Anyone watching the opening ceremonies would be forgiven for thinking that Canada is a nation of English-speaking, fiddle-playing white people who get along well with the First Nations minority and, oh yeah, have some happy Francophones in their midst as well. There were a fair number of comments following the ceremonies expressing disappointment that our country’s diversity wasn’t better represented. Hopefully, they said, this would be rectified in the closing ceremonies. Silly people.

The current exhibit of photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank at the Japanese Canadian National Museum raises intriguing questions. The juxtaposition of those two sets of images is a powerful statement about how the same type of event can be represented so differently, depending on what perspective one is taking. This is particularly relevant for me right now, because I am one of a group of researchers who has been looking for historical photographs to include in a computer software program that is designed to support reminiscence-based conversations for …

Every edition of the Vancouver International Dance Festival has something for everybody, i.e., there is a wide variety of dance expression. But every VIDF also has works by artists who work outside of the focus of mainstream arts. These are the artists that are often the unknown treasures of our programming. In this year’s VIDF, there are two solo dancers, both accompanied by musicians, one from California and one from Denmark, that are well worth checking out. Kitt Johnson from Copenhagen, accompanied by Swedish composer/musician Sture Ericson explores the primordial …

Recently voted “Best Place to Whip up some Art” in the Georgia Straight reader’s poll, Blim is an independent  community-based art resource center that has been operating for the past seven years out of a small storefront on Main Street. The multi-use space is used for any number of creative activities including screen-printing, button making, drawing, knitting, local underground audio, film screenings, animation, video, dance, spoken word, visual art, creative workshops, and crafts, in fact, just about anything you can think of that fits into the independent, creative field.
Blim has …

I never met Lois Hashimoto, but was saddened to hear of her passing on January 8th in Laval, Québec. Lois was a regular contributor to the letters-to-the-editor section over the years, firing off an e-mail whenever she was offended by an article in The Bulletin. She seemed to have a soft-spot for me for some reason, but there were definitely issues that pushed her buttons.
I remember she came down hard on me one time about a statement I made in a piece I had written about the internment. I don’t …

by Diane Kadota
Recent cuts to arts funding in BC have had a terrible effect, threatening community arts organizations that have few other sources of funding to support their public programs and activities.
One such group is Katari Taiko, started 30 years ago by a group of young Asian Canadians eager to reclaim part of their cultural heritage lost during the war and the subsequent largely unconscious drive to assimilate.
Members volunteer their time, attending up to three weekly sessions to rehearse and develop original taiko music. Almost all of the group’s repertoire …

Funding the Arts . . .
by Jay Hirabayashi
The BC Government has slashed funding to the arts by 80 to 90 percent over the next two years. 40% of those cuts will be to the BC Arts Council, which funds companies like Kokoro Dance. Gaming funds through Direct Access grants will be cut completely by next year. We will lose $50,000 in funding support from Gaming alone. We will taxed further, when the HST is implemented in July, for things that previously were not taxed such as tickets to arts events. …

Tenth Anniversary of the Vancouver International Dance Festival

We started the VIDF to strategically develop a sustaining audience for dance and to put Vancouver on the international map of dance. Our company, Kokoro Dance, had developed its own audience but its numbers had peaked with the 1,848 people that came to see Sunyata in 1997. Audiences for dance were dwindling after that high water mark. Part of the reason was that there were increasingly infrequent occasions when touring companies would pass through Vancouver. Vancouver audiences and dance artists needed to be …

When we examine the arts, we generally talk in terms of vision, of creativity, even entertainment value. Sometimes the arts thrill us. Sometimes they infuriate us. Hopefully they make us feel. What we don’t often talk about, or even think about, is arts and culture as a component of the business sector and the economy. If we do stop to think in terms of dollars and cents, the image of the starving artist comes readily to mind. Indeed, many artists live close to the bone, often supplementing their art-derived income …

Happy New Year to our members, readers, advertisers and amazing volunteers. With the noughties behind us (a somewhat unappealing name, but I’ve yet to hear anything better), we head into a decade that promises to be as wild and filled with uncertainty as the last one. As for The Bulletin, we enter our 52nd year with an ongoing mandate of serving the Canadian Nikkei community with news, commentary and community profiles. Thanks to everyone for your continued support.

File under Rats Deserting a Sinking Ship
Not to be outdone by the tabloids, …