The Hidden Costs of Aspiring to Global City Status: Robert Lepage, Vancouver, and Twenty-First Century China Collide at the 2010 Cultural Olympiad

“The Hidden Costs of Aspiring to Global City Status” examines the selection of The Blue Dragon, a sequel to The Dragons’ Trilogy crafted for the international festival circuit by Robert Lepage and Ex Machina, as a top-billed event in Vancouver’s 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Contextualized by the mega-event legacy of development in Vancouver, including the sale of Expo land to the wealthy Hong-Kong businessman Li Ka-shing and the post-Olympics spike in real estate twenty-five years later, this essay interrogates the ways in which The Blue Dragon represents the West’s uneasy relationship with a rapidly globalizing China and highlights the ethos driving contemporary racial tensions in Vancouver.