Round Out Your Vancouver 2010 Experience

Flash forward to January of 2010: Where will your interests take you? Cultural Olympiad 2010, presented by Bell, offers excitement for each of those fast-approaching days and nights.

The festival has just announced 35 additional projects for the arts and culture extravaganza, which begins January 22, 2010 and continues throughout the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, until March 21. The new events join the 20 others unveiled earlier this year, with a final batch to be announced in September.

By the time the festival is complete, Cultural Olympiad 2010 will feature more than 600 performances and exhibitions across British Columbia’s Sea to Sky corridor and Metro Vancouver.

To help fill up your cultural calendar, here are four experiences inspired by Cultural Olympiad programming. For schedules, venues and ticket details check the online event listings.

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A grand festival is all about forming partnerships. Consider The National Ballet of Canada and Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB), which will take the stage together for the first time in 20 years at the Cultural Olympiad’s Dance Canada Dance gala. RWB artistic director Andre Lewis helms one of North America’s most versatile and accomplished companies and artistic director Karen Kain will bring the full National Ballet to BC for its first visit since 2007: This will be an evening worth sharing, an opportunity to form new bonds watching old friends reconnect.

Meet New People

There is no one quite like Anthony Braxton. He is a virtuosic musician, a sophisticated composer and a mind-bending philosopher all rolled into one irrepressible package. His Sonic Genome Project, a world premiere performance, gives free rein to the audience to wander in and out and around as 60 instrumentalists, among them local students, express the human condition in an all-day musical meet-up.

Partie de danse

Get ready for some French fusion. The Lost Fingers, an acoustic trio out of Quebec City, wrap the gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt around ‘80s pop hits: Pump Up the Jam and Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean will never be the same. The Juno-nominated band has a new album out, Rendez-vous Rose, and will bring its infectiously fun live show to Cultural Olympiad 2010.

Rediscover a Magical Place

It is difficult to imagine a better setting than the Museum of Anthropology for an exhibition called Boundary and Translation. The refurbished and expanded landmark overlooks the border between land and water on the University of British Columbia campus and has documented and displayed human cultures for decades. Among the dozen creators reinventing this iconic space will be Tania Mouraud, a Parisian artist whose work is often inspired by the exhibition site. In 2010, at the Museum of Anthropology, she and her peers will have plenty to work with.

The full slate of Cultural Olympiad 2010 events, with ticket information, will be available online at vancouver2010.com/culturalolympiad as events are announced.