The Powell Street Festival is an ongoing annual festival in Paueru-Gai, Vancouver. Originating in 1977 the Powell Street Festival is the largest Japanese Canadian festival and the longest ongoing community event in Vancouver. [1] The festival takes place in and around Oppenheimer Park. The Festival takes place every BC Day long weekend, which usually lands around the beginning of August.
Powell Street Festival features both local, national, and international talent. [2] It also features an outdoor venue with interactive installations, children's activities, craft market, martial arts demonstrations, taiko drumming, amateur sumo tournament, tea ceremonies, ikebana and bonsai demonstrations. [2] [3]
The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The museum occupies a 15,300-square-metre-building (165,000 sq ft) adjacent to Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, making it the largest art museum in Western Canada by building size. Designed by Francis Rattenbury, the building the museum occupies was originally opened as a provincial courthouse, before it was re-purposed for museum use in the early 1980s. The building was designated the Former Vancouver Law Courts National Historic Site of Canada in 1980.
Davie Village is a neighbourhood in the West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is the home of the city's LGBT subculture, and, as such, is often considered a gay village, or gaybourhood. Davie Village is centred on Davie Street and roughly includes the area between Burrard and Jervis streets. Davie Street—and, by extension, the Village—is named in honour of A.E.B. Davie, eighth Premier of British Columbia from 1887 to 1889; A.E.B's brother Theodore was also Premier, from 1892 to 1895.
Obon or just Bon is a fusion of the ancient Japanese belief in ancestral spirits and a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one's ancestors. This Buddhist custom has evolved into a family reunion holiday during which people return to ancestral family places and visit and clean their ancestors' graves when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to revisit the household altars. It has been celebrated in Japan for more than 500 years and traditionally includes a dance, known as Bon Odori.
Powell River is a city on the northern Sunshine Coast of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. Most of its population lives near the eastern shores of Malaspina Strait, which is part of the larger Georgia Strait between Vancouver Island and the Mainland. With two intervening long, steep-sided fjords inhibiting the construction of a contiguous road connection with Vancouver to the south, geographical surroundings explain Powell River's remoteness as a community, despite relative proximity to Vancouver and other populous areas of the BC Coast. The city is the location of the head office of the qathet Regional District.
Bard on the Beach is Western Canada's largest professional Shakespeare festival. The theatre festival runs annually from early June through September in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The festival is produced by Bard on the Beach Theatre Society whose mandate is to provide Vancouver residents and tourists with affordable, accessible Shakespearean productions of the finest quality. In addition to the annual summer festival, the Society runs a number of year-round theatre education and training initiatives for both the artistic community and the general community at large. Bard on the Beach celebrated its 30th anniversary season in 2019.
Daniel Mangan is a Canadian musician. He has won two Juno awards and has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Australia, having released 5 studio LPs and numerous EPs and singles. He has scored for feature film, as well as television for Netflix and AMC. He is also a co-founder of Side Door, a marketplace platform connecting artists with alternative venue spaces for in-person & online shows.
Oppenheimer Park is a park located in the historic Japantown (Paueru-Gai) in the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The Vancouver Pride Parade and Festival is an annual LGBT Pride event, held each year in Vancouver, British Columbia, to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies. It is run by the Vancouver Pride Society (VPS), a not-for-profit, volunteer-run organization that seeks to "produce inclusive, celebratory events, and advocacy for LGBTQAI2S+". Vancouver's Pride Parade is the largest parade of any kind in Western Canada.
Julia Kwan is a Canadian screenwriter, director, and occasional producer of her own short and feature films. She has brought a keen sense of the Chinese-Canadian cultural experience to her films. Several of the films were made in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada. Her feature films include Eve and the Fire Horse (2005), as well as the feature length documentary film Everything Will Be (2014). She is also known for her short film 10,000 Delusions (1999) which screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Out On Screen is an LGBT-oriented arts organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It began as a small, community-based film festival in 1988 and was registered as a BC society in 1989, in anticipation of the 1990 Gay Games. Since then, Out On Screen has evolved to become a professional arts organization with two key program initiatives: the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, the annual queer film festival in Vancouver, and Out In Schools, a province-wide educational program aimed primarily at high school students, but with program delivery across the education system, that employs film and video to address homophobia, transphobia, and bullying.
Headwater is a band from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
St. Paul's Hospital is an acute care hospital located in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is the oldest of the seven health care facilities operated by Providence Health Care, a Roman Catholic faith-based care provider.
BOLDfest (Bold Older Lesbians and Dykes) is an annual conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia to create community for lesbians over 45 from Canada and the United States. The conference is held by BOLD, a non-profit society, which states that its mission is "to raise the visibility of older lesbians, and to provide a venue to meet and to share information and opportunities for learning, networking, and organizing". BOLDfest was created to create community for older lesbians, combat isolation and age-based exclusion from other facets of the queer community, and to remember and celebrate lesbian histories.
Vancouver's LGBT community is centered on Davie Village. Historically, LGBT people have also gathered in the Chinatown and Gastown neighborhoods. Former establishments include Dino's Turkish Baths, a gay bathhouse on Hastings, and the city's first drag bar, BJ's, on Pender Street.
Sher Vancouver is a registered charity in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer South Asians and their friends. The full name of the organization is the Sher Vancouver LGBTQ Friends Society. The society was originally founded as an online Yahoo group for LGBTQ Sikhs in April 2008 by social worker Alex Sangha of Delta, B.C.
Alex Sangha is a Canadian social worker and documentary film producer. He is the founder of Sher Vancouver which is a registered charity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) South Asians and their friends. Sangha was the first Sikh to become a Grand Marshal of the Vancouver Pride Parade. Sangha received the Meritorious Service Medal from Governor General Julie Payette in 2018 for his work founding Sher Vancouver. Sangha's first short documentary film, My Name Was January, won 14 awards and garnered 66 official selections at film festivals around the world. Sangha's debut feature documentary, Emergence: Out of the Shadows, was an official selection at Out on Film in Atlanta, Image+Nation in Montreal, and Reelworld in Toronto. The film was the closing night film at both the South Asian Film Festival of Montreal and the Vancouver International South Asian Film Festival where it picked up Best Documentary. Emergence: Out of the Shadows also had a double festival premiere at the KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival and the Mumbai International Film Festival during the same week, where it was in competition at both film festivals for Best Documentary. The film also had an in-person and online screening at the 46th annual Frameline: San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival which is "the longest-running, largest and most widely recognized LGBTQ+ film exhibition event in the world."
Cindy Mochizuki is a multimedia Japanese Canadian artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. In her drawings, installations, performance, and video works created through community-engaged and location-specific research projects, Mochizuki explores how historical and family memories are passed down in the form of narratives, folktales, rituals and archives. Mochizuki's works have been exhibited in multiple countries including Japan, the United States, and Canada. Mochizuki received MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2006. She received Vancouver's Mayor's Arts Award in New Media and Film in 2015 and the VIVA and Max Wyman awards in 2020.
Lisa C. Ravensbergen is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer of Ojibwe/Swampy Cree and English/Irish descent, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ravensbergen is a Jessie-nominated actor, dramaturge, director and dancer. Ravensbergen is an Associate Artist with Full Circle First Nations Performance Group and Playwright-in-Residence with Delinquent Theatre. She holds undergraduate degrees from Trinity Western University and Simon Fraser University and an MA in Cultural Studies from Queens University.
Taiwanfest, stylized TAIWANfest, formerly known as the Taiwanese Composers Music Festival, is an annual cultural festival held in Vancouver and Toronto. The original focus of TAIWANfest was to celebrate Taiwanese culture, however, in recent years, the festival expanded to include dialogues with local Canadian communities including Indigenous communities, Asian-Canadian communities, and other Asian cultures. It is reported to be the largest English/Mandarin bilingual cultural festival in Canada.