Portals at Queer Arts Festival. | Photo courtesy of Queer Arts Festival
Portals
June 6–28
Portals are gateways to transformation; liminal spaces of transition, possibility and change. For the 2025 Queer Arts Festival, Portals explores queer and trans experiences of crossing thresholds, stepping into new identities and imagining futures beyond imposed boundaries. Presented in partnership with Centre A, this year’s curated visual exhibition also examines diasporic journeys, highlighting the intersections of queerness, migration and belonging. In a time of rising anti-trans and anti-queer rhetoric, Portals is a call to reimagine the world, celebrating art’s power to forge new paths, challenge oppression and open doors to liberation. Check out the festival’s website for more information.
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Game On!
June 11, 7 p.m.
www.vancouversymphony.ca/event/game-on
Be among the first to experience the excitement and adrenaline-fueled drama of this awesome symphonic music, as the epic universes of The Witcher 3, World of Warcraft, Ori, The Elder Scrolls, Assassin’s Creed, Guild Wars 2, BioShock and many others unfold before your eyes. Featuring concert premieres of stunning symphonic music from an unprecedented lineup of blockbuster video games, Game On! combines unrivaled symphonic arrangements with stunning, never-before-seen HD video. Please visit the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s website for tickets and more information.
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Lend Me a Soprano
June 12–29
This operatic comedy, playing at the White Rock Players’ Club, is a frothy escape into the 1930s. Lend Me a Soprano is a clever retelling of Ken Ludwig’s classic farce, Lend Me a Tenor. The combustible and tenacious Lucille Wiley, manager of the Cleveland Grand Opera Company, is ready to welcome world-class soprano Elena Firenzi for her one-night-only starring role in Carmen. It will be a career-defining moment for Lucille but the troublesome Elena arrives late, her impassioned husband Pasquale has a fit of jealousy, and Elena melts down. The show must go on, but how? Can Mrs. Wiley’s mousy but determined assistant Jo save the day? This madcap screwball comedy features mistaken identities, double entendres and seduction. And with any luck, a happy ending. Check out the club’s website for tickets and more information.
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Vancouver Short Film Festival
June 13–15
The Vancouver Short Film Festival (VSFF) is a celebration of Canada’s vibrant community of short film, documentary and animation artists. Their goal is to elevate talent from B.C. and connect B.C. creators to the greater film industry nationwide. By providing an arena for short filmmakers to showcase their films to the public, they help build ties between emerging filmmakers, established professionals and their local communities. For a list of shows, showtimes and more information, please visit the festival’s website.
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Les Filles du Roi
June 16, 1:30 p.m.
Playing at the Kay Meek Arts Centre’s Grosvenor Theatre is Les Filles du Roi (The King’s Daughters), telling the powerful story of a young girl, Kateri, and her brother, Jean-Baptiste, whose lives are disrupted upon the arrival of les filles du roi in ‘New France’ (now Montreal) in 1665. They forge an unlikely relationship with the young fille, Marie-Jeanne Lespérance, whose dream of a new life is more complicated than she could have imagined. Over the course of a year, Mohawk, French and English journeys collide, setting the stage for the Canada we know today. A deeply moving and unique work adapted from the stage for the screen, Les Filles du Roi is a perfect vehicle that uncovers a perspective different from the one told by Settler culture, one that redefines the Canadian narrative. Check out the theatre’s website for tickets and more information.
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Eyes of the Beast
June 18–22
www.sfu.ca/sca/events—news/events/eyes-of-the-beast.html
The Eyes of the Beast documentary theatre production pulls from hundreds of testimonies of people across Canada who have lived through climate change together. A fishing guide who took his boat into flooded farmland to rescue an alligator. An actor rushed to the hospital for heat stroke after performing in front of the legislature. A mother figuring out how to prepare her child for the future after fire flattened their town. Climate disaster is not far away, not happening to someone else. It is here now, happening to us. The production shows how we still have each other during those disasters, creating community amidst catastrophe. For more information, check out SFU’s website.
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The Work of Repair: Redress & Repatriation at the Museum of Vancouver
From June 20
www.museumofvancouver.ca/work-of-repair
Since the 1980s, the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) has been grappling with how to decolonize its work and repair its relationships with Indigenous communities. The Work of Repair: Redress & Repatriation at the Museum of Vancouver digs into some of these efforts by highlighting three ways the MOV is working towards repair: repatriation, community engagement and research that reconnects Indigenous belongings to their histories. Nexwenen Nataghelʔilh is an exhibition within an exhibition exploring the emotional impact of the repatriation of over 60 Tŝilhqot’in ancestral belongings from the MOV collection. Knowledge Repatriation is an MOV cultural revitalization initiative that responds to community identified needs. Projects are designed to reintroduce traditional knowledge to host nation communities by bringing participants together with knowledge holders from neighbouring communities. Film clips and objects in this section of the exhibit document the work thus far, including harvesting for cedar root basketry, making fish traps from cedar withes and learning about the maintenance of sea gardens.
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Another Green World: Works from the Collection
June 20–August 10
Another Green World brings together artists’ works from the Belkin’s collection, many of them recent acquisitions, to consider spaces that redraw the boundaries of power, play and form. The green world is part of a second-world Renaissance attitude born of a human desire to live in and control a world of human invention. The second world of art and speculative thinking (versus the first world made by a god or by nature) seeks a human-made order and meaning. Check out UBC Belkin’s website for more information about the exhibit.
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National Indigenous Peoples Day
June 21, 2–7 p.m.
June 21 is National Indigenous Peoples Day, and there are many celebrations happening throughout the region. One such celebration is in Surrey, where they will be hosting the National Indigenous Peoples Day Celebration & Wellness Event, live at the Bill Reid Millennium Amphitheatre in Cloverdale. Hosted by sǝmyámǝ (Semiahmoo), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), and q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen) first nations, this event is an opportunity to acknowledge and show respect and admiration for Indigenous Peoples past, present and future; to share cultural history; and to share spirit, experiences, stories, song, art and dance with each other and the community. The celebration will feature cultural sharing with teachings and practice through art, music, storytelling and dance by the local First Nations, including XiQuelem, (Eugene Harry), Jade Turner, Wild River Singers, Art Napoleon and many more.
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Scandinavian Midsummer Festival 2025
June 21–22
scandinavianmidsummerfestival.com
There are a number of activities going on that you can enjoy during the Scandinavian Midsummer Festival in Burnaby. Among them are two almost full days of live music with a number of individual artists, groups and choirs. There will be performances by the Scandinavian Dancers and the Vikings in the Viking Village, including songs, games and a real Viking raid – beware of the Norse! At the Midsummer Marketplace, you find over 50 vendors with shopping kiosks with lots of exciting products and crafts. There will be cultural displays, kids’ activities, a troll forest and carnival games. For the Midsummer beginner – there are two very popular events during the festival that you may not want to miss! The raising of the Midsummer Pole with dance around takes place on Saturday afternoon. The popular and crazy Finnish wife carrying contest takes place on Sunday.
