From food-can pyramids to candid self-portraits, the ever-growing art event in Mount Pleasant, Gastown, and Commercial Drive is a hive of activity.

Amy Stewart and Denise Wilson, two local wool designers, have crafted extra-chunky fuzziness for fall in scarves, shawls and wrist-warmers, made with giant knitting needles larger than your average turkey baster.

Ten years ago, a modelling agent happened to spot 15-year-old Jana Broughton in her Coquitlam high-school yearbook, and within a week, she was whisked off to the photo studios and runways of New York City. She’s never looked back.

Amy Stewart and Denise Wilson, two local wool designers, have crafted extra-chunky fuzziness for fall in scarves, shawls and wrist-warmers, made with giant knitting needles larger than your average turkey baster.

Ten years ago, a modelling agent happened to spot 15-year-old Jana Broughton in her Coquitlam high-school yearbook, and within a week, she was whisked off to the photo studios and runways of New York City. She’s never looked back.

In her seminars, which she gives regularly in New York and Los Angeles, and occasionally in Vancouver, Liza Deyrmenjian offers creative types hard-nosed business tips.

The American mezzo-soprano may live in Paris, but her heart remains in Washington, D.C. The lucky Vancouver opera fans at her Festival Vancouver show on August 5 will hear a singer at the height of her considerable vocal powers.

As part of this weekend's Powell Street Festival, curator Aya Takada has brought in works from the world’s most exciting youth culture, such as manga-influenced illustrations of superbabies and musclebound monsters by Toru Morooka.

Mamma Mia's infectiously fizzy ABBA hits draw you in, but it's Meryl Streep who gives this gagglingly camp film its heart. So prepare to meet your Waterloo, and join the hen party; resistance is useless.

Director Tom Kalin is not one to shy away from unspeakable acts.

Starring Julianne Moore and Stephen Dillane. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, July 18, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Jewellery designer Teresa Smed doesn’t just make old things new again, she makes them rock ’n’ roll. Think Audrey Hepburn raiding Cyndi Lauper’s trash can with Karen O.

On its 20th anniversary, the Dancing on the Edge festival commissioned 10 works that made for as much fun as pulling treats from a loot bag.

With personal recollections of his father at the heart of the piece, Brian Webb’s bizarre fusion of bar-band cover songs, candid confessionals, classical piano, and contemporary dance results in a deeply moving experience.

At the outset, the idea of fusing break dance and swing dance might sound contrived. But Montreal-based Solid State’s mashup is so organic and fun-loving that it manages to get the audience members whooping like they’re at a full-blown battle.

It was a surreal opener to the Dancing on the Edge festival when bagpipes cut through the Downtown Eastside’s soundscape of screeching sirens, idling motors, and dope-sick yelling.

A documentary by Werner Herzog. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 4, at the Ridge Theatre

The French-born choreographer is one of the artists returning, 20 years later, with new commissions for the Dancing on the Edge, a festival that offers a rare opportunity to innovate.

When it comes to performing outside, the magic moments usually make up for the drawbacks. Dancer and choreographer Sylvie Bouchard should know: for the past 14 years, she’s overseen Dusk Dances, an Ontario-based program that brings the art form to parks in the summer—and which has been a popular fixture at our own Dancing on the Edge festival over the years.

East Siders passing by Venables and Victoria this morning might have had heart failure seeing a gigantic crane lifting the Cultch's beloved cupola off its roof. But fear not: executive director Heather Redfern reports that, as part of the theatre's huge renovations, the original cupola will go back into its spot--right after workers replace the roof with a new, earthquake-ready steel version.

Corteo

Heather Young injects French chic into her designs for children in a limited collection of playful pieces that are meticulously crafted with her signature pleating, button details, and trims.

Your dad’s plaids are getting hip, because the game that made Tiger Woods famous has a funky new swing to it, with fashion plates such Halle Berry and Jessica Alba puttering around on the links.

Drawn to Vancouver’s adventurous, play-hungry scene, the Magnetic North Theatre Festival arrives on June 4, flaunting a program that’s a force in itself.

The season of grey has finally lifted, and that’s not just in terms of Vancouver’s usual cloudy weather. On the fashion front, winter and early spring’s coolly depressing charcoals and silvers are giving way to a summer of happy, retina-searing new colours, and leading the charge is French Connection, whose recent event at its Robson Street flagship store was all about eye candy.

Starring David Strathairn and Andrew Walker. Rated PG. Opens Friday, May 16, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

From the outset, the trio of pieces on the Dance Centre’s latest Pulse series program seem to have nothing in common. A performer tapes himself into a cardboard box and then rolls around. Dancers push themselves to physical extremes to embody gluttony. And a quartet moves with modern grace to Arvo Pärt’s haunting music.

Movers and Shapers

Mis Hermanas

The Montreal choreographer displays her command in strange, daring expressions of joy and curiosity in one of the dance events of the year.

The former most shaggable men on Planet Earth showed their sense of humour and showmanship was still intact at G.M. Place on Tuesday night.

Peter Pan

Banned from the U.S., Danza Cuba is back with pirouettes and swivelling hips in a fiery new show that’s bound to overcome our national bashfulness.

Victor Quijada’s Rubberbandance Group is known for its street-smart mashup of hip-hop and ballet. But rather than cutting and pasting together moves from each style, his renegade company has spent the past six years aiming for perfect fusion. Asking him to separate out the influences in his choreography, Quijada says, is like asking the Los Angeles–born Mexican-American which parts of him are from which culture.

Vincent Gale returns to the stage with a vengeance for Sam Shepard’s edgy showdown between brothers

In her first local appearance in 19 years, the German-born goddess will join the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to perform the composer’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61.

The niche-market designs unveiled at the grad show for Kwantlen University College’s latest crop of fashion students said a lot about how the industry is changing.

The best thing about the Tomorrow Collective is that its works are rooted squarely in today. Dance can seem rarefied, but this trio of female upstarts is devoted to capturing the here and now. They make dance cool.

Fidelio

Timber/Timbre

Michael Pitt’s chilling preppy in Funny Games doesn’t look like a run-of-the-mill psychopath. With a floppy pageboy haircut, crisp white Bermuda shorts, and starched collar, the New York–based actor is more your average upper-class boy next door, which is entirely deliberate.

Vancouver choreographer Joe Laughlin has made a name for himself by teaching his dance audiences to expect the unexpected. In the dozen years since he founded Joe Ink, the insanely versatile artistic director has featured his performers swinging on giant metal scaffolding, spent years shuttling between here and South Africa to collaborate with the racially integrated troupe Moving Into Dance Mophatong, and delved into high-tech experiments with digital projections.

True to its title, Caramel at first seems like it will be cloyingly sweet. But the sticky substance also has a painful side in Lebanese culture: as we see again and again in the salon at the centre of Nadine Labaki’s sumptuous first film, the hot goop is used to rip out unwanted hair on clients’ legs and faces.

Critics' Picks

Find Paradis/Paradise at the Roundhouse, or just let Sarah Williams, Rita Cioffi, Joe Laughlin, and Christopher House inspire you as they transcend styles and twist genres.

John Alleyne hadn’t taken a vacation in four years, but that wasn’t the only reason he found himself stuck in a hole of deep emotional darkness last year. Aside from the daily pressures of keeping a major arts organization relevant in a world of funding constraints and attention-challenged audiences, he’d recently lost both of his parents.

Daughters of Wisdom serves up more of the same but with a new twist. It focuses on a remote monastery for Buddhist nuns on an eastern Tibet plateau called Kala Rongo, an oddity in a place where religious service has long been the domain of men.

Fortunately for fans of Khaled Hosseini’s book, director Marc Forster keeps the story of Russian-occupied Afghanistan authentic

A provocative documentary studies the courageous act of coming out to Christians

As its title suggests, Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking is like two separate documentaries bundled into one bulky package. One is a biography of the Chinese-American author of The Rape of Nanking (Iris Chang hit the bestseller list with her account of the Japanese massacres of Chinese civilians in 1937-’38 and later committed suicide at age 36). The other is an assemblage of witness accounts and historical footage retracing the long-buried atrocities at Nanking, a place where scholars now believe more people were slaughtered than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined