Vancouver's Lumière Festival brings performing arts to outdoor, public spaces
The re-imagined fest features everything from pop-up flamenco to Persian jazz
Feven Kidane.
The 2022 Lumière Festival takes place November 17 to 27 at various outdoor venues in downtown Vancouver, West End, Yaletown, and Gastown
POP-UP FLAMENCO, RAP, parades, kaleidoscopic light installations, funk, and Persian jazz: these are just some of the things people strolling through downtown Vancouver, the West End, Gastown, and Yaletown might come across during the 2022 Lumière Festival. No two nights are the same, everything is outdoors, and all of the events are free. Re-envisioned with a focus on local artists, it’s all to bring performing arts to the public in unexpected places and easily accessible new ways.
At the helm as creative director is Julie-anne Saroyan, a Vancouver arts veteran whose experience includes being the creative producer of Dances for a Small Stage. The latter series premiered in 2002 at the Royal Pub on Granville Street (with Crystal Pite and Holy Body Tattoo) and has gone on to present a vast range of styles on “ridiculously small” stages anywhere but formal venues, indoors and out. During the pandemic, Saroyan led the Love Bubble Project, an outdoor pop-up experience with dance and music performed in illuminated domes in public spaces. Saroyan, who goes by “J.A.”, has applied the same ideas to the reimagined Lumière Festival.
Julie-anne Saroyan.
“I’ve always been really concerned with access,” Saroyan tells Stir by phone. “And there are no performing-arts festivals that are outside. We have a gap. It feels like people are hungry for this.
“Just before the pandemic, I started doing outdoor shows, busting out of the theatre and going to where people were,” she adds. “This evolved out of that. We need to actually connect with the general public. I feel very strongly we have to put arts in the community. That’s the future.”
“Dream the Future” is the theme for this year’s Lumière Festival. Over eight nights at 15 locations, 19 pop-up performances will take place, along with workshops and demonstrations, with participation from more than 55 artists.
The roster of creative talents—the Lumière Dreamers or “artistic warriors”, as Saroyan calls them—includes Zachery Cameron Longboy. The Two-Spirit performance and installation artist of Sayisi Dene lineage has designed a projection kaleidoscope that will appear at every show. Vancouver saxophonist and jazz impresario Cory Weeds has curated Dream Downtown (November 23), an evening of jazz at four sites. It features pianist Sharon Minemoto with Jon Bentley on saxophones, Darren Radtke on bass and Bernie Arai on drums; the Dave Sikula Trio; Shruti Ramani, who blends Indian and jazz traditions and who will be accompanied by Jodi Proznick on bass and Tilden Webb on piano; and Zephyr, led by vibraphonist Atley King with Andrew Skepast on guitar, Arvind Ramdas on drums, and David Caballero on bass.
Elsewhere, the marching band East Van Horns will fill the city centre with the sounds of tuba, sax, trumpet, trombone, and percussion while YVR Pop Choir brings its 70 diverse voices to the streets. Trumpet player Feven Kidane will perform alongside Harmeet Kaur Virdee (bass), Todd Stewart (drums), and Quincy Mayes (keys). All Bodies Dance Project, which connects artists with and without disabilities, will explore the choreographic possibilities of diverse ways of moving, expanding ideas of who dances and what dance can be.
Contemporary dancer Chengxin Wei, R’n’B singer-songwriter Krystle Dos Santos, rapper Missy D, dance troupe Mozaico Flamenco, and Persian soul singer Tissa Rahim are among the other artists taking part.
Some of their “stages” include šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl'e7énḵ Square (formerly Vancouver Art Gallery North Plaza), Jim Deva Plaza, Gastown’s Maple Tree Square and the area around the Steam Clock, and English Bay.
Saroyan says she was especially inspired to bring the performing arts outdoors after a trip earlier this year to the UK with friend and Vancouver Fringe Festival executive director Cory Philley, a member of Lumiere’s creative team. (Also in the group are Patrick Parra Pennefather, Kyrst Hogan [aka Burgundy Brixx], Mark Haney, and Tsatassaya White.) The two visited the Edinburgh Fringe and attended three outdoor arts festivals, all of them packed. “They’re doing it in the UK and people are coming to the arts outside, pandemic or not,” Saroyan says. “I just thought, ‘This is life-changing.’
“People in the performing arts sparkle things,” she adds. “We want to engage with the public in different ways and get the arts out to people.”
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