Celebrating 15 years, Culture Days returns Canada-wide this fall, offering hundreds of activities highlighting diverse arts and culture in local communities. Running from Friday, September 20 to Sunday, October 13, the event offers a variety of free participatory programs, including over 400 across BC. Last year, Culture Days included over 3,000 programs in over 300 communities and welcomed 4.4 million attendees and more than 1,200 event organizers.

Victoria-based multidisciplinary artist and Culture Days ambassador Judy Woo has previously run programs for BC Culture Days; she says she looks forward to being a part of the variety available this year.

“BC Culture Days is very important,” says Woo. “They have art workshops, public dance, concerts, drumming groups, puppetry, poetry jams, comic-book creations, art walks, museum tours, parades, art exhibitions, DIY art activities. It’s all ages. It’s wonderful… Most events are free… So I find it very neat to be part of this campaign. It’s unique.”

Woo says that Culture Days offers an opportunity for attendees and coordinators to engage and grow in the community through the programs offered.

“It creates a new vocabulary for yourself, not only intercultural, but intracultural communication, because you’re working with a lot of different artists from different backgrounds, lived experiences, shared experiences. So, you benefit a lot from that, and also building kinships, building community resilience, and also visibility,” she says. “It’s important to have visibility.”

This year, Woo has organized a patchwork poetry workshop exploring intercultural themes and personal ancestry.

“The benefit of attending is experiencing different workshops. For an example, my workshop is poetry, so, learning how to write urban poetry, and I have been taught by the poet laureate winner from Victoria, [which] is very beneficial because I have knowledge skills sharing that to how to write poetry,” says Woo. “It’s a specific poetry which is called cento, which is Latin for ‘patchwork poetry.’ So it’s a specialized poetry to do. It’s collage. So you take two, three lines from different poets, and then you put them together. Then after that, it becomes a cohesive poem with your poem.”

As part of the event’s ambassador series, attendees can engage in intercultural interplay, exploring myriad creative commonalities existing across cultures. She says that poetry from around the world can be combined and joined for her program.

“Poetry is very powerful. All the stuff that I used, the poems, they’re all translated from different languages into English. So that’s the cross-cultural intercultural play with that to this project. It’s all picked from different Indigenous languages, I’ve got some from French, I got some that are German, I have some that are Japanese, Taiwanese. I have some that are translated from other parts of the world. And then everyone has to remix them into their own poem,” she says. “And then they can create a visual art piece afterwards, like a collage.”

Culture Days’ mission is to foster, promote, and affirm cultural and artistic expression; Woo says these values help uplift marginalized communities and BIPOC, disabled, and queer artists. She says BC Culture Days has provided a platform to encourage awareness among artists such as herself and the intergenerational BIPOC arts collective she founded, Meltshot Brownie.

“These values… They allow me to have the creative freedom to create a wonderful program for participants,” she says. “They’re very flexible to work with, and they’re amazing to work with… And it concretizes me as well, as an artist, just to be taken seriously, to see myself out there is nice… I believe artistic expression can leverage your voice, making you from a small person, small voice, to a bigger voice. And also learning this skill and using this platform to relieve any distress or emotional distress, because that’s what poetry is… Artistic expression is also for that as well.”

BC Culture Days
Various times, until Sunday, October 13
Free/pay-what-you-can pricing, various venues
culturedays.ca/bc