Nothing makes life more whole, more rich and vibrant, than an acknowledgement of death. And what better time to celebrate the living and the dead than November, when our long northern days are being consumed at either end by winter’s impending darkness.
The Parade of Lost Souls did just that, in grand community style, in East Vancouver’s Grandview Park area last weekend. Organized by the Public Dreams Society, the festival relies on 250 volunteers, over 200 artists, and draws thousands of people from the immediate neighbourhood and the greater Vancouver area.
Standing in the park with its view of the downtown skyline, the darkness descends on the city as costumed stilt walkers and bands invite you to follow the torch-lit procession. You begin your journey, shoulder to shoulder with other costumed revellers, through the four zones of the festival. In the White zone on Charles Street, beautiful shrines have been created to honour departed loved ones, to leave messages for them and feel their presence in our lives.
In Latin American countries, as well as many other cultures around the world, November 1st is honoured as the Day of the Dead, when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest and when the recently deceased are said to be able to communicate with us.
"The festival has the essence of that," says Public Dreams Artistic Director Dolly Hopkins, "but the most fascinating thing is the community representation of it. You see Japanese people carrying photos of the dead, people wearing a sheath with no knife in it – an old German tradition – and Belgian and Italian people carrying bread and water."
There are many cultural interpretations, she says, which contribute to this community’s own acknowledgement and celebration of light.
A left turn into a narrow alley leads into the Red zone with its theme of Awaken the Living. Here various characters line the alley or occupy the balconies of the adjacent buildings. One woman laughs hysterically from a balcony while her counterpart on the opposite side wails with endless misery. The raw display of emotion makes your skin crawl, even as you remind yourself that they’re only actors playing a part. A red stilt-walking devil sits curled up on a ledge, trembling as though exhausted or injured. The people beside me approach to see if he’s okay, but he merely stares blankly back at them. We walk on, never quite sure if it was an act or not; our sense of reality shaken from its mores.
By the time we enter the Black Zone to Face our Fears, everything seems real: the bats swooping and dancing in the park, the man delivering a speech from a mail box, the sign that reads Shake Off Dull Sloth.
Dolly Hopkins sheds some light on the idea behind these zones.
"We all suffer from fears," she says of the Black zone. "If you can’t face them, you can’t move beyond them."
The act of walking down the dark street with the smell of torches and the crack of fireworks, surrounded by friends or strangers, costumed or not, turns the idea that Hopkins speaks of into something more; into an experience you physically move through.
Rounding the bottom reaches of the procession and returning toward Grandview Park, you enter the last of the four zones: Celebrate Life. This lies at the heart of the festival, Hopkins says – a celebration of life in the face of death. A shaky, 12-piece brass band plays in a graveyard. The seven deadly sins greet you as you walk by: Avarice chained to a tree, talking on a cell phone with no time for you; Pride gazing into a mirror and offering you the chance to admire yourself; Lust making eyes and blowing hot kisses in your direction. The procession then spills into the soccer oval below Britannia High School where Shadow Theatre draws everyone’s attention. Stories are enacted, made larger than life on a huge cloth screen through a simple trick of light and perspective.
While the Parade of the Lost Souls plays with your senses at every turn, it accomplishes this with very little technology. Priding itself on this no-tech approach, it relies instead on ingenuity, artistic creativity and the direct interaction of the many participants.
In helping to organize this festival, as well as others such as the Illuminares lantern festival in August, the Public Dreams Society offers a great gift to Vancouver. Such festivals nurture a sense of community, developing culture that is rooted in place. Public Dreams has also helped many other communities, from Victoria to Squamish to towns in Newfoundland, launch their own festivals. For Whistler to host such a festival, with no eye on tourist potential or corporate sponsorships, but to truly nurture its sense of community and culture, would be a great way to inject some soul back into the community.
Back in Grandview Park, the crowds have thinned somewhat and I’m able to walk up to the community shrine where people have written notes for the dead. On small pieces of paper, messages are left for departed mothers, fathers, best friends. Each note is held down by a candle, the heartfelt words flickering between light and dark in their bid to communicate with another world.
