Be alert be very alert. In the next two weeks, you might encounter two men in period costume portaging a canoe from English Bay to Coal Harbour, or a woman giving away money in an East Side café. Or, near Coal Harbour, you might witness Public Displays of Affection, the name as well as the nature of the performance. Performance is what LIVE is about, and "public" is this year's theme.

"We're trying to find a way to engage the public in our practice," says Randy Gledhill, LIVE executive director and curator, in a telephone conversation with the Straight. The Vancouver-based performance-art biennale runs from Thursday (October 11) to October 28 at an array of indoor and outdoor sites around the city. As in the past, a casual consortium of galleries and artist-run centres is hosting more than 30 performances by local, national, and international artists. (For further information, visit livebiennale.ca/.)

This year's theme allows for many possibilities of location, duration, and audience involvement. Look for contemporary interpretations of indigenous dances and ancient myths from Canada, Guatemala, and the Philippines; a "shopdropping" event involving a politicized dictionary; an artist's conversation-based walking tour; and a "banquet" of bones and skulls. Another kind of banquet, In Pursuit of Happiness, occurs at the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 26. Dressed in extravagant costumes, Toronto's Tanya Mars and her performance partner will sit at either end of a long, formally set table. Their plan is to eat their way through an excess of expensive cakes over a 12-hour period and to refuse to share with the audience.

Food has emerged as a recurring means and metaphor at LIVE this year. "That's just a coincidence," Gledhill observes, and then adds: "At these kinds of festivals, something usually happens like that. One year, I noticed everybody was taping things to their head." In addition to Mars's take on gross overconsumption and social inequity, look for Randy Lee Cutler's Hors d'Oeuvres, also at the VAG on October 26. In this work, visitors will sample local delicacies and hear about the issues that stand invisibly behind their production.

More food and conversation will be ingested in Germaine Koh's RSVP: A Series of Dinner-Discussions. Working with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Koh has organized four participatory events, ranging from dinner at a high-end restaurant to a bag lunch at a campus digital-media centre. (For details, e-mail info@contemporaryartgallery.ca.) "My basic idea is that dinner parties, as well as a whole range of other things that we do in our lives, are actually forms albeit low-key of performance," Koh tells the Straight by phone. "They are occasions in which our ability to say the right thing at the right moment, to act in the appropriate ways, does have consequences."

These can be social or professional, she says, adding: "It would be wrong to assume that when you're going to a dinner party, you're not responsible in some way for the action that unfolds." Not that the guests are the only people on the hook during RSVP. Event hosts, including an actor, a musician, a surgeon, and a treaty negotiator, have been chosen for the "performative" nature of their professional lives, Koh explains. Then she adds, "It's pretty fascinating the unspoken rules that govern so many of the things that we do."