VANCOUVER, BC.-The Vancouver Art Gallery will celebrate the opening of Roy Arden and Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction at FUSE, the city’s most intriguing night of art, music and performance. From 6pm to midnight on October 26th, the Gallery will be packed with an ever-changing array of programming drawing on Vancouver’s LIVE Performance Art Biennale and other thriving artistic communities. FUSE-goers will witness a 12-hour cake binge, a séance with a deceased neo-Dadaist, theatres where only human heads take the stage, music played on a frying pan, a performance of the seminal minimalist composition “In C” and much more. With jazz and food in the Gallery Café, drinks and a DJ in the FUSE Lounge and expert tours of current exhibitions, FUSE will once again provide Vancouver’s most unique night of entertainment.

In partnership with Vancouver’s LIVE Performance Art Biennale, FUSE will present one of Canada's most renowned performance artists, Tanya Mars. Joined by Alissa Firth-Eagland in the ground floor rotunda, the artists will perform In Pursuit of Happiness, a meditation on excess and consumption in which the two lavishly dressed women will eat cake continuously for a 12-hour period. Holding court at a table set for an opulent party, the performers construct a social satire exploring the modern human condition. Mars, best known for her PURE series performed at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery in 1990, is a performance and video artist and a professor at the University of Toronto.

Presented by Artspeak, Yves Klein Speaks! will treat visitors to an unconventional séance with French neo-Dada artist Yves Klein. Created by Archive, a collaboration between California artists Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick, the lecture is part of a series that provides alternative portraits of famous artists by allowing professional mediums to interview their spirits from the other side. Walsh and Kubick have lectured at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Getty Centre, Los Angeles, and the Institute for Surrealism Studies in Essex. Walsh is an artist and professor of video art at the University of California, Berkeley and Kubick is an artist and founder and director of Language Removal Services.

The innovative thespians of Theatre Replacement will stage what might be the most personalized theatrical performances ever presented. The group’s one-person shows for one-person audiences take place in extremely intimate theatres—boxes worn on the actors' shoulders. Made up of six performances by six artists, the project, BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience, is drawn from interviews with six first-generation Canadians. The productions are directed by Maiko Bae Yamamoto and James Long and feature the talents of Anita Rochon, Marco Soriano, Paul Ternes, Cindy Mochizuki, Donna Soares, and Una Memisevic.

In a fourth-floor gallery space, Vancouver musician Lee Hutzulak will use a synthesizer, mixer, microphones, prepared CDs, electric pump, jar of water, frying pan strung with springs, disco ball, telephone bells and more to create an electro-acoustic improv focused on texture, tone and space. Presented in partnership with Western Front New Music, Hutzulak’s work, Incident Command, is set in a dark environment where bright shards of light flash randomly and a video camera projects its own out-of-focus image onto itself.

Under the direction of award-winning percussionist Daniel Tones, the Simon Fraser University Contemporary Performance Ensemble will perform Terry Riley’s seminal minimalist work "In C" throughout the Gallery. Written by the great American composer in 1964, "In C" is widely regarded as the composition that brought the minimalist music movement to prominence. Consisting of 53 separate modules, the piece is performed by an unspecified number of players and an unspecified group of instruments. Each performer moves through the composition at his or her pace, and the resulting layering of musical fragments creates a rich, organic texture.

Hors d’oeuvres is a live cooking show staged in the Gallery’s historic courtroom. Performance artist Randy Lee Cutler takes on the persona of Chef Hedda Cabbage, serving up conversation while audiences are sustained with samplings of local fare. Hedda forages the landscape for evidence of west coast food culture and digs up stories of pacific cuisine seldom visible with a meal. These morsels of information are part of the feast, its nourishments.

In the FUSE Lounge, a specially designed bar space featured in the Gallery, well known local DJ and recording artist Paul Devro will spin records. Jamming to Devro’s beats, “extreme” fiddle player Kytami and funk/hip-hop trio The Front will improvise a constant flow of music to create an unconventional fusion of sound. Recently completing a CD compilation exploring a new genre of music called Bailie Funk, Devro has released numerous mixes for media such as Xlr8r magazine in San Francisco.

Timed to coincide with the openings of major exhibitions, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s FUSE puts the city’s leading visual arts destination in an entirely new light—at night. FUSE tickets are $15 per person. Members of the Vancouver Art Gallery receive free admission.