, researcher and mentor in film, sound art, new media, performance, movement and spiritual practice. With over 500 collaborative projects, his work has been shared across Canada, Western Europe, and Asia including Centre Pompidou (Paris), the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), National Art Centre (Ottawa), Stratford Festival, Art Night Venezia (Venice Biennale) and Documenta 15. He’s worked with pioneers of digital performance: Troika Ranch and Wong Kar Wai’s Cinematographer Christopher Doyle and hundreds of internationally celebrated artists and companies. Sammy has been featured on magazines, TV and commercials such as Discorder, Keedan, CBC Arts and BenQ. Sammy is currently co-leading dance projects “We Were One” & “Inner Sublimity”; intergenerational media arts project “Ritual-Spective 迴融”; documentary film “Soul Speaking”, funded by Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Sammy is the official instructor of Isadora, Council of MotionDAO, Co-Artistic Director of Third Space Arts Collective and Co-Founder/Co-Artistic Director of Chimerik 似不像, a multi-award winning interdisciplinary non-profit arts organization who’s worked with Google, Microsoft & NIKE, while prioritizing the focus on empowering various underrepresented communities with various sectoral change research and digital community projects such as Chimerik’s Virtual Live Art Database.

Sammy is the winner of the Changemaker Award for BCMA 2022 (BC Museums Association) for creative engagements that increase awareness of underrepresented voices & the 2023/2024 Chrystal Dance Prize. www.sammychien.com

About Caroline MacCaull

Caroline MacCaull (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded and stolen territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First nations. As a dance-technology artist her work often questions reality and our perceptions. She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts and has had her work presented by Shooting Gallery Performance Series, Co.ERASGA’s Salon Series, Gallery Series 258, Vines Arts Festival, New Works, K.Format/documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany), Drink & Draw (Berlin), FOUND festival (Edmonton), Festival International de Danse Animée (Réunion) and the Scotiabank Dance Centre. She has been artist-in-residence at What Lab (Vancouver), LEÑA (Galiano Island), Dance Victoria (Victoria, BC), ArtStarts Ignites (Vancouver), DeerLake (Burnaby), Dance on Fluid (Taiwan) and NKK Dance Centre (Siem Reap, Cambodia). As a movement artist she has had the opportunity to collaborate and interpret movement with Peter Chin/Tribal Crackling Wind, Okams Racer, The Falling Company, Oksana Augustine and Restless Productions. Caroline is currently the Co-Artistic Director of the Chimerik 似不像 which has given her the opportunity to work as a New Media/Projection Artist on various projects with many different artists/organizations. Some of these include: Veronique West(Rumble Theatre), Mily Mumford (PTC), Jasmine Chen(Rice and Beans Theatre), Zahra Shahab, Restless Productions, Affair of Honor, Ralph Escamillan(Van Vogue Jam), Luke Reece(Theatre Passe Muraille), Arts Club, Active / Passive, Indian Summer Festival, Stratford Festival and Mayumi Lashbrook(Aeris Korper). Caroline is very grateful to be one of the 2023/2024 Chrystal Dance Prize recipients.

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 collective healing and overcoming our shadow selves.

00:17

I'm speaking with Sami Chen and Caroline McCall, artists behind Inner Sublimity, which is being presented at the Push Festival February 7th to 9th, 2025. Inner Sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy through dance, creating a dynamic dialogue between traditions preserved across generations.

00:36

Through this synthesis of paradigms, the artists spark new connections between disparate cultural backgrounds, carving an artistic practice that challenges colonial narratives and enriches contemporary explorations of spirituality.

00:50

Sami and Caroline are the co-artistic directors of Chameric, a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary non-profit organization consisting of artists from underrepresented groups, from various age groups, backgrounds, levels of experience and disciplines.

01:05

Chameric has collaborated on over 500 multidisciplinary projects, which have been exhibited internationally. Sami is a first-generation Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist of colour, director, performer, researcher, and mentor who works with film, sound art, new media, performing arts, and spiritual practice.

01:24

Caroline is a femme-identified queer artist with background in movement, dance, new media, and mediumship. Here is my conversation with Caroline and Sami. And I know just before we hit record, you commented that today is the U.S.

01:41

election, so it's an interesting day to be doing this. There's all sorts of other pressures and nerves in the air. Yeah, it feels like you're saying it feels like a pressure cooker. You know, we are all in right now and not knowing what's going to happen next, but we are in here talking about, you know, you know, this exploration, this spirituality, and it just feels like the right time to be, to have those pressure and then something might come out that we don't even know as well.

02:09

So it's kind of exciting. I appreciate that optimism in terms of the unknown, the unknown can still be a positive place. We are on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the settler on these lands, and I continue to try to educate myself on the ongoing legacy of colonization, the ongoing colonialism here, and I often lean on or reach to the Yellowhead Institute for their incredible words and just framing the state that we're living in now.

02:55

So I'm just going to share some words from them on with regard to land back. Land theft is currently driven by an unsustainable undemocratic and fatal rush toward mass extinction through extraction development and capitalist imperatives.

03:10

It is further enabled by a racist erasure of indigenous law and jurisdiction. And as Yellowhead Research Fellow Henderson has noted, this fatal rush functions as a kind of malware released into our ecological system.

03:25

Indigenous legal orders embody critical knowledge that can relink society to a healthy balance within the natural world. This change must begin on the ground. Canada ceding real jurisdiction to indigenous peoples for this transformation to happen.

03:40

So thank you to the Yellowhead Institute's land back resources, specifically the red paper. We're going to shift gears a little bit in just getting right into talking about inner sublimity, which is the work, your work that's going to be realized during the push festival.

04:03

inner sublimity traverses currents of Eastern and Western philosophy. And I would love to hear what that looks like and feels like within this work, and how it relates to your wider practices. First, we want to say we love how you frame the question of look and feel, it just right off the bat for us to want to hear that question and really dive right into the body of the feeling, you know, and I will say that is probably where we will begin the process,

04:35

you know, about integrating the East, Eastern and Western philosophy and culture is through energetic practice. So why I say that because, you know, in dance, you know, and embodiment, it is really based on feeling the sentient, right?

04:50

And this senses our primary faculty of to connect everything together in our research, our journeys and inspiration, how we create work. And a lot of that in multiple different cultures and whether it's Eastern or Western, there is a lot of theories and research around consciousness and energy vibration.

05:12

And then for Eastern, it's quite, there is a lot of more focus in terms of energetic practices, such as qigong, it's one of the form. And it's kind of quite a wildly practiced form that focus on the flow of energy in the body.

05:28

So then, you know, you can gain this intelligence and control over energy through the body, which we all have, but just not paying attention and really cultivate, you know, the control or the embodiment of energy.

05:43

So I want to make it. I want to share that with the audience, you know, like the qigong is not just, you know, a practice that has to be its own form, but almost as a philosophy. And I was an inspiration for people to understand that it's just an entry point for us to access energy through our body and our consciousness, right?

06:04

So our mind activating those pathways and then have energy moving through. And it doesn't not only translate visually, but also by feeling energetically and vibrationally as well. So that I would say that is some of the entry point that we have is that you will actually feel the energy shift in the work, how we connect to each other, how we connect with the audience, how we connect with the space and how we connect with the spirit in the space as well.

06:38

Yeah. And I guess I wanted to just also kind of take a little bit of a side note off of that. But when we're talking about Eastern and Western philosophy within this context of this work and in our larger practice, we also really want to go into the nuances and complexities of those kind of dialogues, rather than thinking, oh, everything is great.

06:58

And, you know, we're able to move in this way together. We really want to dive into some of those shadow places where there's hard conversations, there's different kind of, you know, I think in a broad stroke, there's a lot of appropriation of these different cultures.

07:15

And we want to go into those difficult and challenging subjects so that we can arrive to a place where we have a deeper understanding of each other. And so throughout the work, there's moments of very meditative state.

07:28

When we talk about Eastern culture, we talk about this kind of like time passing, how we're witnessing time is a little bit at a slower pace, perhaps. But we also want to go into those moments of tension, conflict and really feel together what it means.

07:45

to be witnessing and experiencing that as a collective, so that we can also make decisions to kind of arrive to a new place together. So that's kind of some of the feelings that we're trying to wrap up within this work and within some of our broader practices within the context of Sami and myself both being from Eastern and Western kind of places.

08:07

Yeah, Kiran, you're right about like how, I mean, we're just talking about generalizing terms, right? Like how Western sense of time is quite linear based, right? You have the beginning, middle, and you're taught to think about narrative, you know, shapes and form, linear kind of progression.

08:25

And then in Eastern, again, generally speaking, you know, I'm generalizing the kind of overall framework of what holds the foundation of the culture a lot of the time, the sense of time is very different.

08:35

It's more cyclical, you know, there is more sense of meditativeness, which, you know, then the time kind of expands differently in the less linear. sense, you know, but of course, acknowledging the globalization, you know, a lot of people say, when I go to Asia, I don't feel the same way.

08:51

It's like, yes, it's modernization, modernity, globalization that's happening. We are in this big mess together, integrating both cultures from different routes, and that messiness and the shadow work, the conflict, you know, the dilemma is why we're also very interested in talking about that discomfort, what that is, and going deep down so we don't stay on this kind of just the point of like the generalization,

09:15

the superficial way of looking at each culture. And how does this project exist as part of a wider revitalizing movement of ancient wisdom and spirituality, specifically Taiwanese? Well, even talking about Taiwan is a very risky, it's anti-oppression work politically to be even talking about Taiwan.

09:39

So it's, I do want to say that it's very empowering to be in a place where we can even speak about that in this current political climate, because for the audience that doesn't understand the political situation, the history that, you know, there is like complex history, like colonialism that's going on in Taiwan that happened over the last 400 years.

10:03

And there were Dutch people and Spanish and Japanese colonialism that happened. And Taiwan has its own people, like my family has been there over 16 generations in our family book, we can trace back for 16 generations.

10:21

And then, and then another seven generations before they were installed in China to the migration. So when we talk about that, right now, Taiwan is being censored to be called a country with, you know, having its own presidency and currency and different, there's difference in culture as well.

10:43

I'm not here. to advocate Taiwanese independence, but I'm just talking about how it is where we are right now in Canada to be able to talk freely about this kind of discourse is actually a super valuable and progressive thing to actually have that kind of value we have right now.

11:01

And I'm grateful for being able to even speak about that. And the revitalization of spirituality in Taiwan is quite interesting because of the culture itself, you know, growing up, I didn't realize until I came to the West, you know, how we are quite conditioned, you know, in our brain to be very spiritual.

11:24

So ancestral rituals. a very common thing we do, everyday lives, we go to temples and it's not specific religion, it's more a mix and match of different folklore religion together. So it just became a lifestyle, right, growing up.

11:39

And we don't even question, just like something that we do with our parents, our grandparents or aunties, uncles, you know, and big families, we all do that together, even friends, you know, when you need certain things, you go to temple for certain, certain like requests that you have, you know, not, I don't want to advocate greed and all that stuff on spiritual, what we can talk about later, but it's just so ingrained in our culture.

12:00

And so it wasn't never a question, even the phone phrase situation, the direction of the space, how we understand energy, it's already in the culture so much. And I don't think people value that so much because just, you know, it's normalized, right?

12:15

And the globalization, the Westernization, it's been deemed as superstition, you know, and being reduced to lower value or uneducated kind of thinking. So the revitalization is about going back to the empowerment of those roots and history and to our spiritual culture that has been rooted for hundreds of years, tracing back and its mixture with indigenous culture as well, with indigenous people in Taiwan as well,

12:44

there is a lot of crossover sharing knowledge that also happened as much as the, you know, the problem of colonization and racial happiness or just also acknowledge that that happens everywhere. So, but now while talking about integration, revitalization and a lot of ritual practice are kind of integrating together in new ways.

13:05

And the young people are finding a, there's almost like a trend to like go back to the roots of what is Taiwanese ritual, Taiwanese spirituality, the kind of a temple shamans that are seen like from the older generation now are being empowered back, like they'll integrate techno music, electronic music, rave.

13:27

parties, you know, all these really like current underground movement with this grassroots kind of an older generational historic culture. Yeah, so that's interesting. Yeah, when we were there in Taiwan, it was quite interesting because we spent four months in Taiwan this last year doing some research and different kind of yeah, practiced in development with this piece as well.

13:54

And so we spent a lot of time having dialogues with various people from different kind of backgrounds and in various kind of religions, either monks or different kind of shamans or in the temples. And it was so interesting to also hear about this kind of almost this need to come back to this like almost emergent feeling of needing to come back to something much larger than yourself.

14:22

I think when we talk a lot about like Westernization in specifically Taiwan, like Taiwan is very heavily reliant on the US right now for their power dynamics. And I think a lot about the control and different invisible things that we don't always see that are happening behind the scenes and how that is also holding Taiwan in a different way.

14:43

And I think coming back to the people and coming back to these kind of everyday rituals is allowing a new kind of sense of belonging and identity that is kind of been missing over the last little while.

14:54

Oh, yes. And speaking of which, I do want to, because Gabriel, you mentioned about the ancient western. It is one of our research from years ago is, many of you might already know this, the word dance, the Chinese character of dance that we're using language in Taiwan that is the traditional character.

15:20

It's like a lot closer to the Oracle bone script. So I'm talking about this ancient Chinese language that's used across the Chinese speakers around the world. The character of dance, its original form is a shaman with holding spiritual tools like jades and feathers, rotating, basically doing ancestral and ancient rituals.

15:44

That is the character where dance evolved from. So then thinking about how we talk about dance and performance in the common everyday language while looking at a shaman doing rituals. And that is the secret work of what dance is.

16:03

So that is kind of that connection back to this culture and our context of movement practice. So this is a work that's been in development. And so I haven't seen what will be this realization of it, which is really exciting.

16:18

But when we sat down to talk about this work, you know what, I've seen some other pieces of your work. when we sat down to talk about what this piece could be. I mean, I just was really excited in terms of all the research and the intersection of practices that you hold.

16:35

And I would love to hear you speak about what mediumship is and the power, its power in this performance context. Yeah, thank you. So originally, I'll just give a tiny bit of context, but originally when just before I met Sammy in 2019, I was having these experiences Westernly diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis, and I wasn't quite sure where to reach out to in alignment with finding resources beyond beyond just the Western kind of medical approach.

17:14

And shortly after that, I had met Sammy and he had exposed me. and brought me to some of his different spiritual teachers from Taiwan and from various other places in the world and started opening up some of these kind of ideas for me of what this could be in a different context.

17:33

And through that kind of expanding experience and research, we've begun begun to explore how this can also be transcended into a way of sharing this kind of experience through performance. For the audience listening to this, it's in the Western lens, again, generalizing it.

17:55

When we talk about this kind of spiritual experiences, people think about ghost possession. They think about paranormal activity. They think about woo-woo stuff right away. So it's scary, right? Or they think about this person is crazy.

18:08

You are mentally ill, that it is your making stuff out psychologically. So that's usually where people go to in the Western context right away. And for us, again, growing up in the Eastern world, if you would tell my mom or my aunties about, oh, this is what I'm experiencing.

18:27

They will say, well, do you want to go to the temple and ask the shaman to see if there's something going on spiritually that's bugging you about this? So right away, I didn't come in with the prejudice, or around like what her experiences are and actually understand there, we just need to help find the expert, the right expert to figure out what to do.

18:48

And that's where this whole thing unfolds into actually full on, you know, legitimize meditation practice. Yeah. So that was so empowering to have those moments of dialogue and also to have these like intergenerational dialogues with his family and being able to share and not feel judged in these moments and really allowed us to go deeper into what are these experiences and how can we transform them into something that is more current and maybe it could work within our artistic practice.

19:19

So through, I mean now it's been about four years of specifically working on how to integrate this like safely into our performance practice, but we've kind of cultivated a space where we're able to call spirit and go into like a mediumship trance state, on stage performing it live and allowing people to feel what that actually means in that context and maybe receive what they need at that moment without me having to specifically tell them anything.

19:50

Just because I feel like sometimes with a more outdated states of mediumship, it is very much like it can get into states of telling you how you should feel or how you should experience your ancestors in your way and or in the way that I am prescribing to you.

20:08

But I really want to kind of open that up and also kind of decolonize some of that practice in a way of letting it flow and see how it can touch you in the way that. you need to be held in that, in that moment.

20:22

And just for the audience, like this is real stuff we're doing. It's not just performing a mediumship. It's actually doing this for real. So that's what it's, there is a sense of like real stake, you know, real risk.

20:39

And then when I say race, it's like, we are not just pretending and have to hit the marks, you know, the shapes are in shape. It's like, no, we really have to mind body spiritually, like be there and fully channel and connect and practice with the spirits on you, making sure you're, you know, it's the same, you know, building that rapport as well and have that same framework and bring a whole new,

21:00

a kind of experience for the audience, right? Whole new framework. Yes. And this work is being designed for performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is, you know, a very exciting partnership and a very exciting space.

21:15

But I would actually like to hear what excites you about realizing this work in that space. And maybe you can speak a little bit more to, yeah, how the space influences the design of the experience. Because I know that there's a number of performance or aspects to the design of this experience that draw people into a state of presence, embodied space, and also a space of ritual.

21:42

If you're, I don't know if you're actually using that word with regard to your performance. But yeah, love to hear about that, about the excitement around the use of the space and the general design elements to evoke these kinds of effects, yeah.

21:56

For the audience doesn't know the history of Vancouver Art Gallery, right? The VAG, it was built in 1906 as a provincial courthouse. And the basement is actually a prison, you know? So when you go in, there are some parts when the art party or the old fields, you know, when you open up those spaces there, that's a courtroom.

22:12

And this is like, you know, actually a prison. So, and, you know, it's historically, so that. context is very interesting to be in that building. And also it's the it's very iconic, right? It's a capital A kind of art in there.

22:27

Like, you know, people go there to to see what is the most like prestigious art in the city. And at the same time, you know, it's speaking of like that, it's historically a while, sorry, a white male dominated kind of a space, right?

22:44

You know, people think of like, only white men does art in here as I'm watching white men, white men, type painting. So I think to partner up with the VAC, when push festival, you know, and doing this type of work, it's really progressive.

22:57

And it's quite, you know, quite revolutionary to bring in this kind of work to witness something like this. And then we are taking a lot of risks in the way of like, you know, in theater is a different kind of safe space for performers.

23:10

You know, we're taking more risks in a different way. When we are in the gallery setting, you know, I feel like We both feel like the gallery space they set out has a different kind of amplification and resonance of the energy when we perform.

23:24

And also gallery is used to holding space for audience while coming to see stillness, to see still object, still paintings and sculpture close up in fine details. It demands already that kind of attention, right?

23:41

Very different from theater in many different ways. And then imagine this kind of audience is cultivating this kind of a scale of perception quality or coming to see this type of work where it's slow.

23:53

There's a lot of refined slowness movement, a lot of details and shift of vibration that's just slow and refined for them to actually take the time to be in the space to feel that as if you're watching a sculpture, moving, moving slowly, right?

24:09

And that to me, it's quite, it's very exciting. Yeah, totally. It's so exciting. And I also think that we're really grateful for this opportunity to get to spend more time in the Vancouver Art Gallery and think about how the work can really be integrated within that kind of space.

24:25

I mean, there's definitely a lot of creative challenges that come up working in a museum space, just even technically you can't have certain objects in there and you have to be careful of where the art is.

24:37

And so it's also allowing us to re-imagine and rethink how this work can cohesively kind of work with this space. Because a lot of our art and our practices about really that deep integration with either technology or with movement and I think also the space and how that all works together through an experience.

24:59

So we're really grateful to get to have that time. And every Tuesday where it's closed, we get to spend time to really think about how that will work together in the new year. So yeah, very grateful to think about how this can be reimagined in this way.

25:14

And you've been very creative and it's. since it was going to be in this space. And then there was a really large art piece that, I mean, the team at The Vag has been so great with us, you know, but just realistically, I think we had that surprise last week.

25:29

Oh, there's actually a giant art piece that can only go in the space that you were going to have your performance in, so. And now the audience get to go through this gate of heaven before they come to see our work.

25:41

And then it's going to be surrounded by a bunch of paintings that are in similar themes. So almost like when we think of attending churches or temples, they're all sacred kind of architecture. We're all coming to a different type of creative sacred architecture being surrounded by that.

25:56

And it's not something as like, you know, Dan's audience would just get to experience, right? Because you get to then have a totally different experience by the space and then see this, you know, to feel this experience coming out of that as well.

26:11

Yeah. I find that really, really exciting for the audience to actually go through, yeah. And you just referenced it, Caroline, technology in your work. So that's something that you're also really known for, that America is really known for, audiovisual, incredible audiovisual design.

26:30

You speak about using technology as extensions of the body. I would love to know what that looks like in this work. I think because we're really diving into this energetic practice within this work, it only makes sense for us to also continue to expand that through the unseen kind of visualization using technology of what that could be or what that could look like.

26:57

We, of course, don't want to spoon-feed the audience, but we want to allow them to open their mind and not have to worry about having to watch the body so closely in this kind of way, but also thinking about the whole space being the body.

27:15

Yeah. And just to, not to brag, but just like this is something that we've been doing over 15 years in our company is really to give you some audience, some context. This is one of our primary research is to center on the body embodiment sensory with technology, right?

27:39

So dance technology is our center of our research and our work. And we specialize this sense of immediacy, making sure that technology does not overpower the body, overpower the frequency that you animate from the body, the actual performance value and the experience, right?

28:02

The technology is always here to support. It's part of the body. So you won't be like your hands are not going to take over the whole show. Your eyes aren't going to take over the whole show, but the gates is so important.

28:13

your finger articulation, it just is important as your full body's movement, right? So we've got to think of that as part of our technology as well. It's part of our body, and that's something we really advocate and focus on.

28:27

So for this piece, really, we want to make sure that technology really is becoming a channel to kind of continue to open the bandwidth of what our body and spirit and our energy can do. It's continuing to amplify those bandwidth of frequency.

28:44

And so some people are really, really sensitive to that. So some audience might be like, I can feel you without opening my eyes. I can go through the experience, just like just feeling you being on stage, da, da, da, da.

28:56

But somebody says, I don't really see that, but because there's a projection that bridge the gap of those information, now it allows me to be on the same ride with this other person who are, you know, a meditator or a monk, you know?

29:10

So it's just like, they are, it's there to really facilitate the experience. So then help you amplify those channels so you can all be connected in a deeper sense. Yeah, I'm just gonna jump in because I've seen and experienced your work.

29:24

And so I know I feel very clear when you're describing that. I have images and I get that, but I'm wondering if you could give an example. So specifically with this work, we've kind of created a, we'll call it a DIY kind of motion capture setting system.

29:44

Sorry, not setting system. And by using that, we're able to kind of really show the particles that are falling off of the body, thinking of it as like, what if our energy were to expand through the ground?

29:59

What would that feel like? And how would that look? What would that look like? I think specifically thinking of it as a collaborator in this way, as a reflection, as an expansion allows us to really center on thinking about how technology can really support the work versus again, what Sammy was saying, like take away from the experience or compete with the work.

30:26

Yeah, because part of the actual experience is that like, when you work with energy, we in our practice, we call sending the power. And then when you send the power, you can gather energy, energy going through, we conjure the energy.

30:39

And then to expand that, you can imagine your own energy kind of expanding. outside of your skin and then you start to go beyond to like some people might kiss your astral body you know and subtle body and all these turns so you really can feel the shift that happens so the audience that are sensitive they can feel that shift so audience like cannot feel that shift right away you know we have projection to kind of just hint that you know subtly that this energy are actually shifting and going beyond your skin you're on your body and how that it's almost like a vibration that particle lies and comes back and another thing that Caroline does you know i hope it's not spoiled too much but the pendulum you know is another kind of technology we're using working with the spiritual mediumship practice yeah so with the pendulum we're we're using it as a way of actually guiding the movement through the space but also as a way now to expand into the soundscape as well live so we're thinking about how spirit could guide how the sound is changing in real time as well as the movement and the projection.

31:47

So this kind of extension of body, extension of self, extension of sound. Sound, yeah, and power I think is all rooted together in this kind of beautiful way that we're continuing to explore. But just a good, there are so many different example.

32:03

Those are just two that we can pick up. We do want the audience to create their own journey as well to think about how their own technology that this mechanism designed by modern nature, how your technology can also interface with our work as well.

32:19

And that is the most exciting part of why we want to create performance for audience to witness that as well. The continuation of the technology working with the body. And you talk about the creation journey for this piece with regard to research, creative exploration, iterations.

32:35

Yeah, this is a long time research that has kind of shifted through many different iterations and explorations until it's landed into this piece that we're really excited about. When we first were talking about some of this initial research, it was back in 2020 when we were kind of going through a phase where we were both really dealing with our own shadows at that moment and our own biases against each other.

33:04

Meaning like Sammy had dealt with a lot of racism and there was a lot of work that I was highlighting for him to unpack and same with me. And I had a lot of anger towards men were, and there was a lot of unpacking to do with that kind of process.

33:25

Since then, we've done many different residencies kind of across the world, including in Cambodia, working with Peter Chin as a mentor to kind of think about how we can formalize some of these grand ideas.

33:44

Yeah, it's, I just want to say like when we first met each other, it really felt like it's like our worst enemy manifested in what each other stands for in the societal lens, you know, there's like a social in both our social conditioning of like what our worst enemies, you know, this for me, it was like, I didn't trust white people, you know, I did it, I, you know, someone mentor that were racialized mentor that were still traumatized by,

34:11

you know, a lot of racism, they will, I was really conditioning saying that we can't trust white people about doing sharing our culture, you know, what can be tokenized appropriated, you know, there is a lot of fear, there's a lot of like, I would say, you know, there's danger and risk in sharing like deeper spirituality and, and I'm sure a lot of people are still feeling that way, you know, so we want to say that's real,

34:34

you know, that's what it is something that people are going through and we fall through that. We had to go through so much shadow work. There's a lot of pain. At the same time, I feel like what I used to call white people out on, I stand in that power of being seen as a man, which I never really identified myself as man, but on the societal lens, I'm still, I represent men in Caroline's lens.

35:03

So for me, it was interesting. I go through my own fragility, male fragility, be like, no, that's not me. I didn't do all this stuff. And then she's doing the same thing. We're both like, well, innocent, but we hate you, each other.

35:16

And at the same time, that complex, because love really brought us together to really fight through all these stereotypes and stigma and pain that we, it's so ingrained deep down to our psychic and our subconscious level.

35:31

But then a lot of times people would have given up already. I've given up so many times too, just to be safe, right? We need to take care of ourselves. But because our journey being twin flames, having our soul to be reincarnated into this lifetime to meet together, that we felt like we really, it's our purpose to really have to learn and push through those hardship and the shadow, the deeper shadow work.

35:57

And then we really want to share that part of the process and journey. And it really is not easy to face your own fear, discomfort, the darkest part of you. You don't begin healing until you recognize those dark part of you in the shadow.

36:18

But then you can do that by yourself too. You gotta do it with yourself and with people that you trust can help you do those baby steps until you, I wouldn't say you get out of it, but you just grow more muscle, you get more trust and you have more trust in humanity as well in different ways.

36:36

And then, through the process we're like we want to share more of this story because the more we get to know each other the more feel like we can share this connection and love we have for each other and hopefully that will amplify further to just elicit evoke some of the more creative and loving energy around the world a little bit right yeah i think especially globally there's so much divide happening right now and part of the reason why we're so excited by this work and by what we're doing together is kind of trying to think about how we can collectively heal some of these kind of misunderstandings or i mean shadows and really facing those things like i didn't know that that hurt you and really how do we unpack some of these situations together and through a more intersectional kind of lens and so Yeah,

37:26

it's been a lot of work and it's we've arrived in various kind of creative processes and then also personal processes. There's a lot of peers emotionally down in the studio and the journey. Yeah. But then it's still like it's always worth every process at all.

37:45

That was so worth to conjure that to process and to let go and release some of the things that it's not needed anymore as well. Like, oh, the things we really care about, we hold on to this value. It's like, oh, actually, that's not needed in this current time.

37:57

No, that's that's that's that's into something else. And that that feels very healthy and like moving forward. Right. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. When I hear you speak, like, first of all, it's so generous of you to share the real internal processes that, you know, I think creative process is often gets to those deep personal places, especially if you're really if you're going deep, if you're really doing like authentic research.

38:23

And so just to hear kind of the honesty around that and and the root of also, you know, your mediumship practice. It's, I think, really generous to share that with our with me and with the listeners because it's it's honest and because I think it's relatable.

38:43

A lot of these things are, you know, with regard to like the personal work we have to do, understanding. Intersectionality, how we are situated socially given the power constructs we exist in and and also like, you know, how mental health is viewed and and our general Western disconnect from spirituality and all these things.

39:04

So I'm just so excited that that you are bringing this work to push. I'm so excited to experience it in this iteration. I genuinely look forward to discovering it and just being present in the moment to experience it alongside the other audience members.

39:26

participants who will be there on the journey. And I'm so thrilled to follow your practice. Yeah, I think we're very blessed to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much. We are so grateful. And again, I, when we say our gratitude, it's not just, you know, a usual gratitude.

39:49

It's like, there's so many layers as we talk about, you know, how brave you are to pick up, to actually program our work, you know, and how much value you see, because you also are super open-minded person with such a diverse, you know, view on what's going on with the world.

40:05

You understand the complexity and that's needed in this political landscape that's happening right now. I would say some people might not get our work and someone like you, who does, who are, you know, bring us, this project into such a...

40:21

a beautiful and empowering kind of platform to share that in this really, I would say rare, collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery as well. For us, it really amplifies our deep, deep value of our project and our belief and some of the really deep down, so I think the sole value, the sole work that we wanna do for the world.

40:48

So again, thank you so much for having us to talk about the project and also be able to share this for real in the Vancouver Art Gallery Super Push Festival. Yes, thank you so much. We're so grateful.

41:00

It's been such a pleasure to get to talk to you and get to know more about you as well and we're so excited. Thank you. Thank you. You just heard Gabrielle Martin's conversation with Sami Chen and Caroline Rigal of Chamerique.

41:19

Presented with the Vancouver Art Gallery, inner sublimity will show at Push Festival February 7th to 9th. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and the lovely Ben Charland. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.

41:33

New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. This year marks the 20th festival for Push International Performing Arts Festival. If you'd like to explore more of Push over the last 20 years, please look for our special 20th anniversary retrospective Push Play season.

41:52

And for more information on the 2025 Push Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca and follow us on social media.

42:06

Coming up on the next Push Play. How do I use this performance to actively reshape my life? And how do I use this performance to indulge in communities and meet with people that I wouldn't normally meet with?

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