Norman Armour, artistic and executive director of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, at his office in Vancouver on April 5, 2018.Rafal Gerszak/For The Globe and Mail
The York Theatre was packed for opening night of this year’s East Van Panto, a new-ish Vancouver holiday tradition. Despite the shoulder-to-shoulder full house, there was a hole in the place. A huge, palpable loss. All the seasonal merriment could not make up for the absence of Norman Armour, who had died five days earlier.
Armour, 64, was the co-founder and long-time artistic and executive director of Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. A job title never comes close to explaining who someone was or what they did, but Armour in particular transcended his title. If Vancouver were to name a godfather of independent, interdisciplinary theatre, Armour would certainly be a prime candidate.
The festival he co-created in 2003 and led until 2018 grew under his watch, from startup to cultural staple, bringing extraordinary contemporary performances to Vancouver and offering a platform for local artists and companies to stage their innovative works alongside international peers. It broke down silos of genre and discipline, allowing for collaboration and complement from theatre, live music, film and other artforms. For Vancouver audiences, it was something to look forward to in the cruel months of late January and early February.
I fell deeply in love with PuSh early in my Vancouver life. When The Globe and Mail published a holiday series about things that made a positive contribution to B.C., I chose to write about PuSh. I called it a beacon of avant-garde light in the dead of winter and thanked the cultural gods for it. “Alas,” I added, “the credit does not really belong to the cultural gods but to Norman Armour.”
Armour, who grew up in Toronto, had theatre in his blood; Dora Mavor Moore was a relative. He moved to Vancouver around 1980. He would end up having a tremendous impact on this place.
The York Theatre was packed for opening night of this year’s East Van Panto.The Cultch
The first time Armour’s name crossed my consciousness was shortly after my arrival at the Globe’s B.C. Bureau in 2007. I was writing about a PuSh show that had been threatened with legal action. The one-man show’s creator, James Long, told me he had met with Armour immediately upon finding out about the trouble. No big deal, right? Except that it was Christmas Eve. Such was Armour’s dedication. They met again on Boxing Day. They figured it out.
The first time I interviewed Armour, my fingers hurt. The guy could talk. I was typing like a dervish trying to keep up, as he explained to me over the phone why he was advocating for the City of Vancouver to mark its 125th anniversary with a bunch of cultural events. (It did.)
On another occasion, in 2009, Armour wrote a letter to B.C.’s Culture Minister to be read aloud at an event protesting provincial cuts to arts funding. Armour asked: What was he supposed to say to students dreaming of a career in theatre, local artists hoping to participate in PuSh, and international artists interested in the state of the arts in this province? “Minister, I am at risk of losing my faith,” he wrote.
He never did, of course. Even after he had a heart attack at a Mary Margaret O’Hara concert during PuSh in 2012. His heart stopped, but he didn’t.
Armour was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer on his birthday in February this year. But he was optimistic about his future and still working on projects, including co-editing a book about Vancouver’s independent theatre scene.
In a statement announcing his Nov. 19 death, PuSh called him a mentor, a cultural connector and a trailblazer.
Over the years, Armour had so much to say and it was so worthy of our attention (and my wrist pain). He understood the power of the performing arts. He understood the power of the people who make art.
I could fill pages recounting work he programmed for PuSh, brought to Vancouver from places abroad, or commissioned from local artists. A two-and-a-half-hour blindfolded walking tour through Vancouver created by French artists (Do You See What I Mean?). A Buenos Aires company’s site-specific theatrical experience in real time along a Gastown street (Mariano Pensotti’s La Marea). A four-track film shot live-to-tape by a European collective in the hour leading up to its screening (Gob Squad Arts Collective’s Super Night Shot). Tanya Tagaq improvising live with a violinist and percussionist to a screening of the controversial film Nanook of the North.
This stuff was thrilling.
Armour made many contributions beyond the festival, including as director of the 2014 world premiere of the opera Pauline, with libretto by Margaret Atwood. He co-founded an arts administrative space called The Post at 750, which PuSh shares with other organizations.
Long before any of this, Armour was an actor who drove a cab for 12 years to pay the bills. In 1990, he co-founded Rumble Theatre. “I [wanted] to create things, I [wanted] to instigate things,” he said in a recent interview.
The 2023 East Van Panto cast.The Cultch
In that same interview, on Simon Fraser University’s Below the Radar podcast, Armour talked about the importance of PuSh as a Vancouver endeavour – even if many of its works were international. “If the festival wasn’t felt to be owned by the local community, it would have died,” he told interviewer Am Johal.
In 2010, Armour spoke at a forum imagining what Vancouver’s arts scene would look like in 40 years. Ahead of the event, he told me he hoped that the social value of the arts would be understood and reflected in public policy as “an expression that’s central to what it means to be human.”
Armour didn’t get to stick around to see if this would play out as he had hoped. Many of us who were lucky enough to work with him – or interview him – won’t be around then either. But in 2050, and well beyond, people who never heard of Norman Armour will benefit from his vision – for the arts, for artists, and audiences.
At the opening night of this year’s Panto, how many people in that theatre – on the stage and in the seats – had gained something from Armour’s work, wisdom and kindness? Artists whom he had mentored, whose work he had developed, promoted, supported. Artists who had been inspired by work they had seen thanks to him. Audiences who, maybe not even knowing Armour’s name or who he was, have also reaped those benefits. That very show, the Panto’s take on Beauty and the Beast, was certainly influenced, in ways the artists might not even be able to articulate, by Armour’s work over the years.
Norman Armour was a beacon of light, and that light will not be diminished by his death. He is so missed. But that hole he leaves is filled with endless creative possibilities that he helped nurture.