David McIntosh

David McIntosh is a writer, a performer, and Artistic Producer of battery opera.

Born in Kentucky, trained through transience, the construction industry and taxi guiding, he more or less lives in Vancouver, BC. His theatre, art bands, lounge acts, video and audio work have been performed and shown nationally and internationally. His stories have been published in bourgeois fashion magazines, a play in the National Theatre Review. He has co-created Dance works that have toured nationally and internationally.
In 1995, he co-founded battery opera with Lee Su-Feh with whom he has been collaborating ever since he was run over while on his bicycle somewhere between Kuantan and Kota Baru.

Since 1989 he has studied martial arts. He is currently a student of Bagua Master, Yang Guo Tai.




A Holiday Messages from the 1980s with Five Year Fuck at the Railway Club:


David McIntosh reciting "t'were", a poem brought to his attention by Adrienne Wong, who got it from her sister Karen, who got it from a  boyfriend (now former), to whom it was given by an acquaintance he soon after stopped associating with. -Anonymous, as it t'were, and yet it spoke to him.


Questions for David from Dance Victoria's Producer Stephen White regarding battery opera's [storm]

1. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamic involved in creating a work with someone else? What was the process for [storm]? Did you each take responsibility for individual aspects of the work? How did you put these elements together?

The dynamic is fraught, fraught I say, with exciting possibilities and brutal rejections. Danger lurks: will love, more importantly will I, be destroyed?

Well, I was creating a work with Su-Feh, my wife and partner of the last 20 years, so It’s a kind of delicious, familiar hell. Indeed this would be, we decided, the last of our co-created works for the forseeable future. As such, it was also a little different than the others (Spektator, Reptile Diva and Cyclops) in that we clearly defined roles for ourselves at the outset. Music and text for myself, choreography and overall direction from Su-Feh.

How does it work? Well it starts with discussion about ideas that we are obsessed with at the moment. Events in the past, things taking place in the midsts of our lives and the ideas that we use to link ourselves to all of it. We talk, and find resonance (and some dissonance) in each others ideas and concerns and then we take those discussions into the separate creation of material, then we bring them into rooms together, are surprised, argue a bit, reassess, and go at it again. Because Su-Feh is a bit of a control freak, and also because of the sociological history of men and women and power, and my sensitivity to all that, I often have to act insidiously, developing my ideas in secret before insinuating them into the overall work where they attach quietly and then grow like bacteria. Then, once the bacteria has a life of it’s own, we both have to deal with it as facilitators to let the work that wants to be emerge.

2. Some of the language and stories in [storm] are fairly graphic. Not a surprise when you consider you’re exploring male relationships. But most of your work that I’m familiar with has been peppered with what some would classify as “off-colour” jokes or ribald stories or strong language. How do you answer those critics that have labeled you as a “shock” artist? Is there something you’re exploring beyond shock – is there something you’re after?

Shock, shock-artist, hmm…. (I’m shocked). I could cop to having an “authority figure” complex, in the past- perhaps. And yes I have said, and do say things to purposely push peoples buttons. Maybe because I am not that erudite and it seems to be the quickest way to elucidate a fallacy in logic or a blatant social hypocrisy. I’m impatient. And yes, I enjoy it, but I also cry at the fact that people actually find me offensive. There are far more worthy candidates for your ire! But, also no. I don’t believe that I use any language out of context to the content of a work. I find great beauty in strong language and crude stories poetically expressed with the clarity of language appropriate to the acts described. I suppose that I grew up around a fair amount of foul language, drove a cab, worked in construction, sang in a “fuck band”- as they say, did some smuggling with alcoholic Irishmen, and then I started hanging out with dancers (good lord! They are the worst.). So my ear may have grown to be comforted by obscenity, but no, I don’t believe I use crudeness to shock on it’s own accord. It is suitable to the content, and it is a vehicle of empathic expression. I want to communicate with people, and sometimes a certain amount of crudeness is the best way to bridge the social divides. Stage/house, performer/viewer, man/woman, white neo-colonial North American /everybody else, etc…

3. Your interest as an artist extends beyond dance and theatre to music and spoken/written work. From your perspective, what elements does a work of art need to have to be satisfying?

Mystery, baby. We all need to live with a bit of mystery in our lives. Leave me with a few questions to ponder when I close the book or walk away into the night. If I wake up the next morning still thinking about it, still questioning, that’s art.

4. Where would place [storm] in your own personal canon – does it belong to a group of pieces that are somehow connected or is it unique. Why?

As I mentioned above, it belongs to the work co-created with Lee Su-Feh. The last of a venerable line, for now. They are all unique in terms of content and how that content gets expressed. In some ways, [storm] is the simplest of our joint works, and as such it as also the most challenging to perform. At the moment, we still have questions about where these stories, these dances, unfold, and where the performers and the audience are, in relation to each other. Who are we, and why are we in the room together? I guess I still need the questions to continue performing a piece. I remember “solving” our work Reptile Diva in Yellowknife, and feeling “That’s it. There’s no reason to keep performing this piece now.” In [storm] there is singing, dancing, and some stories and drink; how this all comes together in what kind of alchemical process is all in the performance. The relationship between the content, the work, the performers and the audience is still a ship who’s manifest is unclear. That’s why we perform it.

5. For me, what I have enjoyed about battery opera’s work is the layers of meaning, and the textures that come from putting so many forms of expression together. What are your favourite themes, sections, moments of [storm]?

I love Max talking about his dad. That resonates on so many levels for me. I love talking to the audience, stepping into the fourth wall, and through it to offer a drink to someone. I love the tension of men dancing in tight defined spaces and the cruel vastness of the elements. I love sharing stories (possibly crudely) that have struck me deeply as a father, as a son, and as a man, and I, in particular, love singing the song “Johnny’s Gone” with Max on the baritone saxophone.