Drum & Light Festival

A Hard Rubber New Music production. At the WISE Hall on Friday, March 14. No remaining performances

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: the Hard Rubber New Music Society’s Drum & Light Festival, first staged at the WISE Hall on March 1 and repeated last weekend, was only a festival in the loosest sense of the word. Festivals demand multiple acts and stages, and generally run for several days: this one had several acts performing simultaneously; included a secondary stage that was a definite afterthought; and only felt like it ran for several days.

So what was it?

A “happening”, maybe? Like the multimedia events pioneered by Ken Kesey and other ’60s renegades, Drum & Light was an amorphously structured but continuous barrage of music, dance, and projected visuals. None of the individual components felt designed to hold one’s attention for long, but they added up to a superficially attractive kind of sensory overload; if the idea was to overstimulate the crowd, it worked well enough that more than a few people had to walk out for a breather before plunging back into the fray.

The key here, though, is that damning word superficial. The bones of this project were strong: some of Vancouver’s finest musicians, four of its most promising young dancers, and an array of media artists ranging from rave-oriented scenemakers to veteran avant-gardists. The band united players from event architect John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Orchestra with members of the more pop-oriented nu jazz act Sekoya. The dancers included the three core members of the wildly innovative Tomorrow Collective, plus the electrically charged Josh Beamish. The filmmakers found a way to project images of almost 3-D complexity, through the simple expedient of hanging several translucent screens a few feet apart in the centre of the room. Overall, the effect was lovely—but the event added up to less than the sum of its parts.

The visuals were perhaps the least effective of those components. As an art form, digital video is still in its infancy, and several of the featured artists were essentially finger-painting with light. That must be fun to do, but it’s tedious to watch; only old pro David Rimmer brought any content to his work, with black-and-white images of a 1940s crowd scene that he blurred and smeared into oblivion. With the music taking a darker turn, one was immediately reminded of the Holocaust, of the gruesome obliteration of millions—an effect only slightly undercut when radiant sunflowers later emerged from Rimmer’s waves of visual distortion.

Dancers Mara Branscombe, Katy Harris-McLeod, Jennifer McLeish-Lewis, and Beamish rolled and pivoted through their contact-improv moves with abandon—but putting them on a small, low, and murkily lit stage at the back of the room did them an injustice.

And the music was… Well, it was bizarrely simple compared to the extroverted complexity that has become the Hard Rubber Orchestra’s norm. If bandleader Korsrud’s intent was to explore the ’70s funk-fusion sound, he succeeded, with a flowing 90-minute lope through Moog-driven moonscapes, Afrobeat riffs, and blaxploitation-soundtrack jazz. Keyboardist Chris Gestrin stood out for his creative way with otherwise generic sounds and the five-man percussion section sounded inspired, but on the whole this “festival” came across as more of an excuse to party than a genuine multimedia breakthrough.