Category — The Arts

Bright Light installation at the Yue Shan Society in Chinatown: even more beautiful at night.

Fireworks and dragon dancing celebrated the opening of the Bright Light public art installation in the courtyard of the  Yue Shan Society at 39 East Pender today, where just 30 years ago a narrow walkway linked Pender St. to Market Alley.

The installation by a team led by architect Inga Roecker used 800 umbrellas to light up the sky above the courtyard, which is part of 12 installations commissioned by the City of Vancouver’s public art program during the 2010 Games.

The entire project makes for a fascinating walking tour of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, all best seen at night.

Dragons dance for the opening of the Yue Shan courtyard.

Harbhajan Mann and the Quantum Bhangra Feb. 27 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre promises a hot Punjabi ending to a Cultural Olympiad that began with the cool Taiwan dance classic Moon Water.

While not the first event of the Cultural Olympiad, Moon Water by Taiwan’s Cloud Garden dance company Feb. 5 was an extraordinary evening, not least because of the quiet pool of water that literally flooded the stage as the hypnotic performance unfolded.

Cultural Olympiad director Robert Kerr said the near sellout crowd at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre made it perhaps the largest-ever single audience for modern dance in the city.

If so, it is a tribute to the Taiwanese company and its community supporters, but also a sign of the transformation the cultural program may be working on Vancouver audiences.

For a few weeks, Vancouver will host a series of world-class events normally available only global cultural capitals.

An example, in complete contrast to the cool yet intense Moon Water, is Quantum Bhangra with Harbhajan Mann, an evening of the world’s top bhangra performers on one stage, that will close out the Games program. It is as big a gift to the city from India as Cloud Gate was from Taiwan. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Feb. 27, 7 p.m.

The removal of a graffiti-like mural at Main and Cordova was manna from heaven for critics of the city’s 2010 Games bylaws, proof that a widespread crackdown was under way on the right to free speech.

Except that it’s not.

Now the mural’s back up. It looks a little like graffiti, but it’s not. It’s art, it’s free expression. It’s fine.

As you were.

Is this the last Eastside Culture Crawl for the creative colony of artists at 901 Main?

It may be, given Amacon’s decision to raise rents sharply — up to 100 percent — for the dozens of artists who make the building the westside anchor for one of Vancouver’s most important cultural events.

Some of those who fought so hard to keep the building an artists’ centre are preparing to leave the mothership for a new location at 150 McLean, close to Powell, in the heart of the Crawl territory.

Eri Ishii, who is exhibiting this year at 901 Main for the last time, advises that a small new artists’ co-op created during the fight to save the Main location has signed a five-year lease for space above Peregrine Plastics, with great windows and views of the North Shore.

Those remaining at 901 will face rent increases to $2,100 for a full floor of the building, up from about $900 today.

It was the high rents demanded by Amacon that made it impossible for the artists to move to space near Scotia and 7th Ave. approved for Amacon by the last council as part of a rezoning. The future of that space, notionally allocated for cultural purposes, remains unclear.

But creativity will flourish on McLean.