If, over the next couple of weeks, you find yourself wondering where your favourite performers have gone, you might want to start scouring for cheap flights out east. Because, from Tuesday (April 21) to May 3, Ottawa is being inundated with the largest gathering of B.C. artists ever assembled outside the province, in the multidisciplinary B.C. Scene festival being presented by the National Arts Centre.

Featuring 600 artists from music, theatre, dance, visual and media arts, literature, and even culinary arts, the event will see our province’s cultural workers take over more than 30 venues for 90 events around the nation’s capital in the fourth biennial “Scene”. The first, in 2003, focused on Atlantic Canada; in 2005 Alberta took centre stage; and 2007 highlighted Quebec. This year, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, punk band NoMeansNo, Haida manga artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, photographer Stephen Waddell, experimental theatre group Theatre Replacement, choreographer Wen Wei Wang, spoken-word artist C. R. Avery, and chef Robert Clark represent just a tiny sampling of the range and diversity of the talent heading to the capital.

“Essentially, just about everywhere you go, what you’re seeing [in Ottawa] is going to be B.C.,” notes Heather Moore, the event’s producer and executive director, who has spent the past two years planning for and organizing the festival. For participants, she says, “there’s something about playing in the nation’s capital and playing at the National Arts Centre that still can mean something. On a practical level, if you’re talking about bands and companies, it’s hard to tour out east. A lot of these smaller groups, for instance, they’ll go to Alberta or they’ll go south from B.C., but we’re getting them over the hump.”¦They’re all getting gigs in Toronto and Montreal. We’re getting them here and they’re able to sort of branch out from here. So on a practical level it’s really helpful for them to be able to do that.”

The VSO, for example, performs at B.C. Scene with local young piano prodigy Avan Yu on May 1 before heading to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City. The concerts, which include Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Jeffrey Ryan’s The Linearity of Light, and Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, mark the orchestra’s first eastern tour in 30 years. “We haven’t been to those cities since 1979,” says the orchestra’s president and CEO, Jeff Alexander, noting that the invitation from B.C. Scene provided the impetus to secure funding and sponsorship for the rest of the tour.

Theatre Replacement has also managed to piggyback dates in Toronto and Montreal following its B.C. Scene performances of Bioboxes (April 22 to 25). But just as important, explains the company’s co–artistic director Maiko Bae Yamamoto, is the chance to catch the notice of the various international presenters who will be attending the festival. “It’s another opportunity to show work that we’re trying to market internationally in a really great venue, in an optimal situation,” she explains. “That’s pretty much how we’ve been booking the show—presenters see us at festivals and they are interested in the work and they get in touch and we get booked somewhere else.”

According to Moore, presenters from 17 countries, including China and France, are being flown in. “They’re coming here to buy,” she says. “There are always very tangible bookings that come out of these Scenes directly.”

That’s music to the ears of Bernard Sauvé, general manager of Eponymous, which manages Wen Wei Dance and Kidd Pivot, among other Vancouver-based performing-arts groups. Kidd Pivot will be unveiling a new work at B.C. Scene on April 24 and 25, while Wen Wei Dance will present Cock-Pit from April 30 to May 2. “They all know that Crystal [Pite, artistic director of Kidd Pivot] has a new piece, and”¦it’s an opportunity for Wen Wei to be able to show his piece to different presenters and try to book some tours for the future,” says Sauvé.

Along with the serious business of booking gigs and entertaining audiences, there’s one more aspect of B.C. Scene that Moore is hoping performers take time to enjoy: the social side. “We have late-night sessions at the hotel, and it’s great to see the choreographers mixing with the rock bands,” she says. After a less raucous Quebec Scene, during which performers tended to commute to Ottawa rather than stay the night in the city, Moore is hoping for some hopping nightlife: “I throw out the challenge to B.C. artists when they come here to party.”