Heart of the City Festival Returns This November

For 23 years, the Heart of the City Festival has been grounded in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and focused on listening and learning from the community's cultural practices. The festival works with, for and about the Downtown Eastside community to carry forward the community’s stories, ancestral memory, cultural traditions, lived experiences and artistic processes, illuminating pathways of resilience.

This year’s theme, “Belonging,” celebrates the experience of being seen, heard, respected and valued for who you are. At the festival, “Belonging” is something we create together; it’s sharing stories, laughter, grief and joy. “Belonging” reminds us that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, compassion and respect.

Join us from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7 at the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, where we gather to share music, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, history tours and more.

Some 2026 festival highlights:

• Electric Company Theatre’s new play Epigone is a modern myth about complicated grief, stigmas of addiction and our responsibilities to the dead. In a rundown mobile home on the outskirts of a small northern town, an epic tale unfolds about a pair of siblings trying to escape a labyrinth built of shame and secrets. The brother’s mission is to save his sister; the sister’s mission is to save the world at a time of plague and widespread fear. The festival is excited to include a two-week run at the Russian Hall.
• Three video installations created by The Circle Project, a Vancouver-based association of artists and people with lived experience of incarceration committed to creating provocative art. Produced in collaboration with artists Adad Hannah and Jin-me Yoon, the installations are stimulating riffs on classic theatre that invite us to reimagine justice.
• Life at OPS, a collection of videos by Nathaniel Canuel aimed at raising awareness about the importance of the Overdose Prevention Society.
• Indigenous Exhibition, hosted by Two-Spirit grass dancer Lolita Bird (Larissa Healey), women’s northern traditional dancer Tanisha Shawna Pahtayken and powwow dancer Pavel Desjarlais.
• From the Archives of Sid Chow Tan, new selections from legendary Downtown Eastside documentarian and organizer Sid Chow Tan (1949-2022), with videos compiled by Tan's collaborator, Byron Peters.
• Marita Michaelis’s LIVE IN HELL, a comitragic solo show featuring a self-obsessed she-devil who confronts her own iconoclastic celebrity status as the ultimate scapegoat.
• Theatre Terrific’s gripping adaptation of George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984:AGAIN.

• A cornerstone of contemporary Canadian theatre, House by Daniel MacIvor, performed by Jonathon Paterson.

The 23rd annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival runs from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7. For more information, visit the festival’s website.