August 2004

 

Journey to BC’s Past:

Tourist Attraction Acts out Province’s History

Nicole Vanderwyst

The Peak, Simon Fraser University

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VANCOUVER (CUP)—In the
heart of Vancouver’s Gastown, a
new way of exploring British
Columbia’s early historical roots is
offering locals and tourists alike an
interactive “edutainment” experi-
ence.

Storyeum, a multimedia his-
torical attraction developed by
Vancouver-based Historical Xper-
iences Inc., provides a guided 72-
minute tour that takes audiences
through a series of underground
theatres spanning an area the size
of' six hockey rinks. The $22.5 mil-
lion attraction, which features two
of the world’s biggest lifts, each
with a capacity of over 11,000
kilograms, involves a host of
actors and _ high-tech
effects.

The president and CEO of
Storyeum, Danny Guillaume, first
came up with the idea for the
attraction in 2000 after developing
a similar, smaller-scale attraction
in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Since its opening on June 1,

special

approximately 1,000 people per
day have visited Storyeum.

“The experience being offered
is highly entertaining and based on
historical facts, providing guests
with ‘a sense of place, and better
insight into who we arte as peo-
ple,’ said Drew,
Storyeum’s vice president of mar-
keting and communications, in a
press release.

The tour begins with a look at
a vast timeframe, starting with
BC’s geological development 180
million years ago, moving on to
the 15,000-year-old history of
First Nations peoples, and the first
European contact in the 1700s, up
until modern day Vancouver.

The first lift carries visitors
underground to what is called the
world’s biggest salmon stream.
From there, the actors guide them
from theatre to theatre.

In the first theatre, the audi-
ence sees an ancient coastal forest

Graeme

in which a young First Nations

man is on a_ spirit quest.

  

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Storye

Subsequent theatres showcase a
First Nations’ long house, the
deck of Captain Cook’s tall ship, a
replica of the gold rush town of
Barkerville, the building of the
CPR line through Rogers Pass in
the Rocky Mountains, and the
arrival of locomotive engine num-
ber 374 in Gastown, which was
the first engine to transport pas-
sengers across Canada.

During
actors frequently address and
interact with audience members.
Elwyn Xie, the actor who plays
Chinese merchant Lee Chong in
the Barkerville chapter of the
show, said that this helps to
enhance visitors’ enjoyment.

“T think that it makes people
feel like they’re a part of the expe-
rience. Our experience has been in
trying to make the show a little
more interactive rather than a typ-

the performances,

ical theatre production where you
sit and [the actors] perform.”

Xie also said that the purpose
of Storyeum is to make history

um/historical Xperiences Inc.

News

    

accessible to the public.

“The motto of this company
is ‘It’s about time.’ And that’s what
I say about telling the stories of
the ethnics and the First Nations
people. It’s about time. And, actu-
ally, I would say it’s about bloody
time.”

Historical accuracy is vital to
Storyeum, according to Xie.
Costumes, scripts and even the
cultural heritages of the actors
themselves are all chosen to
reflect the concern for accuracy.

Peggy Ridgeway, a visitor
from Pennsylvania, was impressed
with Storyeum’s attention to
detail.

“The whole show, I thought,
was magnificent, and explained
very well everything that [took
place] all through that time. And
the different cultures—I don’t
think that I ever realized that there
were so many cultures involved in
building [the railroad].”

 

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