4-person audience sees city spaces through new eyes.
Performers conduct a disorienting, rewarding downtown walkabout
By Kevin Griffin, Vancouver Sun Published: January 8, 2009

When the performer leaned over and whispered into my ear "New York" it was the first time I'd ever experienced such intimacy during a performance. She leaned so close to my right ear and spoke so softly, no one else in the audience could hear what she said. In turn, she whispered something into the ear of each of the other audience members.

Not that it was a big audience. I was there with three others. Yes, that's correct: the audience consisted of four people. And that wasn't a poor turnout. In fact, it was better than a sellout.

During most performances of Lives Were Around Me, the audience is limited to three, although an additional body can be added on occasion. The numbers are small for a reason. Lives Were Around Me doesn't take place in a traditional performance space. It takes place in the streets and interiors of the neighbourhood around Hastings and Main, the historic centre of the city.

Although it's difficult to fit the performance into predetermined categories such as theatre or performance art, it's probably best described as the way it's billed: "An intimate guided tour conceived, directed and hosted by David McIntosh."

The tour starts at the Alibi Room. Led by McIntosh, we follow him along Main. He isn't your usual tour guide. He's not unfriendly but he isn't particularly chatty either. He doesn't string together a series of anecdotes about the neighbourhood. He's more cryptic than anything. At one point he turns to us to say that "you can't always understand what you hear." Little did we know that this would prove to be sound advice.

Because a large part of the appeal of Lives Were Around Me lies in discovery and surprise, I won't say exactly where McIntosh led us. What happened was that at a certain point, he left us on the sidewalk after telling us that someone else would be by shortly to take over. What this did was turn every passerby into a potential performer.

Once our guide arrived, she didn't say anything at first and then started recounting a narrative. Played by Adrienne Wong, she led us into two interior spaces in the area that I've passed by hundreds of times but never gone into. All the while, she kept telling a story or bits of stories. It was difficult at times to follow the thread of what she was saying, especially as she had to compete with the noise of passing cars and other city sounds.

At first, this was aggravating. I'm used to following the narrative so that I can make sense of what I'm listening to. But sometimes rational understanding isn't important. So it was with Lives Were Around Me. Even though I was constantly trying to connect the dots in her narrative, at a certain point I realized it was hopeless. What mattered was how I was feeling. Inexplicably, at various times I felt both extremely disoriented and emotional. insertBeforebr his was particularly evident in one of the interior spaces. In a room with various historical displays, our guide recounted a narrative that didn't have anything to do with her reaching out and turning on the lights on each display case. Because there was such a disconnect between what she was saying and what she was doing, it made me fill in the gaps. I had no choice but to create the space of the theatre: I imagined myself as being one of the lives of the people around me. It left me feeling both ephemeral and elated.

At the end, McIntosh returned to direct us back to the Alibi Room. After he finally left and walked off into the night, I felt saddened that the performance was over. For about an hour on a rainy winter night, McIntosh and the other performers in Lives Were Around Me utterly transformed the neighbourhood. I felt like I'd been privileged to have my eyes opened about a part of Vancouver I thought I knew.