World Travel Guide

City Guide  - Vancouver  - Culture
Culture

Vancouver is a young city, and it shows in the city's cultural scene. While there are established companies in the traditional forms of classical music, opera, dance and theatre, none stand out. It is the smaller outfits and the up-and-comers that make the cultural scene interesting and give a bit of an edge to things. Vancouver's performing arts season generally runs from October to April. In summer, there are special concerts and numerous festivals.

Information on performing arts can be found in The Georgia Straight (web site: www.straight.com), a free weekly newspaper, and Thursday's daily newspapers. The Arts Hotline (tel: (604) 684 2787), the Alliance for Arts and Culture (web site: www.allianceforarts.com) and the VCA's Arts Information Centre at 938 Howe Street (Monday to Friday 0900-1700) are other good sources of information.

Tickets can be purchased directly from the venues or from Ticketmaster (tel: (604) 280 3311; web site: www.ticketmaster.ca) or Show Time Tickets (tel: (604) 688 5000).

Music:
Vancouver offers the range of classical music, from large symphony and opera productions to intimate chamber groups and choral societies - notably the Vancouver Recital Society (tel: (604) 602 0363; web site: www.vanrecital.com) and the Vancouver Cantata Singers (tel: (604) 921 8588; web site: www.cantata.org). The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on the University of British Columbia campus (tel: (604) 822 2697; web site: www.chancentre.com) has three stages, including the 1400-seat Chan Shun Concert Hall. The Orpheum Theatre at 601 Smithe Street (tel: (604) 665 3050) hosts choral concerts and is the residence of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (tel: (604) 684 9100; web site: www.culturenet.ca/vso). The Queen Elizabeth Theatre, at West Georgia and Hamilton Streets (tel: (604) 665 3050), stages a variety of performance types from classical to contemporary. It is the home of Ballet BC and the Vancouver Opera, the third largest opera company in Canada (tel: (604) 683 0222; web site: www.vanopera.bc.ca).

Theatre:
Vancouver has a lively theatre scene, with numerous community and student productions supplementing more than 30 permanent fixtures. Granville Island is home to the Arts Club Theatre's MainStage, the Festival House, Waterfront Theatre and Performance Works, as well as the antics of the Theatresports comedy improv troupe at the New Revue Stage (tel: (604) 738 7013 or 280 4444, tickets; web site: www.vtsl.com). The larger venues downtown include the Queen Elizabeth Theatre (see above), and the adjacent Vancouver Playhouse at Hamilton and Dunsmuir Streets (tel: (604) 873 3311), home of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, the largest regional theatre company in the province. Avant-garde theatre can be seen at the Firehall Arts Centre to the east of Gastown, at 280 East Cordova Street (tel: (604) 689 0926).

The annual Bard on the Beach Shakespeare festival is a summer fixture in Vanier Park (tel: (604) 739 0559; web site: www.bardonthebeach.org) that runs from mid-June to late September.

The Greater Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliance publishes a seasonal Theatre Guide (tel: (604) 608 6799; web site: www.audience.com/ax2.html).

Dance:
Vancouver is one of Canada's most important dance centres, with around two dozen professional dance companies operating in the area, performing both classical and modern dance, as well as traditional Japanese and Chinese dance. The Dance Centre (tel: (604) 606 6400) is a useful resource.

Ballet British Columbia
is based at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre (see above). The Vancouver East Cultural Centre at Venables and Commercial Streets (tel: (604) 254 9578) is home to the innovative Kokoro Dance Company.

In July, the Dancing on the Edge festival gives dozens of independent choreographers from Canada and abroad a chance to show their stuff.

Film:
Vancouver is the third largest centre for film production in North America and has stood in for many US cities in films, although there have been no well-known films actually set in the city. Some 170 films and television series were filmed here in 1998, the year that The X-Files moved production out of the city after having filmed its first five seasons in Vancouver.

The industry and filmgoers alike attend the Vancouver International Film Festival (tel: (604) 685 0260; web site: www.viff.org) in the fall when more than 300 films from some 50 countries are screened. The Out on Screen gay and lesbian film festival (tel: (604) 844 1615; web site: www.outonscreen.com) takes place in August.

Mainstream cinemas can be found on Granville Street between Robson and Smithe and at the new Cinemark Tinseltown at 88 West Pender Street. The Pacific Cinematheque, 1131 Howe Street (tel: (604) 688 8202), is the city's main repertory cinema, and offers numerous cross-cultural and multimedia events in addition to a wide range of film programming. Other independents include the Festival Cinemas' three locations south of downtown (tel: (604) 290 0500), The Ridge, 3131 Arbutus (tel: (604) 738 6311), and more experimental works at Video-In, 1965 Main Street (tel: (604) 872 8337).

Literary Notes

Some 1500 authors live in the province, including such popular authors as Douglas Coupland and the science-fiction writer William Gibson. Both men captured a certain zeitgeist with their works - Coupland's novel, Generation X (1991), about disaffected twenty-somethings, gave birth to the moniker for the post-babyboom generation, while Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984) was at the forefront of defining the cyberpunk ethos and envisioning a dystopian future based on where technology appears to be taking society. Evelyn Lau captured the city's seamier side in her autobiographical Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989). Nick Bantock of Griffin & Sabine (1991) fame lives on nearby Bowen Island, while WP Kinsella, whose Shoeless Joe (1982) was the basis for the film Field of Dreams, lives just south of Vancouver. Other famous local writers include Bill Bisset, George Bowering and George Woodcock. One of the area's earliest writers was the Native poet and performer Pauline Johnson (also known as Tekahionwake), who settled in Vancouver in 1909 and two years later published Legends of Vancouver.

Many of the city's authors (as well as big-name authors from elsewhere) attend the Vancouver International Writers (& Readers) Festival (tel: (604) 681 6330; web site: www.writersfest.bc.ca) in October.



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