THE CULTCH’s 2026–27 season, announced today, includes theatre, circus, and more from acclaimed local, national, and international creators.

The critically lauded local company The Search Party (which in recent years has delivered hits like the thought-provoking Fairview and the riotous Stupid Fucking Bird) kicks things off at the Historic Theatre September 29 to October 11 with the tech-focused psychological thriller JOB.

The last time playwright Amiel Gladstone and songwriter Veda Hille teamed up, the local creative titans brought us the ambitious Onegin, inspired by the writing of Alexander Pushkin and the operas of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Next spring (April 21 to May 2, 2027, to be precise), the Cultch’s Historic Theatre will host the premiere of Gladstone and Hille’s new musical, For Frances when it’s raining, adapted from Kathryn Davis’s novel The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. 

Theatre Replacement’s perennially popular holiday-season production offers an all-ages spin through Greek mythology with East Van Panto: Hercules, which also features Hille’s songs and runs November 18 to January 3 at the York Theatre. Another family-friendly show is Jordan (a copresentation of Montreal’s Geordie Theatre and Vancouver’s own Carousel Theatre), which reflects on the struggle for justice within Indigenous communities, at the Historic Theatre November 12 to 15.  

Definitely not for kids, though, is Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes’ The Daisy Theatre: Back in Bloom, running February 9 to 28 at the Historic Theatre. Toronto puppeteer Burkett’s shows tend to err on the side of the bawdy and the naughty.

Puppets also play a role in Dirt, an examination of humanity’s not-always-kind treatment of the planet, by Montreal-based dance company Tentacle Tribe. That one’s at the Historic Theatre November 4 to 8.  

For next year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, the Cultch will present a pair of shows at the Vancouver Playhouse. The first is Knitting Peace, a copresentation with DanceHouse in which world-renowned Swedish circus company Cirkus Cirkör gives new meaning to the phrase “hanging by a thread”. The second Playhouse show is a Hamlet with a difference. In the version by Peru’s Teatro La Plaza, which runs February 4 to 6, eight actors with Down syndrome share their dreams and struggles while pondering life’s big questions.

As part of the Warrior Festival—which per its website “celebrates the strength of artists who are reclaiming space, rewriting narratives, and advocating for justice from the stage to the street”—the Historic Theatre plays host to three shows. In No Apologies (March 10 to 14), the UK’s Emma Frankland mashes up grunge, pop culture, and alternate history. Here Here: Songs We Sing for Home, pairing eight local writers with a bespoke band of Vancouver musicians, is at the Historic Theatre March 17 to 21. In Joey Lespérance’s Michel(le) (March 24 to 28), Pi Theatre presents a deeply personal meditation on resilience and transformation. Closing out the festival, writer-director Cheyenne Scott’s Wolf Cull (April 1 to 11) is a thriller exploring the power of Indigenous women.

From the fertile mind of Lucy Prebble, who won an Emmy for her work on Succession, comes The Effect. In the Rumble Theatre and ITSAZOO coproduction (running October 15 to 25 at the Historic Theatre), two strangers meet while participating in a clinical drug trial and fall in love—or maybe it’s just the pills talking.

At the York from January 19 to 31, Toronto’s Crow’s Nest Theatre brings us Rogers V. Rogers, playwright Michael Healey’s tale of corporate greed and familial grudges based on the real-life battles between Canadian telecom tycoon Ted Rogers and his son Edward.

In addition, The Cultch has also announced that the previously postponed The Horse of Jenin, is coming to the York Theatre October 8 to 11.

“We are proud to have a season that features so many amazing local artists and companies, as well as the work of incredible national and international talents. We hope the 26/27 line-up will create joy and connection, spark conversation, and strengthen community,” Cultch executive director Heather Redfern and associate executive director Nicole McLuckie said in today’s announcement.  

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THE DANCE CENTRE has just announced Odd Meridian Arts artistic director Ziyian Kwan as the recipient of the biennial Lola Award, while Co.ERASGA artistic director Alvin Erasga Tolentino receives the annual Isadora Award.

The biennial Lola Award encourages the work of a mid-career or senior choreographer in B.C. and carries a $10,000 prize, supported by the Lola McLaughlin Endowment Fund with the Vancouver Foundation. Past winners have included Crystal Pite, Justine A. Chambers, and Company 605.

Establishin her name as a magnetic dancer for companies as diverse as Kokoro Dance and plastic orchid factory, Hong Kong–born Kwan went on to begin choreographing in 2013 and has created 14 full-length and many shorter works. She often draws on striking set pieces and props, exploring themes ranging from identity and feminism to immigration. Recent pieces have included Crone and Rebel Grace, created under her company’s former name Dumb Instrument Dance. Odd Meridian Arts has hosted residencies for more than 30 artists as well as three month-long festivals celebrating Asian artistry. In July 2020, Ziyian spearheaded Morrow, Odd Meridian’s cultural space.

The annual Isadora Award recognizes the achievements of B.C.’s dance professionals, honouring the recipient with a specially-designed award created by renowned glass sculptor Mary Filer, studio or theatre space up to a value of $4000, and $1,000 in cash. Previous recipients have included Pite, Wen Wei Wang, and Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes of Corporeal Imago.

Filipino-Canadian choreographer Erasga Tolentino has also been a prominent figure in Vancouver’s contemporary dance, as well as making his mark interationally. He founded Co.ERASGA in 2000 and has since created 21 full-length works, including SOLA, Bato/Stone, Paradise/Paradis, Accumulation, Colonial, Unwrapping Culture, and Eternal Gestures; his Undivided Colours returns to the Dance Centre from May 14 to 15.  Often drawing on artful set pieces and costumes, Erasga Tolentino’s practice has long explored identity, gender, migration, and cross-cultural collaboration, touring to countries from the Philippines to France and Uruguay.

Both were chosen by a jury of their peers.  

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The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts presented The Passion of Joan of Arc with live accompaniment by Beautiful Violence on May 2

GETTING A HANDLE on exactly who the members of Griefwalker are is a serious challenge. The band’s website doesn’t list them, and at any given performance, the Vancouver post-rock act might have as many as 10 people onstage or as few as five. Perhaps the mystery is all part of the fun, but it can make life difficult for anyone writing about the band.

This is not an article about Griefwalker, mind you. It’s a review of a performance by Beautiful Violence, the ambient side project of Griefwalker’s Simon Dobbs and Jon McGovern. The duo’s lineage is important, however, because it was as members of Griefwalker that Dobbs and McGovern got their start creating live scores to classic silent films at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in 2024.

Before Saturday night’s screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc came the announcement that the Shadbolt will host a showing of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist vampire flick Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror on October 17, with an original live score by Taxa. Why am I mentioning this? In part, it’s because Nosferatu is one of the greatest films ever made (and also one of the creepiest) and you owe it to yourself to watch it on a big screen at least once. The other reason is that all four members of Taxa are also in—can you guess?—Griefwalker.

Thank you, reader, for indulging me in this little trip down an extremely niche rabbit hole. Beautiful Violence’s musical family tree may have numerous branches, but it was just Dobbs and McGovern making all the sounds on Friday night. Or at least I assume this was the case. The Shadbolt’s Studio Theatre is a wonderful space with fantastic sound and (mostly) great sightlines. On this occasion, though, the performers were tucked off to one side, so to anyone seated in the narrow section of seats at house right—including me—they were completely obscured by a black curtain.

So, while I can’t tell you who was doing what during any scene, it’s probably just as well. The point of the evening was not to watch the band, but to experience the way their sounds transformed the experience of viewing Carl Theodor Dreyer’s depiction of the trial and (spoiler alert) execution of France’s beloved cross-dressing 15th-century teenage holy warrior.

The duo kept things spare but melodic during the opening scenes, underscoring the entrance of the captive Joan (Renée Falconetti) and the beginning of the court proceedings with droning timbres and shimmering guitar chords.

McGovern and Dobbs built up the tension by bringing in dissonant drones and feedback—and what sounded like the work of an EBow, a hand-held device that vibrates a single string of a guitar to produce essentially infinite sustain—as the trial reached its dramatic climax.

That crucial moment is an exchange between Joan and lead prosecutor Jean d’Estivet (played with scowling malevolence by André Berley). After ascertaining that Joan believes God has promised her she will go to heaven, d’Estivet follows up with: “So you are certain of your salvation?” Coached by the double-crossing priest Nicolas Loyseleur (Maurice Schutz), Joan responds in the affirmative, which the sympathetic monk Jean Massieu (Antonin Artaud) cautions her is “a dangerous answer”.

The warning comes too late. Seizing the moment, d’Estivet asks: “Are you in a state of grace?” It’s a trap, a question with no right answer. If she says yes, it’s heresy, but to say no would be a tacit confession that she is in a state of sin. Her equivocal response is rhetorically clever, but ultimately not enough to save her: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.”

After constructing a wall of noise that felt like the aural equivalent of a panic attack, Beautiful Violence stripped things down for a gentler and more melodic sequence as Massieu meets with the now-condemned Joan for one last time, to prepare her for her execution. Artaud’s facial expressions are a master class in subtlety, blending empathy, frustration, and ultimately admiration for a woman who, though resigned to her fate, refuses to recant her conviction that she is a child of God.

The drones swell again, this time bearing the weight of tragedy rather than anxiety, as Joan succumbs to the flames while English soldiers quell dissent among the onlookers, sparked by one man's plaintive cry of “You have burned a saint!”

When I interviewed Dobbs in advance of this show, he expressed admiration for Nick Cave, emphasizing the Bad Seeds frontman’s mastery of thematic and emotional dynamics: “He has a great way of moving between the huge to the tiny, right? The epic to the small, fragile.” While Beautiful Violence would have done well to employ more of that range in accompanying The Passion of Joan of Arc, the fact is that the source material makes that a monumental challenge.

By favouring tight close-ups and dispensing with establishing shots altogether, Dreyer and his cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, created a sometimes oppressively claustrophobic atmosphere evocative of the world-closing-in horror that Joan herself surely felt in her final days. By that measure, Dobbs and McGovern did a masterful job of complementing what was on the screen.  

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Martin Harley plays the BlueShore at CapU on May 10 at 7:30 pm

IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE that there’s no gig so “out there” that Martin Harley will turn it down. The Welsh singer-songwriter and slide guitarist once played at an elevation of 21,000 feet on Kala Patthar in the Himalayas. That 2005 performance, for which Harley accompanied British musician Oz Bayldon, was recognized by the folks at Guinness World Records as the highest-altitude concert in history, although it has since been surpassed.

In 2010, Harley spent a month touring the UK, playing 27 shows along the way. That doesn’t sounds like such a big deal until you learn that he traversed the entire 1,900 kilometres by bicycle. It’s a good thing Harley’s chosen instrument is the relatively compact Weissenborn lap slide guitar and not, say, a Steinway & Sons Model D-274 concert grand piano.

The BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts at Capilano University isn’t quite as high up as Kala Patthar, although it is nestled in the foothills of the North Shore Mountains, so while it’s conceivable that Harley could get there by bicycle, don’t count on it. (Don’t let that stop you from doing so, though.)

What you can count on is that Harley will deliver both heartfelt songs and instrumental fire, wielding his Weissenborn to create what SLAP magazine called “a glorious and intoxicating sound”.

And if we’re really lucky, he might even bless us with his absolutely killer cover of Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”.  

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Presented during Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s centennial year, The Show 2026 highlights work by more than 400 graduates across creative practices. It’s on view from May 13 to 27 at ECU’s campus.

Bringing together final projects from Fine Arts, Media Arts, and Design, the exhibition spans disciplines including painting, sculpture, performance, interaction design, animation, film, and sound. It offers a dynamic introduction to a new generation of artists and designers.

Marking ECU’s 100th anniversary, this edition reflects a milestone moment as the university enters its second century. The graduating class both builds on a longstanding creative legacy and charts new directions for art and design, with works that demonstrate the scope, diversity, and evolving impact of contemporary practice.

Among Vancouver’s largest free public art events, The Show presents work that reflects years of research, experimentation, and creative inquiry in an accessible, shared setting. Visitors are invited to see the first public unveiling of these projects—encountering ideas and works as they enter the wider world. Bringing together an extensive range of subjects and perspectives, the exhibition invites dialogue, expands forms of expression, and engages with the social, cultural, and technological questions shaping contemporary life.

The exhibition opens with a public celebration on May 13 from 5 pm to 10 pm, inviting visitors to explore the work and take part in a defining moment in ECU’s centennial year.

Admission to The Show 2026 is free, and RSVPs are encouraged to reserve a spot at opening night. Learn more and plan a visit here.

Post sponsored by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

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Chor Leoni presents The Big Roar at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on May 8 at 7:30 pm and May 9 at 1 pm

AT CHOR LEONI’S annual choir extravaganza, The Big Roar, the draw is the sheer number of voices—350 strong—that gather to harmonize across generations. Participants this year include the group’s professional ensemble The Leonids, MYVoice youth choirs, young PRÉLUDE singers, and participants of the Emerging Choral Artist Program, as well as two B.C. high-school choirs.

But there’s another aspect of the two-concert celebration for audiences to “roar” about: programs that, far from presenting the tried and true, showcase an excitingly diverse slate of rising new voices in choral composition.

Below, just a few of the highlights hitting the Chan Centre on May 8 and 9.

“Pass on the teachings”

By Miranda Currie

The event’s finale gathers all 350 voices for this world premiere by Miranda Currie, the inaugural Amplify Artist in Residence for Chor Leoni's 2025–26 season. She’s a northern Indigenous multidisciplinary artist educator and composer who lives among the Dene people in Yellowknife, drawing on the influences of her own Mushkegowuk (Swampy Cree) heritage and Euro-Canadian ancestry. Currently completing a Masters in Indigenous Land Based Education, she’s released five albums of music, including two for children. The song expresses Dene knowledge systems, where Indigenous Elders share wisdom, stories, and traditions with younger generations.

“The Day Is Yours”

By Marie-Claire Saindon

Choral numbers don’t come much more uplifting than this recent work by Franco-Ontarian choral composer Saindon. The rhythmic piece, performed by the entire 350-voice chorus, is a percussion-driven affirmation to “Rise up,/ And know the day is yours to shape./ Fill it with hope,/ Fill it with life,/ Fill it with awe,/ Fill it with Joy!” The artist is composer-in-residence at Chor Leoni—one who loves to draw on imagery and poetic text. Based in Montreal as composer-in-residence for Chœur Adleisia, she multitasks across scoring films, teaching fiddle and accompanying dancers. Expect this one to get the entire chorus moving—not to mention its conductor, music director Erick Lichte.

“Lingua Tonga”

By Shruthi Rajasekar

Minnesota-based Rajasekar’s premiere is a joyful homage to the colourful music of Bollywood, bursting with ornamentation and raga-like rhythms. The composer and performer’s accolades include being named McKnight Composer Fellow with the American Composers Forum and the Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and winning the Global Women in Music Award from the United Nations. Her music draws from her roots in the Carnatic and Western classical traditions, and has been performed everywhere from London’s Royal Albert Hall to Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts. The Chor Leoni choir performs the piece at The Big Roar.

“Woods”

By Bon Iver, arranged by Henrik Dahlgren

We’re curious about this one, a choral arrangement of the beloved indie folk band’s raw, a capella track, a vocorder-enhanced song about isolation and introspection from 2009’s Blood Bank EP (“I’m up in the woods/I’m down on my mind”). The mesmerizing original uses heavily processed, autotuned vocal layers to simulate a digital choir. Enter young, award-winning Swedish composer Dahlgren, who interprets the short but arresting piece for the decidedly no-autotune-necessary The Leonids. The composer began his musical education at the Malmö Academy of Music, continuing at the Royal College of Music in London and the University of Aberdeen.

“Muhona”

By Cedrick Howoseb

The young MYVoice choir, with its singers aged 12 to 24, is the perfect vehicle for another exuberant entry on The Big Roar program. The Namibian composer's rousing a capella piece draws on African rhythms, but it also springs out of Howoseb's inspiration from the hymns of his old Lutheran church choir. The young, self-taught musician directs the Sion Youth Choir of Namibia, and won the title of Best Old Mutual Choir Conductor in his home country. 

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Ballet BC presents UNITY at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from May 7 to 9

NEW YORK–BASED DANCE mavericks Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber just staged a sold-out production of Satyagraha at Paris’s legendary Palais Garnier. That was on the heels of choreographing Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk-feminist Frankenstein remake The Bride!. Only a few months earlier, they wowed Toronto audiences with a buzzed-about new work for the National Ballet of Canada.

Those are just a few of the recent large-scale projects the couple has created—and so it says something that they’re beyond eager to be back in Vancouver at Ballet BC. Smith and Schraiber are crafting a new work, FOR GLASS, after debuting at the company a year ago with the restless, open-hearted Obsidian. The full-evening piece, on the season-closing UNITY program, will feature the Microcosmos Quartet playing two of Philip Glass’s string pieces onstage with the entire company of dancers.

Schraiber has no problem articulating why they admire the dancers at Ballet BC so much. “They have the sense of humour and the generosity and the commitment—it’s a reminder why this is what we do,” says Schraiber, joining his partner in life and art on a Zoom call with Stir. “There’s also the chemistry, and the talent, and the skill—and the ability to listen to each other.”

On the day of the interview, Smith is in Vancouver finessing FOR GLASS with the company here; Schraiber has been in New York, where their daughter goes to school, before heading back to the West Coast. The anticipation with which he receives rehearsal videos from Ballet BC—helmed by artistic director Medhi Walerski—speaks volumes about his excitement about the company.

“I receive videos every night to watch the runs that they do in the studio—and, you know, the videos come in at 10 p.m., 11 p.m.,” he recounts. “And I’m waiting all day to see those dancers, even though it’s a studio run. They have really something special, and I think it has to do with Medhi cultivating a culture and picking these people and supporting them. It’s unheard of for me.”

As Smith adds with a smile: “It’s a special dance vortex here.”

Smith and Schraiber’s connection with Ballet BC is key to their work. In an intimate process, they don’t come in with set ideas, instead improvising and drawing core ideas from company members for each creation.

For an idea of what it’s like to work inside that uniquely collaborative process, just ask Vivian Ruiz. In a separate interview, the powerhouse Ballet BC dancer says she considers working with Smith and Schraiber on the earlier Obsidian a turning point in her career. 

“That was an artistic awakening for me. I just felt like something inside of me cracked when it needed to be cracked,” says Ruiz, a Miami-born, Arts Umbrella–trained, four-season company member. “I feel so much more free from working with them on Obsidian, and I noticed how much that filtered into other works and other things I was doing. What differentiates them from other choreographers is they really want us to bring our whole selves into the process, no matter how we’re feeling that day—if we’re emotional, if we’re angry, all these human emotions come up in our personal life and they really encourage us to just let it out through movement.

“Hearing that really just makes you able to let go and dance without fear,” she continues. “So whenever we work with them, it just feels so honest and pure….It’s a constant evolution of dance that never feels stagnant. It feels like it’s always this very alive thing. It’s never in a place of just repeating steps for the sake of repeating steps. Honestly, it’s everything you can hope for in a creative process.” 

Another thing that sets Smith and Schraiber apart is their intense, dedicated work with live music. Obsidian found Perri Lo playing a suite of pieces by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann on a grand piano right on the stage. Satyagraha featured soloists and the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus performing Philip Glass’s Gandhi-inspired opera. FOR GLASS will have live performances of String Quartet No. 3 from Glass’s score for the 1985 Paul Schrader film Mishima, and 1991’s String Quartet No. 5.

The fact that two of their recent works have drawn on the pioneering minimalist’s music is partly coincidence: FOR GLASS expands on a short piece that Schraiber and Smith created for L.A. Dance Project, set to the No. 5. Pairing it with the track from Schrader’s stylized biopic felt natural. 

But the duo also has a close affinity with Glass’s music—a choice that, on its surface, might seem surprising. At first glance, Glass’s sound, with its repetitive structures and interlocking rhythmic patterns, might seem in contrast to the wild, raw, and rebellious dance of Smith and Schraiber.

“I find it very moving that it’s through the practice of the repetition that the emotion gets made,” says Smith of Glass’s music. “But it’s not necessarily looking for the emotion or striving for the result. Inside that kind of mathematical layering, all of the human emotion arrives and you feel his soul.”

Smith and Schraiber, who met in 2010 at Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, play intricately with Glass’s complex patterns—as Schraiber puts it, “pushing the rhythm, succumbing to the rhythm”.

Having the string players onstage, within sight of the dancers, is integral to their work, he says, with the musicians’ interpretations feeding off and into the dancers’. The rhythmic movement of the musicians, as they perform the driving notes of Glass, becomes another force of motion to play with on the stage. 

“What we’re really interested in is how the sonic and the physical world collide into each other, or constantly intermingle,” the Israeli-born artist says. “It’s not that the dancers are just dancing to the music. The dancers and the musicians are one—they are with each other.” 

Though Schraiber and Smith prefer to keep the aesthetic look of FOR GLASS a surprise, you can expect a performance that demands rigour and endurance from all involved.

For Ballet BC’s dancers, Schraiber and Smith’s physically demanding choreography comes at a time when the troupe is recovering from a recent tour to Paris. But Ruiz loves the challenge. She describes one central section of the work when a large, all-female group dances together, fuelling one another’s movement.

“We all feel it together. It’s so exhausting. And at the end of it, we’re huffing and puffing. But it feels rewarding in a way, getting to feel that type of exhaustion,” she explains. “It’s not only physically exhausting; it is very emotional too. Through the movement, the emotions come out. And that can be 10 times more exhausting. And I think we’re all managing it together. We try to feed off of each other’s energy. There might be a section where I am basically just dead, and I look at someone in the eyes, and they seem a lot fresher than I am, and I feel like they’re passing some sort of energy to me. Just knowing that we’re in this exhaustion together gives you more energy, and the only way out of it is through.”

It’s the kind of exertion, she allows, that all the healthy eating and proper sleeping habits in the world can’t ever totally sustain. But Ruiz says: “Like, how lucky am I to be this exhausted by something I love so much?”

Entering new physical and creative terrain, the dancers may love working with Schraiber and Smith as much as the duo enjoys being back in Vancouver with them.

“Obviously, they have a lot of themselves in the piece, but there is so much of us in it, too, and it’s so beautiful,” Ruiz says.

As Smith says before heading back into rehearsals at Ballet BC: “We’re so excited to share this with the Vancouver audience—and, you know, honoured to be able to be in this vortex with them.”  

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Western Front is presenting Magic Show, a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Rosamunde Bordo, from May 2 to July 25.

This exhibition brings together new metal-cast, woodworked, glass-blown, and sewn objects, alongside video. These forms resemble clues or magical instruments, positioning detective and magician as corresponding frameworks for making meaning through intuition and association, iteration, and sleight of hand.

Magic Show builds on Bordo’s ongoing project The Denise File, an interdisciplinary work of serial-detective fiction started in 2018. It has evolved from a collection of found postcards addressed to a woman named Denise; with each chapter, Bordo responds by materializing objects, sourcing found items, and constructing installations.

In Magic Show, talisman-like works hold material, linguistic, and supernatural resonances, while also acting as evidence of Denise’s existence.

Magic Show is curated by Kiel Torres. An opening reception takes place May 2 from 5 pm to 7 pm; for more information, visit Western Front.

Post sponsored by Western Front.

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Elektra presents the Tapestry International Festival, with performances taking place at Pacific Spirit United Church on May 8 at 7:30 pm, and at Christ Church Cathedral on May 9 at 7 pm

A CERTAIN PRESIDENT south of the 49th parallel has dialled back his rhetoric about turning Canada into the 51st state, but the months he spent ratcheting up the tension between our two nations has had a lasting effect.

Good luck finding a Tennessee bourbon on the shelf at your neighbourhood liquor store, for example. And good luck, for that matter, finding any Canadian who feels inclined to take their next vacation anywhere in the United States.

Some things know no international boundaries, however, and music is one of them. In that spirit, long-running local choir Elektra is once again hosting its signature event, the border-crossing Tapestry International Festival, which gathers together adult treble choirs—those focused on the soprano and alto ranges—from different countries.

“It happens every three years, and we invite choirs to apply from around the world,” Elektra’s artistic director, Cassie Luftspring, tells Stir in an interview conducted via Zoom. “They come and they bring their own sound and identity and share that with us and with our community, and we share our own. It’s a beautiful collaborative journey, culminating in performances for the wider public.”

Visiting choirs this year include one from Canada—the Aeolian Singers from Halifax, Nova Scotia, led by Frances Farrell—and two from the United States: La Caccina from Chicago, Illinois, under the guidance of artistic director Carling FitzSimmons; and the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, based in Palo Alto, California.

“This chorus came to Tapestry years ago with a previous artistic director,” says Peninsula’s current AD, Anne Hege, on the same Zoom call. “So there’s been a long relationship with Elektra that I think is really quite wonderful. So it’s been on my radar to apply, and this seemed like the right time to come.”

This won’t be Hege’s first visit to B.C.—as a young chorist she performed at the International Choral Kathaumixw in Powell River twice, and she also sang at Expo 86—but it will be her first time at Tapestry.

This year’s fest will also be the first for Luftspring, who stepped into the role of artistic director for the 2025–26 season following Elektra co-founder Morna Edmundson’s retirement after 38 years at the helm.

Luftspring explains that Tapestry consists of two events, kicking off at Pacific Spirit United Church. “The first concert is on May 8; it’s called Choral Threads,” she says. “It’s free, with RSVP, to the public. It’s an open, exploratory experience. It’s a chance to meet the choirs and hear the individual voices and approaches that make each ensemble unique. We each have our own set, and we perform on our own on a kind of rotation basis, and that is the entire concert.”

Things conclude the following night at Christ Church Cathedral with the Tapestry Celebration Concert.

“That is a ticketed performance in a more formal setting,” Luftspring says. “We still do our own solo sets, but we also bring our collective energy into four massed-choir works that we all learn together. So, that combines all 130 voices in song as a really exciting concert finale.

“Ahead of time, each of the conductors selects a massed-choir piece that’s representative of our country or our ensemble,” she continues. “The two choirs from Canada have chosen pieces that are by Canadian composers, for example. So, yes, we prepare the music in advance, but when we meet on the festival days, we do have combined rehearsals. We all get together and each conductor conducts one of the four massed-choir pieces with everybody.”

From stateside come Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things”, set to music by by Joan Szymko; and Rosephanye Powell’s Maya Angelou–inspired Still I Rise.

The pieces by Canadian composers are Sherryl Sewepagaham’s Cree-language kahkiyaw oskâyak and Stephanie Martin’s setting of Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”.

Canadian composers are well-represented throughout the Tapestry weekend, through performances of works by Marie-Claire Saindon, Don Macdonald, Katerina Gimon, and Andrew Balfour.

Hege says she is eagerly anticipating not just the performances, but the opportunity to connect with others who have a passion for the power of the human voice—no matter which side of the border they reside on.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing how the other choirs work, how they sound, and how the directors lead,” she says. “We programmed the four massed pieces, two in the fall and two in the spring, so it’s been great having that as part of our repertoire all year, and I’m just really excited to see the rest of the sets, and to get to know these other singers.

“It’s like a conference meets a festival meets a gathering,” she says. “I like that name for the way musicians can come together and pick each other’s brains and enjoy each other.”  

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Art Vancouver 2026 presents a group of exhibitors whose practices span painting, sculpture, mural work, and interdisciplinary forms, reflecting a range of cultural backgrounds and lived experiences. The fair brings together artists whose work engages with identity, relocation, material transformation, and contemporary life.

The participating artists approach these themes through distinct visual languages shaped by personal and cultural contexts. Iraqi-American artist Sousan Alwan, who’s based in Istanbul, works with figurative painting to examine questions of identity, femininity, and resilience. Her work reflects the experience of navigating multiple cultural frameworks, where the figure becomes a site for negotiating visibility, autonomy, and self-definition.

Opeyemi Matthew Olukotun brings a practice rooted in portraiture and lived experience between Nigeria and Canada. His paintings reflect relocation and adaptation, exploring how identity is shaped through movement, memory, and shifting cultural environments.

Based in Vancouver, Kelcy Timmons Chan works through mural and pop-inspired visual language to reflect everyday cultural symbols, food, and shared spaces. Her practice considers how community and identity are formed through lived experience within urban environments, particularly within diasporic and queer contexts.

Working in sculpture and mixed media, Jorge Izaza explores how material, light, and surface interact. His work uses wood, resin, glass, and natural materials to construct forms that shift with their surroundings, emphasizing how physical transformation shapes perception and spatial experience.

Together, these practices reflect how contemporary artists are engaging with questions of identity, belonging, and material experience in different ways. Bringing these works into dialogue within the fair offers a reflection on how lived experience and cultural context inform artistic practice today.

As the 10th edition of Art Vancouver, the fair reflects a continued commitment to presenting a broad spectrum of contemporary practices from both international and local contexts. It brings together artists whose work engages with current cultural, material, and social conditions through diverse approaches and mediums.

Art Vancouver 2026 takes place from May 28 to 31. The fair is held within Canada Place at the Vancouver Convention Centre’s East Building in Hall B.

To purchase tickets to the event and learn more about programming, visit the Art Vancouver website.

Post sponsored by Art Vancouver.

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The Cultch presents The Elbow Theatre’s Soldiers of Tomorrow at the Historic Theatre from May 6 to 10

HELPED BY A MESMERIZING live score by Syrian-born musician Emad Armoush and an army of toy soldiers, Itai Erdal has crafted a compelling one-man show about a difficult subject.

In Soldiers of Tomorrow, which makes its local return at The Cultch next week, the well-known Vancouver theatre artist confronts his time as a conscript in the Israel Defense Forces, grappling with his role as an “oppressor” and the guilt and trauma he still carries today.

The title is drawn from the day when his eight-year-old Israeli nephew came home from school with a box to fill with goods for soldiers on the front lines. On it, the teacher had written: “To the soldiers of today from the soldiers of tomorrow.” When Erdal was young, Israelis spoke of a time when there might be peace—and no need for conscription of all Jewish 18-year-olds—a goal that, amid rising conflict, he observes, seems increasingly impossible.

A lot has happened since Erdal debuted this artful mix of memoir, history lesson, and theatre project in 2023—including a drastic escalation in conflict in the Middle East—making his innovative, personal, and brutally honest work all the more resonant. No doubt, it’s loaded territory. In an interview before the show’s local premiere, he told Stir that “me as a Jewish person who loves Israel and all my loved ones live there and I’m very proud to be Jewish: I can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic.”

Since then, the show—directed by Anita Rochon, written with theatre artist Colleen Murphy, and featuring evocative lighting by Alan Brodie—has also toured to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it won the 2023 Lustrum Award. Reviews there called it “innovative”, “illuminating”, and “sensitive and engaging”—words one does not always associate with debates about the Arab-Israeli conflict.  

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Mahler’s Third Symphony doesn’t unfold politely. It surges, expands, and pulls listeners into something far bigger than a concert. In one sweeping arc, the music moves from raw, driving force to moments of stillness that feel almost suspended in air.

Music director Otto Tausk leads the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra through this monumental work, joined by mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb and the Vancouver Bach Choir. Together, they bring a human voice into a sound world that already feels vast and elemental.

Audiences don’t need to know Mahler to feel this. The impact is immediate: bold colours, sudden contrasts, and passages that draw listeners in before opening out again. Symphony No. 3 is immersive, physical, and unexpectedly intimate.

This is not background listening. It’s a full-scale experience that demands attention and rewards it, leaving a sense of something shared—something lived through—long after the final note.

Purchase tickets to the concert, taking place May 29 and 30, through the VSO.

Post sponsored by Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

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Some Assembly Theatre Company presents Glitch at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from May 6 to 9

AS DIRECTOR OF THE Some Assembly Arts Society, Valerie Methot hears what’s bothering young people every day.

Each year, she and her executive team work with a large crew of youths to produce and stage an original play about timely concerns for young people. In 2013’s Sticks and Stones, it was bullying; in 2022’s The Wait List Experiment, it was the social fallout of COVID lockdowns. In 2026’s Glitch, which opens for free at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre’s performance hall on May 6, it’s something even more pervasive.

“Glitch stems from youth concern about societal expectations, anxiety they experience in their lives, and phone addiction,” Methot tells Stir in a Zoom interview. The play follows a group of teens who find themselves sucked into a phone. It’s a familiar story to anyone who’s lost an afternoon to scrolling, but for the protagonists of Glitch, it’s a little more literal. They soon find themselves struggling to escape a digital landscape expressly designed to trap their attention.

Methot decided on the theme in February 2025, following conversations about phone addiction with Some Assembly’s teenage crew. The topic speaks to her personally, she says—she worries about young people turning to the internet instead of physical life.

“The phone has so much overwhelming information that no human being needs, and it’s really harming to one’s mental health,” she says. That’s not just speculation—Methot and the team run research workshops with dozens of young people before producing each show. This October, they spoke with around 140 youths over the course of multiple sessions.

“Many of the young people were saying they were addicted to their phones,” Methot notes. “Once they’re on their phone, scrolling, tapping, hours go by and their anxiety increases. Any expectations they may have had in their lives to do with school or parents…they tend to go on their phone to avoid those expectations.”

The kids who said they felt trapped by the algorithm ranged from fourth-graders playing games on their iPad to high school seniors addicted to Instagram. The workshops confirmed Methot’s hunch about the theme’s wide relevance, and she sat down to write the script.

Methot is the primary writer and director of Some Assembly’s plays, but the youth team is with her every step of the way through the year-long process of developing the production. At every show, the crew hands out forms to the audience, and young people interested in getting involved can fill them out with their preferred roles. Methot then contacts them for interviews or auditions, and once the year’s group is onboard, Methot works on the script with a youth writing team.

“It’s a collaborative process, which I love because, as a writer, I find it much more fascinating working with other people,” she says. After about six rounds of drafts are workshopped with Some Assembly’s script advisors—both young volunteers and adult professionals—they host a reading with the full crew and move to production.

Working with young people on large projects like Glitch can be difficult. Some require extra support from Some Assembly’s counsellor, Heather McCrae, but Methot says it’s not always the youngest members of the crew who need assistance. One star player of this year’s production, for instance, is only 11 years old. Despite usually working with teens between 13 and 18, Methot decided to give her a chance because of an impressive original audition piece. 

“She came to a callback, and there was no doubt,” says Methot. “We all wanted to work with her, and she’s doing an amazing job. She does not need extra help at all.”

Needing extra help isn’t a problem, of course. Many members of Some Assembly’s cast and crew don’t have experience in the theatre, but the company’s structure and timeframes are built to accommodate learning on the job. “We have a big enough team to provide the mentorship skills [and] transference as needed,” Methot says.

This year has been a challenge, she says. Glitch is the most complex play she’s ever produced with Some Assembly, but she’s happy with the way it’s coming together. The show’s set design—a massive construction representing the cellphone that traps the protagonists—is a particular point of pride, as are the musical elements, overseen by Some Assembly’s music mentor, Sophie Labrie. Labrie joined Some Assembly in 2011, when she was 14, and Methot has been hiring her since—a perfect example of the kind of community Methot envisioned when she founded the company in 2002.

“I love working with young people,” she says. “I wanted to start this project [Some Assembly Theatre] to give young people an opportunity to voice their thoughts and ideas in the forum of theatre.…It’s really exciting when we all come together as a team and work on a show. There’s nothing like it.”

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SUBVERSIVE COMEDY, genre-blurring Punjabi music, and a picnic with plant-generated sound are on the roster as Indian Summer Festival unveils its first slate of programming for 2026.

For its 16th year, the fest is titling its curatorial program Ragas for a Ruptured World, running July 9 to 19.

At the July 9 opening celebration, Sri Lankan–born, London-based standup comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa, recognized for his deadpan, postcolonial-themed, and often darkly funny humour, makes his Vancouver debut as part of his Paradise Gothic Tour. The evening also features Vancouver comedian Charlie Demers and a live performance by interdisciplinary artist Priyanka “Piu” Chakrabarti, who blends raga-inspired vocals with experimental electronic sound.

On July 10, writer, documentary filmmaker, and journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat presents his national bestseller We Survived the Night, a book that blends memoir, history, and reportage. He’s joined in conversation by the fest’s executive artistic director, Am Johal.

Punjabi singer and composer Rashmeet Kaur makes her Vancouver debut on July 11th at Sacred Sounds, New Worlds, giving a genre-blurring performance that fuses folk, Sufi, hip-hop, and R&B influences. Opening the evening, Asad Khan’s Sammah Project interprets devotional and classical traditions with electronic flourishes.

And July 13 features An Evening With Modern Biology at VanDusen Botanical Garden, an immersive outdoor performance by Modern Biology that transforms plant bioelectricity into live, improvised sound. The work draws on raga and ecological systems. The event is designed as a relaxed, picnic-style gathering with beloved local musician Tarun Nayer.

“While the world seems to be unravelling at the seams, we are coming back to the question of what art can possibly open up in this time of necessity, storytelling and defiance. We will resist this time by gathering together in new ways,” Johal said in the announcement.

Additional programming for Indian Summer Festival 2026 will be announced in the coming weeks.  

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Escape to the 1920s silent-movie era at the historic Orpheum theatre as Vancouver Civic Theatres presents Silent Movie Mondays. This immersive experience screens popular silent films accompanied by dramatic music played live on the historic Wurlitzer organ—the last theatre organ in Canada still performing in its original home.

For the final show of the 2025–26 season on May 25, audiences get to watch the silent thriller Alfred Hitchcock considered his true directorial debut, 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. The featured organist is Koos van Nieuwkoop.

Ticketholders are invited to enjoy a pre-show performance by the Gatsby Strutters Jazz Band in the West Coast Lounge. Following the screening, Keith Blackmore of the Vancouver Film School will host a lively discussion about this movie’s important place in film history; and special guest Katherine Montagu will join in on the conversation.

Montagu is a writer, producer, script analyst, story editor, and teacher. She has won multiple awards and development funding grants. Previously, she wrote for the television series Alienated, and is currently a writing partner on a TV-series adaptation of a time-travel novel alongside Sara Cooper. Montagu is the head of film production and head of department writing for film, TV, and games at Vancouver Film School. She is also the senior story editor for Crazy 8s short filmmaking competition.

The Lodger tells the haunting tale of a mysterious young man who takes up residence in a London boarding house just as a killer known as The Avenger descends upon the city, preying on young blonde women. Beloved composer and movie star Ivor Novello appears as the nameless “lodger”, whose suspicious behaviour and uncanny resemblance to the notorious serial killer strikes fear in the hearts of his new landlords, The Buntings. Their golden-haired daughter Daisy is at risk of becoming The Avenger’s next victim, but she falls head over heels for the lodger, believing his innocence when he becomes the police’s top suspect for the killings.

Doors open at 6:30 pm, and the screening starts at 7:30 pm. For tickets and more details, visit Vancouver Civic Theatres.

Post sponsored by Vancouver Civic Theatres.

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Eliades Ochoa plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on May 9 at 7:30 pm

AS HARD AS IT may be to believe, Buena Vista Social Club formed 30 years ago. The Havana-based Latin American supergroup’s Grammy-winning eponymous album, produced by Ry Cooder, was a surprise international hit, kicking off a revival of interest in traditional Cuban music. A 1999 documentary by Wim Wenders, titled simply Buena Vista Social Club, cemented the ensemble’s legendary status.

These were veteran musicians three decades ago, of course, and most of them are no longer with us, or at least no longer active musically. A notable exception is Eliades Ochoa. At 79, the singer-guitarist is still donning his trademark cowboy hat and hitting the road. There’s no slowing down for this man, who is given to making such proclamations as “a troubadour never retires” and “I’ll die singing”. That’s dedication.

His current tour, in support of his most recent album, Guajiro, will take Ochoa and his four-piece backing band to the U.S., Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Vancouver, of course, for a May 9 show at UBC.

To be more specific, he’ll be playing the Chan Shun Concert Hall at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, and you can be sure the set list will include the Buena Vista Social Club’s signature hit, “Chan Chan”. That’s a lot of Chans.  

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Vancouver New Music presents A Voynich Manifesto at the Annex on May 9 at 8 pm

AS FAR AS UNSOLVED mysteries go, they don’t get much more enigmatic than the Voynich Manuscript. It’s a book—a medieval codex, to be precise—but it’s written in a language that has defied interpretation by even the world’s most accomplished codebreakers. Its abundantly illustrated pages are made of calfskin vellum that has been carbon-dated to the early 1400s, but the earliest known mention of the manuscript dates from more than 200 years after that.

Modern fascination with the inscrutable codex began when Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich purchased it in Italy in 1912 and presented it in public three years later. In spite of the best efforts of cryptographers and medievalists since then, the book’s provenance and its meaning remain unknown.

“This manuscript would most likely fall under the category of herbarium—so, something that describes plants, even though the plants that are described in the manuscript don’t actually exist on this planet,” musician and multimedia artist Terri Hron says when Stir meets up with her for an interview at a Strathcona café. “The most striking thing about the Voynich Manuscript is that it is written in an unknown language and an unknown script. It’s been the subject of a lot of speculation and a lot of interest, naturally, because the production of a medieval manuscript like that would have taken an awful lot of time and resources.”

Indeed, at least one scholar has posited that the Voynich Manuscript is not the work of a single person but bears evidence of having been created by five different scribes. If it was indeed a collaborative work, it has that much in common with A Voynich Manifesto, a performance piece that the Montreal-based Hron has created in conjunction with a team of West Coast artists: shadow-theatre duo Mind of a Snail (Chloé Ziner and Jessica Gabriel) and vocalists SJ Kirsch and Viviane Houle.

Hron’s background is in early music, as a recorder player, and her knowledge of medieval Europe extends beyond her fascination with the Voynich Manuscript. She points out that this period, particularly in England, saw a major shift in ideas about land ownership. The policy of “enclosure”, for example, allowed individuals to appropriate common land and enclose it, reserving it solely for their own use or that of their tenants. In doing so, landowners deprived commoners of their former rights to access and use the land. 

“As I was thinking of those beginnings of capitalism, I was also reading a lot about the witch hunts and the transformation of knowledge of that time into a lot of the ideas that we consider very normal today, that we don’t question as kind of basic principles,” Hron says. “I think that was all boiling up in the cauldron of my mind when the prompt kind of popped out.”

A Voynich Manifesto, Hron clarifies, is not a set work—it’s not enclosed, if you will—but is “more of an improvisatory space” in which the assembled artists are free to work together in exploring the prompt that Hron has devised.

“The prompt was to see this as a manifesto for ecstatic relations with the non-human world,” she says. “And I guess there’s a few more steps that go from private property to the non-human world!”

A Voynich Manifesto is the third and final instalment of On Curation, Vancouver New Music’s two-year mentorship project. Composer Peter Hatch served as Hron’s mentor.

“Peter was instrumental in making me aware of this residency program on Salt Spring Island, where he lives, that acquaintances of his run,” she says. “They’ve converted a barn into a theatre space.”

The show had a dry run in that very space last October. That embryonic iteration of A Voynich Manifesto might not have borne much resemblance to the version that the audience at the Annex will experience this week.

“We had just had one session of improvising at that point, and we had, I would say, just the very beginnings of ideas,” Hron shares. “Not that our ideas are very much more concrete now, but we wanted to try some things out. Also, the space where we were performing wasn’t the greatest for working with projections, because it wasn’t completely dark. So we were working with a lot of constraints.” 

Hron says that there isn’t so much a narrative through-line as there are “signposts” that keep the show on track, more or less, while also giving the performers leeway to make decisions on the fly. Those performers might very well include Hron herself. She says she had no intention of being in the show on Salt Spring, but her fellow artists had other ideas. 

“I was trying to not guide as much as possible, because I thought, ‘Well, my job is to bring them together and to give them this prompt,’ but they roped me into the performance by saying that there were five scribes and there were only four of them, so I had to perform as well,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was okay with that, but then I really wanted to not direct, because that’s very often my role in productions. I really wanted to see what they had to say. Especially in a short production, we have very limited time to create this thing, so a lot of decisions have to be made, and I didn’t want to make those decisions. Luckily, they’re all very ideaful, and also have a lot of experience putting shows together, so there’s no danger there.”

Given that collective expertise, and the fact that interest in its source material shows no sign of abating, could A Voynich Manifesto have a life beyond this one performance, perhaps even a future as a touring production?

“I’ve thought about that question and how to make that happen,” Hron says. “Mostly, it’s a logistical and funding question. It’s a hard moment to effectively move shows around the country. But I’ve also thought about it in terms of bringing more people into the show, maybe bringing other artists to interface with some of these signposts that I was talking about, or maybe to create other ones. The manuscript is so generative because it doesn’t mean anything specific, so it could mean so many things.”  

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Théâtre la Seizième presents Brussels-based Compagnie Chantal & Bernadette’s Kevin at the Waterfront Theatre from May 21 to 23 at 7:30 pm.

It’s high-school geography class, and despite the teacher’s explanations, Kevin is unable to sort out his map based on cardinal points drawn on the whiteboard. His teachers are at a loss: why can’t this student grasp such a basic lesson? Twenty years later, this failure marks the beginning of investigations into educational success and equal opportunity.

Following their French spelling-revolution play La Convivialité, Arnaud Hoedt and Jérôme Piron are now taking on school with Kevin. Slyly casual and deliciously facetious, the two former teachers point fingers at the flaws of a multitiered education system. This playful show unpacks the workings of an invisible selection process that favours students with the right academic background from the outset—and leaves others by the wayside.

Kevin is created and directed by Hoedt, Piron, and Antoine Defoort, with the participation of Clément Thirion. Kévin Matagne is behind the show’s video, set, and props design, while lighting design is courtesy of Charlotte Plissart.

Performances take place in French with English surtitles. On May 21, a post-show talkback is happening in French with Lucile Denys, who is an orthopédagogue (reading and writing specialist). A bilingual meet-the-artists conversation is taking place May 22.

For folks who want to experience more of Compagnie Chantal & Bernadette’s work, Théâtre la Seizième is also presenting Hoedt and Piron’s aforementioned play La Convivialité at the Waterfront Theatre on May 19 and 20 at 7:30 pm. It runs in French with no subtitles.

A technical tool disguised as a marker of prestige, institutionalized spelling unleashes passions and bolsters the powerful. The French language presents many questions for those learning it—like why the verb “alourdir”, meaning “to burden”, is written with a single ‘l’, while “alléger”, “to lighten”, takes two. Led by a pair of linguists who make light of this weighted debate, La Convivialité is a subversive show that shakes up the dogmas surrounding written norms—and with them, centuries of status quo.

Both Kevin and La Convivialité have toured extensively in Belgium and France, with a tally of over 650 performances since their creation.

Purchase tickets to Kevin here and La Convivialité here.

Post sponsored by Théâtre la Seizième.

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The Polygon Gallery presents the launch of Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023 on April 30 at 7 pm as part of the Capture Photography Festival closing event

THE LATE DIANE EVANS left an indelible mark on photographic art around Vancouver. Not only was she an accomplished photographer herself, she was a respected expert in the field, as well as an influential teacher at Emily Carr University of Art + Design from 1996 to 2019. She helped shape The Polygon Gallery as well, from curating acclaimed exhibitions (like Deanna Dikeman’s moving and unforgettable Leaving and Waving) and establishing its signature bookstore (which is now named in her honour).

But, three years after her death from a rare cancer, attention is circling back to her own, quietly astonishing body of photographic work. At an event on April 30, The Polygon is set to launch Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023, a beautifully illustrated book of her photographs—spanning everything from street shots to experimental works, and revealing an impressively wide range that wasn’t fully appreciated during her lifetime. As The Polygon director Reid Shier puts it in the book’s forward, amid Evans’s three-decade career at Emily Carr and the gallery (including its former location at Presentation House Gallery), “Not even those closest to her grasped the breadth and consistency with which Diane continued to make and exhibit photographs herself.

“This book seeks to redress that misunderstanding and give credit to an important and underappreciated photographer.”

Designed by Judith Steedman, the art book, edited by Karen Love, contains more than 90 colour and black-and-white reproductions—and they work not only as a vivid exploration of style and content but a fascinating chronicle of Vancouver’s public places and interior spaces. Her images differ in numerous ways from the Vancouver School of photography the city is known for; as Grant Arnold, former Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, describes it in one section, her work is “more a love for the way the world discloses itself through photographs than consistency in method or approach”, full of the “poetic everyday”.

On the cover is a shot from her series “Exhibition Park Racetrack”, taken circa 1979, and capturing a vast cross section of generations and social classes intensely watching a horse race. There’s a young couple in bellbottoms, a man with a bushy grey beard in the foreground, and even a seemingly unattended baby in a carriage. It’s an intriguing study in time and place—all the more resonant in 2026, now that the track has been shuttered for good.

SRO interior, Cordova Street, shot in 2005, suggests the rich personal history of the unseen resident of a Downtown Eastside hotel room, with calendars, McDonald’s buttons, pictures of ancient Chinese bronzes, and poppies covering the wall. In its quiet observation, it humanizes someone who was marginalized, and makes seen what has been erased. As Arnold writes in the book: “In seeming to carry the charged trace of someone’s life, the image asks us to consider the extent to which it may have been marked by conviviality and joy, sorrow and despair.”

There’s much more, including a range of exploratory still lifes of peaches, tomatoes, candlesticks, pomegranates, and tulips in clear vases. Always striking is Evans’s use of light, late-day sun illuminating pickle jars and gumball machines, or dancing off wrinkled white bedsheets.

The Polygon celebrates its launch April 30 with speakers moderated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator at The Polygon Gallery and the commissioning editor for Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023. The panel includes Arnold, independent curator and writer Helga Pakasaar, and art historian, writer, and curator John O’Brian, all of whom have provided text in the book, as well as editor Love. The event marks the end-of-April close of the Capture Photography Festival.  

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The Vancouver Bach Family of Choirs presents SummerSing: Folk Songs at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on May 10 at 2 pm

SUMMER STILL FEELS a long way off, but the Vancouver Bach Family of Choirs will go all-out to bring the season one step closer with its annual SummerSing concert.

The 2025 edition of SummerSing focused on Broadway show tunes and Beatles hits; this year’s theme is folk songs, and while we can’t tell you which songs will be included (it’s a closely guarded secret that even we don’t know), we can at least tell you who will be singing them: everyone.

SummerSing features all the choirs under the VBFC umbrella, which includes the Vancouver Bach Children’s Choirs ensembles—Piccolo, Tocata, Partita, Chorus, and Chorale—and also its adult ensembles: Sarabande, Cantabile, and the Symphonic Choir (a.k.a. the Vancouver Bach Choir).

After each of the choirs has performed, they will all join together, Voltron-style, to form one unstoppable “tutti” choir. And if 500 massed voices can’t make summer arrive just a little earlier, we don’t know what could.  

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