“It’s rare that any city that’s had the Olympics or one of the European cities of culture has had the opportunity to immediately follow [the event] with something so significant as a 125th anniversary,” he said recently, noting the commemoration could act as a sort of creative tonic to the city’s “post-Olympic hangover.”

It may be early days, but Mr. Armour, who is executive director of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, said the city needs to get moving on this quickly, if it wants to do it right. “Time moves fast, particularly if you’re wanting to do artistic work with depth, with integrity and with a kind of rigour,” he said.

Ironically, it’s the Olympic Games, in part, that have slowed the city’s ability to plan for any celebrations next year.

The Olympic’s economic impact may not be fully felt for more than a decade according to a new report released by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, one of the largest auditing firms in the world.

The governments of Canada and British Columbia both made commitments to the success of the 2010 Olympic games. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has been commissioned to create a comprehensive study of the games economic and cultural effects starting in 2008 and continuing through to 2013.

…The commissioned study will take into account over 200 other studies, articles, and books that address the various impacts of the Olympic games.

Some notable reports that will be considered are post- games studies of both the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics and the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and a pre Olympics assessment of the upcoming London 2012 Games.

The report will study eight interrelated areas covering, sport development, tourism, environmental sustainability, social development, arts and culture, economic development, employment and business development.

Some effects will be tangible and immediate, such as its impact on the International Olympic Committee and other Olympic Games organizing committees. Others will be more intangible and may take months or years to come to fruition.

“I don’t want to put words in (the IOC’s) mouth,” said Burke Taylor, executive producer of the Cultural Olympiad, “but I can characterize what they were saying to me: They really discovered what a Cultural Olympiad could be. We’ve literally set the bar for future Games, particularly for Winter Games.”

Taylor said while Summer Olympic Games such as Sydney in 2000 organized an impressive Cultural Olympiad, it wasn’t as comprehensive, inclusive and accessible as Vancouver’s, which stretched not only over 60 days this year but also took place over similar durations in 2008 and 2009. Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad included artists from across the country, had a national touring component and used the Internet like never before.

“The IOC took notice of all of that,” he said. “Over and over again I heard people saying: ‘You can’t turn around without bumping into the Cultural Olympiad.’ They were reading about it every day in the media, seeing the marketing and the celebration sites. People were talking about it because they were experiencing it — and they were having a ball.”

“With the help of the Cultural Olympiad, DanceHouse brought in Batsheva’s Deca Dance for the 2009 Cultural Olympiad and Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters and Marie Chouinard’s The Golden Mean (Live) this year for the Cultural Olympiad.

“Without the Cultural Olympiad’s help, DanceHouse could not have afforded to bring in Batsheva and launch a dance series for Vancouver of cutting edge, contemporary dance from around the world.

“I think it’s been a wonderful shot in the arm. I feel that DanceHouse is one of (the Cultural Olympiad’s) legacies.”

Bob D’eith, Executive director, Music BC

“It was a major international showcase for B.C.’s independent music artists such as Alex Cuba, Dan Mangan, Mother Mother, Delhi 2 Dublin and Said the Whale.

“I don’t think Canadians are afraid of excellence now. There was always this thing with arts. We were always apologizing for being second best.

“I was just in Toronto. They felt the same thing. It was a Canadian thing — you could feel it through the TV sets. I think the pursuit of excellence was hopefully instilled in the arts community as well.

“I hope that arts organizations will be healthy enough to carry this momentum forward.”

They are not, their creators stress, about being disabled.

The Paralympic Games begin tomorrow, and art exploring the disability experience is very much in evidence in Vancouver’s continuing Cultural Olympiad. But the people behind these shows say it is essential that the physical challenges of the protagonists, stars and/or creators do not overwhelm the subject matter of the works.

“We have disabilities, but it’s just a landscape,” says James Sanders, 39, the Maple Ridge, B.C., resident who stars in Spine and collaborated on its creation.

“There’s two characters with disabilities in this show and yet my character’s really not interested in his disability; that’s not his problem,” says Sanders, who is quadriplegic. “It’s the fact that he realizes he’s getting old; he didn’t have his shit together relationship-wise.”

Visitors were lured by free admission, courtesy of the B.C. government, and two blockbuster shows — Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man and Visions of British Columbia: A Landscape Manual.

Lineups wrapped around Robson Square as thousands of visitors toured Vancouver. The fourth floor of the art gallery housed the B.C. Pavilion for the Games.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man, showcases Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic and scientific investigations of the human body, featuring hundreds of sketches. It is on loan from the Royal Collection in the U.K.

Visions of British Columbia: A Landscape Manual is an exhibit focusing on British Columbia art and artists, drawn mainly from the gallery’s own collection.

Free admission is also being offered during the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games, March 12 to 21.

Bill Morris said Burke Taylor, executive producer of Vancouver’s 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and his team have integrated the cultural side of the Olympic Games with sports “so that it does not feel like a separate offshoot.

“It feels like it comes from the same DNA,” Morris said.

What Vancouver has done “brilliantly,” he said, is marketing the Cultural Olympiad. Wherever a visitor turns, there are Cultural Olympiad program guides or advertising about cultural events and exhibitions.

Morris was in Vancouver for five days earlier this month when he watched the torch relay journey and the opening ceremony at BC Place. He is the director of culture, ceremonies, education and live sites for London 2012.

He’s describing musical spaces, but by now, many Vancouverites have experienced it — the magical ebb and flow of humanity on the streets of our city during the past week, hundreds of thousands strong. Despite the hectic schedule of the Cultural Olympiad, it has been easy to defer our plans and join an energetic street mob, to dance for a djembe drummer on a corner, or to coo for a magician flipping cards, or to just stand dumbstruck while a man on a ten-foot tall unicycle shoots hoops.

Still, with less than a week left for the official Olympic festivities, it is time to focus, and to take advantage of the awesome display of arts and culture still remaining. Though the Cultural Olympiad will officially end on March 21, many of the best performances are happening this week, so I’ve created a quick time-line to help your wandering heels find their way. These are my picks, but I’m sure you may have your own. Feel free to comment if I’ve missed out on something essential.

Kinesphere is less than 15 minutes long, but its mix of music and dance is bursting with energy. Choreographer Shawn Hounsell and composer Gordon Cobb teamed up, Hounsell training 18 dancers, ranging in age from 17 to 20, and Cobb working with 13 musicians, ages 14 to 18.

The groups performed together on the Air Canada Stage at Place de la Francophonie, a big open space between Arts Umbrella and Performance Works on the island’s eastern end. On Saturday, a large crowd gathered in blessedly beautiful weather and took in a compelling mix of music and dance.

Roxburgh knows that makes him unusual. The Toronto resident admits that unless someone gives him tickets to a hockey game, he probably won’t be attending any sporting events. Instead, he plans to take in as many cultural performances as he can during the Cultural Olympiad.

An artistic administrator with the National Ballet of Canada, Roxburgh has taken a five-week leave of absence to work with Patrick Roberge Productions which is producing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paralympics.

During his first week in Vancouver, Roxburgh attended the joint performance of the National and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Laurie Anderson’s Delusion and Hal Willner’ Neil Young Project. Next week, he plans to see Crystal Pite’s new dance work Dark Matters. He’s also trying to get tickets to Robert LePage’s The Blue Dragon and Vancouver Opera’s Nixon in China. He also hopes to visit the Vancouver Art Gallery to see Visceral Bodies and the Leonardo da Vinci drawings when the crowds die down after Sunday, Feb. 28, the day when the Winter Olympics end.

But not all institutions have enjoyed the same kind of international attention, at least not yet. And the intentions of foreign media outlets with respect to highlighting the rest of the 60-day extravaganza are mixed.

Dana Sullivant, marketing director with the Vancouver Art Gallery, says staff there couldn’t be more thrilled about the coverage the gallery has received so far. Prior to the cauldron being lit, television crews from Poland and Germany had also visited, shooting not just the highly anticipated Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man but also Visions of British Columbia: A Landscape Manual and its other exhibitions.

Furthermore, the VAG has been mentioned by the L.A. Times, the New York Times, theWashington Post, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Minnesota’s StarTribune, among other publications.

Case in point, the Purple Thistle. The February edition of their broadsheet, The Thistler, features an editorial about civil disobedience and a “riot 2010″ graphic on the front page. Conceived as a sort of free school, the Purple Thistle center has become a space for youth to create art and media, to discuss, and to learn from one another. They are also one of a handful of local artist groups that had access to money from the Cultural Olympiad and made a collective decision to reject that money.

“We just don’t want to owe anybody any thing,” said Aly de la Cruz, a member of the Purple Thistle Collective.

Similarly positive is the success of the Cultural Olympiad, the dozens of cultural events surrounding the 2010 Olympics.

Some its notable events are the upcoming Blue Dragon by Robert Lepage, the Vancouver Opera’s Canadian premier of Nixon in China and dozens of others performances making the Olympics about more than gold medals.

It’s all planting the seeds for a cultural legacy. But will it all evaporate after the Games leave town?

Possibly so.

With the 2010 Winter Olympics coming to the city, Slow’s onstage confrontation with Expo’s authorities serves as a reminder of the potentially volatile relationship between culture workers and the mega-funded global events that try to engage them.