There are no shortage of epic performances this weekend in Vancouver. Want to sing along with some of Queen’s greatest hits? No problem. Prefer to be transported back in time to the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic tribes of the Northern Europe? We’ve got you covered. Out for a laugh, or just want to dance your socks off? You can do that too! All this and more at some of this weekend’s upcoming events.
Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Ongoing
Friday January 10
Arts Club Theatre Company presents: The Shoplifters
Where: Granville Island Stage
What: Meet Alma, a career shoplifter who prefers the “five-finger discount” over any senior citizen’s deal. When a grocery store theft goes awry, her elaborate life of petty crime is halted by an overzealous security guard and his affable mentor. With sharp-witted comic observations, Morris Panych has expertly drawn a cast of misfit characters that will leave you rooting for all sides to come out on top.
Runs Until: Sunday February 9, 2020
Where: Historic Theatre
What: A surprising, funny, and revelatory new play about love, sex, and math. The cynical, skeptical daughter of a theoretical physicist and a composer, Sarah Jean’s clinical approach to love meets with little success. In this absorbing drama infused with science and classical music, three exceptional minds collide like charged particles in an accelerator. Sarah Jean’s hugely talented, yet severely dysfunctional, family will learn that love and time itself are connected in unimaginable ways.
Runs Until: Sunday January 19, 2020
Where: Commodore Ballroom
What: Let’s face it, this band looks good in a toque. Hell, they’ve toured the world teaching people that it’s called a toque not a beanie, so why not have your cross-country tour in the height of toque season! Don’t miss The Strumbellas on their Rattlesnake Canadian Tour this winter, joined by Halifax’s Neon Dreams.
Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre
What: We Will Rock You tells the story of a globalized future without musical instruments. A handful of rock rebels, the Bohemians, fight against the all-powerful Globalsoft company and its boss, the Killer Queen; they fight for freedom, individuality and the rebirth of the age of rock. Scaramouche and Galileo, two young outsiders, cannot come to terms with the bleak conformist reality. They join the Bohemians and embark on the search to find the unlimited power of freedom, love and Rock!
Runs Until: Saturday January 11, 2020
Early Music Vancouver presents: Charms, Riddles and Elegies
Where: Christ Church Cathedral
What: Benjamin Bagby joins his Sequentia colleagues Norbert Rodenkirchen, Hanna Marti and Stef Conner, for Charms, Riddles and Elegies. This concert features music of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic tribes of the Northern Europe sourced from the old Icelandic poetic Edda, Beowulf, and the few poems surviving in ancient songbooks such as The Exeter Book. Featured instruments will include 6-string Germanic harps, triangular harps, wooden flutes and the rare and intriguing “swan-bone” flute.
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: Elizabeth Zvonar is a Vancouver artist who works extensively with collage techniques and sculpture. Zvonar draws material from a broad spectrum of sources to produce savvy, sardonic, and often comical juxtapositions that critique socio-cultural norms. Her works—vivid, colourful, and alluring—are examinations of subliminal power dynamics and ideologies in visual culture. Her exhibition, I Spy, features two new large-scale murals and recent photographic collages that allude to how we look at and make sense of photographs.
Runs Until: Sunday March 1, 2020
Where: Emily Carr Institute
What: Emily Carr University and The Obakki Foundation present A Handful of Stories; an exhibition and series of public events that explores new ways for design to address and disrupt the single story of the global refugee crisis.
Runs Until: Sunday January 19, 2020
Yuk Yuks presents Mark Normand
Where: Yuk Yuks
What: Mark Normand is a fun-loving, New York comedian whose “relentlessly punchy writing and expert delivery” (The Laugh Button) has made him one of today’s most talked about comedians, and a favorite of the New York comedy scene. Recently Mark has appeared on HBO’s 2 Dope Queens, a sixth set on TBS’s Conan, and a return to NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Comedy Central’s Roast Battle.
Runs Until: Saturday January 11, 2020
Saturday January 11
Jillian Fargey, Andrew Wheeler, Kimberly Ho, and Darian Roussy | Photo by Matt Reznek
Firehall Arts Centre presents: House and Home
Where: Firehall Arts Centre
What: Jennifer Griffin’s biting, comic take on Vancouver’s current real estate crisis. Hilary, a waitress/poet turned social worker, and Henry, a Butoh dancer turned lawyer, didn’t know how lucky they were when they managed to escape bad roommates and buy a house before the real estate market skyrocketed. Finding themselves house rich and cash poor they abandon their values and plunge into the world of short-term rentals. How far can they go to keep their house?
Runs Until: Saturday January 25, 2020
Early Music Vancouver presents “Beowulf: The Epic in Performance” featuring Benjamin Bagby
Where: Vancouver Playhouse
What: For over 25 years, Bagby has toured the globe performing his one-man show to universal and enthusiastic acclaim. Armed with nothing but a medieval harp and his captivating stage presence, Bagby draws audiences into an ancient world of valiant heroes and evil monsters. Though this millennia-old epic poem has spawned countless re-imaginings in novels, movies and theatre, Bagby’s dramatization has been uniquely successful.
VSO New Music Festival: (Re)-Creations
Where: Chan Centre For The Performing Arts
What: A trio of 21st Century masterpieces by three of the most outstanding and original composers of our day. Canadian star, Nicole Lizee, re-imagines iconic scenes from The Sound of Music set to her own unique soundscape; Unsuk Chin is Korea’s most celebrated living composer, her rhapsodic Violin Concerto brought her international acclaim; the works of Kaja Saariaho (“sonic images of magnetic power” – The Guardian) magnificently evoke the distinctive colours and atmospheres of her native Finland.
Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre
What: We Will Rock You tells the story of a globalized future without musical instruments. A handful of rock rebels, the Bohemians, fight against the all-powerful Globalsoft company and its boss, the Killer Queen; they fight for freedom, individuality and the rebirth of the age of rock. Scaramouche and Galileo, two young outsiders, cannot come to terms with the bleak conformist reality. They join the Bohemians and embark on the search to find the unlimited power of freedom, love and Rock!
Runs Until: Saturday January 11, 2020
Yuk Yuks presents Mark Normand
Where: Yuk Yuks
What: Mark Normand’s “relentlessly punchy writing and expert delivery” (The Laugh Button) has made him one of today’s most talked about comedians, and a favorite of the New York comedy scene. Recently Mark has appeared on HBO’s 2 Dope Queens, a sixth set on TBS’s Conan, and a return to NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Comedy Central’s Roast Battle.
Runs Until: Saturday January 11, 2020
Sunday January 12
Where: The Annex
What: Called a “brilliant musical scientist,” JUNO-nominated composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.
Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades Film Screening and Closing Day of Al Araba Al Madfuna
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: On the final day of the exhibition Wael Shawky: Al Araba Al Madfuna, The Polygon Gallery is pleased to screen the third instalment of Shawky’s film trilogy Cabaret Crusades. The Secrets of Karbala (2015) utilizes Murano glass marionettes to explore the origins of the Sunni-Shiite schism, concluding with the capture of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204. Cabaret Crusades is inspired by Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983), presenting alternative understandings of history and emphasizing the presence of bias and myth within historical records
Ongoing
Wael Shawky: Al Araba Al Madfuna
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: This exhibition brings the extraordinary and timely art of Wael Shawky to the west coast for the first time. Shawky’s ambitious, multilayered film productions look at the ways in which history and mythologies are recorded, highlighting the fallibility of cultural memory, while offering critical perspectives on our current narratives of uncertainty and change.
Runs Until: Sunday January 12, 2020
Where: Historic Theatre
What: A surprising, funny, and revelatory new play about love, sex, and math. The cynical, skeptical daughter of a theoretical physicist and a composer, Sarah Jean’s clinical approach to love meets with little success. In this absorbing drama infused with science and classical music, three exceptional minds collide like charged particles in an accelerator. Sarah Jean’s hugely talented, yet severely dysfunctional, family will learn that love and time itself are connected in unimaginable ways.
Runs Until: Sunday January 19, 2020
Where: Emily Carr Institute
What: Emily Carr University and The Obakki Foundation present A Handful of Stories; an exhibition and series of public events that explores new ways for design to address and disrupt the single story of the global refugee crisis.
Runs Until: Sunday January 19, 2020
Lessons from the Arctic: How Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole
Where: Vancouver Maritime Museum
What: Lessons from the Arctic celebrates Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, the first person in history to both traverse the Northwest Passage (1903-06) and reach the South Pole (1910-12), paying special attention to the three years that he spent living with the Inuit.
Runs Until: Sunday January 19, 2019
Where: Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coastal Art
What: A solo exhibition of carvings, jewelry, and portraits by contemporary Ts’msyen artist Morgan Asoyuf. Asoyuf challenges the classical definition of the “royal portrait” with new photographs of activists wearing crowns, frontlets and headdresses.
Runs Until: January 19, 2020
Jillian Fargey, Andrew Wheeler, Kimberly Ho, and Darian Roussy | Photo by Matt Reznek
Firehall Arts Centre presents: House and Home
Where: Firehall Arts Centre
What: Jennifer Griffin’s biting, comic take on Vancouver’s current real estate crisis. Hilary, a waitress/poet turned social worker, and Henry, a Butoh dancer turned lawyer, didn’t know how lucky they were when they managed to escape bad roommates and buy a house before the real estate market skyrocketed. Finding themselves house rich and cash poor they abandon their values and plunge into the world of short-term rentals. How far can they go to keep their house?
Runs Until: Saturday January 25, 2020
Where: 43 W Hastings
What: Voted the Number 1 drag show, Absolut’ly Dragulous is a drag show mix of classic glamour to punk rock to legendary ballads. Hosted by Vancouver’s own legendary Queen of the West End Carlotta Gurl.
Runs Until: Saturday January 25, 2019
Burnaby Art Gallery presents ‘Echoes’
Where: Burnaby Art Gallery
What: As an echo reflects and repeats between entities, this exhibition considers communication between bodies which may be thought to be eclipsed. Here, the bodies of water and the physical remnants of stone, plastic, and land become the houses for the historical traces of change and continuity. Selected artworks contemplate the physical and embodied ways in which memory reappears and continues to resonate within the individual and across generations.
Runs Until: Sunday January 26, 2020
Courtesy of The Capilano Suspension Bridge Park
Canyon Lights at Capilano Suspension Bridge 2019
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. Once again the 30-ton Douglas firs of Treetops Adventure will receive star treatment. Treetops Adventure is a series of seven suspension bridges attached to eight 250 years old Douglas-firs with viewing platforms, reaching up to 110 feet above the forest floor. These magnificent Douglas firs will be lit above and below the collars, making these trees the eight tallest Christmas trees in the world!
Runs Until: Sunday January 26, 2020
Arts Club Theatre Company presents: The Shoplifters
Where: Granville Island Stage
What: Meet Alma, a career shoplifter who prefers the “five-finger discount” over any senior citizen’s deal. When a grocery store theft goes awry, her elaborate life of petty crime is halted by an overzealous security guard and his affable mentor. With sharp-witted comic observations, Morris Panych has expertly drawn a cast of misfit characters that will leave you rooting for all sides to come out on top.
Runs Until: Sunday February 9, 2020
Vancouver Art gallery presents Transit and Returns
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: Transits and Returns presents the work of 21 Indigenous artists whose practices are both rooted in the specificities of their cultures and routed via their travels. These forces of situatedness and mobility work in synergy and in tension with one another, shaping the multiple ways of understanding and being Indigenous today. Within the exhibition, these dual realities are explored through themes of movement, territory, kinship and representation, with many artworks inhabiting multiple categories.
Runs Until: Sunday February 23, 2020
Where: 1100 West Georgia Street
What: Vienna-based artist Erwin Wurm alters and re-envisions recognizable forms in order to challenge our psychological perceptions of what is well known, including our bodies and familiar architectural forms. This 19th installation in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite series will incorporate three sculptural works from Wurm’s oeuvre that highlight his wry sense of humour and his ongoing interest in the body. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, local artist Mike Bourscheid will develop a series of performative interventions.
Runs Until: Sunday February 23, 2020
Being Punjabi: Unfolding the Surrey Story
Where: Museum of Surrey
What: The first major exhibition in Canada to shine a spotlight on Surrey’s Punjabis, showcasing their stories of struggle and success. The exhibition is intended to be a catalyst for discussion and sharing, while also documenting histories of this diverse community.
Runs until: February 23, 2020
Where: The Polygon Gallery
What: Elizabeth Zvonar is a Vancouver artist who works extensively with collage techniques and sculpture. Zvonar draws material from a broad spectrum of sources to produce savvy, sardonic, and often comical juxtapositions that critique socio-cultural norms. Her works—vivid, colourful, and alluring—are examinations of subliminal power dynamics and ideologies in visual culture. Her exhibition, I Spy, features two new large-scale murals and recent photographic collages that allude to how we look at and make sense of photographs.
Runs Until: Sunday March 1, 2020
Where: Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre
What: Ambassadors, the first exhibition of its kind at the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, celebrates the staff family and faces of the Cultural Centre while highlighting their strong sense of connection to their land, their cultures, and each other. Visitors to the exhibit will learn about our Ambassadors’ deeply-rooted connections to our immersive Cultural Centre, and the passion they share in belonging to Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Lil’wat7ul.
Runs Until: Sunday March 1, 2019
Vancouver Art gallery presents Cindy Sherman
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery
What: This major exhibition explores the development of Cindy Sherman’s work from the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s to the present day. Widely regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, Sherman (b. 1954) manipulates her own appearance by deploying material inspired by a range of cultural sources, including film, advertising, and fashion.
Runs Until: Sunday March 8, 2020
Where: Cypress Mountain
What: Pizza, S’mores, Fire Pits, Music and more! Bring the whole family up and hang out, every Friday night.
Runs Until: Friday March 27, 2020
MOA Presents Playing with Fire: Ceramics of the Extraordinary
Where: Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC
What: Showcasing a group of 11 highly celebrated BC-based artists, this premiere exhibition of ceramic works, expresses strong opinions on urgent social issues and offers subtle perspectives on the state of our contemporary world. In Playing with Fire, the artists defiantly challenge the notion that all things made of clay are required to be functional; in their works, clay is released from this constraint and elevated into extraordinary works of art. Visitors are invited to explore the many layers of understanding each of these provocative works embody, boldly demonstrating clay’s myriad discursive possibilities.
Runs Until: Sunday March 29, 2020
Where: Cypress Mountain
What: Grab your skis and snowboards and get ready for some extra runs! Hours of operation have been extended until 10pm.
Runs Until: Tuesday March 31, 2020
Xuuya Gaada White Raven by Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson
Bill Reid Gallery: Out of Concealment
Where: Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art
What: Out of Concealment is a solo exhibition featuring the work of Haida artist, performer, activist, and lawyer Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson. Female Supernatural Beings of Haida Gwaii are re-imagined through photomontages, film, and sound to convey origin stories and oral traditions from the Haida Nation. Passed on from generation to generation, these are important narratives that illustrate the Haida laws, values, customs, rituals and relationships with earthly and metaphysical realms.
Runs Until: Sunday April 5, 2020
Ingrid Koenig – Navigating the Uncertainty Principle
CAG Presents Ingrid Koenig | Navigating the Uncertainty Principle
Where: Contemporary Art Gallery
What: Navigating the Uncertainty Principle is a major solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist and educator Ingrid Koenig, presenting large scale drawings across the gallery façade and off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse station.
Runs Until: Sunday April 5, 2020
Photo – Pardeep Singh, Vancouver Art Gallery
Where: The Vancouver Art Gallery
What: Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Rapture, Rhythm and the Tree of Life – Emily Carr and Her Female Contemporaries is on view from December 7, 2019 to June 28, 2020. Drawn primarily from the Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition presents an expanded view of the diverse creative practices of women in this region during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Presented in conjunction with Carr’s paintings of forest interiors are works by Indigenous creators such as Amy Cooper (Th’ewá:li), Mary Little (Nuu-chah-nulth), and Placida Wallace (Líl̓wat Nation).
Runs Until: Sunday June 28, 2020
What are you up to this weekend? Tell me and the rest of Vancouver in the comments.
