For the next two weeks you'll have an opportunity to see some of the flowers that grow in the mud of our Downtown East Side, as the fourth annual Heart of the City Festival starts rolling. Created to showcase the artists that live and create in the East Side, the festival features an enormous breadth of disciplines, with over 200 artists performing at 55 different events. Art forms on display include theatre, film, hip-hop, drumming, comedy, poetry, cultural celebrations, forums, and workshops, among many others.

This year's festival pays special attention to the Asian Canadian communities of the DTES, in conjunction with Anniversaries of Change 2007, to commemorate - among other catalytic events - the 100 year anniversary of the 1907 anti-Asian race riots that led to radical immigration reform in Vancouver. Check out the following for some highlights, or click here for the full schedule.

Good news, everyone...Bioboxes are back! Get 'em while they're hot! What's that, you say you've never been Bioboxed? Well, you've got one night and one night only to rectify that; on October 26 from 8 to midnight Theatre Replacement offers up their newest serving of tasty plays-for-an-audience-of-one during FUSE at the VAG. They're wicked good fun, six mini-plays that take place on a tiny stage-in-a-box (with full production values) placed around each actor's head, who perform stories culled from interviews with recent Canadian immigrants. Bioboxes: Artifacting Human Experience is as intimate a theatrical experience as you're likely to have.

Ooh! Hallowe'en theatre! This looks wicked (literally), Spectral Theatre has a play up at the Beaumont called Dead Ends, which pays homage to the old EC horror comics (they of Tales From the Crypt and Mad Magazine), and late-night chiller cinema. Billed as a trio of "twisted, lowbrow, and occasionally terrifying" stories, it sounds like a fun way to get in the Trick-or-Treat mood.

Urban Ink Productions is a First-Nations theatre company devoted to the creation of new multi-disciplinary work that discusses the relationship of Aboriginal and minoritized individuals to each other and to our community. Their newest work, Gravity, has opened its world premier run at the Chapel Arts Theatre in the DTES. It's a combined theatre and video installation that connects the stories of four women together across "time, water, and worlds...and their love for life and one another."

An American fighter jet is shot down over hostile Middle-Eastern soil, its pilot survives despite severe injuries but is unable to walk. A local farmer discovers him, hauls him to the nearby village, and sequesters him inside a dirty shed where he is beaten, then stripped of his ipod by the local military Captain, who is torn between selling him for ransom and publicly beheading him. Sounds like a pretty gritty night of theatre, eh? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

How many actors does it take to change a light bulb? Seventeen. One to change the bulb and sixteen to say: "Pft. I could have done that better."

Closer is one of those plays that actors looove to talk about doing. It's cobbled together out of scenes virtually tailor-made for acting-class work, one-on-one 10 minute capsules of relationship politics brimming with smooth and witty dialogue, thus if you've ever spent time within any actor's training facility, you've been exposed to at least a couple of scenes, and probably taken quite a shine to it. Plus it's was made into a very successful film with some very, very good actors with careers that we'd kill for. So when a group of locals get it together to actually mount the thing, they've got a guaranteed audience of secretly jealous and very critical actors to count on. Smart marketing tactic, and a ballsy choice to throw it in front of a theatre full of people with their own identification with the material. And yes, that would include me...

At the tail end of the arts festival season arrives the 2007 Live Performance Art Biennale, inhabiting galleries around town until October 28. It was inspired by a one-off festival here in 1979 called Live at the End of the Century, which united all the leading art galleries by inviting them to curate and produce performance art as a single group, thereby forging a new model of interdependency among them. The series was reborn in 2001, and now goes up every other year, and is open to local and international artists. The curatorial theme of the festival this year is "Public", and the artist guidelines require each piece to manifest as: "an action presented in public, and intervention into public, the participation of public, or a descriptive reference to public." The intent of Live is to examine issues of community and identity through this unique form of art, and in doing so to take it out of the back rooms and insider galleries and bring it into the public domain.

I usually only use this preview series to post about independent theatre, figuring that if your company can afford to advertise on the side of a bus then you don't need my help. However, I will make a rare exception today, because this play has got my spider-sense tingling. The Arts Club is premiering a new work by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor called His Greatness, based on a visit that Tennessee Williams made to Vancouver in 1981 to premier a play here. It's a hypothetical look at how he may have spent his time in a downtown hotel room, alone with his typewriter and his fading genius. If the play is half as good as the idea, it'll be amazing.

Now back to the indies and one of the coolest company names in town: Theatre Conspiracy returns with the English language premier of La Estupidez...Stupidity, and it sounds...kind of bizarre. And kind of great. It's a comedy, set in a hotel in Vegas, with 5 actors playing 24 characters. "Imagine gags that George F. Walker and Quentin Tarantino might write for Reno 911." All right then. The mind reels. Director Richard Wolfe has helmed some dynamite plays in the past, this should be a goodie.

Yet another premier to report this week (what's going on here Vancouver, if I didn't know any better, I'd think that there was some kind of new theatre movement going on in this town), this one drops at the Jericho Arts Centre. The American Pilot is a politically critical (or should that be critically political?) look at our neighbours to the south and their somewhat questionable foreign policies...with "music, dancing, and explosions!". The titular fly-boy crash lands on unfriendly foreign soil and causes somewhat of a stir with the locals, who take him in and then have to decide his fate...whether to hold him for ransom or publicly execute him. And a new theatre season is under way...

His Greatness photo courtesy of the Arts Club Theatre