By: Katie Walkley, Peak Associate
On January 22, SFU MFA alum Lucien Durey will perform his show, So Many Feelings, at Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, joined by singers Caroline Ballhorn, Chance Lovett, Amanda Sum, and Mark Wolf. This show goes beyond the norms of performance with a call-and-response between the call of the silent lip-syncing videos of the performers and the response of them singing live to the audience. The footage spans over 12 years and was all filmed on the same camera, and so, along with the live concert, audience members get to watch a seamless progression of Durey aging a decade. In the following interview, he discusses his openness to include personal and humorous elements into his art.
The following interview has been edited for concision.
Do you intentionally aim for a feeling of intimacy in your work?
In my work in general, I really have tried to not shy away from the personal. Sometimes there is a feeling in art that you are not supposed to talk about your personal relationships or things that are not grounded in academic or concrete ideas. Details from my personal life always creep into my personal work and I am not afraid of that.
What are the visuals in your performance?
The piece itself is like a reverse lip-sync. Everyone who is singing live in the space is singing to their own image pre-recorded. So it’s a silent video of people mouthing the songs. It creates a weird feeling as an audience because you are conflicted about where your attention is supposed to go. So the experience is that they’re watching a figure mouthing words in various settings, but meanwhile there’s a live singer moving around the room singing what they’re seeing on screen. It’s disorienting as a viewer to see.
What made you want to create that disorienting feeling?
It was an evolution. I started the project when I was a grad student at SFU in 2013. The first iteration of it was singing a song in a bathtub, as it filled with water. It was experimenting with ideas of performance and giving myself physical challenges while singing.
What kinds of songs do you perform?
In the past I’ve had original songs. In this iteration it will all be cover songs. It’s lots of cheesy, retro songs like Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing and ABBA’s Knowing Me Knowing You.
“The whole project tries to straddle sincerity and comedy at the same time”
— Lucien Durey, Producer and Performer of So Many Feelings
So there are these poignant emotional moments, but they’re not where you expect to see them. There’s kind of a melancholy feeling to the whole thing. Because of that disorientation where you’re choosing between the live and recorded performer, something happens where you are affected in ways you weren’t expecting.
When using cover songs, everyone has their personal associations, which is also why I gravitated towards using cover songs more than my own compositions. You hear Bruce Springsteen’s Tougher Than the Rest and it has a very specific association for people. Then you hear it performed differently in a kind of a cappella way and it changes the performance, but it still has the personal associations that we each put on songs that we know by heart.
Why do you think that humour is important in performance art?
It’s more honest. It’s more palatable. There’s something about a full scope of feeling that feels more true. We only really know what pain feels like because we know what laughter feels like.
Catch this 45-minute show for $10 on the evening of January 22, and stay updated on Durey’s future endeavours by following him on Instagram @luciendurey.
