Sep 5
9月5日
Sep 6
9月6日
(North of the Vancouver Art Gallery)
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
An all-ages street dance program celebrating youth expression, creativity, and community through dance. The program features a Rookie Open Styles Dance Battle, performances by local Vancouver dance teams, and a community cypher showcase.
The Rookie Battle provides an accessible platform for emerging dancers to develop their freestyle skills, build confidence, and connect with the local dance community. Featured performances will highlight the diversity and talent within Vancouver’s dance scene, while the cypher showcase invites dancers of all ages and backgrounds to participate in a shared space of movement and creative exchange.
Inspired by this year’s festival theme exploring Scotland’s influence on Canadian communities, LINK UP reflects the traditions of gathering, connection, and shared experience. Through battle, performance, and participation, the program creates an inclusive environment where young people can build community, express themselves, and celebrate the power of dance to bring people together.
Artists:
Judge: Sevrin Sev
MC: Sophia Sosa
DJ Ice B
Performers:
Dancin’ Stars School of Performing Arts
Barangay Project Society
Barangay Project Society is a non-profit organisation that provides, highlights and nurtures Canadian dance artists and other artforms through Dance festivals and mentorship programs. Our purpose is to build interconnections, create bridges and long lasting relationships with all kinds of artists all over the world. We aim to advance an equitable society for all kinds of Artists through our continuous efforts by providing job opportunities and equitable pay to local artists of Vancouver, BC and all of Canada.
Barangay Project Society is led and founded by interdisciplinary Filipina artist and first generation immigrant Sophia Sosa in September 2020. Since its establishment, Barangay Project has successfully hosted 3 successful arts festivals in Vancouver, BC showcasing local talents through curated dance and musical performances, dance battle events, mentorships and panel discussions. For the last 4 years, with the continued support of the BC Arts Council and Canadian Heritage, Barangay Project Society consistently hosts an annual dance festival called “MOVE TOGETHER” that invites multidisciplinary artists to gather from all over the world through a 5-day experience that includes free dance workshops, performances and panel discussion from local Canadian Artists, as well as international artists.
MC: Sophia Sosa
Sophia Laurio also known as “Sosa”, is a Filipina interdisciplinary artist. With a heavy focus on dance and its multiple forms, Sophia is a versatile movement artist that explores a wide variety of dance styles like Hip Hop, House, Waacking, Locking, Afro-Dancehall and Contemporary dance.
Judge: Sevrin Emnacen-Boyd
Sevrin Emnacen-Boyd is a Filipino-Canadian b-boy, dance artist, and an enthusiast of all things rhythmic and expressive. With over twenty years of experience in Vancouver’s street dance scene, Sevrin has sought to support this community over the years through organizing a number of youth-oriented street dance battles with the City of Surrey as well as events in collaboration with VIDF, Dance West Network and CADA/West. He is an active member of Vancouver’s Now Or Never Crew, Scndrlz, and Think Twice Japan.
Performers: Dancin’ Stars School of Performing Arts
Established in 2001, we offer small class sizes with highly qualified instructors. We are an Award Winning Studio with state of the art sprung floors spread across approximately 5,700 sq. feet! Dancers of all levels and ages are welcome. Recreational or competitive we have it all: from Hip Hop, Ballet, and Break dancing.
DJ Ice B
Our programming joins this year’s festival theme, “Islands in the Wind,” creating a dialog with the shared histories of islands and coasts through music. Historically, these shores have been the first site of cultural sharing and mixing before reaching the mainland, a space of hybridization. Yet while these places have, from time immemorial, welcomed exchange with visitors and newcomers, their inhabitants also share common stories of colonization, carrying the memories and echoes of violence and alienation that arrived on their ancestral seas and land, and in many cases suffering from modern versions of these realities.
For this third year of programming, we are inviting local audiovisual artists from the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan diasporas as part of the curatorial exchange and opening a dialog with these themes. Through this programming, we intend to open a space for artists and the audience to interpret and weave together these stories of resistance, care, and stand together in solidarity.
** Part of TAIWANfest’s Queer Night Programming, this performance will feature drag artist openers Wanting Moi & Awesome Bitch.
Performers:
Max Ammo – AKA El Ángel Exterminador
Elias Musiak – AKA Jaijiu
Apple Cabrera AKA IHA
Michelle La – AKA Ephemeral Objects
Laine Butler – VJ
Clara – VJ
Xiumei – DJ
Mikubat
5000 BPM – DJ
Max Ammo - AKA El Ángel Exterminador (MEX via VAN)
Max Ammo (they/them) is a non-binary audiovisual artist and curator from “Mexico City.” With over 10 years of working professionally as a graphic designer and illustrator, they’ve been closely working and inspired by the underground music scene in both CDMX and “Vancouver.” In 2021, they launched their DJ project “El Ángel Exterminador” as a response to the lack of bookings of Latinx artists in the city.
Elias Musiak - AKA Jaijiu (ARG via MTL)
Elias Musiak AKA Jaijiu is an audiovisual artist hailing from the depths of Soundcloud and Argentina. Influenced by the Argentine club sound, Jaijiu reimagines what folklore could sound if you hit it with a hammer and recorded it. He has worked alongside colleagues in Buenos Aires to find a new sound that is rapidly spreading to other hemispheres. In 2019 along with these peers they started a record label called “Rebote” which encompasses music productions representing these sounds that have been brewing all across Latin America.
NAGA
Naga is a multimedia arts and music imprint and collective established on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Since 2023, they’ve operated on the fringes of ambient, bass, and broken beats, with releases by Siadic and Enereph gaining international recognition for their artistry and for blending the lines between club and listening music. Centered around immersive multi-sensory environments and collective artmaking, their events explore these same values, inviting their audience into unexpected and otherworldly realms- a feast for their senses.
Apple Cabrera AKA IHA
IHA (they/them) is an arts and music curator based in Vancouver, BC.Inspired by the west coast underground community and nature, they apply organic flow and methods, dreams, mythology, and cultural memory as a Filipinx diaspora to their work.
Michelle La - AKA Ephemeral Objects
A Chinese-Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist, producer, DJ, VJ, and curator. She has been a collaborator of artists across Canada, and has performed live visuals along the West Coast. She is half of the a/v project and DJ duo i+eo with IHA. She facilitates workshops and mentors emerging VJs, and co-runs Acceleration Radio.
Laine Butler - VJ
Laine Butler (he/him) is an audio visual artist whose multidisciplinary approach creates dense, textured environments that envelop the viewer. Laine’s work has been showcased, including Centre Phi Montreal, the Vancouver Mural Festival Winter Arts, Holt Renfrew Winter 2022 Campaign, Neo Shibuya TV in Tokyo, True Digital Park in Bangkok, and many more.
Clara - VJ
Clara (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and live visual performer based in Vancouver. She builds audiovisual systems that sample video lineages (video art/internet culture), route feedback and live cameras, and interweave them into custom-coded visual synthesizers and shaders (C++/GLSL/Metal).
Xiumei - DJ
Vancouver-based Taiwanese DJ and producer Xiumei (she/they) centres their musical project around irregular rhythms and delicate textures for a disorienting journey through sound. Xiumei is the host of Mycelium; a resident radio show at BSide Radio, and has also performed outside Vancouver, including Italo Moderni at the Domesicle Festival in Montreal, and at FINAL in Taipei.
Mikubat
Mikubat (he/they) with roots in Tehran and a growing presence in so-called Vancouver’s electronic scene, is a DJ, producer, and multidisciplinary artist. As the force behind @miaan.art and Golchin series, Mikubat is dedicated to reclaim cultural narratives, challenging Western hegemony in the music industry, and weaving with the experiences of the Iranian diaspora.
5000 BPM - DJ
5000 BPM (she/her) is a visual artist / DJ from Northern Mexico based in so-called “Vancouver”. Blending the explosive rhythms of Latin club, guaracha and norteño she creates relentless momentum and raw dancefloor energy resulting in a sound that is bold, rebellious, and impossible to stand still to.
Archipelago: online / offline is a long weekend pop-up where imagination meets tinkering — everything you make becomes part of a growing collection of possible technological futures.
Co-presented with the Vancouver Linux User Group (VanLUG), this hands-on activation invites the public to dream up a speculative device: a gadget, tool, or artifact from a world that doesn’t exist yet. What does it do? Who uses it? What kind of society needs it?
Then comes the fun part: bring that story to life online. Working together with other participants, you’ll use fully open-source tools and workflows to build a live website (no prior experience necessary), turning your invented object and its lore into a real artifact on the internet.
Over the course of the weekend, these creations accumulate into a growing archive of invented things and the imagined worlds that hold them, existing simultaneously as physical objects and living web pages.
Throughout it all, invited guests will be dropping in to share resources and spark conversation around privacy, digital democracy, and data autonomy: the kinds of questions that tend to come up when you start imagining the internet differently.
Vancouver Linux User Group
The Vancouver Linux User Group (VanLUG) is a non-profit association of technology professionals and enthusiasts in the Great Vancouver area. With over 2,200 members, we are one of the largest Linux user groups in the world.
INTER/MEDIATE
INTER/MEDIATE is a media art educational organization focused on cultivating growth within Vancouver’s media art communities and empowering under-represented groups by providing access to workshops, mentorships, and collaborative opportunities. INTER/MEDIATE programming includes a hybrid of technical and soft-skill workshops and artist talks designed with entry-level learners in mind.
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Performance / Vendor / Sponsorship Opportunities
TAIWANfest Vancouver is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered here, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples of this land while we engage in meaningful conversations of culture and reconciliation.