Photo by Michelle Lee
It’s no secret that Vancouver is an ethnically diverse city, attracting nationalities from around the world. Arts and culture has always been a way to explore and address interpersonal relationships. In Vancouver, these conversations have a rich multicultural tone. Every year people find common ground and every year cultures become more integrated in Greater Vancouver’s artistic displays.
The totem poles in Stanley Park are a nod towards Aboriginal Heritage. Mural works sprinkled throughout the city are a chance for artists like Kazakhstan-born Ilya Viryachev to make their mark on the arts scene. The city of Surrey, now home to the largest concentration of ethnic communities in Canada, annually hosts a multicultural festival. The Surrey Fusion Festival is but another testimony to the increasing presence of cultural diversity in Metro Vancouver`s art scene.
Diversity representation still a challenge
Deb Pickman, communications and marketing manager of UBC’s Arts and Culture District and co-founder of theatre company Shameless Hussy Productions, speaks of theatre as a forum for both sensory enjoyment and intellectual challenge. While ethnic festivals bring colour to the streets of Metro Vancouver, her specialty is spreading the word about themes travelling through permanent venues and companies. When asked about diversity in the theatre today, she says it has been a subject of much debate in recent years. She cites an open letter written to the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards Society in 2015, complaining about the prevalence of white faces and voices being awarded for excellence. An open forum was held in response, and adjustments were made to the selection process. Diversity on the stage may be slow, but it is a growing trend.
“I saw my first ‘colour blind’ cast play at the Firehall (Theatre) and I see (colour blind casts) much more now,” says Pickman.
Cultural enrichment
Tarun Nayar, artistic director of the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration, sees the Punjabi folk dance as a way to enrich community life.
“The City of Bhangra festival is about using the joy and exuberance of this Punjabi art form to explore issues of culture, gender and identity – and to create complicated spaces where we can all find meaning and belonging,” he says.
While he acknowledges the increasing acceptance of ethnic diversity, he says the issue of equality is not ready to rest.
“As more and more of us become comfortable in diverse environments, festivals like ours become an antidote to a norm which has lost touch with a changing reality,” Nayar says.
Cultural appreciation simply doesn’t match the cultural opportunities. Deep-seated, vibrant ethnic communities exist, and are willing to offer their arts and insights to the broader population if they would only be received. Fortunately, the arts can be both a forum and a catalyst with their embodiment of human experience.
Cultural preservation in arts and communities
Tyler Russell, executive director/curator with Centre A Gallery, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, thinks that artists are important cultural actors in our community as they feel what’s going on and react to it.
“When artists who are having these reactions are given a stage and platform to explore those ideas these feelings are complicated. They’re multi-layered. It’s not simple … Sometimes the crafting of objects is a part of it, but other times it’s more of an exploratory cultural work. So when that’s given a platform, the possibility to impact others opens up and then real change happens,” Russell says.
Some of the exhibitions and talks hosted by the Centre have had an impact on the community’s consideration of questions around intangible cultural heritage, namely the Cantonese linguistic and cultural space, Chinatown, as a site of Cantonese language and culture.
Russell refers to the first exhibit he curated at the Centre in 2014, called M’goi / Do jeh: Sites, Rites and Gratitude, which had to do with the Saturday Chinese Language School.
The Centre invited a young artist to put together a series of Cantonese language classes in a nostalgic Saturday school fashion and Russell feels the impact of those classes were significant. Now the Youth Collaborative for Chinatown has picked up those specific classes.
“[In these classes] you have this impact where people are changing the way that they think about the neighbourhood that they live in. Instead of this alien inconvenience, it’s this rich cultural treasure of sorts that has so much to offer. We would hurt our own cultural wealth as a community if we were to get rid of it,” he says.
Transgression / Cantosphere, another exhibit of Centre A, explored the reaction to growing anxiety over the loss of Cantonese culture. According to Russell, the city and the province went on to do a tangible cultural heritage inventory.
Nathan Edelson, a former Downtown Eastside city planner, stood up in a meeting and said recognizing these cultural impacts the city needed to halt and reassess for that cultural aspect.
“An influential actor like that was there and was a part of the work, saw the different things that we were doing, and the conservations that we were facilitating. That was something,” says Russell.
