After 11 years of bringing you local reporting, the team behind the Vancouver Observer has moved on to Canada's National Observer. You can follow Vancouver culture reporting over there from now on. Thank you for all your support over the years!

Tom Graff

Tom Graff is an art curator who also conducts and sings, classical to folk "world" musics. Until recently, his writing has been confined to curatorial essays, art articles, performance art scripts, or books on Readers' Theatre (historical quotations in performance in (mostly) museums). He makes a living by curating both in Canada and abroad, teaching voice, with a particular emphasis on "deeply vocal" thinking patterns while physically embodying one's singing or speaking. As well, he has recently found himself coaching artists and musicians how to master the business portions of their careers, from the shaping of their art and public persona, to writing and honing grants and budgets.

The Passion Project: Joan’s Story is in the Room

Reid Farrington’s The Passion Project is an electrifying work that compresses the entirety of Carl Dreyer’s classic silent film "The Passion Of Joan Of Arc" into a 30-minute concentration of movement,

Norma and Richard Bonynge Celebrate Vancouver Opera’s 50th

Two-timing tenor causes all the fuss as opera creates Norma manga, passes out memory sticks to the media, and blogs the night away.

Revalia, the 17-Year Old Conductor, and the Jealous Tubas and French Horns

From Vedran Smailovic, the cellist who played Bach in the cross-fire erupted streets of war-torn post-Olympics Sarajevo, to the non-jingoistic Country & Western ballads (and the responses to...

Haruki Murakami's After the Quake: A Surreal Play

Celebrated author Haruki Murakami, born in 1949, is one of many artists pointing outside Japan for inspiration to exist in the modern world. Isolation is his enemy.

Vangroovy Vancouver

When outsiders look at Vancouver, what do they see? (Read on.)

Bridge of Song: Revalia & Chor Leoni

Count yourself lucky if you are there this weekend to hear the best of Estonian choral singing meeting the best of Canadian men’s choirs in an unforgettable evening of music.  This weekend...

From Film to Fabulous: Arts Club Presents White Christmas

Take a movie and add some more famed Irving Berlin songs, some great tap dancing and perform it live. Put a creatively integrated band, enhanced with well-sampled and performed digital keyboards,...

45 Local Vancouver Artists Featured in 2009 Eastside Culture Crawl

What a difference a decade makes. The Eastside Culture Crawl officially began in 1997 with 45 artists in 3 Strathcona area studio buildings and was attended by a few hundred people, me amongst them...

Bravo! by Rosemary Cunningham is a Gem of a Book About Opera's British Columbian History

BC is the province with the largest per capita opera audience in the country. Lots of us cannot get enough opera, big or small. As the curtain rises and thrills us with the prospect of singers, costu

Vancouver Playhouse and The Miracle Worker: Helen Keller’s Mind and the Meaning of Annie Sullivan

They are not sure if it was scarlet fever or meningitis, but 19 months after her birth, Helen Keller could no more see or hear. Some 60 years later a play was written about Annie Sullivan joining the...