PuSh Is Celebrating Vancouver’s Cultural Capital of Canada 2011 Designation as well as its 125th Anniversary
November 12, 2010
We are ecstatic to hear that Vancouver has been designated a Cultural Capital of Canada for 2011.
“Vancouver is renowned for its cosmopolitan charm, its vibrant cultural scene, and its wide range of activities,” said Minister Moore. “Our Government is pleased to confer on Vancouver, for the second time in that city’s history, the prestigious title of Cultural Capital of Canada. This honour is well deserved and a fitting celebration of Vancouver’s 125th anniversary.”
“Vancouver is home to a vibrant and diverse arts and cultural community, and in 2011 we’ll be showcasing it throughout the city with our 125th anniversary celebrations,” said Mr. Robertson. “This support from the Government of Canada will help us build on the cultural legacy of the 2010 Winter Games and make 2011 a year to remember in Vancouver.”
In little less than a year, Vancouver will celebrate its 125th Anniversary. The occasion will be momentous—a truly meaningful time in our city’s history.
2011 is the moment to open the curtain on the premiere of Vancouver’s next 125 years. It’s a unique opportunity for leading institutions in our community to proudly state their mission and values in honour this city’s future. 2011 promises to be a year of celebration, a year of reflection and visioning. Commemorating a city’s birthday is a fortuitous follow-up to 2010 and a creative tonic to the inevitable post-Olympic “hangover.”
The PuSh Festival is finalizing preparations for Vancouver’s quasquicentennial. Plans involve an ambitious suite of performances and events that engage directly with civic life, with the everyday, and with individuals. Celebrated work from the international stage will be showcased alongside the premiere of new creations from local artists just around the corner. Collectively, the programming promises a snapshot of Vancouver and its residents—their dreams, histories, perspectives, frustrations, concerns and aspirations.
125th Celebration Goals:
– explore ideas and issues associated with Vancouver’s 125th Anniversary,
– present and animate a suite of community engaged events and performances,
– engage with the city’s culturally diverse communities,
– strengthen the public’s appreciation for the value of arts and culture.
The 125th Anniversary Series at the PuSh Festival
100% Vancouver
production is an innovative project that puts 100 everyday Vancouverites front and centre. Casting starts with a single person. This first person has 24 hours to find another participant, and they then find another, and so on, until the full 100 are linked. Casting is dictated by a series of search criteria based upon Vancouver’s demographics. All 100 participants participate in the project’s performance, becoming a dynamic array of different voices and stories. 100% features a live band and the lives of 100 individuals that now make up our city 125 years after its beginning.
La Marea
When strangers walk past you on the street at night, do you ever start imagining what they are thinking? Where they come from? Or what they are doing there at the very moment you glance upon them? Moving from the pavement to illuminated windows, La Marea presents nine different scenarios—the secret stories and private emotions of the city. Conceived by Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires) and adapted by Vancouver’s Boca Del Lupo, La Marea will be produced in a groundbreaking partnership with Langara’s Studio 58, SFU’s School for Contemporary Arts, and Theatre at UBC. A week of performances will be presented with free admission on Water Street in the heart of the city’s historic Gastown.
City of Dreams
This production is an intimate theatrical investigation into the very meaning of Vancouver, its’ multiple histories and overlapping narratives. A poetic map made from hundreds of found objects is slowly and methodically assembled during the performance. This real time building of a city is mirrored by a soundscape composed of sampled and archived audio materials, from sounds of the street to snatches of song and oral testimonies. The result is a panoramic vision—a sense of time and place. Co-produced at the Roundhouse Arts and Recreation Centre with Vancouver’s Urban Crawl, City Dreams will be led by London-based artist Peter Reder.
PodPlays
Plug in and listen for your own intimate experience of a Vancouver that you won’t find in the tourist brochures. Podplays is four stories transposed onto four, fifteen-minute walkable routes. Audience members load PodPlays onto portable media players and step outside where the plays become a soundtrack to a guided tour of our city’s downtown streets, originating from SFU Woodwards in Gastown.
Portraits in Motion
Portraits in Motion is an ongoing project of Berlin-based flipbook cinematograph Volker Gerling. To collect his photographic tales, Gerling has spent the last decade hiking around Europe, documenting chance encounters with his camera—three images per second for the duration of twelve seconds. Conjuring the aesthetics and practices of early photography and cinema, Gerling’s flipbooks are projected onto a large screen and accompanied by tales of his travels: people, stories and places. Volker will spend three weeks in residence, traversing the city’s streets and neighbourhoods, with newly created flipbooks as part of a full-evening performance.
Iqaluit and Bonanza
Text, film, and an igloo-like installation of seven screens survey the landscape and lives of the Inuit capital, Iqaluit, through image and sound. Bonanza is a unique cinematic portrait of a desolate mining town. This world-in-miniature is portrayed on a scale model of the town and five film screens. Antwerp-based Berlin’s unique interdisciplinary working methods and aesthetic involves exhaustive research, academic approaches, interdisciplinary creation and various media. In 2003, Berlin launched the multi-year project “Holocene (the current geological period)”, a series of city portraits. Berlin’s inaugural trip to North America includes a Vancouver presentation of both Iqaluit and Bonanza (Colorado).
Click here to read the Canadian Heritage press release: Vancouver Designated a Cultural Capital of Canada for 2011
I saw La Marea when i was in an argentina travel. I really liked it!! Has someone ever saw it?? Tell me the best part for you!!