We are thrilled to announce the 23rd Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival!

For twenty-three 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 our 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 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 walks, and more! 

A couple of highlights in the upcoming 2026 Festival: 

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 run-down mobile home on the outskirts of a small northern town, an epic tale about a pair of siblings trying to escape a labyrinth built of shame and secrets unfolds. 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 spectacular 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.

Other exciting Festival highlights include: Indigenous Exhibition, hosted by Two-Spirit Grass Dancer Larissa Healey and Pow Wow Dancer Pavel Desjarlais; Life at OPS, a collection of videos by Nathaniel Canuel aimed at raising awareness about the importance of the Overdose Prevention Society (OPS); Marita Michaelis’ Live in Hell, a comitragic solo show featuring a self-obsessed She-Devil who confronts her own iconoclastic celebrity status as the ultimate scapegoat; 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 Sid’s collaborator, Byron Peters; Theatre Terrific’s gripping adaptation of Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984 Again.