Things to Do in Vancouver this Weekend: Jan. 11, 2018

Have a weekend of figure skating, Canadian film, femme performances, comedic dating disasters (stories anyways, hopefully not your own), music and art shows. Or, get ready for the Dine Out Vancouver festival – reservations are now open!

Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Ongoing



Friday January 12

Dine Out Vancouver Festival

Dine Out Vancouver Festival: Now Taking Reservations
Where: Metro Vancouver
What: The menus have been revealed and reservations are now open for the Dine Out Vancouver Festival! See what over 300 restaurants across the city have put together for fixed pricing of $20, $30, or $40, or save your spot at a culinary event.

Canadian Tire National Skating Championships

Canadian Tire National Skating Championships
Where: Thunderbird Stadium
What: Watch top competitors such as Patrick Chan, Kaetlyn Osmond, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in Vancouver on their quests to Olympic gold. Who will make it to the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea?
Runs until: Sunday January 14, 2018

Femme January
Where: The Cultch
What: The Cultch is dedicating a whole month to celebrate the power of female and female identifying voices. Femme January is their way of addressing and speaking truth to the challenges and the triumphs of the feminine. Join performances and discussions that focus on the female experience.
Runs until: Sunday February 4, 2018

Cinema in Concert

Cinema in Concert
Where: The Orpheum
What: Beijing’s 80-member China Broadcasting Film Symphony Orchestra (CBFSO) will perform dramatic themes from Oscar-winning masterpieces while the iconic film scenes play on screen. Expect Braveheart, Casablanca, Jurassic World, Legends of the Fall, Pirates of the Caribbean, classics from the Chinese Movie Music Collection, and much more.

Canada’s Top 10 Film Festival
Where: The Cinematheque
What: The year’s best Canadian films are in the spotlight in The Cinematheque’s annual presentation of the Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival. Established in 2001 by the Toronto International Film Festival, this celebration of excellence in our national cinema showcases Canadian achievements in feature-length films, short films, and student short films.The festival’s selections are curated by TIFF.
Runs until: Sunday January 21, 2018

Blue

Blue
Where: VanCity Theatre
What: Karina Holden’s urgent documentary charts the drastic decline in the health of our oceans–more than half of all marine life has been lost due to plastic pollution, overfishing, habitat destruction and the expansion of industrialization–sets out the challenges we are facing, and illustrates the opportunities for positive change. Filmed on location in Australia, Hawaii, the South Pacific, the Philippines and Indonesia, Blue is a cogently argued, beautifully shot and truly inspired call to action.

Wolf Parade

Wolf Parade
Where: The Commodore
What: Indie pop punky music.

Above The Hospital

Above The Hospital
Where: Red Gate Revue Stage
What: Two Vancouver millennials – the rational nursing student, Lauren, and her older, aspiring, musician-boyfriend, Cameron – live together in an overly priced, tiny apartment above a hospital. A casual evening of sex, pot, and talk turns into a casual night of drinking, arguing and reminiscing about the past, until unexpected guests arrive at their door and disrupt their stable existence, forcing them to re-examine themselves in the face of an unknown future.
Runs until: Sunday January 21, 2018

Electro Swing Circus
Where: The Imperial
What: Dress up in your favorite circus/steampunk influenced attire and have a night of circus acts, dancing and weirdness. 


 

Saturday January 13

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Tinder Tales
Where: Goldies
What: Professional/amateur daters, storytellers, comedians & everyday people confess their most outrageous and hilarious Tinder tales and other online dating stories live on stage, in the basement of a pizza place.

Otto Tausk Conducts Brahms and Dvořák
Where: The Orpheum
What: Maestro Otto Tausk returns to the VSO, conducting a beautiful program, including a work that emerged triumphantly from under the shadow of Beethoven’s mighty Ninth Symphony. Brahms struggled mightily with the idea of writing a symphony in the wake of Beethoven’s Ninth, feeling that music had been perfected in that great work. He finally worked up the courage after twenty years of delay his Symphony No. 1 in many ways picked up where Beethoven left off.
Runs until: Monday January 15, 2018

Lunararium

Lunararium
Where: The Fox Cabaret
What: Creating a vaudeville re-imagining of Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon is pretty ambitious, but certainly is some fab source material. In this version, “after centuries of war, pollution, and overpopulation, the Earth is unable to produce enough food to feed its people. After being visited by a beautiful spirit in the night, a lone scientist hops in his glider on a trip to the Moon.” So, it’s more than a bit of a stretch from the original plotline, but I’m interested to see how it goes.

Lift Cannabis Expo
Where: Vancouver Convention Centre
What: Featuring nearly 200 exhibitors from across North America and Europe, main stage talks by cannabis thought leaders, live cooking and growing demos, a vape lounge and a cannabis career fair, the expo is your chance to learn about medical cannabis and the coming legal recreational market.
Runs until: Sunday January 14, 2018

Audien

Audien
Where: The Commodore
What: Trancy electro-house music to dance to.

 


 

Sunday January 14

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Unarmed Verses

Unarmed Verses
Where: The Cinematheque
What: Charles Officer’s deeply affecting Unarmed Verses — named Best Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs – follows Francine Valentine, a sensitive, shy, and fiercely curious adolescent discovering the power of poetry, music, and her own voice. She lives with her Antiguan immigrant family in a low-income housing project in Toronto.

New Year Bunny Yoga

New Year Bunny Yoga
Where: Sunberry Fitness (Richmond, BC)
What: Take it easy in this yin/flow yoga class, with a room full of bunnies! Proceeds go to a local bunny rescue and shelter.


 

Ongoing

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Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
Where: Arts Club Theatre
What: “Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.” Follow Belle behind the castle walls in this adaptation of the Academy Award–winning animated film.
Runs until: Saturday January 13, 2018

Canadian Tire National Skating Championships

Canadian Tire National Skating Championships
Where: Thunderbird Stadium
What: Watch top competitors such as Patrick Chan, Kaetlyn Osmond, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in Vancouver on their quests to Olympic gold. Who will make it to the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea?
Runs until: Sunday January 14, 2018

Otto Tausk Conducts Brahms and Dvořák
Where: The Orpheum
What: Maestro Otto Tausk returns to the VSO, conducting a beautiful program, including a work that emerged triumphantly from under the shadow of Beethoven’s mighty Ninth Symphony. Brahms struggled mightily with the idea of writing a symphony in the wake of Beethoven’s Ninth, feeling that music had been perfected in that great work. He finally worked up the courage after twenty years of delay his Symphony No. 1 in many ways picked up where Beethoven left off.
Runs until: Monday January 15, 2018

Chinese Lantern Festival

Chinese Lantern Festival
Where: Hastings Park
What: As the largest festival of its kind in Canada will feature 35 illuminated displays transforming over 14 acres. Lantern festivals started during the Han Dynasty, about 2,000 years ago. This festival will be embracing traditions with elaborate new lanterns featuring Dragon, White Pagoda, Kylin, and Huabiao Column, each symbolizing a Chinese sage or legend. There will also be two nightly performances in the PNE Amphitheatre featuring acts such as face changing, acrobatics, and folk dance.
Runs until: Sunday January 21, 2018

Throwdown International TheatreSports Festival
Where: Vancouver Improv Centre
What: Throwdown welcomes TheatreSports teams from around the world who bring their A-Game to head-to head matches with each other and local teams comprised of VTSL’s top improvisers.
Runs until: Sunday January 21, 2018

Canada’s Top 10 Film Festival
Where: The Cinematheque
What: The year’s best Canadian films are in the spotlight in The Cinematheque’s annual presentation of the Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival. Established in 2001 by the Toronto International Film Festival, this celebration of excellence in our national cinema showcases Canadian achievements in feature-length films, short films, and student short films.The festival’s selections are curated by TIFF.
Runs until: Sunday January 21, 2018

Above The Hospital

Above The Hospital
Where: Red Gate Revue Stage
What: Two Vancouver millennials – the rational nursing student, Lauren, and her older, aspiring, musician-boyfriend, Cameron – live together in an overly priced, tiny apartment above a hospital. A casual evening of sex, pot, and talk turns into a casual night of drinking, arguing and reminiscing about the past, until unexpected guests arrive at their door and disrupt their stable existence, forcing them to re-examine themselves in the face of an unknown future.
Runs until: Sunday January 21, 2018

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature
Where: UBC Museum of Anthropology
What: MOA will showcase its Amazonian collections in a significant exploration of socially and environmentally-conscious notions intrinsic to indigenous South American cultures, which have recently become innovations in International Law. These are foundational to the notions of Rights of Nature, and they have been consolidating in the nine countries that share responsibilities over the Amazonian basin.
Runs until: Saturday January 28, 2018

Canyon Lights

Canyon Lights
Where: Capilano Suspension Bridge Park
What: Re-capture the feeling of wonder and excitement of the holiday season and be amazed by the hundreds of thousands of lights throughout the park. The suspension bridge, Treetops Adventure, Cliffwalk, the rainforest and canyon are transformed into a world of festive lights and visual enchantment. See the world’s tallest living Christmas tree (153 feet !) go on a Snowy Owl Prowl, decorate gingerbread cookies and make your own Christmas card in the Winter Pavilion, and sing-along with the holiday band.
Runs until: Saturday January 28, 2018

True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada

True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: This ground-breaking exhibition examines the significant influence of Scandinavian craft and industrial design on the development of Canadian culture. Spanning more than seven decades, True Nordic reveals how Scandinavian design was introduced in Canada and how its aesthetics and material forms were adopted, revised and transformed.
Runs until: Saturday January 28, 2018

Tin and Gold: A 10 Year Anniversary Show
Where: The Fall
What: Celebrate 10 years of alternative music, tattoo artistry, and multimedia events. The art show includes artists Megan Majewski, Jenn Brisson, Alison Woodward and more.
Runs until: Thursday February 1, 2018

Portrait of the Artist

Portrait of the Artist
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: This exhibition brings together The Royal Collection’s paintings depicting self-portraits, portraits of artists and artists at work. Encompassing over eighty works, Portrait of the Artist is a rich survey of how artists have seen themselves and the role of the artist within society.
Runs until: Monday, February 4, 2018

Femme January
Where: The Cultch
What: The Cultch is dedicating a whole month to celebrate the power of female and female identifying voices. Femme January is their way of addressing and speaking truth to the challenges and the triumphs of the feminine. Join performances and discussions that focus on the female experience.
Runs until: Sunday February 4, 2018

Gordon Smith: The Black Paintings

Gordon Smith: The Black Paintings
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: The exhibition features a body of work described as black paintings that Gordon Smith began producing in 1990. These densely painted, darkly abstracted paintings—punctuated with occasional colour, text and collaged elements—sometimes refer explicitly to this wartime experience. Smith was deployed with the Allied invasion at Pachino Beach, Sicily (code name Husky), in July 1943, when he was twenty-four.
Runs until: Monday February 4, 2018

Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive

Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: Sawyer’s ongoing project that reconstructs the life and work of the genre-defying, fictional singer and artist Natalie Brettschneider. The works on view will connect Brettschneider to a community of mid-twentieth century artists and musicians in British Columbia.
Runs until: Monday February 4, 2018

City on the Edge: A Century of Vancouver Activism
Where: Museum of Vancouver
What: A photo-based exhibition exploring how protest demonstrations have shaped Vancouver’s identity from the Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers’ photo collection. These photographs are exceptional historical records of intense and transformative moments in the lives of Vancouverites.
Runs until: Sunday February 18, 2017

Robson Street Outdoor Ice Rink

Robson Street Outdoor Ice Rink
Where: Robson Square
What: Bring your skates, hold hands for balance, and circle the rink for free right in the heart of Downtown Vancouver. Skate rentals are also available, and for that you’ll need to bring cash.
Runs until: Wednesday February 28, 2018

Tasting History: The Traveling Tales of Tea
Where: Roedde House Museum
What: Tea is one of the most consumed liquids in the world, second only to water. But the beverage that brings much pleasure and calm to our 21st century senses is steeped in a turbulent history of politics and society. The exhibit will also feature stories from Vancouver’s modern-day tea community.
Runs until: March 2018

Emily Carr: Into the Forest

Emily Carr: Into the Forest
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: Far from feeling that the forests of the West Coast were a difficult subject matter, Carr exulted in the symphonies of greens and browns found in the natural world. With oil on paper as her primary medium, Carr was free to work outdoors in close proximity to the landscape. She went into the forest to paint and saw nature in ways unlike her fellow British Columbians, who perceived it as either untamed wilderness or a plentiful source of lumber.
Runs until: March 4, 2018

The Lost Fleet Exhibit
Where: Vancouver Maritime Museum
What: On December 7, 1941 the world was shocked when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, launching the United States into the war. This action also resulted in the confiscation of nearly 1,200 Japanese-Canadian owned fishing boats by Canadian officials on the British Columbia coast, which were eventually sold off to canneries and other non-Japanese fishermen. The Lost Fleet looks at the world of the Japanese-Canadian fishermen in BC and how deep-seated racism played a major role in the seizure, and sale, of Japanese-Canadian property and the internment of an entire people.
Runs until: March 25, 2018

Chief Dan George: Actor and Activist
Where: North Vancouver Museum
What: An exhibition exploring the life and legacy of Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George (1899- 1981) and his influence as an Indigenous rights advocate and his career as an actor. The exhibition was developed in close collaboration with the George family.
Runs until: April 2018

空 / Emptiness: Emily Carr and Lui Shou Kwan

空 / Emptiness: Emily Carr and Lui Shou Kwan
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: The exhibition pairs Canadian modernist Emily Carr with the founder of the New Ink Movement in Hong Kong Lui Shou Kwan. Looking across culture, geography and time to explore expressions of the sublime in landscape painting, the exhibition draws connections by exploring how each artist experimented with abstraction and spirituality in their respective depictions of nature.
Runs until: Sunday April 8, 2018

The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving

The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving
Where: UBC Museum of Anthropology
What: For generations Salish peoples have been harvesting the resources of their territories, transforming them into robes of rare beauty and power. Symbols of identity, they acted as legal documents and were visible signifiers of the presence of knowledge holders and respected people. Now mostly stored away in museums these masterworks are rarely seen. They have much knowledge to share and many stories to tell. Musqueam asked the Museum to bring these weavings to inspire weavers and share part of this rich legacy with all of us.
Runs until: Sunday April 15, 2018

Public Artwork by New Delhi-Based Artist Asim Waqif

Public Artwork by New Delhi-Based Artist Asim Waqif
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: Inspired by environmental concerns and the pace of human consumption, Waqif will construct an immersive architectural experience from materials collected at re-purpose stores, transfer stations and landfills in the metro Vancouver area. Waqif’s architectural structure will also incorporate an interactive acoustic system using microphones, effects pedals and speakers. Visitors are encouraged to move through the installation maze allowing them to actively experience the architecture instead of passively observing it.
Runs until: Sunday April 15, 2017

Winter Farmers’ Market

Winter Farmers Market
Where: Nat Bailey Stadium
What: Each week you can look forward to finding locally grown vegetables and fruit, meat and seafood from local ranchers and fishermen, artisan cheese and bread, herbs and seasonal nursery items, baked goods, prepared foods and artisanal craft.
Runs until: April 21, 2018 (Saturdays)

N. Vancouver

N. Vancouver
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: The show in the newly-opened gallery will pay tribute to the evolution of North Vancouver and will feature commissioned works by more than 10 artists, including Andrew Dadson, Gabrielle Hill, Althea Thauberger, Stephen Waddell and Tracy Williams, paired with existing work by Stan Douglas, Greg Girard, Fred Herzog, Curt Lang, and Jeff Wall, among others.
Runs until: Sunday April 29, 2018

In a Different Light

In a Different Light
Where: Museum of Anthropology
What: More than 110 historical Indigenous artworks and marks the return of many important works to British Columbia. These objects are amazing artistic achievements. Yet they also transcend the idea of ‘art’ or ‘artifact’. Through the voices of contemporary First Nations artists and community members, this exhibition reflects on the roles historical artworks have today. Featuring immersive storytelling and innovative design, it explores what we can learn from these works and how they relate to Indigenous peoples’ relationships to their lands.
Runs until: Spring 2019

What are you up to this weekend? Tell me and the rest of Vancouver in the comments below.

 

 




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