Article, Community, Arts & Culture
Threads of Connection: 2024 Heart of the City Festival Recap
Between October 30th to November 10th this year, the 21st annual Heart of the City festival animated the Downtown Eastside with over a hundred community-oriented events under the theme Threads of Connection.
SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement was delighted to once again partner with the Festival and host a variety of events in our space!
Louise Noguchi: Eyes Locked: Hunter and Prey
To kick off the festivities with a pre-festival event, multidisciplinary visual artist Louise Noguchi was joined in conversation with moving image artist Midi Onodera on Friday, October 25.
For over forty years, Louise Noguchi has been inspired by the contradictions of identity, employing humor, shock, and subtle intellect manifested in a multiplicity of media: sculpture, the moving image, photography, text, drawing and performance art. In Noguchi’s own words, her “work is a battleground of opposites. The artist as hunter and prey simultaneously.”
In the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Louise and Midi chat about the context of artmaking in the 1980s, the politics of identity, and their brief overlap as some of the few Japanese-Canadian artists at Ontario College of Art (now OCAD). Louise shares a selection of her work, drawing on the recurring themes of “hunter” and “prey” that show up throughout her career.
Louise Noguchi’s talk is part of the pilot program, The Japanese Canadian Legacy Artists Talk Series presented by the Asian Canadian Studies Society.
2024 Warren Gill Lecture: Belongings Matter
On October 30, SFU Geography professor Nick Blomley presented the 2024 Warren Gill Memorial Lecture, Belongings Matter. He was later joined in conversation with Connie Long, an Indigenous advocate for vulnerable communities with lived experience who organises in Chilliwack and Abbotsford, and Alexandra Flynn, associate professor and director for the UBC Housing Research Collaborative. Nicholas Blomley was also awarded the 2023 Warren Gill Award for Community Impact.
During the lecture, Nick presented the findings from Belongings Matter, a Canada-wide research project that sought to document and explain the systematic confiscation and devaluation of houseless people’s belongings. Much of his empirical work concerns the often oppressive effects of legal relations on marginalized and oppressed people. This research ultimately led to the creation of belongingsmatter.ca, an online resource containing both the report as well as written and verbal testimonials from community members vulnerable to street sweeps.
Wayfaring Stranger, a film by Andrea Luka Zimmerman
On November 1, filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman made her return to the Heart of the City festival with a showing of Wayfaring Stranger, her latest film that charts the life of an itinerant character, embodied by seven performers, across seven days, representing seven decades.
This event was co-presented with Reel Causes, and featured a specially recorded pre-show message from Andrea herself, all the way from Berlin.
The Carnegie Dance Troupe & Karen Jamieson Dance: Threads of Connection
This year’s Carnegie Dance Troupe performance is a milestone, as it commemorates the transition from Karen Jamieson’s 18 years of leadership of Karen Jamieson Dance to new mentoring facilitator Rianne Svelnis. On Sunday, November 3, the Carnegie Dance Troupe presented their latest work-in-progress, inspired by this year’s Heart of the City theme Threads of Connection.
This year’s performance also includes the debut choreographic work of Deborah Charlie, a current and longstanding performer of Karen Jamieson Carnegie Dance Troupe. Deborah presents Deer Dance, a powerful performance honouring the Spirit of the Deer, featuring dancers RavenWing (Lorelei Hawkins), Heather Blais, and Deborah Charlie, with production support by Lance Lim (Pigeon Art Collective).
The Carnegie Dance Troupe is part of Karen Jamieson Dance, and partners with the Carnegie Community Centre and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
The Brutal Joy: Performative Lecture by Justine A. Chambers
On November 9, as the closer for SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement’s programming with the Festival, we were honoured to have Justine A. Chambers lighting up the Gathering Space at 312 Main St. In this performative lecture, Justine spoke to, gestured and danced around and with her current choreographic project, The Brutal Joy.
The Brutal Joy unfurls Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living. The Brutal Joy explores these diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs and outward facing, physically dialogic activations that allow for actualizing oneself at present in a dance of future possibilities. Centering dance and attire as relational and living counter-archives, the work considers movement and personal style as tools for self-determination and the collective reclamation of Black humanitarian value.
The lecture was concluded with an electric group performance of the Electric Slide!
And that's a wrap for this year's Festival!
Thank you for joining us this year for these incredible events activating arts and culture in the Downtown Eastside. We look forward to next year's programming, and we hope to see you there!
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