34th Annual Powell Street Festival
Saturday, July 31st and Sunday, August 1st, 2010
11:30 am to 7 pm
Oppenheimer Park (400 block Powell Street)

Download the schedule (1.1 MB) and the full programme (3.8 MB) as printed in The Bulletin.

The Powell Street Festival is heading home! After last year’ one-year relocation to Woodland Park, the Powell Street Festival will return to its traditional home in the newly-renovated Oppenheimer Park. Taking inspiration from the Japanese notion of Koen debut, or Park debut, whereupon neighbourhood toddlers are introduced to their local community, the 34th Annual Powell Street Festival celebrates the idea of neighbourhood, youth, children, the park and its landscape.

Festival Weekend Highlights

Cross-disciplinary collaboration by Toronto-based contemporary dancer Andrea Nann and Vancouver theatre artist Maiko Bae Yamamoto • World premiere of the Podplay Ground Zero, a downloadable audio theatre piece (320 kbps or 128 kbps) by NeWorld Theatre (Vancouver) • Performances by local bluegrass band Shout!WhiteDragon, butoh innovators Kokoro Dance (Vancouver), New York singer Yoko Kikuchi, Katari Taiko (Vancouver) with Mario Zetina, and many more • Screening of award-winning video art from Japan

Zero Waste + Bike Valet

Join Powell Street Festival’s 3rd year with its Zero Waste Challenge! In addition to providing a free Bicycle Valet to all Festival attendees, the Festival serves all food and drinks sold on site in compostable or recyclable containers. Compost and recycle at the Festival and help us reduce our garbage output by over 80%!

The Bicycle Valet service is a free, safe and secure solution for event goers. It allows attendees to store all non-motorized transportation while they enjoy an event without the worry of where they lock or store their bike.

It’s quite simple. Patrons sign a claim check, give us their bike and keep the stub. When they want to leave, they bring back the stub and their bike/belongings are returned. For more info, go to www.thebicyclevalet.com.

This Year’s Theme

Park/Koen

Returning to its traditional home in Oppenheimer Park after a one-year relocation, Powell Street Festival Society (PSFS) will celebrate its return and its 34th year with the theme of Park/Koen. As important places of congregation and community, Oppenheimer Park is a source of escape, celebration and rejuvenation. Heralding the city-directed and community-based renovation of Oppenheimer Park, PSFS looks back to its grassroots origins and to its future as a community-based organization and presenter of challenging experimental arts. Like Oppenheimer Park where nature meets cultivation, PSFS’ 34th year celebrates the confluence between the wilder side of artistic expression as well as the more refined traditional forms of art.

Oppenheimer Park is inseparable from the organization’s 1970s birth. It is the locus of the formerly-named Powell Grounds, and is the centre of Vancouver’s early 20th century Japantown, once a busy gathering site for baseball games and big community gatherings. 2010 aims to re-entrench the stable roots of the past and build strong local connections, reflecting on this newly seeded and reborn environment. Taking inspiration from the Japanese notion of Koen debut, or Park debut, whereupon neighbourhood toddlers are introduced to their local community, PSFS will focus particularly on the idea of neighbourhood, youth, children, the park and its landscape itself. The season’s many shades of Park themed events begins with the artistic collaboration between Andrea Nann and Maiko Bae Yamamoto who perform a new interdisciplinary work set in the historic Vancouver Japanese Language School (located nearby the Park), a new series of youth-directed and community-based theatrical PodPlays set in the Oppenheimer area by NeWorld Theatre, performances by local bluegrass band Shout!WhiteDragon, and the experimental performance and public interactive exchange by Tochka Factory. This series of events planned for 2010 will bring in new artists and create many opportunities for creative collaborations.

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