The actors in A Downtown Eastside Romeo and Juliet are clearly learning a lot from their director, Gina Bastone, who is one of Vancouver’s favourite clowns.

Starving polar bears, fatal hurricanes, droughts: the news about climate change is rarely uplifting. Even the most dedicated crusader runs the risk of fatigue when faced with the task of trying to do right by our planet.

Three leading figures in the arts community give their views on a city at a cultural crossroads.

Critics' Picks

Indo-Canadian singer Kiran Ahluwalia wants her husband, Rez Abbasi, to get his artistic due. After last year’s release of her third album, Wanderlust, the media focused almost exclusively on the more exotic new elements in the music, such as the use of Portuguese fado musicians on three tracks and the trancelike Saharan groove of “Teray Darsan”. But they overlooked the contribution of her guitarist spouse, whose influence on the recording is everywhere.

Josh Epstein is a rising musical-comedy star, but he won’t perform in his latest project, Edges: A Song Cycle. Instead, he’s producing it, and he says it’s the scariest career move he has ever made.

The Chutzpah! Festival opens up the Facebook generation’s anxious heart with Edges: A Song Cycle

John Alleyne hadn’t taken a vacation in four years, but that wasn’t the only reason he found himself stuck in a hole of deep emotional darkness last year. Aside from the daily pressures of keeping a major arts organization relevant in a world of funding constraints and attention-challenged audiences, he’d recently lost both of his parents.

Roy Kiyooka, the subtly influential Japanese Canadian painter, poet, photographer, musician, educator, and philosopher, died in 1994 at the age of 67. But among the creators of Marginalia: Re-visioning Roy Kiyooka, Vancouver New Music’s Alcan Performing Arts Award–winning celebration of the late artist’s life, there’s a sense that his work lives on—and that he does, too.

Turkey’s acclaimed video artist Kutlug Ataman explores the themes we use to create the stories of our lives

Purged by fire and then by successive waves of development, Vancouver does not have many haunted places. If ghosts exist, however, Gastown’s Blood Alley is where they will be found. Home to the city’s first jail and a long-time refuge for the down-and-out, it has a dark aura that persists to this day—as Vancouver-based actor, choreographer, and dancer Byron Chief-Moon found out one night in 2005.

Kicking off the Cultural Olympiad, a myth-rooted piece of music gives voice to a sensational sculpture by Bill Reid

Forty-eight Tsimshian First Nation artifacts, collected in 1863 by the missionary Robert J. Dundas, are revisiting their place of origin, the Northwest Coast. During their long absence, these items sat in the curiosity cabinets of Dundas’s descendants in Scotland and England

Your couch is okay, but it doesn’t have the crazy pull of the PuSh festival, the cool of Feist, or the lure of Chinese dragons.

Everyone loves a silver-lining story, and here's a good one: 81 years after the fact, Dal Richards sounds almost grateful for the terrible loss that helped him find his life's true path. The year was 1927. The place was Vancouver's Marpole neighbourhood, close to the banks of the Fraser River's north arm.