Winter is almost over and spring is just around the corner, so the city is starting to shift into a lively season filled with fresh energy and new experiences. Vancouver is coming alive with cultural celebrations, community gatherings and an exciting lineup of live theatre, music and arts events happening across the city. Markets, outdoor activities and neighbourhood festivals start to return as the days grow longer and brighter. With so much unfolding, it’s an ideal time to get out, explore and fully enjoy the city’s vibrant culture and welcoming community.
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House of Folk: A Lost Canadian Folk Show
Now until March 8
www.firehallartscentre.ca/event/house-of-folk-a-lost-folk-canadian-show
Set in the 1960s during the height of the Canadian folk music revival, House of Folk takes us to a time when coffeehouses from coast to coast were filled with song and spirit, and became a source for conversation, communion, and personal revolution. From Joni Mitchell to Leonard Cohen and Neil Young to Gordon Lightfoot and more, House of Folk: A Lost Canadian Folk Show uncovers the incredible voices and music of the artists who lived it, the artists who had the courage to step up to the mic and the artists who asked us to listen. For tickets and more information, please visit the Firehall Arts Centre’s website.
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The Balikbayan Project presents: Ingat Kayo!
Now until March 21
www.centrea.org/blogs/exhibitions/the-balikbayan-project-presents-ingat-kayo
Ingat Kayo! meaning “take care” in Tagalog is a common greeting shared amongst loved ones and oftentimes the last thing you hear before leaving home and embarking on a new journey. Bringing together the work of five Filipino youth artists: anata laylay, Aurora Yol, Luigi Pulido, Sophia Santos English and Khim Mata Hipol, this exhibition serves as the culmination of their journey together as the first cohort of the Balikbayan Project. This programming series provided an opportunity for the youths to commune, grieve and respond to the continued need for a physical space in the Filipino community while exploring themes tied to their own unique identities and artistic practices from within the diaspora. Balikbayan, literally meaning return to one’s country, refers to the practice of shipping goods from overseas Filipinos back to their families and signifies the return of youth to their own roots through culture, community, acts of care, sharing and resourcefulness.
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Strawberry Fields: Handel, Sancho and English Country Dances
Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m.
www.earlymusic.bc.ca/events/strawberry-fields
Strawberry Fields is a joyous feast of rustic dances from the 18th century. Featuring Ruckus’ dazzling arrangements of Ignatius Sancho’s 12 Country Dances for the year 1779 and the evergreen trio sonatas of George Frederic Handel, this program will have audiences craving to get on their feet. New York City’s ensemble Ruckus has a unique and playful approach to the world of early music, drawing inspiration from the groove of American roots music and the rhythm of jazz. The group’s fresh take on English Country Dances from the 18th century, with their gavottes and minuets, presents a pairing of Handel’s music with the British African composer Ignatius Sancho and a wink to the Beatles’s hit song. Country dances in the 18th-century were among the most available and widely used music of their day, bringing people together through the joyous ritual of social dancing.
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Pippin
Feb. 27–March 7
Play on Words Productions reimagines the iconic musical Pippin as a raw, underground nightclub fever dream. Inside a decaying club suspended between life and death, the party never ends – sweat, smoke and shadows blur the line between desire and destruction. Misfit souls, beautiful but broken, dance endlessly in search of release, desperate to escape their endless cycle. When Pippin, a lost young man, stumbles inside, he becomes their chance at freedom. Guided by the magnetic Leading Player, Pippin is seduced by the promise of ultimate glory. Dark, raw, and reckless, this Pippin is a haunting exploration of purpose and temptation, where performance is survival, and the choice is devastating: burn in the fire, or walk away.
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Nunsense
Feb. 27–March 21
The world’s most successful musical based on a greeting card returns to Metro Theatre! Join the Little Sisters of Hoboken – the survivors at least – as they put on a madcap variety show to raise emergency funds for the convent. For what, you ask? You wouldn’t believe them if they told you. Expect a former circus performer, tainted vichyssoise, foul-mouthed puppets, amnesia and, of course, tap-dancing nuns. Overflowing with laughs, Nunsense is pure joy, and the Metro Theatre folks are thrilled to welcome it back to their stage. For tickets and more information, check out their website.
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Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D Major
Feb. 28, 7:30–10 p.m.
The Vancouver Bach Family of Choirs will be presenting the Canadian Premiere of the chamber arrangement of Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D Major, along with the Canadian premiere of Kati Agócs’ Hosanna of the Clouds on Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. You won’t want to miss the opportunity to hear the powerful music performed by members of Vancouver Opera’s Yulanda M. Faris Young Artists Program, along with the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra and the VBFC Symphonic choir. Check out their website for tickets and more information.
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Franck meets Lekeu – Piano Trio
March 3, 7:30–9 p.m.
www.sakkamusic.com/event/francks-meets-lekeu-piano-trio
Come discover, celebrate and shine a light on the unsung treasures of classical music. This concert pairs the voices of a master and his student, bound by music and fate. César Franck, one of the great figures of 19th-century French music, was admired for the warmth and lyricism of his works. Guillaume Lekeu, Franck’s devoted pupil, carried his teacher’s spirit into his own music. Intensely sincere and full of restless energy, Lekeu poured his whole heart into every bar he wrote. But his life was heartbreakingly short: he died of typhoid fever at just 24. His Piano Trio, completed in those few brief years, shines as a moving testament to both his talent and his promise. Placed side by side, the trios of Franck and Lekeu are more than just beautiful music – they are the story of a torch passed from teacher to student, a musical conversation across a single, too-short lifetime.
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Coastal Dance Festival
March 3–8
www.damelahamid.ca/coastal-dance-festival
Dancers of Damelahamid will present the 19th annual Coastal Dance Festival, honouring Indigenous stories, song and dance from across Canada and around the world, on stage March 3 at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster and March 4–8 at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC in Vancouver. Audiences can enjoy all-ages matinee programs and signature evening performances with dynamic offerings of ancestral and contemporary performances from the Northwest Coast and international Indigenous artists. For full festival details and to buy tickets, visit their website or the Museum of Anthropology’s website.
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Same Same Different
March 5, 1 p.m.
A silly, heartfelt family spectacle for all ages, brimming with song, dance and shenanigans playing at the Kay Meek Arts Centre on March 5. The Myrtle Sisters had always dressed, sang, danced, talked and even ate the same. They could hardly tell themselves apart! In this show, their secret unique features are revealed through a hilarious and unexpected series of calamities. Can they keep these oddities from one another? Will they still be part of the trio if their differences are discovered? Featuring Vancouver performers Candice Roberts, Nayana Fielkov and Kat Single-Dain, the Myrtle Sisters delight audiences of all ages with their harmonies, twinkling tap numbers, and family antics. Expect plenty of shenanigans, surprises and mishaps from this outrageously fun performance. Through original and historic live music and dance, watch as The Myrtle Sisters embrace their individuality and learn to work together. Come along for this silly, heartfelt musical journey, where we discover we can all be our unique selves and still belong!
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TANIA WILLARD: PHOTOLITHICS
March 7–May 24
www.thepolygon.ca/exhibition/tania-willard-photolithics
The Polygon Gallery will organize the largest solo exhibition to date of artist, curator and scholar Tania Willard. Drawing on her mixed Secwépemc and settler-Scottish ancestry, Willard has developed a collaborative, land-based practice, which attends to the history, present and future of the land and community. The focus of this ten-year survey is her ongoing experiments with photography, as a technology of both colonization and decolonization. Combining new and existing works, and showcasing a broad and inventive array of photographic printing, materiality and presentation techniques, the exhibition materialises the artist’s paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research. The title Photolithics (combining ancient words for light and stone) calls up Willard’s expansive notion of working directly with the sun’s changing rays, and with varied formations of soil, crystal, metal and sediment. Throughout, Willard poses key questions about the confines of galleries and museums, juxtaposing these spaces with the forms of Salish basketry and kekuli (pit house) architecture simultaneously ancient and current.
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