Ep. 46 - Building from the Back Door (BOGOTÁ)

PuSh Play

Gabrielle Martin chats with Andrea Peña, whose work, BOGOTÁ, will be presented at the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. You can catch her show on January 31 and February 1 at the Vancouver Playhouse, in association with New Works.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Andrea discuss:

• What does the choreographic practice require?

• What is the future of choreography from today forward?

• What does it mean to democratize the choreographic process and how is that different from the norm?

• What are the sociopolitical questions in the work?

• What does it mean to make a work about the anthropocene?

• What do you mean by the container-state?

• What does the word “queer” mean to you, your practice, and Bogotá?

• What does it mean to queer the baroque, especially in the body?

• How do you capture both past and future notions of the industrial and industrial society?

• How does it feel to return to Vancouver with this work?

About Andrea Peña and Artists

Andrea Peña and Artists (AP&A) a millennial company that believes in the possibilities of crafting new imaginaries in choreographic and performing arts. Returning, individually and collectively, to our essence as humans. As an upcoming generation of artists, we feel we have the responsibility to reflect on the values that shape us, our decisions, reflections, work, to focus beyond our actions and return to our essence.

AP&A merges the universes of choreography and design; a multidisciplinary company that creates performative universes that challenge notions of a sensible humanity through political yet abstract creations which transform conceptual research into theatrical larger ensemble installations. The foundations of Peña’s work is to create rich choreographic systems that reveal the point of view of the performers. Negotiations can take the form of frames, concepts, athletic constraints, to reveal the individual and collective point of view, as much as the choreographers.

As a bi-cultural artist, our works bring forward interwoven Latin American philosophies and inclusive values to carve space for the futuring of finding unity through our complexity and diversity, thus perpetually encouraging collisions between heterogeneous fields, disciplines and individuals. We aim to democratize the choreographic process as public sources for experimentation and collective knowledge creation.

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.

Andrea joins the conversation from Pittsburgh, ancestral lands of the Seneca in Pittsburgh and Sharpsburg, Adena culture, Hopewell culture, and Monongahela peoples who were later joined by refugees of other tribes (including the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Haudenosaunee tribes, who were all forced off their original land and displaced by European colonists.

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

00:02

Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, director of programming at the Push Festival, and today's episode highlights grotesque liberation, death and resurrection, bodies of labor, and more.

00:21

I'm speaking with Andrea Pena, choreographer of Bogota, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 31st and February 1st, 2025. Visceral and transgressive Bogota constructs a brutalist landscape from choreography inspired by Colombia's political and spiritual heritage.

00:40

This raw physical experience of mutation and resurrection explores embodied origins, inherited mythologies and mortality, honing the rebellion of deviant bodies and paying tribute to resilience within the post-colonial era.

00:56

Interested in the depth of human individuality that breaches from a personal disposition as a bi-cultural artist, Pena's approach is known for its difficult choreography as a highly intricate, vulnerable, and somatic raw physicality that engages in deep encounters between the physical body and a highly conceptual research approach.

01:16

With a background in industrial design, her work borrows from visual art practices and spatial qualities of creative making, questioning the body as a material existing in relationship to space and time.

01:28

Here is my conversation with Andrea. There is a JGB beside me, but I am actually on indigenous territories. I'm on the unceded traditional and ancestral territory of the Coast Salish peoples, so the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.

01:45

I am a settler, and I've been, you know, a part of the being a settler is a responsibility to learning and engaging with learning about indigeneity and engaging with contemporary indigenous. issues affecting Indigenous people today.

02:03

And one way that I've been doing that is through the Yellowhead Institute, which you'll hear me plug in quite a bit. And so I'm working through their red paper land back course, which is really encouraging settler folks to reflect on what it means to be living in accordance with Indigenous law and to enact land back by supporting front lines.

02:24

And one thing that really stood out in the lesson, one of the recent lessons from this course is they just put it so clearly that if we really want land back but do nothing about it, we are upholding the liberal fantasy, a belief that you can change the world by simply feeling a certain way.

02:44

And I just think that's really to the point. Andrea, where are you joining the conversation from today? Hello. So I'm actually currently in Pittsburgh. So I'm a bit in transit, stepping out of Montreal for a few days.

02:58

I'm here on the ancestral lands of the people of Adena, Hopewell, Morengohala, and Seneca people here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. Thank you for that. And usually you're in Giorgia, Montreal. Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia, Montreal.

03:20

And so you describe AP&A or Andrea Pena and artists as a millennial company. What does that infer for you? Yeah, I think for me it was really important to situate, you know, AP&A in terms of the fact that it is millennial.

03:39

I mean, you know, I'm in my 30s. A lot of the artists that we work with are also within the same age range. And I think there's something that is social, politically cultural specific to our generation and to the sort of desire or lens or perspective.

03:55

And so I really wanted to kind of, you know, be frontal about that and kind of situate ourselves there. I think in the word millennial or in how I connect to the word, I think I, you know, see myself as a sort of new generation of artists, a new generation of thinkers, of creators, where for me it's really not just about the work, but the how.

04:17

So not just what are we creating? What is the work about? What is the art about? But like how is it being made? I think for me, you know, the choreographic practice is something that really requires a lot of reconsideration and deconstruction.

04:31

And I would go as far as saying like decolonializing the practice itself. I think it's a practice that has certain hierarchies embedded to it, certain ways of seeing. And I and what we're trying to do with APNA is sort of take the responsibility to reflect on what does it mean to do choreography today?

04:50

What does it mean to gather people, to lead people, to build these things? shows? What do the shows talk about? How do they talk about them? What is at stake inside of a work? And then, more importantly, like, how do these people come together in community to build these pieces?

05:08

I think what we're trying or what I've been trying to do with an AP&A and, you know, first it started as something utopic and a goal and little by little, it's reframed itself. But it was really important for me to kind of approach choreographic works from a different lens.

05:24

I mean, I used to be a professional dancer and I think it was important to both bring Bring my own values as somebody who's Latin American Colombian who has indigenous Latin American Backgrounds to bring some of those values into not just how we make her work, but what is a company today?

05:43

so everything from bylaws internal communication things that try to kind of make us reframe and rethink what does Company and leadership mean as well Obviously these things are not always easy because having a company There are certain structures framework systems that you operate under But I think for me that millennial aspect is sort of giving space for those internal tensions to exist and also to reflect on You know,

06:12

what is the future of choreography from today forward? What do we want to build as a community? what do we want to build as a practice for each other for Publix and Yeah, and and kind of what that looks like so it's it's really an amalgamation of a lot of those questions and reflections I think that are simply situated in that word Millennial is like it's today meaning we're looking at the past the history of Choreography in the past the history of companies in the past and trying to reimagine like what do we want this to look like?

06:43

In the future. Yeah, I get it. So excited hearing you speak about this and I remember in one of our first conversations Almost exactly a year ago at par cordonce in Montreal we we thought we had a conversation and you spoke a bit about this as well like how you're How your company is working and how you're thinking about?

06:59

democratizing the choreographic process and as you referenced you've danced with ballet BC and other Other high caliber technical Great. Thank you. Yes Company is with you know, like a more classic hierarchical environment It's quite, you know common as you're mentioning that These companies operate in a certain way.

07:27

So I would love to just hear a little bit more about democratizing the choreographic process like, how does that differ from the norm? And what is the impact on the work itself? So maybe like, what does that look like in the studio and a rehearsal process?

07:41

And is that translated into the finished work? Yeah, I mean, I think for us that kind of, it's a bit twofold. The notion of democratizing is kind of both internally for us as a team, but also externally in terms of community and our public.

07:58

For me, my kind of first goal is how do I de-center the choreographic role? There's a really amazing book that I forget her name. She's a Spanish author and she talked about everything that is the sort of tension between the periphery and the center.

08:14

So, embodiments of the peripheries versus embodiments of the center and the sort of boundaries that lie between the periphery and the center. And I think that's just always something that's kind of, you know, you know, as someone who's immigrated Latin American in Canada, it's tensions that I've always had.

08:31

And so, yeah, I think I became really curious about how do I de-center the choreographic role? I think the choreographer or choreography is sort of this like role that is often put on a pedestal as something that is mysterious and amazing.

08:47

It's like, no choreography is just a lot of trial and error and a lot of failure. And you happened to choose some ideas that you feel like works in community with your people and you put a show, you know?

08:57

But it's often, very often do we talk about the fact that it's just trial and error and that it's not that mystic, you know, or like genius. And so, yeah, I kind of was fascinated to like, how do we de-center that role?

09:12

And, you know, we're not a collective. AP&A is not a collective. There's companies that work as in a collective infrastructure. For us, we're not a collective, but I see myself sort of as like a facilitator, team leader.

09:26

For sure, I'm proposing a project or a concept or a research idea that I'm bringing to the table of my collaborators. But what we've realized that we've been doing kind of little by little through time, I would say is to de-center the choreographic process.

09:43

One of the things we've done is sort of democratize the dramaturgical practice. I've been working with the same sort of group of artists, both from designers to performers for many, many, many years.

09:56

And together, we've sort of been building these sort of hybrid practices that allow all of us to hold a dramaturgical key in what we do, meaning that it gives us like codes, information, angles to kind of each one of us, them, also to bring the sort of own agency to the work, questions, point of views, perspective.

10:20

A lot of the times, the dramaturgy, which is the sort of internal thread or like overstating. structuring intelligence or network of information of a piece is really between the choreographer and the dramaturge.

10:32

And we've sort of tried to sort of evenly, not evenly, but like spread that reflection across the team, meaning that we really prioritise like, you know, even if sometimes we're a team of 25 people, hour and a half conversations after rehearsal to make sure that this the sort of conceptual frameworks, ideas, political standings, questions, reflections are shared across everybody and that those conversations are,

10:57

yeah, like approached from a very collective point of view, even with our designers as well. So I think it allows, I call it like a sort of ecosystem. When we create works, it allows the sort of ecosystem to create a work together, specifically building Bogota.

11:16

I remember saying to the team, I really want to build a piece from the back door. And everyone's like, what the hell does that mean? I was like, I don't know. Just metaphorically, it feels right. Like, how do we build a piece from the back door?

11:28

How do we build a piece from the bottom up? What does that mean? What does that look like? And through two years of research, what we did was we realized that together we were sort of building tools, systems, language, putting words onto things we've done for years to help us understand the sort of tools that we've been co-building together.

11:49

And so in order to do that, you know, we, I mean, specifically for Bogota, we had about two years of research before we actually started Bogota or knew that that's what we were doing. It was about two years, year and a half of trying to research practices and methods that would allow us to be all equipped with tools that gave the team agency and the ability for everybody to kind of bring in their point of view.

12:17

I don't know if you heard me what I was saying about trying to create a piece from the back door, from the bottom up. And so it was how do we, what are those tools? What are those practices? What are those methods in order for us to build a piece from the back door or from the bottom up?

12:33

And, you know, intrinsically, some of that stuff may have looked like, you know, having like prioritizing time for conversation. That's something we do a lot, is that the dancers and the artists, performers are very much in tune in line with everything that's happening in the production side from conceptual choices, artistic choices, materials choices.

12:53

There's a lot of conversations that we have as a team where we share, you know, what is at stake in the work? What are the sort of social political questions of the work? How do people feel? I think for myself as well, I realized that if for me to build a work and be this facilitator as a team leader, I also had to get really comfortable with being vulnerable.

13:16

And I think that sometimes the choreographic role were expected to be the with the answers and it's often that I come to my team and I'm like guys I feel really overwhelmed we're making work about the Anthropocene what does that mean who are we to make a work about the Anthropocene like and to share those vulnerabilities um those discomforts those insecurities places where I don't have answers I have no idea so that together we can find answers and together we can build uh doesn't have to be a homogenous point of view but build a common language and a common understanding to have a direction together that holds a space for multiple points of view so yeah we've been building different practices um we work a lot on trying to use language it's strange but like we work a lot with Post-its a lot with like not just about the creation itself but trying to name how we work so that we're all aware of what are the tools we've been developing together can we put language on those tools so that um Yeah,

14:20

people can feel empowered, like here's this random tool that we're using, but this tool means this to me, even if that means something else. But we have a common understanding. So trying to build ways that we can share, I think, choice making.

14:33

Can you give an example of a tool? For example, I think one thing that will help make sense of that is so I finished my master's last year. It's a master's in design and it's a master's that looks at how the choreographic practice is actually situated within the everyday built environment.

14:53

So like for me, a chair, a handle, a car, anything that is the built environment is the sort of choreographic proposition that our body has to interact with. And I realize that a lot of the times our bodies are interacting with the built environment, but they're not necessarily in a negotiation.

15:11

And so a lot of my work, choreographically, are these tools are about putting systems of negotiation in place, which for me means the position for two people, two things, two entities to propose their own point of view and actually have a sort of push and pull, meaning a negotiation or where we're not just interacting or interpreting or receiving or reacting, but there's actually a negotiation.

15:34

So, for example, some of those tools we call it like an example of a tool is like a container state that comes to mind. So where we use a lot of words in creation. So, for example, the container could be a word like.

15:53

I'm trying to find a reference like grotesque and the state is maybe liberation. And so the body is in a container of grotesque and the individual is trying to find a state of liberation. And so what we're trying to do is we kind of put these two words together and the artists are exploring what does it mean to be in a container of grotesque and in a state of liberation.

16:14

That doesn't for me or we play with these sort of tools because. creates a sort of language that we understand what we're playing with, but the interest is not the succession of that. It's not how well is it received, how well is it literal, it's just kind of being able to see a person in negotiation with these two elements and the point of view that is brought forward.

16:37

We also have things like we've named it like all supports one, one supports all and those are just like tools where we know okay whatever situation we're in choreographically, what does it mean to be in a situation where one is supporting all or all are supporting one.

16:51

So trying to name sort of bigger picture tools where it's vague enough that there's room for interpretation and for a situation to guide what is happening in that moment, but clear enough I think in what we're just in our own comprehension together of these things so that we can move forward in a direction.

17:12

So a lot of the works are built with these sort of larger picture tools that were yeah trying to find language for. Thank you that's really fascinating to just get a little more clarity about what that means and it's like so rich already with imagery.

17:30

You describe Bogota as queering death or that one aspect of the work is queering death and when we met and had our conversation last year you also introduced me to Sarah Ahmed's queer phenomenology and I'm wondering if you can talk about what queer as a verb means to you, to your practice, to Bogota specifically.

17:55

So I think in that notion of you know both also millennial artists the APNA is the team is predominantly queer doesn't mean everybody has to be your is queer but there's a big part of from the people that work in production to designers to the performers to our grand writers are people who identify as queer which for me means without defining it because we always say like who are we to define what queer it is what is a queer aesthetic that's not the goal like it's queer it for us is more of a lens a point of view like glasses that you put on that that you see the world in a certain way so definitely we use a lot the term queering in APNA.

18:36

I was recently talking to Jonathan Sosier designer and he's like you know every time I'm thinking about the sonography I feel that the way I think about the materiality is how am I on the edge or how am I queering this materiality what does it mean to queer that materiality it's a very metaphorical metaphysical word but I think we try to approach from lighting to sonography to costumes to our writing like how do we queer and in Bogota specifically and in the notion of like looking at death I didn't know we were going to make a piece about death or I didn't know that was going to be what I was going to propose to the team but I started being fascinated with death as a notion of like cycles of transformation and deaths outside of maybe more western notions of death like the end of life,

19:27

but rather looking at death as like the multiple deaths and rebirths that we have in our lifetime, like in a human lifetime here on this earth, and other alternative notions of what those cycles mean.

19:42

So that was kind of a way of queering that question. And then specifically, somehow, this notion of death and life cycles brought me back to Bogota, my hometown, and I've never made a work that is super rooted in my culture in such a tangible way and my ancestors and the place where I was born.

20:06

But I realized that a lot of the history of Colombia is rooted in these notions of different cycles of life and from the colonial era, you know, like the colonization and taking a lot of our ancestral heritage to contemporary notions of life and death, to the way we mythologize life and death.

20:28

I don't know if you've heard of magical realism, but in Colombia, magical realism is both in literature, but it's like extremely rooted into everyday life stories and ways of living. And through this mythological research, I became fascinated with what I found out is the Latin American Baroque or the Andean Baroque.

20:55

And Baroque paintings are all about the Renaissance, death, rebirth, resurrection, all of these European perspectives on the notion of death. And in Latin America, when Latin America was colonized, a lot of churches and paintings, obviously all of this infrastructure came with, but a lot of the craftsmen and artisanal people of Colombia who were building these things, not just Colombia, but other countries in Latin America,

21:26

started to hybridize a lot of these Baroque architectures, paintings that were being imposed by infusing them with Latin American ancestral, I would say, aesthetics, qualities, and narratives. So for example, in Bogota, you have a small church that is super Baroque, extremely exaggerated, covered in gold, but all the paintings of these religious Catholic saints that the local people painted are actually painted in the backdrop of the Amazon.

21:59

So you have these religious saints that are coming from colonization, but they're being painted in the Amazon. And so you have these sort of tensions between what is local and what is being imposed and the subverting of the Baroque by the Latin American people.

22:15

So this was really fascinating for us. realize that the Baroque is not just something European but it was something that was subverted subverted many many years ago and in that we were thinking wow well what does it mean to queer the Baroque as well like a lot of the times the Baroque representation and everything that is religious is obviously has a long-standing history with queer bodies and notions of body so we also took a lot of these paintings and we tried to queer those paintings so find ways of representing hinting at playing with these hybrid Baroques but through the queer body what is it i mean we have a movement called the Double Gate Jesus and it's two men on top of each other like back to chest in a sort of Jesus position in this really beautiful tender embrace so trying to kind of subvert these notions through queering of image of like images that are so embedded in our social cultural history and I think Colombia in particular a country that is sort of highly influenced by Catholic culture,

23:25

Catholic religion and how that's intention in the country itself. To imagine this sort of queer landscape and when we talk about death you know you're asking me about queering death Bogota is also this sort of we call it a sort of post-human and post-colonial space where we're trying to imagine you know what does it mean what is the future of of a colonial I don't think we're in post-colonial times at all but like our role as artists is to imagine what this looks like and imagine these sort of places so we're using I always say Bogota is a piece about Bogota but it's not about Bogota Bogota I'm using it as a sort of trampoline that is very personal to me my culture my ancestry to talk about like post-colonial landscapes and what that looks like and how do we queer those imaginaries by how bodies inhabit each other in space and for us to queer some of that stuff was also like there's a lot of chaos and complexity in Bogota and it was important that we create visual aesthetic choreographic spaces that make space for complexity and non-uniformity and non-homogeneity so that we as people I think society is not really comfortable with complexity we really like order and we like to understand and so for us as artists like how do we make space for us to sit with complexity on stage as a way of building different visual landscapes that become part of social culture After Push Balibisi will be presenting choreography they've commissioned from you and I would love to hear you talk about the through lines of your choreographic inquiry so if people see Bogota and then your work with Balibisi what might they see as an ASIMS that carries through?

25:17

I think it's a really good question. I mean, you know, I'm really excited to work with Ballet BC. It's like coming back to like one, a place where I started working. So it's like a massive full cycle and we've never been to Vancouver and Vancouver was my home for such a long time.

25:30

So I'm so excited for all of this. I think it's wonderful that the artists of Ballet BC can come see APNA, you know, because we work on a piece for three years, we're able to build practices, methods, kinship and ecology that helps us dream of these other universes that are pluriversal and complex.

25:53

And that's like in the, it's in the ecritsir, like it's in the choreographic writing. Of course, bringing that to Ballet BC is a challenge in five, six weeks, but that's the goal is like, how much of that point of view can we bring to a company who does repertoire?

26:10

How much of those ways of working and seeing can... Can I transfer and bring into conversation with the artists of Bali, BC? I think in particular, one of the things that really excites me and we were talking with Mehdi about this the other day is I think this notion of negotiation for me really comes from my design background.

26:32

So we were trying to imagine how can I bring a sort of design, let's call it loosely intervention or a design situation that allows for the work that we'll do at Bali, BC to have some form of negotiation.

26:48

So that's kind of what we're thinking about is trying to imagine, I call it loosely a design intervention not to give too much away because it's there but I don't know if I'm gonna go in that direction but something that allows for the choreographic work at Bali, BC to be a negotiation between these people.

27:03

The goal is to make a piece on the full company so it's a lot of performers to transfer some of those ideas over. But yeah, I think that would be it. My goal is to sort of transfer these notions of negotiation and also the sort of hybrid practices between design and dance movement.

27:23

I always say for us, sonography is not, I never call it sonography. Usually I call it more like landscapes of interaction because it's important to see how the body is in dialogue with its environment.

27:36

So we're trying to find what's possible to do with Bali, BC in that regards. And with regard to design, because yeah, you've mentioned you're a design artist and that's a big part of your practice. And in Volkata, you reference Baroque which we've spoken about, brutalism.

27:56

Are these aesthetics thematic to your work or are those really specific to Volkata? No, actually they're really, it's interesting we were, there's currently actually a research group at UCAM, the University of Quebec Amor et al that is studying like AP&A practices.

28:16

So it's really interesting from like a ecological sonography from a decolonial dramaturgy with Angelie Rilke to two students in the theatre department. There's a sort of research group that is meeting for a year to understand the sort of decolonial and design practices of AP&A and what are like you asked me to name some tools it's like we're trying to name these things so that we can also democratize like the things we create to like build discourse around practice like what are artists making today in 2024 and what is choreography and how can we also make some of those thoughts tools trial and error available at large.

28:58

So there's a an interesting group working on that at UCAM at the moment and they asked me, they were like, what do you mean by industrial? And me, Ugo, the lighting designer in Jonathan, the sonography were like, whoa, we've never, we just take that word for granted, because we've been working for so long together.

29:16

And it was interesting, because I said, for me, the industrial refers to the past and the future. And it's a word why I'm trying to encompass both past and future notions of the industrial, where obviously the past is like the industrial revolution and the industrialization of humanity, where like, you know, we live in a very industrialized society, whether we're aware of it or not, you know, from everything from cars nine to five,

29:42

like the industrial revolution really affected the sort of mechanized lifestyle of humanity. And everything that is industrial, we call that also the body of labor. So in APNA, we name different bodies.

29:55

So we have bodies of mythology, bodies of labor, bodies of like bodies of anthropology, bodies of non-human, like we try to name different bodies. So those are also just to insert the tools. And this notion of bodies of labor for me really comes from Colombia, like a lot of the countries that exist in the peripheries, right, countries that are not the center like North America, but a lot of countries of the periphery,

30:21

you see a lot of bodies of labor, right, you have a lot of industries that are still active, even in Quebec or in Canada, like the moment you step out of Montreal and you go to Rimsky or like these outside cities, you see industry and you see these bodies who through industrialization, they become bodies of labor.

30:39

So for us, the word industrial hints at this sort of body of labor, and also the resilience and the humility of most of those bodies of labor that exist outside of the center or the city center. And at the same time, now for us, the word industrial also is sort of hinting at everything that is the artificial.

30:58

So let's call it like the post-human and thinking about the digital environment, the digital era, artificial. intelligence we just did a piece called replica that looks at the sort of notions of replication of body through time and because i was quite quite fascinated with like how we represent bodies in the digital sphere today with the metaverse and tiktok and all this stuff um so yeah the industrial sort of teeters between everything that is this body of labor that comes from the industrialization and things that are maybe most more post-human or artificial or artificial intelligence um in terms of digital digital culture thank you andrea we are very blessed to have you coming you and apna the artist you work with coming to share this work with us here i am so thrilled i'm so excited um and i imagine that our listeners are too after hearing you paint this rich picture of the kind of influences and tools that you're using to devise this work no we're super excited i mean i think for me coming back to vancouver like i mentioned is It's quite precious.

32:05

There's a community there that I still feel connected to. We haven't been to Vancouver yet. And I think, again, just to be in conversation through practice, I think is really, really interesting for all of us.

32:20

You just heard Gabriel Martin's conversation with Andrea Pena. Her show, Bogota, will be presented at the Push International Performing Arts Festival on January 31st and February 1st, 2025 at the Vancouver Playhouse.

32:34

The festival will run from January 23rd to February 9th. I'm Ben Charland, and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Trisha Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

32:53

And for more information on the 2025 festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca. And on the next Push Play.

33:09

When I was little, I thought that one day I would feel like an adult, but that day never came. I'm just I'm still the same person. I just have a little bit more of responsibilities than when I was 11.