Things to Do This Weekend in Vancouver

Shakespeare and beer headline this weekend with the opening of Bard on the Beach at Vanier Park and the Vancouver Craft Beer Week Festival at the PNE Fairgrounds. There’s also World Oceans Day at the Vancouver Aquarium, Italian Day on Commercial Drive, the Maritime Museum’s 60th anniversary and a whole lot of arts and music.

Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Ongoing

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Friday June 7

Bard on the Beach
Where: Bard on the Beach Festival Site, Vanier Park
What: Bard on the Beach, Western Canada’s largest not-for-profit, professional Shakespeare Festival, welcomes you to join them for their 30^th season. Presented in a magnificent setting on the waterfront of Vanier Park, this year’s lineup includes: The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare In Love, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Coriolanus.
Runs until: Saturday September 21st

Undivided Colours
Where: Scotiabank Dance Centre
What: The artists of Undivided Colours reunite for a spring Canadian tour. The originality of these multicultural practices explores identity through contemporary voices, transcending the complexity of gender and the search for the third space, duality and spirituality.

Mom’s the Word: Nest ½ Empty
Where: Granville Island Stage
What: From the world-renowned creative team behind the Mom’s the Word series comes another chapter in their stories of family and fracas. The kids are grown, marriages have “evolved,” and bodies are backfiring. Life doesn’t get any prettier, but it never strays far from ludicrous or poignant as the moms continue to mine their personal history for every embarrassing detail. From a sold-out run and a hit tour, the moms are back again to share this nest-full of insights and ribald humour.
Runs until: Saturday July 20^th, 2019

Mark Kopp
Where: LeSoleil Fine Art Gallery
What: Mark Kopp started working with a commercial art company and then on to run his own company in his early twenties. As the years went by, discovering his style, evolving as an artist, entering and winning local contests, Kopp realized He was meant to be a full-time artist. Most recently Kopp has been reaching the palette knives instead of the brushes. Mark’s art has once again been re-born and evolved with a diverse subject matter that is created with a quick deliberate application.
Runs until: Monday June 10, 2019

FotoFilmMic18
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: Fotofilmmic18 is the 6th edition of FotoFilmic’s annual touring exhibition juried by an international panel of photography curators and established artists. This group exhibition features 30 emerging and mid-career analogue photographers representing 12 countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Scotland and the United States.
Runs until: Sunday June 16, 2019

The Lind Prize 2019
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: Established in 2016, the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize is awarded annually to an emerging BC-based artist working in mediums of film, photography, or video. While in past years, the Lind Prize was limited to BFA or MFA students, the 2019 competition has expanded its scope. For the first time, nominees have been accepted from outside academic institutions. The shortlisted finalists will be on display at The Polygon Gallery all weekend.

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra: Harriet Krijgh
Where: Orpheum Theatre
What: Twenty-eight year old Harriet Krijgh is one of today’s most exciting and promising young cellists. Her grace and expressiveness touch her audiences as soon as she is on the concert platform.
Runs until: Saturday June 8, 2019

BC Lions vs. Calgary Stampeders
Where: BC Place
What: Join the roaring crowd at this Canadian Football League (CFL) game.

Chromeo
Where: Malkin Bowl
What: The Montreal-born electro-funk duo will be taking on the Malkin Bowl outdoor stage for the first time with a full live band. Their sound draws from blue-eyed soul, dance music, rock, synth-pop, disco and funk.

Billy Gardell
Where: River Rock Casino
What: Emmy nominated actor and comedian Billy Gardell will bring his hilarious stand-up comedy to the Show Theatre at River Rock Casino Resort. Gardell’s stand up show is a powerhouse. His grounded, down-to-earth point of view strikes a chord with audiences. Stories about his rough childhood, wild adolescence and new family life are executed with the skill of a master craftsman.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
Where: The Rickshaw Theatre
What: It’s rare that a band’s debut album sounds as confident and self-assured as Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s Hope Downs. To say that the first full-length from the indie rock Melbourne quintet improves on their buzz-building EPs from the last few years would be an understatement.

Operators Present Handsome Furs
Where: Fortune Sound Club
What: No matter what a farewell tour might suggest, in today’s touring landscape you almost always get another chance to hear the songs you love performed live. Operators, Dan Boeckner’s latest band, picked up where Handsome Furs left off, and the discussions of the new outfit playing Handsome Furs material stretching back a few years have amounted to this epic revival.

Little People
Where: Biltmore Cabaret
What: For Laurent Clerk, AKA Little People, making music is all about the process – each sound used on his latest album were created with a technical idea in mind, all building within the electronic genre. Either with a modular synthesizer or using digital means, Laurent draws inspiration from the set of tools at his disposal.

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Saturday June 8

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Vancouver Craft Beer Week Festival
Where: PNE Fairgrounds
What: Vancouver Craft Beer Week started in 2010 at a small venue hosting about 100 beer aficionados and 15 breweries. This year, on it’s 10^th anniversary, sample from 100+ breweries and cideries pouring more than 300 beers and ciders! The festival showcases music, food, art, and craft beer all weekend long.
Runs until: Sunday June 9, 2019

World Oceans Day
Where: Vancouver Aquarium
What: This World Oceans Day, come along and enjoy a day of celebration, packed with family fun and entertainment. Enjoy live music from Bobs and Lolo, tuck in to slab cake and cookies, meet a penguin, be entertained by our puppet troupe and get involved with crafts and face-painting – all while getting to know what Ocean Wise does to conserve our oceans.

Vancouver Maritime Museum 60^th Celebration
Where: Vancouver Maritime Museum
What: The museum will be open to the public, admission by donation, with the celebration continuing outside, complete with a beer garden, food trucks, cake, and performances by Hey Ocean!, Tiller’s Folly, and more.

Chor Leoni presents Lion’s Share
Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre
What: Chor Leoni transforms the spacious multi-tiered lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for an extravagant fundraiser. Competitive karaoke, extreme a capella, designer choreography, or touching serenades: nothing is off the table as teams of lions entertain and vie for your support. Celebrity judges will offer their commentary, but your financial support will crown the victor. It will be a party to remember as we come together to ensure that the transformative power of male choral music is shared for years to come.

Ron Josol
Where: Yuk Yuks
What: Ron Josol represents the new generation of comedy. With his modish comedy style and commanding stage presence, he is one of the hottest acts today. He performs regularly in Canada, U.S., Pacific Islands, Persian Gulf, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

Nick Murphy / Chet Faker
Where: Commodore Ballroom
What: Nick Murphy has played sold-out shows on five continents, appeared at major festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury, and taken the stage at The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Since the release of his debut album, he’s dropped the Chet Faker moniker and made his debut under his own name with the brooding 2016 single Fear Less, with follow-up single Stop Me premiering in mid-2016 and Missing Link arriving in spring 2017. Don’t miss Nick Murphy reveal what’s next in 2019.

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Sunday June 9

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Italian Day on the Drive
Where: Commercial Drive
What: Held annually on the second Sunday of June, Italian Day on The Drive is a vibrant cultural street festival celebrating Italian culture, heritage and community. The event includes over 120 street participants, comprised of partners, vendors, community organizations – and an estimated 300,000 attendees of all ages and cultures.

The Cult: A Sonic Temple
Where: Vogue Theatre
What: Classic 80s dark rock band with shout-along hits like She Sells Sanctuary.

Mattiel
Where: The Wise Hall & Lounge
What: Mattiel is the whole package. Musically, the Atlanta artist blends ’60s rock ‘n’ roll and a bit of jangle pop with a bit of blues and soul.

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Ongoing

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Vancouver Symphony Orchestra: Harriet Krijgh
Where: Orpheum Theatre
What: Twenty-eight year old Harriet Krijgh is one of today’s most exciting and promising young cellists. Her grace and expressiveness touch her audiences as soon as she is on the concert platform.
Runs until: Saturday June 8, 2019

Magnetic North Theatre Festival
Where: The Cultch
What: Canada’s Magnetic North Theatre Festival is Canada’s only national theatre festival. We showcase the very best of contemporary Canadian theatre – theatre that moves us, shares our stories, and explores how we see the world as Canadians today.
Runs until: Sunday June 9, 2019

Vancouver Craft Beer Week Festival
Where: PNE Fairgrounds
What: Vancouver Craft Beer Week started in 2010 at a small venue hosting about 100 beer aficionados and 15 breweries. This year, on it’s 10^th anniversary, sample from 100+ breweries and cideries pouring more than 300 beers and ciders! The festival showcases music, food, art, and craft beer all weekend long.
Runs until: Sunday June 9, 2019

Displacement
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: This exhibition comprises internationally acclaimed Victoria-based artist Mowry Baden’s work from the late 1960s to the present. Baden is known for producing intricate, sometimes humorous sculptural works and installations that borrow from the fields of perceptual psychology, science and architecture, and often solicit the audience’s participation. Runs until: Sunday June 9, 2019

Mark Kopp
Where: LeSoleil Fine Art Gallery
What: Mark Kopp started working with a commercial art company and then on to run his own company in his early twenties. As the years went by, discovering his style, evolving as an artist, entering and winning local contests, Kopp realized He was meant to be a full-time artist. Most recently Kopp has been reaching the palette knives instead of the brushes. Mark’s art has once again been re-born and evolved with a diverse subject matter that is created with a quick deliberate application.
Runs until: Monday June 10, 2019

Throne and Games – The Last Laugh Where: The Improv Centre What: Loosely based on HBO’s popular TV series, this improv laugh-letting features myriad unexpected plot twists – all suggested by the audience. No two performances can ever be the same because of this key element. Like its TV inspiration, the audience has no idea what to expect next, and, neither do the cast. VTS improvisers are master actors – creating the plot line, developing characters and dialogue all on the spot based on audience involvement and suggestions. Warning–there may be spoilers!
Runs until: Saturday June 15, 2019

Deanna Bowen: A Harlem Nocturne
Where: Contemporary Art Gallery
What: Deanna Bowen’s artistic practice concerns itself with overlooked histories of Black experience, often connected to her own family in Canada and the US. Mining archives and forgotten documents, she makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal and often violent past into public visibility. Bowen’s solo exhibition A Harlem Nocturne comprises two separate trajectories of new research that follow the artist’s maternal lineage in Canada.
Runs until: Sunday June 16, 2019

FotoFilmMic18
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: Fotofilmmic18 is the 6th edition of FotoFilmic’s annual touring exhibition juried by an international panel of photography curators and established artists. This group exhibition features 30 emerging and mid-career analogue photographers representing 12 countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Scotland and the United States.
Runs until: Sunday June 16, 2019

The Late Show – Adult Only Improv Comedy Where: The Improv Centre What: Are you a grown-up? If you are, join us! This show takes the furry hand-cuffs off our improvisers to present edgy, uncensored improv comedy. With the aid of audience suggestions, our quick-witted improvisers create scenarios that explore mature themes, content and language. You never know how far this show will go and the audience are willing accomplices. Runs until: June 29, 2019 (Saturdays)

Wild Things: The Power of Nature in Our Lives Where: Museum of Vancouver What: This exhibition delves into the life stories of local animals and plants—how they relate to each other and how they connect people to nature in the city. Scenic design, videos, taxidermy, crowd-sourcing technologies, and the display of natural specimens breathe life into these tales of co-habitation. The immersive nature of the exhibition, including hands-on activities, encourages visitors to examine their relationship with nature, think about momentarily disconnecting from their devices, and find equilibrium with the natural world around them.
Runs until: September 2019

Matilda The Musical
Where: Stanley Alliance Industrial Stage
What: Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty to find your happy ending! Armed with an outsize wit and a vivid imagination, precocious Matilda takes a stand to change her destiny. Even cruel parents and a hardened headmistress can’t get in her way. From the wonderfully subversive imagination of Roald Dahl, this fun family musical will bring out the child in everyone.
Runs until: Sunday July 14, 2019

Mom’s the Word: Nest ½ Empty
Where: Granville Island Stage
What: From the world-renowned creative team behind the Mom’s the Word series comes another chapter in their stories of family and fracas. The kids are grown, marriages have “evolved,” and bodies are backfiring. Life doesn’t get any prettier, but it never strays far from ludicrous or poignant as the moms continue to mine their personal history for every embarrassing detail. From a sold-out run and a hit tour, the moms are back again to share this nestful of insights and ribald humour.
Runs until: Saturday July 20^th, 2019

Butterflies at the Vancouver Aquarium
Where: The Vancouver Aquarium
What: Step out of British Columbia’s temperate rainforest and into the Amazon’s tropical rainforest when you enter the Graham Amazon Gallery. Discover a wide variety of butterflies, including blue morphos, giant owls and heliconians, as you stroll along the boardwalk. Keen eyes will spy them feeding on nectar, fruit and flowers, camouflaging on tree trunks, courting a mate and hitchhiking on lucky visitors.
Runs until: September 2019

Moving Still: Performative Photography from India
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery & Annex Theatre
What: A major exhibition of works by thirteen artists based in India whose photographic practices focus on constructing and reconstructing realities. The exhibition and will showcase more than one hundred works, dating from the 1800s to the present, and examines themes of gender, religion and sexual identity using photography, an important medium in India since the mid-nineteenth century.
Runs until: Sunday September 2, 2019

Making Waves: The Story and Legacy of Greenpeace Where: Vancouver Maritime Museum What: With humble beginnings in Vancouver, Greenpeace has grown into a large organization with offices in 40 countries. The NGO has protested numerous causes: whaling, deforestation, mining, genetic testing, and nuclear testing. Explore this exhibit that goes from their first voyage from Vancouver to Amchitka to protest Nuclear testing on an old fishing vessel to how cities, government, and industry today are developing new policies, technologies, and sustainable practices to ensure the preservation of our environment.
Runs until: Monday September 9, 2019

Bard on the Beach
Where: Bard on the Beach Festival Site, Vanier Park
What: Bard on the Beach, Western Canada’s largest not-for-profit, professional Shakespeare Festival, welcomes you to join them for their 30^th season. Presented in a magnificent setting on the waterfront of Vanier Park, this year’s lineup includes: The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare In Love, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Coriolanus.
Runs until: Saturday September 21st

Rolande Souliere: Frequent Stopping IV and V
Where: Contemporary Art Gallery
What: The multi-media practice of Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere entangles the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with that of contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. Her solo exhibition Frequent Stopping IV and V presents new large-scale, site-specific work at the Contemporary Art Gallery’s two public sites: its street level façade and the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. This exhibition draws from Souliere’s ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive, muscular installations.
Runs until: Friday September 20, 2019

Shipyards Night Market
Where: The Shipyards, North Vancouver
What: Fresh food, locally made products, musicians, art and entertainment. The festivities in the Square kick off at 5pm on Friday nights where you will find 100+ vendors selling fresh food and locally made products. The Friday Night Market also includes a beer garden serving local craft beer and cider as well as Betty’s Vodka Iced Tea. You must me 19+ to enter the beer garden. On the Shipbuilders’ Stage there is live music until 10pm, showcasing talent from all over BC.
Runs until: Friday September 27, 2019

Womxn and Waterways Where: Bill Reid Gallery What: Explore the unique connection between womxn and water in the matriarchal societies of the Northwest Coast, with special attention to the roles of child-bearers, healers, and doulas. Artists Richelle Bear Hat (Blackfoot/Cree), Krystle Coughlin (Selkirk), Lindsay Katsitsakataste Delaronde (Mohawk), Alison Marks (Tlingit), Dionne Paul (Nuxalk/Sechelt), Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena), Marika Echachis Swan (Nuu-chah-nulth), Carrielynn Victor (Sto:lo), Veronica Rose Waechter (Gitxsan) and Water Keeper, Audrey Siegl (Musqueam) will explore water as a crucial element of creation, its historical uses for survival, and contemporary over-consumption as a threat to sensitive coastal ecosystems.
Runs until: Wednesday October 2, 2019

Shake Up: Preserving What We Value
Where: Museum of Anthropology
What: The exhibition will bring to light the convergence of earthquake science and technology with the rich Indigenous knowledge and oral history of the living cultures represented in MOA’s Northwest Coast collection. Beyond scientific discoveries, knowledge of earthquakes and natural disasters has been passed down through generations throughout many cultures, including those of the Northwest Coast First Nations. Also as part of the exhibition, visitors will have the opportunity to see the majestic poles of the Great Hall undergo conservation, many for the first time in 40 years.
Runs until: Fall 2019

Richmond Night Market
Where: Richmond, BC
What: Stop by for authentically Asian snacks, street food and retailers selling unique accessories and knick-knacks at street-side prices. Some merchants are willing to bargain, so channel your inner negotiator and you’ll leave with a haul. There’s a diverse array of nightly live entertainment ranging from music and dance performances to carnival games and rides.
Runs until: Friday October 4, 2019

Shadows, Strings and Other Things: The Enchanting Theatre of Puppets
Where: Museum of Anthropology
What: This enchanting exhibition illustrates the role puppets have played around the world in the transmission of cultural knowledge, stories, and values from generation to generation. Shadows, Strings and Other Things features a broad array of puppets, old and new, from 15 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Visitors will have the opportunity to view more than 250 handcrafted puppets from MOA’s collection — the largest in Western Canada — plus, new acquisitions from China, Brazil, Italy, Java, the UK, and France revealed to the public for the first time. Enter into an immersive and theatrical world for visitors of all ages.
Runs until: Monday October 14, 2019

How Far Do You Travel
Where: Select B-Line TransLink busses
What: Five Canadian artists — Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Tasdelen and Anna Torma — are being commissioned to graphically wrap the exterior of a series of articulated buses traveling on major routes in Metro Vancouver.
Runs until: Tuesday December 31, 2019

Teatro Intimo Del Flamenco
Where: The Improv Centre, Granville Island
What: Karen Flamenco brings the glamour and extravagance of a large flamenco dance production onto a small theatrical stage. The one-hour production welcomes audiences of all ages with live traditional flamenco music, dance, storylines, puppetry and magic. With theatre style seating and bistro-style table seats, every audience member will get a close-up and personal experience that is very typical of a traditional Spanish Tablao.
Runs until: Saturday May 1, 2020

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