Vancouver marks Black History Month 2023 through the arts
Film screenings, concerts, a photo exhibition, a dance performance, and more explore Blackness throughout February
Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris.
Xaviera Simmons, Denver, 2008, chromogenic print. From As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo
Black History Month runs all throughout February, a period for people to learn from, honour, and celebrate Black communities, experiences, pasts, and futures. Here’s a handful of related arts events taking place in Vancouver.
Black History Month at VIFF Centre
February 1 to 28
VIFF Centre’s Black History Month programming for 2023 includes two series: Icons and Dispatches.
Icons highlights accomplishments of American movie stars like Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Samuel L Jackson, Angela Bassett, and Chadwick Boseman, among others. Look for screenings of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X; Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier; Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained; Purple Rain, Black Panther, and other titles.
Dispatches focuses on documentaries, ideas, and social justice, including work by and about James Baldwin (including 1970’s Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris) and Camille Billops. Also screening are two recent standout Canadian films: Dear Jackie, a cinematic letter to Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in Major League Baseball and a civil-rights activist; and Our Dance of Revolution, which tells the story of how Toronto's marginalized non-white gay and lesbians of the 1980s forged community, organized, and demanded recognition and equity.
Black History Month at VIFF launches with weeklong engagements of two of the most acclaimed movies of last year. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, from France (February 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 16) is a response to the 2013 news story of a 15-month-old girl found drowned on a beach and the French mother of Senegalese origin accused in her death. After a series of documentaries, this is the filmmaker’s first dramatic work, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year.
Margaret Brown’s Descendent (February 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9)—one of the five best documentaries of 2022, per the National Board of Review—zeroes in on the people of Africaville, Alabama, and in particular the descendants of the 110 slaves brought in aboard the Clotilda in 1860. This was the last known slave ship to transport kidnapped Africans to America as human cargo, an illegal shipment undertaken as a bet by a local landowner, Timothy Meaher, who burned and sank the boat to destroy the evidence.
Karin Jones, Worn, 2014-2015, hair extensions, cotton bolls, hair of the artist, from the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum, ROM AN#2016.13.1. Photo by Eydis Einarsdottir
Karin Jones: Ornament and Instrument
February 3 to April 16
Vancouver-based artist Karin Jones is known for her intricate, meticulous, and visually compelling work. Worn, on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum, is a Victorian mourning dress crafted from synthetic hair, evoking the complexity of African identity shaped by colonial displacement, slavery, and oppression. Connecting this work to the local, a new iteration of the work Freed utilizes an early-20th century dress from the Burnaby Village Museum collection. Jones’s background as a goldsmith is highlighted through Damascene inlay work on objects such as farm tools, with new pieces presented in mixed media exploring European beauty ideals, furthering her exploration of notions of beauty and race through fine craft.
The Black Arts Centre @ Club PuSh
February 3 from 9 pm to 1 am at Club PuSh at Performance Works
The Surrey-based Black Arts Centre collaborates for the first time with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival: curated by BLAC creative director Olumoroti George, the Club PuSh event marks the start of Black History Month. Vancouver-based DJ, artist, and community organizer Mada Phiri will be performing a three-hour set of music that reflects the diaspora and Black plurality. (Read more about the youth-led gallery and community site devoted exclusively to Black artists and its PuSh event in Stir’s feature article here.)
Songs of Freedom
February 4 from 7:30 to 10 pm at Christ Church Cathedral
Marcus Mosely and his ensemble present the 11th annual Black History Month concert: Songs of Freedom. The event features jazz legend Louise Rose and guests Khari McLelland, Noah Walker, Bill Sample, Tom Keenlyside, and more. In addition to her performance, Rose will direct a mass choir made up of workshop participants who will work with the icon on February 3 and the morning of February 4.
Naxx Bitota.
Issamba Showcase - The Ultimate Journey Through the Depths of African Rooted-Rhythms
February 19 at The Wise Hall & Lounge
The concert is presented by The African Art & Cultural Community Contributor Society (AACCCS), a Black-led arts and culture organization based in Victoria, which, since 2017, has been advocating for the International Decade for People of African Descent in B.C. As part of its Black History Month celebrations, the Vancouver performance features Mamadou Diabate and Percussion Mania. Diabate is a Burkina Faso-born, Vienna-based virtuoso of the balafon, a West African xylophone, who’s known for his fiery, frenzied playing that gets people up dancing. Also appearing is Naxx Bitota. Hailing from the Democratic Republic of Congo and now based in Quebec, the vocalist has been described as a cross between South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba and Whitney Houston.
Gregory Maqoma, Lubabalo Velebayi, Tshegofatso Khunwane, Xolisile Bongwana, and Zandile Hlatshwayo in Broken Chord. Photo by Lolo Vasco
Broken Chord
February 23 to 25 at 8 pm at Vancouver Playhouse
The dance-and-music piece by renowned South African choreographer-performer Gregory Maqoma and musical director Thuthuka Sibisi shares the forgotten history of The African Native Choir. The 16-member ensemble, in traditional African dress, toured the globe in the late 1800s, performing at such iconic venues as London’s Crystal Palace and for dignitaries like Queen Victoria. The group was on a mission to raise funds for a technical school in Kimberley, South Africa. Having its Canadian premiere in Vancouver, Broken Chord (presented by DanceHouse and Vancouver New Music) features the Vancouver Chamber Choir sharing the stage with four South African vocal soloists and Maqoma in a powerful exploration of the choir’s legacy while shedding light on migration and colonization.
Dawit L. Petros, Sign, 2003. Chromogenic print. From As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy of the artist/Bradley Ertaskiran
As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic
February 24 to May 14 at The Polygon Gallery
Curated by Elliott Ramsey, the exhibition features more than 100 photographs from the Wedge Collection, Canada’s largest privately owned collection committed to championing Black artists, founded by Dr. Kenneth Montague in 1997. The show features images of African diasporic culture from both sides of the Atlantic selected from Aperture’s recently published book of the same name. (Aperture is the exhibition’s organizer.) Highlights include images by iconic civil rights photographer Gordon Parks, Hasselblad Award-winner Malick Sidibé, influential portraitist Carrie Mae Weems, contemporary photographer and rising star Texas Isaiah (the first trans photographer to shoot a Vogue cover), and more.
Chan Centre EXP Black Futures: Saul Williams / Moor Mother / Irreversible Entanglements
February 25 at 7 pm at the Chan Centre’s Chan Shun Concert Hall
The next installment in the Chan Centre EXP series shares the visionary work of revolutionary artists Saul Williams, Moor Mother, and Irreversible Entanglements in a collaborative boundary-blasting concert of hip-hop, free jazz, blues, noise, and poetry. Williams is an acclaimed poet, hip-hop musician, producer, actor, and director who has performed everywhere from the White House to the Louvre, his art charged with social and political commentary. (His directorial debut, Neptune Frost, an ‘exhilarating Afrofuturist musical’, screens at The Cinematheque on February 23; see below.)
Moor Mother, the musical alias of Camae Ayewa, is a poet, musician, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, as well as the co-lead and vocalist of Irreversible Entanglements. Her latest album, Jazz Codes, explores Black musical history through a blend of hip-hop, blues, and jazz. Joining Moor Mother on stage are Vitche-Boul Ra, a self-described transhumanist folk-theurgist; vocalist Kyle Kidd; and her band, Irreversible Entanglements.
Neptune Frost
At The Cinematheque on February 23 at 7 pm
Neptune Frost is an Afrofuturist musical by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, which the Hollywood Reporter described as “The future of Black cinema”, utilizing “everything the medium of film has to offer—visually, sonically, and emotionally”. Presented by the Chan Centre in partnership with The Cinematheque in conjunction with the Chan Centre EXP’s concert Black Futures, the film is set in a sci-fi Burundi that portals into strange, interdimensional realms and tells of two cosmically connected runaways—an intersex hacker and a coltan miner. Together with an enclave of computer-foraging cyberpunks, they “seed a techno-revolution to topple industry and oppression”, according to a release. “The anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, bracingly queer work is the latest installment of American hip-hop poet Williams’s ‘MartyrLoserKing’ multimedia project. The film’s pulsating songs are drawn largely from his 2016 album. The ravishing cinematography, bathed in glow-stick neon hues, is by William’s co-director (and wife) Uzeyman.” Indigenous electronic collective The Halluci Nation (aka A Tribe Called Red) has a production credit; so does Lin-Manuel Miranda. In Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English with English subtitles.
National Film Board, Creating to Express Yourself
February 2 to 28 in person at various venues and online
NFBs theme for Black History Month this year is Creating to Express Yourself: A Spotlight on the Process of Creating a Work at the NFB.
Among the numerous offerings is a February 2 panel session—which is being livestreamed via the NFB’s YouTube channel—highlighting the creative process of five Black filmmakers: Will Prosper, Fredy (in production); Jorge Camarotti, Ousmane and Kinship; Stefan Varna, Night Watches Us; Laurie Townshend, Away with Words (in production); and Habibata Ouarme, Koromousso, Big Sister (in production).
Two specially curated, regularly updated playlists related to Black History Month are available at nfb.ca: Focus on Black Filmmakers, a collection of titles from Black filmmakers across Canada; and NFB Abroad: Africa on Screen, a selection of NFB films made across Africa that illuminate the continent and its people, arts, and culture, as well as Canadian intersections with Africa over the years.
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