The once-small-scale Winter Solstice Lantern Festival now illuminates six separate neighbourhoods on the darkest night

What began 13 years ago as a small collective effort to light up the darkest day of the calendar has grown into a constellation of events spread out over the city. Tomorrow night (December 22), the Secret Lantern Society’s annual Winter Solstice Lantern Festival will encompass six unique Vancouver neighbourhoods: Granville Island (where the event was founded), the West End, Yaletown, Chinatown, Strathcona, and, with a newly expanded program, the Commercial Drive area. Like any constellation, each part will have its own centre of gravity, drawing people in its area together. (Check out www.secretlantern.org/ for complete listings, and see sidebar below.)

“You have to take what’s special about each neighbourhood and make that the focus,” artistic director Naomi Singer told the Straight in a recent conversation at the Roundhouse Community Centre, the hub of this year’s Yaletown program. “It’s not a cookie-cutter event that you just drop into each neighbourhood.”

All of the family-oriented activities feature live music from around the world as well as processions of local residents carrying lanterns, many of them made in workshops the society has hosted in recent weeks. Three processions in Yaletown, for example, meet up at False Creek’s David Lam Park and head over to the Roundhouse Community Centre for the 600-candle “labyrinth of light” and performances by Squamish Nation singer Cease Wyss and mythmaking theatre company Mortal Coil, among others. Meanwhile, processions starting from the Strathcona Community Centre and Science World join at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, where the Celtic harp of Jill Legge and jazz from Saul Berson and Paul Blaney will drift over a landscape illuminated by some of the city’s most innovative lantern artists. And, in the most ambitious addition to the program this year, the East Side’s Britannia Community Centre is the gathering point for processions flowing from small public concerts by such artists as Orchid Ensemble and the Adama Trio, all held in Grandview-area homes.

These concerts stem from a new partnership between the Secret Lantern Society and In the House (www.inthehousefestival.com/), the one-of-a-kind performing-arts event run by artistic director Myriam Steinberg. According to Singer, there’s a seamless fit between her own project and Steinberg’s, an intermittent series launched in 2003 that uses the living rooms and back yards of Vancouver homes as venues for everything from theatre and dance to film screenings and comedy.

“I want the lantern festival to stay small and really be integrated into the community, so when I went to Myriam’s In the House festival in the summer, I thought, ‘This is perfect,’” Singer said. “Each audience will have the opportunity to be a little lantern procession [to Britannia]. The idea is that it’s so intimate inside each house’s concert setting that it becomes a new little group of people that has an association and familiarity with each other through the shared experience.”

Steinberg, who joined Singer in conversation with the Straight, was quick to point out the similarity between her colleague’s goals and her own. Both Secret Lantern and In the House, she said, strive for a kind of artistic cross-pollination that fosters new bonds between citizens in a town that’s both diverse and growing fast.

“I think these events kind of bubble out of the ground and become all the more powerful and large because there’s a huge craving for community-oriented festivities,” explained Steinberg, who will be hosting two sets by the group Mariachi Romantico in her own home tomorrow night. “That’s really a lot of what In the House is about. You’re exposed to things that you would never necessarily realize exist in Vancouver. It’s the most amazing city for the amount of performers per capita and the different genres that exist here, so this is a really good platform for them to get out there and be exposed to various audiences.…I think people are saturated with Top 40, so it’s just about exploring new worlds.”

Each of the new worlds in tomorrow night’s little galaxy will offer celebrations that have little to do with the commercial holiday rituals that create a blend of exhaustion and passivity. “You’re not shopping, not watching television, not consuming something plastic,” Singer noted. “You’re participating—that’s the key to all of this.”