Speakers Series 2008-09

Norma

Public Performances

Following the opening of the Book Drop project at Vehicle, members of the Norma performance collective will present work devised for public spaces.
Norma consists of seven young artists who live and work in Vancouver, B.C. During the last several years the collective has produced a series of site-specific works that use performance and installation to explore urban architecture, social interactions and popular culture. Their works respond to specific contexts and venues— and the various modes of communication that are taken for granted in the creation of cultural spaces.
Norma has created site-specific work for a number of public locations, including a recently created park at Granville and West 5th Ave. In this location, the performers occupied the site in a formation similar to the “idealized public” represented in schematic drawings of civic spaces. Participants were assembled in small groups, or alone, and performed repetitive actions and dialogue for a full workday (9:00am - 5:00pm). Two young people— a man and a woman, casually dressed—sit by a fountain, talking. Their dialogue and movements are scripted and do not change; their scene takes approximately two minutes to complete. Once finished, they begin the scene again. Another performer repeats a monologue while strolling back and forth across the park. Others throw Frisbees, walk dogs, and endlessly eat lunch. Interrupting their predictable activities, their dialogues and monologues are lifted from the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, creating a discontinuous experience of time and place, reality and representation.
Recently, as part of the November 2008 Fuse Event at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Norma performed Semiotics of the Kitchen: Pussycat Dolls Remix. Starting with Martha Rosler’s influential feminist video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Norma choreographed a dance to the Pussycat Doll’s song, Don’t Cha, utilizing all of the original physical movements. This pairing of gestures and ironies across decades of gender debates responded to the exhibition WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution.

Current members of Norma include Vanessa Kwan, Diana Lopez-Soto, Josh Neelands, Christy Nyiri, Pietro Sammarco, Erica Stocking and Kara Uzelman.