BeatRoute Magazine BC Edition - January 2020

YVR
FLY PAN AM NAVIGATE
THROUGH LIMINAL
SPACES IN FRONTERA
By YASMINE SHEMESH
L
ast
September, Fly Pan Am released C’est ça, their first
album in 15 years. Now, commissioned to create the
soundscape for FRONTERA, a collective multimedia
performance that leads the charge at this year’s PuSh
International Performing Arts Festival, the Montréal
post-rockers are back with a very big bang.
FRONTERA fuses the band with Animals of Distinction, the
contemporary dance company of renowned choreographer Dana
Gingras, and United Visual Artists, a UK-based art practice. With
its title meaning “border” in Spanish, the show uses live music,
wild movement, and striking lights to explore concepts of boundaries
and surveillance.
Though mixed-media endeavours are familiar terrain for
guitarists Roger Tellier-Craig and Jonathan Parant (outside the
band, Tellier-Craig and Gingras are frequent collaborators, and
Parant has worked extensively in congruence with dance and
theatre), FRONTERA was a unique undertaking.
Parant describes the creative process as a series
of co-existing ecosystems. The first was Gingras
and a few dancers, who then worked alongside
UVA to design the lights. Fly Pan Am entered
into the third ecosystem and composed by
watching, listening, and doing. As they developed
the score, the choreography and lights
shapeshifted with them, and vice versa. “There
was this constant push and pull that ended up
crystallizing,” Tellier-Craig explains. And as the
collective have begun to publicly perform the piece in its
entirety, he says, the work has continued to transform.
Borders are liminal spaces, too—something we can’t
tangibly see, but we feel—and the notion expands both
metaphorically into the performance experience, with
interactivity between the artists, and physically. “I feel
like we’ve never seen [the show],” Tellier-Craig laughs.
“We have a few layers of different types of opacity, curtains
going up and down.” These, he adds, are a type
of frontier that can feel limiting, but also very freeing.
“I’m totally obsessed with liminal spaces,” Parant
says. “Sometimes a border is very open. It’s what you
don’t perceive. The space where matter is intertwined.
Is it the beginning of existence or the end of
it?”
January 30 // Queen Elizabeth Theatre //
Tix: $36-75, pushfestival.ca
PuSh
Festival
Preview
01.20
VANCOUVER’S ESSENTIAL JANUARY HAPPENINGSk
JANUARY 2020 BEATROUTE 35
ADRIÁN MORILLO