Gabrielle Martin is Programming the World for Local Audiences
About This Episode:
In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with Gabrielle Martin, Artistic Director of Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Gabrielle discusses her unconventional path into arts leadership, the realities of curating large-scale interdisciplinary work, and the responsibility of presenting challenging, global performance within a local context.
This episode explores:
- Gabrielle’s journey into arts leadership and festival direction
- The role of PuSh Festival within Vancouver’s cultural ecosystem
- Curating interdisciplinary and international performance
- Audience engagement and accessibility in contemporary performance
- The realities of producing large-scale work in Canada
- Care, sustainability, and leadership in the performing arts
And much more!
Guest: 🎭 Gabrielle Martin
Gabrielle Martin is a cultural producer and live arts curator practicing transformative experiential design in one of society’s few remaining ritual spaces. Her work prioritizes embodied criticality, imagination, pluralism, and risk. It centres the body, and is framed by social and political urgencies.
Gabrielle has a BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University (Montréal), a Certificate in Dramaturgy from the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (Châlons-en-Champagne), and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from Rome Business School.
Recently, Gabrielle has participated on curatorial and selection juries for Denmark’s CPH Stage International Days, England’s Horizon Showcase, and Canada’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in Dance. Before joining PuSh in 2021, she worked as Festival Manager with the Vancouver International Dance Festival. Prior to working in arts management, Gabrielle performed over 1,400 shows internationally with Cirque du Soleil’s TORUK – The First Flight and Cavalia, participated in choreographic residencies in Belgium, Sweden and France, and presented her work in the UK, US, and across Canada.
Connect with Gabrielle:
🌐 Website: pushfestival.ca
📷 Instagram: @pushfestival
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Transcript
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast.
And on this program, I talk to people who make theatre, whether they are actors, directors, playwrights, stage managers, producer, if they make theatre, I’m talking to them. Some of them you will have heard of and others I really think you should get to know. As I mentioned previously, Stageworthy is now in its 10th year.
And I’m wearing a fancy new Stageworthy t shirt. It’s got a little patch on the sleeve that indicates the 10 years of Stageworthy. And those are just for me because right now I don’t have any kind of supplier or anything like that an easy way to do it.
But I mean, if enough people came to me and said I really want one of these Stageworthy t shirts, I would obviously have to make that happen. So if that’s something you’re interested in, I don’t know, leave a comment, let me know. If you’re watching on YouTube, make sure that you like this episode, leave a comment and tell me what you did like and also hit the subscribe button and click on the bell icon so that whenever a new episode comes out, you get notified right away.
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And while you’re there while you’re in your favorite podcast app, especially if you’re in Apple podcasts, or Spotify, make sure that you leave a rating and a review. Those ratings and reviews help new people to find the show because the algorithm prefers shows that get reviews. And you know what, since this is the 10th year of Stageworthy, what a great time it would be to leave a review because it would really help this show.
So if you’ve been enjoying the show, go in there, leave your review and the rating and I’d be really grateful. You know what else to be grateful for. I’m going to get into more details about that at the end of the show when I tell you about next week’s guest.
But I do want to mention about the Patreon. I can’t make this show without the people who’ve chosen to back me on Patreon. And so that’s another thing you could do in the 10th year of Stageworthy.
If you have enjoyed this program in the past, you could go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. Like I said, I’ll get into more details about that after the interview. While we’re talking about the 10th year of Stageworthy, I told you last time that I would come up with a few episodes from the archives of Stageworthy that you might want to listen to.
And I want to suggest that you go to stageworthy.ca and you search for Michael Ross Albert. Michael Ross Albert is one of my favorite Canadian playwrights, and I have spoken to Michael quite a few times in the history of this program. I’ve talked to him at least five times in the history of Stageworthy.
I’ve enjoyed talking with him about the shows that he creates that much. So go to Stageworthy, search for Michael Ross Albert, and you will not be disappointed with the episodes that you’ll find there. My guest this week is Gabrielle Martin.
Gabrielle Martin is the Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Push Festival. And if you’re not familiar with the Push Festival, it is Vancouver’s mid-winter festival showcasing contemporary theatre, dance, music, multimedia from all over the world. And in this conversation, Gabrielle and I will talk about the Push Festival.
We’ll also talk about her experience and her time as an aerialist as part of two shows with Cirque du Soleil and how that time with Cirque and her experience has informed the work that she does as the Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Push Festival. Let’s get right into the episode. Here’s my conversation with Gabrielle Martin.
Gabrielle Martin, thank you so much for joining me. You are the Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Push Festival. And, you know, I’m based in Toronto, so I wasn’t familiar with Push Festival.
And I’m sure there are people who are listening who don’t know that festival. Could you give us a quick rundown about what the Push Festival is?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s curated. It’s international in scope.
It happens in winter. So the last couple of weeks of January, first week of February, we’re in venues all over the city. And it’s really, well, this year we’re really talking about it as a festival for the culturally fearless.
So it’s always been known as presenting work that takes creative risks. There’s a lot of interdisciplinary work. And ultimately, it’s work, you know, that shifts our paradigms for expression and how we relate to one another.
So a lot of the work is really adventurous in terms of its form, its discipline, and also work that is in conversation with social and political urgencies. So it’s a contemporary performing arts festival. So, you know, we are living in a polycrisis.
And what does that mean? Like it’s art that obviously there’s subjectivity to curation, but it’s art that I really feel strongly is helping us make sense of the world around us and hopefully inspiring us to better futures.
[Phil Rickaby]
How long has the Push Festival been in existence?
[Gabrielle Martin]
We’re in its 21st year. And I’ve been with the festival since 2021. So I believe that means this is my fifth festival, though there was a kind of weird pandemic festival in there.
And yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
Every story in theatre includes there was a weird time in the pandemic. But yeah, now you come from an aerialist background in the choreography and dance sort of thing. How did you come to artistic direction?
And specifically, how did you come to the Push Festival?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yes. So I’ve always been interested in the ritual of performance and that ritual, you know, it’s one of society’s remaining ritual spaces is theatre. So interested in the potentiality of that social gathering when people come together to imagine together.
And that that is more than necessarily what just transpires on stage, but it’s the whole event. So early on, I was, you know, as a eight year old putting on theatre plays with my friends in their backyards. And then later in life, I mean, I studied dance at Concordia in Montreal, I studied circus, I went on tour with Cirque du Soleil.
And while I was on tour with Cirque du Soleil, I would also be the tour party planner. And I would plan epic parties for the cast as an opportunity to come together and have fun and just create short little fun and wild performance vignettes. And so I’ve always been interested in bringing people together.
I’ve always been excited about live performance and producing live performance. I mean, just before we started recording, we were talking about, you know, there’s always something that’s gonna be an opportunity for a creative solution or, or, you know, in other words, something can go wrong always, you know, but that is something that I think a lot of people in this line of work are excited about that live means. And yeah, so I kind of always knew that I wanted to be contributing to just contributing more, just contributing more, offering leadership.
And, you know, for a long time, I was performing circus skills. So I was very grateful to be physical every day and touring and, and, and having that practice. But also at a point in my mid thirties, I was like, I need my worth to be more than my splits and my tricks, you know, like, I think I have some more to give the world than this.
And, and then went back to school for arts and cultural management and, and here I am some years later.
[Phil Rickaby]
Did you have a relationship with the Push Festival before you became artistic director? Like what, what, what did you know about it? How did, had you worked with the Push Festival before?
[Gabrielle Martin]
So it’s almost my lack of relationship that makes my love for it greater because I left Vancouver in 2006, the year after it started. And I left Vancouver to pursue a career in the arts because there wasn’t enough happening here. And so, and then I went, I lived in Montreal for quite a while and I toured internationally for many years.
And now I’ve come back and I’m just, I so value what this festival does in, in terms of creating an opportunity for exchange of ideas of perspectives and practices that may be foreign to us and vice versa to the visiting artists that, that we, we bring and host here. So I am passionate about the raison d’etre of this festival. And I know a lot of other people who say, I decided to move to Vancouver to study at the Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts because I knew Push was there, or I stayed in the city because of Push or these kinds of things.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, I think you, you, you mentioned leaving Vancouver because of the lack of the arts. And I think that for a lot of people, when they think about Vancouver, they think about film, they think about television production and that sort of thing, and not necessarily theatre, not necessarily dance. How has that changed in Vancouver and how has Push helped to, to drive that forward?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah. I mean, we are relatively geographically and therefore culturally isolated and that’s very real here. Living in Montreal, you get many more artists on tour passing through or other areas.
I mean, I guess you, I guess the same could be said for many areas of this country. And there are a lot of areas of this country that are even more isolated. But a big aspect of Push has been not just bringing in international artists to perform here and connect with the artists and audiences, but also we have an industry series, which is a platform, it’s a showcase, and it’s also a sector assembly.
So we bring together artists and arts workers in the middle week of the festival for a conference is kind of like a, it’s too formal a word for what it is. It’s a gathering, it’s an assembly, but it is also fundamentally an opportunity to show visiting international national presenters the work of Canadian artists and local artists. So that, that showcase aspect through both the full productions of Canadian work that sits alongside the international work in the program, as well as during that industry series week, there’s also lots of like work in progress showings and studio sharings and pitches.
And so that’s been a big important aspect of the festival that really puts us on the map because it is key in supporting our Canadian artists and also building those international relationships and having that reciprocity, international reciprocity.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Now I’m curious, cause you know, I’m very familiar with the fringe movement. So I know how that works, you know, cause it’s a random draw, but Push is a curated festival.
And so how does a festival come together? How do you make decisions about the shows? How do you curate a show, the festival and decide what’s going to be in it?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, I think that that’s an evolving practice for me. And I think that I’m, I’m developing more confidence in terms of my own creative intuition, my intuitions and beliefs about what is urgent now. And I think because it’s always going to be subjective.
So I think I am gaining more confidence to lean into that. And I think for me, what’s important now is work that as mentioned, help us imagine possible futures that are, you know, I’m not that into realism. I’m, I’m interested in work that can really spark our imaginations and seed a different reality from the ones that have resulted in us living in a poly crisis.
But yeah, I see a lot of work. I travel a lot. I, I’m always guilty that I’m not seeing more because this is a big world and there is so much to see.
And there are so many incredible artists out there. So I see as much as I can. I watch a lot of videos that artists send me.
My list of videos that I need to still see is very, very long, but that is really the fun part. A key, super engaging and interesting part of, of the job for me, because I’m so curious about what artists are making and what that says about the world we’re living in. And then, yeah, honestly, a lot of it comes down to how much does it cost?
You know, like what is my curatorial framework? Budget? No, but it is, it’s a key, it’s a key reality.
And especially because we are living because of also that, even if we’re part of a tour that has a stop in Toronto or Montreal, the cost of getting across the country is still really significant, but that creates creative problem solving opportunities. So yeah, a lot of it does come down to logistics as well. And then also trying to ensure that there’s a really great balance of both forms of expression that the artists are practicing, themes explored, and also regions represented.
We’re an international festival. So for me, it’s important that there’s also work from the global South, which is really hard to do because of the neocolonial economy, global economy, and how that affects arts. So yeah, a lot of different things to factor in.
[Phil Rickaby]
You mentioned, you know, seeing a lot of shows, traveling to see shows, watching videos. In your mind, what makes a show right for the Porsche Festival?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, great question. And I mean, there’s a spectrum, but I would say, and again, it’s going to be personal, but it’s a show where I feel like I hadn’t seen this before, for one, like a real excitement of the experimentation and the creative risk that’s being taken, how the artist is expressing themselves through the form. So something that I want my mind to be blown, actually, to be honest, I want my mind to be blown.
And I see a lot of work, so that’s hard to do. But when I feel that’s the case, I love a feeling of like, what is this? When I’m kind of in that shock.
And that’s my curious mind of just being so excited for foreign things. And that’s not the end of it. Because, you know, it’s not just about a novel feeling.
It’s about that excitement, about the imagination of an artist, and how it therefore transports me somewhere in my mind, or my experience that I haven’t been before. And it’s it’s often work that is then makes me think about the world that I’m living in, in a way that I haven’t before, or in a way, or just that speaks to how I’m grappling with the times we’re living in, or things like that. But that brings a certain poetry to it.
Yeah, I definitely enjoy a work that is simultaneously in conversation with the times we’re living in.
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, you know, bringing me into a new dimension or projecting me further in my experience or thinking about it or Yeah, does your experience as an aerialist as a dancer as a curator, as as somebody who’s toured with Cirque de Soleil inform how you approach curation and your artistic direction?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yes, absolutely. I come from a physical practice. So I did work as a circus artist for many years.
And before that, well, I started in street circus arts, actually, which then took me into dance, somatic dance practices, contemporary dance that then took me back to circus, but all to say, very embodied practice. And I do think that the body holds so much wisdom, so much knowledge and, and poetry as well. Like I really I do have a bias to work that’s very embodied in terms of its modes of expression.
I think that I appreciate the kind of nuance and the poetry of what can be expressed through the body. And I think Yeah, and again, I do feel that there’s a certain presence that that can invite us into an embodied presence, often. And I feel like I’m about to walk into my own trap.
Talking about text based work that stays in a very literal place, I think does something else to my brain and my experience and doesn’t necessarily invite me into the space that I feel has the most potentiality.
[Phil Rickaby]
Is that something that you’ve always felt? Is that something that came out of being a physical performer and sort of doing because Cirque du Soleil is kind of known for its sort of abstractions in its in its shows? Does, does that inform your sort of ideas about about what you want to see?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Does it? Yeah. I mean, I think that some of the themes that drew me to circus are what draw me to how I lead.
And what I think that we can do what I think we can achieve, like the kind of the dreamer in me, I guess, because I think a lot of circus is about surpassing external or preconceived expectations of Yeah, what we can, it’s it’s becoming superhuman, almost right. And so I think that concept of mind over matter and what we can do when we put our minds to it, I think that’s very present in my leadership, in terms of my belief for first of all, just what kind of impact this festival can have if our staff and our artists work together and and believe in it. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s actually the key thematic there or through line.
[Phil Rickaby]
Let’s talk a bit about this year’s festival. And I want to talk about what what what people could expect to see at the festival. What’s what what what do you what would you want to highlight about this year’s festival?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, I mean, this there’s always an incredible range of work. So, you know, we have a work of absurdity and that like punk rock absurdity of slug, which it weaves in humor beautifully and a kind of DIY aesthetic. Well, you know, it’s shocking in the best of ways.
And we also have work that something like ask a one which is expanded cinema, which is a more contemplative experience. There is live mixing of multiple cameras on stage that are filming objects, digitally affected, projected, creating these amazing moving landscapes that give you a really deep sense of time, vertical and horizontal time. And it is beautifully layered with live music, vocals and and instruments.
And we also have things like Le Beau Monde, which, again, is an absurd work of these French artists that imagine a future where people are trying to imagine what life in this time was. And they get it all wrong often. But it is also a really thoughtful kind of take on what we leave behind, what we value as important, things like that.
We have Tanya Tagaq presenting her incredible new work, Split Tooth. And this is a work that brings, as far as I know, and my understanding is, as far as the production team knows, the first Inuit throat singing choir on stage, en masse. And that’s layered with an incredible indigenous futurism, embodied narrative that’s woven into that work.
So there is work that, you know, it’s a multidisciplinary festival. So there’s dance, there’s theatre, there’s music, more music this year than previous years, actually. Music, theatre, dance, expanded cinema.
And a lot of the work is interdisciplinary. And that’s something that really excites me. So for music, for example, a lot of it is music theatre.
It’s work like Trouble Score, which is a ritualistic pop concert, which uses this incredible lighting design by Nick Verstand, who does a lot of lighting for fashion shows and pop concerts internationally, and creates this really beautiful space that supports a text of magic realism that’s also simultaneously magic realism, but weaving in the artists, the brother-sister duo, Pablo and Luanda Casella’s childhood in Brazil and family controversy and things like that.
So there’s an incredible range. And also I think one of the exciting things is the interdisciplinarity is that mix of forms that creates something really exciting. And we have from intimate experiences like Slugs I mentioned, which is in The Nest, I think it seats about 90 people, to The Playhouse, which seats closer to 700 and is a more kind of conventional theatre experience.
[Phil Rickaby]
Music when played live is extremely affecting. And it is, it’s like, listen, I could watch a movie musical and I’m like, yeah, that’s nice. But if I hear people singing live on stage, I’m always moved.
And so there’s something about like voices in the same room and all that, which is sort of like, you know, theatre is people in the same room. What speaks to you about the musical pieces that you’ve brought to this festival this year?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, I mean, I think you just spoke to it. There’s something that’s undeniably visceral about that experience. And it just, the impact and that it’s, it’s potential to really transform us from the inside out in what feels like a kind of undeniable and real, and again, like embodied way.
The resonance and the vibration of that music paired with something like a really compelling narrative, or a really innovative visual landscape, I just think is really exciting. And that’s been something for me that I am really proud about this year’s festival. It’s something that I’ve actually focused on in terms of my curatorial research.
So there are a number of projects, we’ve mentioned Split Tooth, we’ve talked about Troublescore, there’s Rainbow Chan at the Dream Factory. Also, Kingoriak is a theatre work, but there’s beautiful live music and singing within it. So it holds that, it definitely uses that medium as a strong way to connect with the audience.
And Askawan as well, which is that project I mentioned as Expanded Cinema, but there’s beautiful, beautiful singing in the kind of style of Gregorian chanting, but in, spoke in the Cree language, Nahiavu, or the lyrics are in Nahiavu. So quite a few projects that integrate music and vocals in a really special way.
[Phil Rickaby]
Is there a show that, some of the shows you’ve mentioned, you know something about them, you haven’t quite seen them, or there’s a bit of mystery around the show. Is there a show that for you is like, this is the show that piques my interest the most, that’s like, I am so curious about this show, I’m so curious to see this on stage?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Well, yeah, okay, so there are so many.
[Phil Rickaby]
And I say that knowing that it’s kind of an unfair question to, because they’re all, they’re all like the shows that you want to see because you curated them. So knowing that it is an unfair question to ask of the artistic director, I choose to ask it anyway.
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, I mean, I have my secret favorites, but that is kind of of the ones I’ve seen, and a number of these projects are world premieres or Vancouver premieres, but a number of them are still in development. Actually, we have three projects that are going to be in residency, production residency at the festival, and then premiere at the festival. So that is really exciting.
So that is Split Tooth, that’s also Conway Conway, this is a Zerohini Movement Factory, a Zimbabwean dance company, we’ve actually co-produced this work. And remember that Time We Met in the Future, this is a work by Lara Kramer, who is pretty internationally renowned as a performance, it has the way she mixes dance and performance art. And she’s an Indigenous artist, and this is her first group work.
So it’s a very exciting work for that reason. But I guess I would say what I’m most kind of, let’s see, what am I most curious about as a piece that’s premiering at the festival? Khalil Khalil, this is a project by Khalil Albertran.
And these are artists that are based in the West Bank, Palestine. And this is the world premiere of this work. This is a very interdisciplinary project in the way that it weaves in.
I mean, Khalil is a dance artist, he also makes his own electronic music. And he has collaborated with filmmaker, documentary director Bilal. And they weave together autobiographical film footage, as well as in videos.
But I think what’s so beautiful is not just the form, but it talks about his martyred older brother who hold or held his same name, and his reckoning with that and how he holds the ghost of his deceased older brother, and how he reconciles his present with that history and that legacy. And, and this is a so it’s a project that I am so excited to see. I’ve seen some work in progress, but I’m so excited to see because, because this artist, this performer is really powerful on stage.
And I think that I just think this is going to be a really memorable performance.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, for sure. You’ve mentioned artists from Zimbabwe, you’ve mentioned artists from the geographical south, you’ve mentioned artists from Palestine. There must be a lot of logistics of bringing artists to Vancouver, that makes PUSH a particularly unique festival.
And there’s so many artists coming from different places. How do you navigate those logistics?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Well, it’s easier with a language translation app. I’ve been writing a lot in Spanish, so I don’t even speak Spanish. That’s very helpful.
Yeah, we’ve also learned a lot about, you know, the non-public information of who to contact at what embassy to help us to support our visa applications and these kind of things. That’s actually been a key, a very important aspect of making this happen for a of our artists from the global south specifically. And it’s been a learning curve for us over the last few years.
So yeah, that’s it. That’s a huge part of it. And yeah, it gets really interesting.
Each project, every country has its different tax arrangement with Canada, lots of supporting artists and their tax waivers and that kind of less exciting stuff. And then also just getting to know the artists and also the kind of cultural context they’re from as we figure out how to make this tour happen together.
[Phil Rickaby]
One of the other logistics of any festival is you bring people to your city and then you have to find a place for them to sleep, to stay. And I know with a lot of the French festivals, they’ve eliminated billeting. They don’t do billeting anymore.
It becomes incumbent on the artists to find a place to stay. How does PUSH navigate that particular aspect of bringing artists to the city?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, the time of year we’re in is really helpful. Like, you know, often we’re bringing people, for example, the Zimbabweans who are coming here. We’re like, oh my God, so sorry.
It is so cold right now. And we swear this can be a beautiful city. But actually, you know, that’s part of the beauty of PUSH for the locals, is that in the dead of winter, it’s something to look forward to and get excited about.
But the good aspect of being in the winter is that we can have these beautiful partnerships with hotels. So we have a really key relationship with the Vancouver Hotel Destination Association, Stay Vancouver’s. We have a great partnership with one of their hotels, Sandman.
And it’s just, they work with us and make, really make a lot of this possible because it’s an incredible expense. You know, I think we’re over a thousand hotel nights across the festival.
[Phil Rickaby]
Wow.
[Gabrielle Martin]
I mean, that’s a lot.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. I want to shift a little bit and talk a little less about this particular festival, but I’m curious about PUSH and any restructuring or changes that happened in the wake of the pandemic years.
How has the pandemic impacted the festival and what changes for better or for worse have been made or had to be made?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah. I mean, it was that 2019, 2020, 2021 year was a year of reckoning for so much of the world for different reasons, huge reasons in being the pandemic, but there were also, you know, then there’s the murder of George Floyd and there was this, there’s just a real time of, of reflection and of this urgent necessity to not do things the way they’d been done before. And so, you know, PUSH wasn’t alone in that nationally, internationally as an organization that kind of came to this moment where the way that things had been done really wasn’t working anymore.
So, yeah, there’s been a number of shifts that have been made and I think one, well, one key one was within the organizational structure and establishing a kind of collaborative leadership model. I work really closely currently with the managing director, Annie Clark, who’s incredible. And just to kind of focus on workplace culture and also how do you embed that workplace culture in a more lasting way beyond just, okay, this is how we do things while this one leader is here and then they go and then maybe the organization goes through an identity crisis.
And yeah, and also really putting equity forward as a value. And I do think that the festival has always had diversity and inclusion as a key value. And we, you know, we’ve really worked at looking at what does it mean, as mentioned, to be an international festival.
So we do, you know, we’re historically, we are a presenter that buys performances, buys shows and presents shows. And that’s what we’re funded for. So that’s understandable.
But also in an international context, and also locally, there are situations where that more transactional model doesn’t necessarily work or it doesn’t, it leaves people out, you know. So for example, that is one of the reasons that we are co-producing the work Kamwai Kamwai by the Zimbabwean company, Gervani Movement Factory this year. So kind of looking at how, how the impact of our models and shifting them where it’s important to align with our values.
And we also have really worked to make the industry series, that assembly, a real place where artists feel welcome to, and to just continue in that direction of really making, push a place where artists and arts workers, presenters, producers can come together and exchange and be on the same level. Because that’s not something that necessarily happens a lot of places, a lot of places, especially those arts markets, the artists are really the bottom of the food chain. It’s a very, like the power dynamics are very intense.
So trying to create the kind of more horizontal spaces of exchange. Yeah. I mean, those are just some, just a few that I can name in terms of conscious shifts.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I would like to shift my focus again, and I want to talk a little more specifically about you, Gabrielle, I would love to talk about your performing arts origin story. You’ve alluded to a little bit performing in the backyard, that kind of thing.
But I’m curious more specifically about how you first discovered performance, how you discovered choreography and aerialism and just like all of that. How did, how did you get started in this performing arts world?
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I mean, I started out arts adjacent.
I was in sports. I definitely was not in ballet from a young age or gymnastics, which would have been very helpful, but somehow I made it. I like, I kind of went in through the back door into Cirque du Soleil somehow.
It’s kind of surprising still to me, but I, yeah, I was playing sports in my teen years and the kind of team culture that I was in, it wasn’t really, it wasn’t speaking to kind of who I was as much as I loved the intense physicality. I was actually a hockey player. I loved feeling like I was flying on the ice and I loved the like, yeah, the yeah.
Intensity of it. And then I had friends who were fire spinning in the park and I got into fire spinning and, and then that opened up this world of like, what if we put on our own fire spinning shows and perform them at rave parties? Wouldn’t that be great?
And then we did that. And then, and then I felt like my audience was too generous because they were high. And I felt like they’re telling me I’m amazing, but I feel like there’s more, I don’t feel like I, I like hit my peak here, you know?
So I really had this desire for more technical training and that’s what led me to go study contemporary dance at Concordia University in Montreal. So I mean, in that kind of period of deciding I wanted to study this more seriously. I also saw Key Down by Cirque du Soleil, which was one of their classic pieces that no longer tours, but like a real classic.
And I just fell in love with the aerial performance. And I, you know, from that point on, I was kind of obsessed in my late teens and, and I auditioned for the National Circus School of Canada, which was a horribly embarrassing experience. I did not get accepted, but it did squash my desire to continue training as an aerialist.
So Montreal was a great place for me to, to live because adjacent to my dance training, I was able to, to train in aerial forms and, and in a place like Montreal, like everybody, all the coaches have worked with Cirque du Soleil. So it’s just like learning from the best. Yeah.
And, and I think, you know, a big part of it was being in the right place at the right time then too, because the headquarters of Cirque du Soleil are there. Not that it was an easy kind of trajectory, you know, to, I didn’t start with Cirque du Soleil till I was 36 or 34. Anyways, no, that’s not true.
It’s 30, 30. I’m aging myself, but 30 feels old. It, these disciplines and being there, it was very helpful just to like, you know, be at the auditions and, and, and hear about, oh, Cirque is auditioning for this show.
And yeah. And in my, in my late twenties, and I started with Cavalia and then that developed into Cirque, but it was pretty much as soon as I saw QDEM, I was just like, I want to do this. And then I worked for 10 more years to get there.
[Phil Rickaby]
When you joined Cirque du Soleil at 30, I think you alluded to the fact that maybe you were not the youngest person in that cast. When you are joining a cast and you are a little older than, than, than a lot of the people, does that affect how your relationship with the cast in any way? How, how, how does that navigate?
[Gabrielle Martin]
So often in circus cast are younger. Interestingly for the show I was on, which was Turok, the first flight, it was the avatar inspired Cirque du Soleil show that toured arenas. They actually chose to cast a more mature cast.
And I think it was because they wanted what they call generalists, people who could do a lot of different acts and also people who could bring the world of avatar to life. So who ideally had more of a kind of performance experience, stage presence, that kind of thing. So I wasn’t the youngest there, but touring the, the social ecology of the tour is very interesting and complex.
You know, it’s a hundred people on the road that you live with all the time that you didn’t choose to live with. At times, incredible because you’re having these bonding experiences of being stranded at a Shanghai train station because there’s a storm and, you know, you’re camped out in the train station for 12 hours together and you kind of like have these incredible bonding moments, but also, also some strange dynamics because it’s a, it’s a weird family that you haven’t chosen.
[Phil Rickaby]
At what point did you decide that, I mean, I sort of alluded to it earlier, but what, you know, you were, you had this career as an aerialist using your body physically performing and that sort of thing. And then what, what was really at the heart of the, the decision to pursue arts administration? Was it just that, that, that, listen, I am no spring chicken.
I am a very old man and it is very easy for me to hurt myself if I do anything physical. And so like around the time that I turned 40, I was like, I have to be careful of the shows that I do. I can’t do the things I used to be able to do.
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah. I think it was a combination of things, but actually that was a huge part of it. So I had, I toured internationally for eight years.
I toured four years with Cavalia and four years with Cirque du Soleil and I performed over 1400 shows in that time. So, and I was on the road for eight years. So, and I’d had a number of injuries and I, I did feel near the end, like, well, with, with Tour Up, the Cirque du Soleil show, we knew that it was, it only had a four year run.
We knew it was going to end, you know, at a certain time and near the end, I was like, please just let me get through to this last show without a final injury. And I did start to feel that accumulation of, you know, you start to compensate for this and then you’re compensating for this in your body. And it’s like, so that’s, that was part, yeah, definitely a reality.
Definitely a reality. And I think also it was a very competitive, I mean, I played a principal character and it was a very competitive environment, you know, like a lots of, I think also in my mid thirties at a point, like I spoke about wanting to have more worth than my splits or my tricks. And I think that is a big part of it too.
Like I, I wanted to feel that my, my sense of self, my confidence, my self-worth wasn’t like if I had a bad show. There’s just, it’s lots of those kind of environments lend themselves to hyper-criticism and living in that space for a really long time at a certain point starts to feel like, yeah, not great. Even though there were lots of amazing things to touring and my experience there as well.
[Phil Rickaby]
Sure. I can imagine that, that when you get a bunch of artists who are traveling together for a long period of time, there could be cast dynamics that sometimes really great and sometimes really not. And I’ve been involved in groups and sometimes it feels like we’re suddenly back in high school and those are the main girls.
And this is like, it can really feel like that kind of thing. And that could be exhausting too.
[Gabrielle Martin]
Especially when you’re in your mid thirties. But I think what that did actually is in some moments in my time at Push over the last four years, there have been some controversial, um, controversy over my programming. There have been a number, you know, leadership also, you’re like in a highly visible position.
And I think that my experience, it might not seem obvious, but in circus and in these different kinds of environments, high performance environments, a lot of criticism, you know, high visibility roles, power dynamics, all this stuff really actually prepared me quite well for being in an environment where you’re fielding criticism all the time.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. How, I mean, ultimately when programming decisions are made, they fall on you.
You’re the one that ultimately made the decision when there are controversies or questions to be answered. How do you deal with the difficult questions?
[Gabrielle Martin]
I mean, I try to deal with them in dialogue. And I think one of the challenging things is that often there are not questions, there are social media comments. And I wish there were more questions because I am also questioning things a lot too.
And, um, and I think some of the challenges is that Push serves a very wide community. In fact, it’s not one community. It’s we serve many, many, many communities.
And sometimes the expressed needs of those communities can be contradictory. And then what do you do then, you know, and also we take risks on, for example, I mentioned there are a lot of works that are going to premiere in this festival. So I haven’t seen and vetted every detail of it, you know, but I have a relationship with the artist and also it’s important that artists are able to take risks.
And it’s important also that relationships are honored to the best of our ability. But sometimes, yeah, sometimes I’m a bit surprised about something in the content, you know, and it’s like, well, this is also a platform for expression, but lots of hard conversations come up about, you know, when something is viewed as harmful and different perspectives on what is harm and when is something is harmful and intention versus impact and, and all of that.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, there’s, there’s definitely a lot of, it’s really easy for somebody to make a social media comment in criticism where, you know, it’s not helpful as the artistic director or anybody involved with the festival to just like read the comment because that’s, that’s not dialogue. Social media is, is, has become a broadcast rather than a, than something that’s for dialogue. It’d be much better if people, I don’t know, reached out another way.
If they had, if they had questions, if they had concerns, like social media is not, is not for that anymore. I remember the heyday back in the olden days of like Twitter, when it was good, when it was silly, when it was fun. And it was about connection and conversation.
And that, that is entirely changed. Now everything is just about like, here’s my opinion, blah, which is not helpful from an arts perspective.
[Gabrielle Martin]
Couldn’t agree more.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I’m curious about your work and the work that you’ve done. It spans continents, disciplines, forms, and I’m curious how identity, heritage, and politics have shaped or how they do shape your artistic and curatorial vision for PUSH.
[Gabrielle Martin]
Yeah, in many ways. I mean, I’m interested in, I’m interested in a lot of artists who have a trans-cultural practice. I’m mixed race.
I also, you know, which informs that interest for me, but also I think just like the world we’re living in and, you know, ideally it’s a world which opens its borders more and has more transmission of ideas and perspectives and practices and all of this stuff. So I’m, I’m often drawn to artists who exist between cultures, because I think they’re able, what they’re able to do in translation and the kind of references that they’re able to tap into, the world bridging they’re doing, I think is really interesting and relevant. Yeah.
I also am very aware that our sense of self is very dependent on place, where we are, the history of that place, the context we find ourselves in. And so I’m interested in a range of expressions and also, I mean, actually just as I’m saying this, I’m looking at the cover of our PUSH program and it’s an image of Wet Mess, the drag artist, more than drag, performance and drag, and much more artists behind Testo, which is a work that brings in documentary audio of interviews they’ve done with people who are transitioning on testosterone, using testosterone, transitioning or not transitioning, people who are using testosterone actually. But the piece itself weaves in incredible drag, it weaves in incredible movement and humor and documentary to explore messy transitions. And I think that that is so exciting in terms of the vulnerability and the honesty and transparency of the artist to get into the messiness of identity.
And I think that is something that we would like the world to be more fix than it is because that’s easier to navigate. And so I’m drawn to this piece for so many reasons. And one of them is because I think so many people can relate to that.
[Phil Rickaby]
Just as we’re sort of drawing to a close here, I am curious how, as we record this, the festival is about two weeks away from its start. And so as we’re drawing to that, what are you most excited for audiences to get from this year’s Bush Festival?
[Gabrielle Martin]
I mean, I really hope, I mean, transformative experience, like, it’s simple, but to to walk away, transform, to walk away, like shifted, like something’s shifted internally, like, you know, images or a feeling or the way it made you think that something that stays with you, as mentioned, like our, our mission is to shift paradigms for expression and relation. And, and it kind of all boils down to that. And I really believe that these projects do that.
So yeah, and also, one of the things that’s so exciting, I hope that people come to see more than one show. And I know that not everybody can. Also, one thing that we do have is that no one turned away for lack of funds policy.
If you reach out in advance, if finances are a barrier, we don’t want it to be. It’s amazing. The great thing about a festival that’s different from a seasonal presenter, you know, a seasonal program is that all of these ideas, all of these artists are in this space, it’s concentrated in the space at the same time.
So I think the potential of like, all these ideas and people bouncing around, like what that what can transpire, what we create together, it there’s, there’s a lot more possibility in that proximity and density. And I think it’s really exciting when people can see more than one. We always hope that also, you know, we talk about it being a festival for the culturally fearless, because we, we hope that people come and it’s like, okay, and we hope that everything you see is like, it’s the best thing you ever saw, you love it, you know, but also, art is subjective, there’s going to be pieces that okay, it wasn’t exactly for you.
But that are, are excited that this exists in the city that want to engage in it that are curious that that are open to being like, you know what, that one wasn’t exactly for me. But then they see that another one and they’re like, well, but that one was like, exactly speaks to me personally, specifically, you know, and I think, but in the very least, hopefully, that first one, and hopefully it happens in the other order, actually, if it’s gonna happen in an order. But anyways, if there’s a piece that people don’t, you know, feel like, oh, it’s not exactly my taste, that it is it sparks conversation.
It makes them think about why it makes them think about what is it makes them have a great conversation with the person they went there with. So that, you know, we hope that people embrace that, that spirit, because it’s a festival with incredible diversity. And when you get diversity, you get diversity.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, yeah. Well, Gabrielle, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you giving me the time.
It sounds like you’ve curated a really incredible festival. And I can’t wait, I won’t be able to get to Vancouver. But I can’t wait to see the reviews and things that come out about about the shows this year.
[Gabrielle Martin]
It’s been a real pleasure to speak with you, Phil. Thanks.
[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you for listening to this episode of stage ruler. Like I said, I’m going to tell you about who is coming on the show next week. But before I get into that, I also said, I was going to talk a little bit more about Patreon.
Because this is the 10th year of stage worthy, I would love to be able to grow this podcast. And the only way that I’m able to do that, because I don’t have advertisers is to have people back this podcast on Patreon. Patrons get early access to episodes, we’ll have discussions about topics and things we might want to cover on this podcast, the more people who join the Patreon, the more I’m able to offer to patrons as perks, I give you this podcast for free.
And like I said, I don’t run any ads. So that means that I’ve been paying for this podcast out of the pocket for the entire history of it. I do have backers who are the reason why I was able to start this podcast up after my hiatus.
And I’m eternally grateful to all of them. Because there are costs involved with a podcast, even if the podcast is a free one, it costs me money to make the podcast to host the website to host the files and distribute them paper editing software, image editing software for social media posts and things like that. There are so many little costs.
And also, I’ve just added transcripts back and transcripts do cost money to make. So if you like this show, and you want to be part of making it helping me to make it go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a backer, I will be forever grateful and you will help to make this podcast keep going. My guest next week is Jack Burrell.
Jack is an actor, writer, teacher and the artistic director of Unchained Theatre. So tune in next week for my conversation with Jack Burrell.
