A blues ode to Hogan’s Alley history

ARTS Heart of the City

AAlexander Varty

good idea never grows old, and there’s no doubt that East End Blues & All That Jazz was a very good idea when Vancouver Moving Theatre and the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival first presented the vibrant concert spectacle in 2006. Based around the history of Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood, a Chinatown adjunct once home to most of Vancouver’s black population—and drawing heavily on the family stories of siblings Thelma, Chic, and Leonard Gibson, who grew up there—the initial production proved a surprisingly joyous way of shining a light on how development can steamroller but not obliterate culture. (Hogan’s Alley was bulldozed in the early 1970s to make room for the eastern terminus of the Georgia Viaduct.)

East End Blues & All That Jazz proved successful enough that it was remounted in 2009 and 2011, and now it’s back, with a few new twists. Popular singer and storyteller Khari Wendell Mcclelland, for instance, has taken over the MC’S role, originally filled by the program’s cocreator Denis Simpson, who died in 2010. And the program also has new relevance, with the pending demolition of the Georgia Viaduct sparking calls for the city to recognize Hogan’s Alley with an African-canadian cultural centre on the neighbourhood’s former site.

“That’s kind of been one thread that’s going on,” says Vancouver Moving Theatre’s Savannah Walling, speaking from her home office in Strathcona. “And then another thread has been the collegial

East End Blues & All That Jazz.

relationship between the artists involved. With Thelma [Gibson] coming to be 90 years old, we realized that if we wanted to do something with her present, now’s the time!”

Walling, who cowrote East End Blues & All That Jazz with Simpson, sees their script as a loose framework for a concert rather than musical theatre. It’s also “kind of a living being”, in a way. “It’s gradually evolved in small ways as other stories came forward,” she says, noting that its building blocks were the Gibsons’ memories, interviews with other area residents, and the oral histories collected in Opening Doors, an invaluable survey of Strathcona and Chinatown compiled by poet Daphne Marlatt and artist Carole Itter during the 1970s. And now, she says, it’s time to incorporate some new stories—hence the presence of Mcclelland, a descendant of slaves who fled to the Detroit-windsor area around the time of the Civil War.

“I have been really, really intrigued, living in Strathcona, about the history of the black residents here,” says the singer-guitarist in a separate telephone interview. “Part of that came through a Black Strathcona project that happened not too long ago. And then, as well, very recently I had the opportunity to just sit with Thelma Gibson, who grew up in the neighbourhood and who played the theatres in the neighbourhood with her brothers Len and Chic. So just getting that firsthand knowledge has been really wonderful.”

Driven from their native Oklahoma by racist violence, the Gibson family settled in northern Alberta before coming to Vancouver during the Great Depression. Mcclelland sees some parallels between their path and his own family’s escape from slavery. Both, he says, grew out of a desire for a better life— which is essentially why he moved west in the 21st century. And he also notes how immigration—in this case, black immigration from the U.s.—has historically enlivened Canadian culture.

“The vibrancy of that time and this community… I wish I could take a time machine and just go back and see that,” he muses. “But I can see it in my imagination and in my mind.”