By Raynee Novak

Boasting over 100 events that showcase the artistic richness of its community, the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

The 12-day festival, launching late October, “showcases a lot of the people that are there and in the community itself,” says Tony Wilson, who created a piece that is part of the festival.

As a long-running community arts festival, Heart of the City comes directly from the people in the neighbourhood, rooted in cultural practices, stories, and ancestral memories. Lived experiences and artistic processes are at the forefront of the countless events that span more than 40 venues across the Downtown Eastside, alongside some digital presentations.

The theme of this year’s festival is “Grounded in Community, Carrying it Forward” and uses music, stories, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, and history walks to spread this message.

Wilson himself takes part in the festival with his multimedia presentation, The Homeless Project. It will feature 10 artists playing music, plus a narrator, a sign language interpreter, and film and photography components. The film portion is being done by award-winning filmmaker Michael McKinlay.

“The narration is just about the fact of the number of homeless in Vancouver, the Lower Mainland, and also throughout Canada,” says Wilson, “Some of the narration was written by my daughter… she experienced being homeless in her teenage years.”

Events run the gamut from silly to serious. Take Famous Last Words, which features Sara Bynoe (host of long-running Teen Angst at the Fox) judging five raconteurs over a series of literary and comedy games. It’s classic light-hearted fun, which contrasts with some of the heavier programming, like the staged workshop reading of Battle of Ballantyne Pier. The new musical explores the 1935 Vancouver longshore workers’ strike that injured 60 people, but had wider ramifications in the labour movement and governmental anti-perceived-communist crackdown.

Other historical events include the Cultural Tributaries Building Tour: a guided walk through Chinatown’s Lim Association building that examines the intersections of art, community, and labour in the neighbourhood; and Insite 20: Then and Now, a speakers corner-style documentary and discussion reflecting on two decades of the groundbreaking supervised consumption site.

There’s also plenty of contemporary art and culture to take in. Consider We Live Here II, a large-scale outdoor installation of video and art from BIPOC youth and other local residents projected on the wall of a building, situating artists very literally in their communities to demonstrate their presence.

For Wilson, the festival isn’t just about having a nice time. He hopes that attendees take away something deeper, too, and “develop some empathy for the community itself, and especially for the people that are involved or trying to shine light on a very real problem.”

That kind of spirit is on obvious display with documentary screenings of Ryan Sudds’ Stop the Sweeps and Nat Canuel’s Smokey Devil—Underworld Street Reporter, which both highlight resistance and resilience in the Eastside through following the work of local activists and artists.

An even-more up-to-date event, Spontaneous Street Poetry, has writer and activist Gilles Cyrenne and Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam set up shop on the sidewalk outside Carnegie Community Centre to host three days of responsive writing, collaborating with passersby to simply see what happens.

At a time when bad-faith concerns for public safety are disproportionately leveraged against poor and marginalized people, Heart of the City reminds us that its name is apt: the Eastside is the haunting, hopeful heart of Vancouver. 

“There are people that are disadvantaged, people that are drug addicted, and may need help. We need to help them,” Wilson says, “And I think the festival is a place where they shine a light on that.” GS

The Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival takes place at various locations around the Downtown Eastside from October 25 to November 5.