Hip-hop-driven Can I Live? looks at how people of colour have been excluded from climate activism, online to May 15

Artist Fehinti Balogun on hand for watch party at The York Theatre, May 14

The Cultch presents Can I Live? digitally until May 15, with a live watch party at the York Theatre on May 14 at 8 pm

STREAMING THIS WEEK via The Cultch, Complicité's Can I Live? trails a heap of positive reviews.

In a show driven by hip-hop, spoken-word, animation, and science, artist Fehinti Balogun explores the connection between the environmental crisis and the global struggle for social justice. In other words, Balogun doesn’t just look at climate activism, but how people of colour have been excluded from it.

As The Guardian put it in a review last year, “This powerful cri de coeur grapples with the question of inclusivity in environmental activism not only by connecting it to class and race but to geopolitics, imperial history, and his own journey into activism in the context of his British Nigerian family’s cultural attitudes.”

Those messages resound loud and clear here, where Vancouver has struggled recently with heat domes and atmospheric rivers—as well as racial reckoning.

You can tune in on your home screen, but we recommend you head to the Watch Party at the York Theatre on May 14. That’s because it’s followed by a talkback with the artist who created it.

The show marks the final event of The Cultch’s busy 2021-22 season. You can find more info here.

Featured

Janet Smith

Janet Smith is founding partner and editorial director of Stir. She is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

Articles

Theatre review: Sophie's Surprise 29th throws the season’s wildest party, mixing offbeat laughs and high-calibre acrobatics

At The Cultch’s York Theatre, wonderfully weird characterizations meet gravity-defying feats in a raucously unpretentious banger that has “hit” written all over it

Summer Arts Guide: Vancouver stage artists reveal their favourite pre- and post-show patio spots

Whether you’re looking for a quick drink and snack, conversation, reflection, or people-watching, these airy meeting places hit their marks

Antigone lands at Bard on the Beach's Douglas Campbell Theatre, starting June 30

Playwright Kate Besworth and director Ming Hudson team up for a contemporary adaptation of the classical Sophocles tragedy

Theatre scene's raucous new Rumpus Awards hope to come back in 2027

Cheeky, DIY theatre event aimed to throw light on the stage scene’s unsung heroes—and ended up selling out

Stir Q&A: Director Stephen Drover takes Macbeth into a dystopian near-future at Bard on the Beach

The veteran theatre artist grappled with big questions of good and evil, and took inspiration from genre films, for his visually stylized new adaptation

Theatre review: Come From Away captures the humanity at the heart of hit musical

Elevated visual design and a strong, multitasking cast bring ample Newfoundland warmth to new Arts Club Theatre Company and Citadel Theatre coproduction

Merry Wives of Windsor star is an old hand at bringing Sir John Falstaff to the stage

Ashley Wright has helmed it himself, but in Bard on the Beach’s new production, he plays Shakespeare’s dissolute knight under the capable direction of Rebecca Northan

Sophie’s Surprise 29th gets the party started with a few Brit circus twists

London’s Three Legged Race Productions folds in influences from contemporary circus to cabaret in a raucously funny show that celebrates a ’90s-style birthday at The York Theatre