Gabriel Levine

An analysis of Paul Chan's "Breathers" series, especially Bathers at Night (2018), with reference to theories of puppetry, animation, breath, and precarity. From the anthology Moving Parts: Articulated Bodies and Objects in Performance (Café Concret, Montreal, 2020).

In the midst of climate catastrophe—a warming rate twice the global average, raging wildfires, surging floods—the Canadian addiction to pipelines and oil sands exploitation remains unchecked. The spectacle of a settler colony desperately turning more oil into state revenue, while ravaging Indigenous lands and simultaneously preaching environmental sustainability, could inspire a dark sort of laughter: catastrophe as camp. But could the ridiculousness of our predicament foster new forms of inter-species intimacy and collective transformation? This is the wager taken by Bears, a production by playwright/director Matthew MacKenzie and Alberta’s Punctuate! Theatre which has toured widely since 2018. The play tells the story of Floyd, a Cree-Métis pipeline worker who finds himself on the run from the Mounties after committing an act of sabotage. Floyd narrates his westward escape in collaboration with a chorus of eight dancers who transform into the flora and fauna alongside the Trans-Mountain pipeline route: prairie gophers, berry patches, orcas, and grizzlies. Black light, shifting video projections and electronic beats provide a backdrop as Floyd, in his flight from the state, slowly finds himself turning into a bear. With the help of his Mama, a protective figure who moves freely about the stage, Floyd eventually manages to wipe off the oil that has obscured his connection with his ancestors and with the land. Yet Floyd’s journey is not an escape into a romantic ‘nature’ or a commodified Indigenous spirituality. As Floyd moves through devastated landscapes, the chorus animates a black-light vision of our collective future, and calls for solidarity between humans and other beings. Can we find a way to stand together for justice, as the play exhorts us, within a dark mess of our own making?

In Toronto in the summer of 2017, during a season of flooding and heightened Canadian nationalism, two processional performances honoured the land and water’s sustaining ecology. Freedom Tours, a multi-site performance by the artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner, was part of the LandMarks2017/Repères2017 project, in which artists created interventions in Canada’s national parks. Freedom Tours featured an alternative boat tour of the Thousand Islands National Park highlighting Indigenous and African-diasporic histories and futures, and a procession through Scarborough’s Rouge River Urban National Park in which local youth were invited to speak to Mother Earth. The Toronto Island Fire Parade, a community lantern procession with a puppet and shadow performance by Shadowland Theatre, continued its long-running participatory tradition, but without a culminating bonfire on the beach. The parade welcomed visitors from the city to celebrate the power of water, and offered thanks to the community for its mutual aid and resilience after the spring floods. Linking these two projects together allows for a deeper understanding of their contrasting ecologies and choreographies of assembly, which gather humans and other creatures into renewed relation, inviting gratitude to the land and water—to Mother Earth.

Tide By Side, a processional performance celebrating the opening of the Faena Arts District in Miami Beach, was held in November of 2016, weeks after the US presidential election, and the very weekend of the death of Fidel Castro. The performance was curated by New Orleans-based independent curator Claire Tancons, in collaboration with a number of local, national and international artists. On high-priced land that will soon be submerged by rising seas, the procession highlighted the tensions between speculative capital and vernacular invention. This video essay works performatively, through a blend of narration and images (still and moving), to register the contradictions of the event and its political-economic and ecological surround.

Parades and processions are experiencing a renaissance in contemporary art and performance. Inspired by Marlon Griffith's Ring of Fire procession and the accompanying exhibit Symbols of Endurance, this essay asks: what are the elements of a procession? Can some basic elements—sound, movement, height, adornment, production and power—illuminate the connections between diverse parade-based arts and vernacular traditions? Catalogue essay from Marlon Griffith: Symbols of Endurance (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2017).

In the winter of 2012-13, the music of Ottawa-based DJ collective A Tribe Called Red provided a catalyzing soundtrack for the Idle No More movement sweeping across Turtle Island. Melding samples of pow wow drum groups with electronic Afrodiasporic syncopations, the group remixes musical traditions of invention that persist in the aftermath of cultural suppression. In A Tribe Called Red's live performances , this vibrant sound is combined with video clips lifted from the colonial archive, creating a powerfully decolonizing aesthetic. This article engages with the group's " work of return " in sound, vision and performance, connecting its audiovisual bounce to the ongoing Indigenous cultural-political resurgence of which it is a part. RÉSUMÉ À l'hiver 2012-2013, la musique du collectif DJ A Tribe Called Red d'Ottawa a servi de trame sonore catalytique au mouvement Idle No More qui balayait l'île de la Tortue. Fusionnant le son des tambours des groupes de powwow aux syncopes afro-diasporiques, le groupe mélange les traditions musicales dans une invention qui a survécu l'annihilation culturelle. Dans les spectacles en direct du groupe, les sons vifs se mêlent aux extraits vidéos d'archives coloniales pour créer une puissante esthétique de décolonisation. Nous examinons ainsi « l' oeuvre de retour » du groupe – ses sons, ses images et ses spectacles – pour lier ce dynamisme audiovisuel à la résurgence politicoculturelle autochtone dans laquelle le groupe s'insère.

Examining radical reinventions of traditional practices, ranging from a queer reclamation of the Jewish festival of Purim to an Indigenous remixing of musical traditions.

Supposedly outmoded modes of doing and making—from music and religious rituals to crafting and cooking—are flourishing, both artistically and politically, in the digital age. In this book, Gabriel Levine examines collective projects that reclaim and reinvent tradition in contemporary North America, both within and beyond the frames of art. Levine argues that, in a time of political reaction and mass uprisings, the subversion of the traditional is galvanizing artists, activists, musicians, and people in everyday life. He shows that this takes place in strikingly different ways for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in settler colonies. Paradoxically, experimenting with practices that have been abandoned or suppressed can offer powerful resources for creation and struggle in the present.

Levine shows that, in projects that span “the discontinuum of tradition,” strange encounters take place across the lines of class, Indigeneity, race, and generations. These encounters spark alliance and appropriation, desire and misunderstanding, creative (mis)translation and radical revisionism. He describes the yearly Purim Extravaganza, which gathers queer, leftist, and Yiddishist New Yorkers in a profane reappropriation of the springtime Jewish festival; the Ottawa-based Indigenous DJ collective A Tribe Called Red, who combine traditional powwow drumming and singing with electronic dance music; and the revival of home fermentation practices—considering it from microbiological, philosophical, aesthetic, and political angles.Projects that take back the vernacular in this way, Levine argues, not only develop innovative forms of practice for a time of uprisings; they can also work toward collectively reclaiming, remaking, and repairing a damaged world.