Category — The Arts

Burnaby historian and retired taxi driver Rolf Knight refuses to express satisfaction at the republication, after 41 years, of his classic Along the No. 20 Line, the story of the people and places who lived along one of the city’s old Interurban streetcar lines.

But as Tom Hawthorne’s profile in today’s Globe points out, the memoir of the people who travelled the line is just one book in a library of Knight’s work Knight work that changed the direction of BC historical research.

Unlike most historians, Knight situated class at the centre of his analysis and saw the actions of working people, like Japanese Canadian fisherman Ryuichi Yoshida, the subject of A Man of Our Times, as the levers of change.

No. 20 Line is one of the easiest reads by a remarkable scholar who considered any praise from establishment forces as a sign he was heading off-course. That certainly was his reaction about 10 years ago when I congratulated him on the widespread praise for a second edition of Indians at Work, another classic that rewrote the BC history of contact between BC’s aboriginal people and successive waves of settlers. The book, as much a polemic against leading historians as it was a new history, was termed “indispensible” by one target of Knight’s criticism, but Knight shrugged off the compliment as an irritating distraction.

Now, whether he likes it or not, the republication of No. 20 Line as part of Vancouver’s 125th birthday celebration, will bring a new round of praise. Knight will just have to suffer through it, his underdog status intact.

Council’s Feb. 1 decision to give the Vancouver Art Gallery an option on two-thirds of the Larwill Park site next to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is not as definitive as it sounds.

Pete McMartin’s column in today’s Sun reports the views of architect Bing Thom, a sceptic about the need for a new building on a new site, who has just led the transformation of a Washington, DC, neighbourhood with the Arena Stage theatre complex. This project encased old buildings in a new one.

In effect, council rebooted a stalled process that has seen the VAG leadership bounced from one option to another for almost five years.

The first paragraph of council’s decision calls for development of a strategy to meet the future needs of the city, including “further refinement of the business case, analysis, peer assessment and feasibility of all options for a possible Gallery expansion or possible relocation.”

Job one is “a comprehensive review of the various options considered for the expansion and relocation which confirm the 688 Cambie site as the best option.” In other words, all the work up to now will be reviewed and assessed. [Read more →]

One of the best things about Todd Wong’s Gung Haggis Fat Choy — a haggis-stuffed evening that melds Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations with Robbie Burns Night — is the unexpected revelations about Vancouver’s ever-changing diversity.

This year’s example was One Big Hapa Family, an award-winning documentary by Vancouver native Jeff Chiba Stearns. At a family reunion in 2006,  Stearns realized that everyone in his extended family had married outside the Japanese community. This documentary and animated feature explains why.

As his family members struggled to describe what they were — “half Japanese, half Canadian, but 100 percent Canadian” — Stearns stumbled on the Hawaiian term “hapa,” evolved by Japanese of mixed race on those islands to describe their ethnicity.

The result, in film and animation, is an insight into the possible evolution of multicultural Vancouver.

(More on One Big Hapa Family here.)

100% Vancouver, the remarkable PUSH festival play that closes tonight, does the seemingly impossible: explore Vancouver through the eyes and voices of 100 first-time performers selected to match the city’s demographic reality as determined by the long-form census.

It’s instant, real-time civic engagement, using an accurate cross section of the community.

The premise is simpler than it sounds and is derived from similar experiments in Vienna and Berlin, spearheaded by Berlin’s Rimini Protokoll. Using five criteria from the census (gender, age, ethnicity, marital status and neighbourhood), the directors find first-time performers, each of whom will represent one percent of the roughly 646,000 Vancouver residents.

The Vancouver crew, recruited by word of mouth, family connections, business ties and even on Craigslist, ranged from four to 88 years old, had a median age of 38 and represented every neighbourhood but Shaughnessy, Oakridge and Arbutus Ridge. After two private rehearsals and a public dress rehearsal, they premiered earlier this week to a sold-out crown at Woodwards’.

Once on stage, the performers organize themselves in response to a series of questions. Who is in a same sex relationship? Who was born in Vancouver? Who smokes marijuana. Who is male and who is female? (One performer stayed firmly centre stage on that one and received a warm round of applause.)

The result is a shifting and moving kaleidoscope of our city in real time. Director Amiel Gladstone likens it to “opening the top of a Skytrain car and putting the people on stage.” [Read more →]