The 2026 Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival returns, October 30 to November 7, celebrating the city’s east side neighbourhoods’s art, culture and community.
The annual Festival features over 100 free and paid events at over 30+ local venues, including music, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, history tours, and more. 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 created together; it’s sharing stories, laughter, grief, and joy. Belonging reminds us that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, compassion, and respect.
For 23 years, the Heart of the City Festival has been rooted in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and focused on listening and learning from the community. The Festival works with and for the Downtown Eastside to carry forward the stories, ancestral memory, cultural traditions, lived experiences, and artistic practices, illuminating pathways of resilience that make the neighbourhood a richly diverse community.
Selected highlights of the free events at 2026 Heart of the City Festival include:
photo: David Cooper
Summer City Street Mural Celebration
Friday October 30 @ 6pm
Carnegie Community Centre Theatre, 401 Main – Free.
Join in a celebration of Richard Tetrault’s dynamic collage mural, Summer City Street. The mural will join the City of Vancouver’s Public Art collection, ensuring its continued presence in the public sphere and, importantly, on the walls of Carnegie Community Centre. Tetrault will present an overview of his collaborative and solo murals located in Vancouver’s Eastside, ranging from the 1998 Walls of Change project to other murals on themes of displacement, striving and empowerment.
Reimagining Justice: The Circle Project
Time Freed (Beyond Capture) Opening Reception
Saturday October 31 @ 12pm
Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings St: Free
What Fools These Mortals Be & Harlequino’s Folly Opening Reception
Saturday October 31 @ 2pm
KW Atrium Studio, 110 – 351 Abbott St: Free.
Screenings & Sharing Circle
Saturday November 7 @ 12pm
Carnegie Community Centre Theatre, 401 Main St: Free
The Festival presents three 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 videos are stimulating riffs on classic theatre that invite us to reimagine justice. The installations will be presented at Gallery Gachet and KW Atrium Studio. The project concludes at Carnegie Community Centre with a screening of all three videos and a community sharing circle.
Drag Storytime Sing-along!
Saturday, October 31 @ 4pm
MacLean Park, 710 Keefer St: Free
Celebrating their sixth year with the Heart of the City Festival, Drag Storytime Sing-along brings an all-inclusive flavour with the jazz stylings of Magic Triangle and the folk punk hijinks of Legion of Flying Monkeys. Come in costume, as host, bearded lady Drag Satan, presents awards for Best Strathcona Community Engagement Arts, Longest Serving MacLean Park Music Event, the highly anticipated Best Cable and Extension Cord Management Award, and, new this year, the Award for Best Dancing.
From the Archives of Sid Chow Tan
Thursday, November 5 @ 5pm
Carnegie Community Centre Theatre, 401 Main St: Free.
Legendary Downtown Eastside documentarian and organizer Sid Chow Tan (1949 – 2022) spent four decades documenting the struggles, victories, celebrations, and everyday lives of DTES and Chinatown communities. This screening features selections from Sid’s extraordinary archive of volunteer-produced video journalism, with newly digitized tapes and old favourites alike, compiled by Sid’s collaborator, Byron Peters.
Solo Solo Together
Friday, November 6 @ 1pm
SFU Djavad Mowafaghian World Arts Centre, 149 W Hastings St. : Free
All Bodies Dance Project presents a collection of new solo dances. Each work offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s unique perspective, and together these solos form a portrait of a diverse community. Featuring work by Susie Gray, Nico Gruzling, Lance Lim, Peggy Leung, and Old Baby, Solo, Solo, Together celebrates the strength of the individual while asking what becomes possible when we gather our singular experiences together.
The 2026Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival runs October 30 to November 7, 2026 at various locations around the neighbourhood. Tickets and details are available online at heartofthecityfestival.com
Running beyond the festival:
Photo: David C Cooper
Epigone
Preview Tuesday November 3 @ 7:30pm
Wednesday November 4 – Saturday November 7, Tuesday November 10 – Saturday November 14 @ 7:30pm
Matinees Sunday November 8. 4pm; Sat November 14, Sun November 15 @ 2pm
Russian Hall, 600 Campbell St
$0–$75. Tickets: Epigone
Electric Company Theatre presents Epigone, a new play in development written by Kevin Kerr and directed by Jonathon Young, featuring a cast of Lili Beaudoin, Kevin Macdonald, Tom McBeath , and Colleen Wheeler. The play is a modern myth about complicated grief, stigmas of addiction, our responsibilities to the dead, and to one another. It follows an unlikely hero exiled to a remote northern double-wide trailer, where the living wrestle with loyalty, shame, and the unfinished work of care as the past refuses to stay buried.