By: Amrit Randhawa, SFU Student
F-O-R-M Festival (online) | September 12–19 | Cost: Pay What You Can (festival passes starting at $5)
Dance artist Sophia Wolfe’s F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement), co-presented with SFU Woodward’s Cultural & Community Programs, returns for its fifth iteration. Going online to support physical distancing, the festival screens short films depicting the human body in motion, in addition to offering online workshops and events. Emerging artists, athletes, and “movers” share choreographed interactions of camera and movement. F-O-R-M encourages experimental style and involvement from artists of all body types, physical abilities, and identities.
Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire | September 14–November 13 | Location: Audain Gallery, Hastings Street Windows | Cost: Free
Tania Willard, Secwépemc Nation artist and assistant professor in creative studies at UBC Okanagan, presents her street-facing window exhibition, Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire, from the Hastings Street windows of SFU’s Audain Gallery. Willard’s art draws on Indigenous cultural practices and highlights Indigenous resistance. Bringing her home territory of Secwepemcúl̓ecw to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the exhibit uses light, colour, reflection, and flora to focus on the changing socio-political landscape of resistance as well as the changing of the seasons, contrasting and connecting the two under the theme of transformation.
Poetry Reading: Lunch Poems (online) | September 16 from 12 p.m.–1 p.m. | Cost: Free with registration
SFU’s monthly Lunch Poems has moved online to ensure public safety. Lunch Poems is held every third Wednesday of the month from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. September’s Lunch Poems feature poets Sonnet L’Abbé, an Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, and Québecois, writer, and professor of creative writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and Jane Munro, a 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize winning writer, professor, and Iyengar (style of yoga) yogi. Come relax to some casual poetry in the SFU community.
Festival: Word Vancouver 2020 (online) | September 19–27 | Cost: Free with registration
The 26th annual Word Vancouver Literary Festival has moved online, but continues to provide free programming for festival-goers. Word Vancouver unites readers and writers in celebration of the written word. The festival comprises readings, panels, workshops, and conversations with writers. Potential attendees should be sure to peruse the festival’s long list of writers from the newly-emerging to the long-established. Some notable writers include Desmond Cole, Jodi Wilson-Raybould, former SFU Writer-in-Residence Wayde Compton, and former Peak contributor Isabella Wang.
