The Holy Body Tattoo to Play 2016 PuSh Festival

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival is proud to present monumental by Vancouver's legendary dance company The Holy Body Tattoo, accompanied live by Canada's post-rock giants, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. This one-night-only performance takes place Thursday, January 28, 8:00pm at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, as part of the 2016 PuSh Festival.

After a 10-year absence, The Holy Body Tattoo returns to the stage and the PuSh Festival is pleased to announce that Vancouver is the first stop on this multi-city, international tour. For this tour, the company joins forces with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the influential and elusive Montreal post-rockers, who perform the score live on stage.

The Holy Body Tattoo, co-founded by Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras in 1993, shot to fame as the punk darling of the international performing arts scene, with searing choreography and seamless multimedia performance. Their singular style of athletic, pummeling, adrenaline-pumping movement that combined cross-discipline collaborations with Canada's leading visual and graphic artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers catapulted Vancouver dance into the world's spotlight. Vanguard in shaking up the city's reputation as a cultural backwater, they set the stage for an exciting new era of contemporary dance in Vancouver. monumental was the company's fifth and final work, earning rave reviews when it premiered in 2005.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor's apocalyptic, ghostly chamber rock invokes devotion and fervor amongst their legion of fans. The instrumental art-rock group, with a penchant for sampling found sounds and soaring, hypnotic compositions, has been, in their own words, "plowing our field on the margins of weird culture for almost 20 years." Their death grip intent for anonymity, deeply political motivations and sporadic touring has pitched them to cult status. This spring they released their highly anticipated fifth studio album, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress.

monumental, with nine dancers mounted on pedestals and an eight-piece band, is the expression of the madness of urban life-the repetition, the confinement, the alienation. Movement turns into metaphor, dance into poetry and sound into substance. The result is as violent, beautiful and cathartic as art can get. For fans of the band, lovers of contemporary dance, or anyone open to the most radical possibilities of human creativity, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can't be missed.

Tickets go on sale Friday, October 2 at 10am and are available online at ticketfly.com. Tickets start at $45.

To post a comment, you must register and login.