Our Mission

VCO’s mission is to preserve and promote Cantonese Opera throughout BC and Canada.  By offering performances, workshops, outreach activities, and professional training opportunities, we strive to maintain the highest level of artistic excellence while reaching out to diverse audiences.  VCO is uniquely situated as a Canadian arts organization deeply rooted in its local community yet maintaining strong ties to the opera groups in China, Hong Kong, and across North America.

What distinguishes our work from other Chinese opera troupes in Canada is our dedicated focus on reaching non-Chinese viewers, including families, senior, and youth.  All of our performances are subtitled in English/Chinese, and we have brought our performances outside the traditional theatre, to perform in libraries, community centers, parks, and mainstream cultural festivals. 

燕鳳鳴粵劇團 的使命是在整個卑詩省和加拿大保存和推廣粵劇。 燕鳳鳴 作為一家深深植根於當地社區的加拿大藝術組織，具有獨特的地位，同時與中國、香港和整個北美的粵劇團體保持著密切的聯繫。一個多世紀以來，粵劇一直在海外華人的文化和精神生活中發揮著重要作用，將各個年齡段和背景的人們聯繫在一起。作為一個海外的藝術組織，我們信奉同情、友誼、包容、多樣性和和解的價值觀。這些價值觀反映在我們的歌曲和故事中，以及我們在社區中培養的許多創造性和協作關係。

About VANCOUVER CANTONESE OPERA

Vancouver Cantonese Opera is uniquely situated as a Canadian arts organization deeply rooted in its local community yet maintaining strong global ties to the opera scenes in China, Hong Kong, and across North America. We work closely with performers and audiences at home and abroad, exchanging ideas and mutual support.

In the local context of Vancouver, BC, our organization continues to serve the Chinese-Canadian community as a site of creative expression, social bonding, and cultural exchange. While our current audience is primarily Chinese-Canadian opera fans, we have a growing audience of diverse Canadians. What distinguishes our work from other opera troupes is our focus on outreach to broad audiences, including non-Chinese viewers, youth, and families. Our performances are subtitled in English and we provide workshops, demos, and classes in English to a general audience. We have brought our performances outside the traditionalal theatre, to perform in libraries, community centers, and cultural festivals.

The rapid gentrification of Vancouver’s historic Chinatown in recent years has raised the stakes for the work we do, as we struggle to keep alive the stories and theatrical practices so rooted in Chinatown’s history and culture. Despite our best efforts, we believe that bolder steps need to be taken to safeguard our traditional heritage. Therefore, our creative vision for the future is to engage more effectively and strategically in reaching out to new audiences, especially the younger generation who must carry the torch with our art form.

We realize dramatic steps are needed to realize this goal and that a committed focus on innovation and risk-taking is both necessary and desirable. We have thus reached out to new community partners to engage in more creative forms of performance and outreach. In particular, we plan on working with the younger generation of performers and artists to launch an exciting, new repertoire of performances that incorporates new media. Building on our past successes and strong local following, we believe this new direction has great potential to address our broader goal of sustaining the Chinese-Canadian heritage in a meaningful, open-minded, sustainable, and creative way.

A summary of the VCO’s history in the creation, development, production, or dissemination of their field of art practice in British Columbia.

Since our incorporation as a non-profit society in 2000, VCO has played a leading role in the development and dissemination of Cantonese Opera throughout British Columbia. In our early days, we focused on building a strong network of performers, musicians, and technicians to produce high-quality performances for our core audience of Chinese Canadian opera fans. We hosted visiting artists from Hong Kong and offered professional singing classes, performance workshops, and community social events. We also partnered with Vancouver's various martial art associations to train performers for our combat scenes.

Since 2010, we have gradually witnessed the aging out of our core audiences and slower ticket sales. Rising to the challenge, however, VCO energized its efforts to reach diverse and younger audiences through innovative programming, targeted outreach, and participation in high-profile, mainstream festivals. Since 2012, we launched our first Multicultural Heritage Festival and since 2016, we participate annually at the Richmond World Day Festival, Pull of the Net Multicultural Celebration, the Silk Road Festival, the Chinatown Spring Festival Parade (Lunar New Year), and the Vancouver Outsider Arts Festival.

We now have extensive outreach programs, including our popular “Cantonese Opera behind the scenes” workshops held at the Vancouver, Richmond, and Surrey public libraries and our Opera-in-Care program for adult care homes. Every year, we visit three to five care homes to engage seniors and disabled adults with short performances and facilitated conversation. We also offer summer “Opera Flash Mob Camps" for youth to teach the basics of Cantonese Opera’s water-sleeves dancing and to host “surprise” flash mob dances in various public squares.

In recent years, we’ve also taken bold steps to collaborate on stage with younger artists from other disciplines. In 2018, we worked with indie rock band Son of James to produce the Tale of the Eastside Lantern, a ground-breaking “Chinese rock opera-The Eastside Lantern” that attracted a full house at the CBC Studio 700. The work weaves together different musical genres to explore the troubled history of Vancouver’s Chinatown. The piece sparked profound conversations on history, cultural displacement, intergenerational ties, and creative innovation. As we turn our focus towards creative collaboration and diversifying our audiences, we are also engaging more directly with local communities and our shared cultural heritage here in British Columbia.

Moving forward, we are keen on pushing the boundaries of our evolving art form as we respond to the challenges in our community.  On November 5^th, 2022, we premiered our first fusion opera “The Prop Master’s Dream” at the Annex Theatre in Vancouver.  We sold out two shows and received numerous good reviews from our audiences. 

The goal of “The Prop master’s Dream” is to infuse Cantonese Opera with more contemporary and experimental approaches to musical compositions, stage performances, and storytelling.  By collaborating with diverse artists from other genres and traditions, we will tap into new avenues of creative expression and audience engagement.  To preserve the dynamic art of Cantonese Opera, a diasporic tradition that has long absorbed the influences of different cultures, we see artistic risk-taking as a critical component to our success. 

溫哥華燕鳳鳴粵劇團 (VCO) 於 2000 年由資深粵劇表演家應國鳳創立，其願​​景是為子孫後代在加拿大推廣和保存這種獨特的傳統藝術。燕鳳鳴粵劇團 在溫哥華推廣粵劇文化處於領先地位。 通過參加各種主要節日慶典，將粵劇帶給主流和其他族裔的觀眾認識與欣賞。為了致力推廣這聯合國認可的非物質世界遺產 "粵劇", 通過承擔更多創造性的風險，我們在多元化觀眾的領域裏，傳遞我們獨特藝術形式的火炬方面取得了重大進展。

我們的使命是向所有年齡段的華人和非華人觀眾展示我們獨特的最高藝術水平。因此我們的表演始終是雙語的，包括現場翻譯和中英文字幕。我們還超越了傳統劇院，在圖書館、社區中心、公園、城市廣場和節日中表演。我們有廣泛的外展計劃，包括定期的表演和歌唱班、青年夏令營，以及為住在養老院的成年人和老年人舉辦的免費音樂會。