Chris Wootten was a key to the success of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, the Vancouver International Children’s Festival and the cultural programming at Expo 86.
Chris Wootten seemed to be everywhere in Vancouver’s cultural world in the 1970s and ’80s.
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He founded the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in 1973. He was the founding artistic director of the Vancouver International Children’s Festival in 1978. He was the director of programming for Expo 86.
“He was really the animating spirit in the ’70s and ’80s,” said former Vancouver Sun writer Max Wyman. “He was just a spark for everything that was going on.”
Wootten died from pneumonia and kidney failure on Jan. 29 at Lions Gate Hospital. He was 81.
Christopher Ellis Wootten was born in Vancouver on Aug. 23, 1943. After obtaining a degree in English and economics at the University of B.C., he got an MBA from Harvard in 1967.
But rather than enter the business world, he went into arts administration. He turned down a high-paying job at The New Yorker magazine for an internship at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn.
After a spell in arts management in New York, he returned to Canada to run youth programs for the federal government.
“I had been working in New York in theatre and dance and came home and was trying to get a pulse on the city and soon discovered the Inner City Service Project, which was an umbrella for a number of anti-poverty organizations operating out of the old Grandview United Church in East Van,” he told Postmedia News’s Stuart Derdeyn in 2023.
“It was a time when there was government money available to design community projects of all kinds, all across the country. And it created many of the theatre groups that are now mainstays from coast-to-coast. At around that time, Inner City was folding and someone suggested that we should take over the church and turn it into a performance space or lose it.”
So he did, transforming the old church at Victoria and Venables into a 350-seat performing arts venue.
“They opened in ’73, and bang,” said Wyman. “It became the real hub for so much that was new and fresh in the city, dance and theatre and music. I mean, Chris had an astonishing influence on what was happening. He was determined to make it a cultural centre, and Vancouver a cultural centre.”
One of the big successes at the east cultural centre was John Gray’s play Billy Bishop Goes to War in 1978. Toward the end of its run, Wootten came to see Gray and the star of the one-man play, Eric Peterson, with Vancouver investor Haig Farris and Lewis Allen, a N.Y. producer. They brought Billy Bishop to the U.S., where it played on Broadway, in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Then it went to London, England, and Edinburgh.
He was director of the east cultural centre from 1973-82, and artistic director of the children’s festival from 1978-81. He was director of programming at Expo 86 from 1982-85, “responsible for conceiving and planning the $45-million cultural and entertainment program.”
There was a lot of politics at Expo, and Wootten left before the fair opened. But his vision continued.
“A lot of the really magical things at Expo were Chris’s creation,” said Michael Heeney, who worked with Wootten at Bing Thom architects. “He was the one that basically animated the site and brought in these amazing acts.”
After working on a couple of projects with artist Bill Reid, Wootten moved to Toronto to become executive director of the Ontario Arts Council in 1987-88. He came back to Vancouver to be general manager of the Vancouver Playhouse theatre company from 1992-98 and was associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery from 2001-05.
“He was everywhere and did everything, you couldn’t stop him,” said Wyman. “He was a force that could not be reckoned with, determined to make it happen. Not because he wanted it, because he thought it was good for the city. He was probably one of the most effective advocates of this idea that the arts belong to everyone.”
Wootten is survived by his wife Lib and children Ed, Nathan, Chuck and Sarah.