Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival: Win Tickets

The 16th annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival features over 100 events at over 40 locations over 12 days. From October 30th to November 10th, enjoy music, stories, theatre, poetry, cultural celebrations, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, mixed media, art talks, history talks and history walks.

Heart of the City Festival

When: Wednesday, October 30 to Sunday, November 10, 2019
Where: 40 locations across the Downtown Eastside

This year’s theme Holding the Light has emerged from the compelling need of DTES-involved artists and residents to illuminate the vitality and relevance of the Downtown Eastside community and its diverse and rich traditions, knowledge systems, ancestral languages, cultural roots and stories.

Festival Highlights

• The workshop production of Opening Doors – Vancouver’s East End 2019, a Firehall Arts Centre and Vancouver Moving Theatre production. Directed by Donna Spencer, Opening Doors features the dramatization of lived experiences of indigenous and settler women who lived, worked and raised families in the historic Vancouver East End, including selected personal histories from Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter’s extraordinary local legend-of-a-book Opening Doors first published in 1979.
• Urban Ink Productions’ workshop presentation of SRO by Middle of the Sky (aka Brenda Prince). The play uses a fascinating style to tell the story of an Indigenous woman trapped in a DTES SRO (Single-room-occupancy) and her efforts to escape from her circumstances. Presented in parallel with the SRO Indigenous Women’s Project, a week-long residency that features visual art, ceremony, discussion and live performance, led by Renae Morriseau with Sophie Merasty.
• Khari Wendell McClelland (The Sojourners/Freedom Singer) as the 2019 Festival Artist-in-Residence. Khari is curating a number of events, including a special music series that profiles an exciting and diverse line-up of local professional and emerging musicians.

The mandate of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival is to promote, present and facilitate the development of artists, art forms, cultural traditions, history, activism, people and great stories about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Follow the festival on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more info.

Win Tickets

I have a pair of tickets to give away to the opening night of ūtszan on October 31st at the Firehall Arts Centre. This passionate story about language and how it informs identity, follows the journey of a woman and her quest to reclaim her language. In the process, she uncovers Indigenous knowledge, humour, strength and resilience. ūtszan (to make things better) is written and performed by Yvonne Wallace (Lilwat) and directed by Jefferson Guzman.

Here’s how you can enter to win:

• Leave a comment on this post (1 entry)
• Click below to post an entry on Twitter

I will draw one winner at random from all entries at 12:00pm on October 23, 2019. UPDATE the winner is Jenn!