Drum Roll Please...Heart of the City Festival Marches to the Beat of the DTES

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.

Canada's first all-women taiko drumming group Sawagi Taiko brings some rolling thunder, at the Carnegie Community Centre Theatre, 401 Main, tonight (Friday) @ 7:30 pm.

Grand Slam Evening of Performance Art + Hip Hop. Filipino performance art, African spoken word and hip hop, First Nations hip hop, and Chinese DJs, together at last. Featuring Toronto's Boonaa Mohammed, recently named "best new artist" at the CBC poetry slam face-off, in his first Vancouver appearance. Saturday, Oct. 27 from 8:00 pm - 1:00 am, at Gallery Gachet, 88 E. Cordova.

Riot in Vancouver: an evening of short films by Asian, Aboriginal, and South Asian media artists that tackle notions of displacement, family, language, and culture. Sunday Oct. 28 @ 7:30 pm, Carnegie Community Centre, 401 Main.

Finding the lighter side of marginalization, poverty, and gentrification, Vancouver Moving Theatre presents A Downtown Eastside Romeo and Juliet, using the bard and DTES actors and musicians as a springboard to take a serio-comic look at familial and societal splits through this series of vignettes. Friday, Nov. 2 @ 8:00 pm & Saturday, Nov. 3 @ 9:30 pm, Russian Hall, 600 Campbell St.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nujoy