With a soundproof room where you can bang on bhangra instruments, a lounge to practise dance moves and stations for listening to top tunes from Vancouver, the U.K. and India, the Museum of Vancouver's Bhangra.me: Vancouver's Bhangra Story is bound to be as invigorating as bhangra beats.

The new exhibit that launches tonight (May 4) and runs until Oct. 23 highlights the role bhangra has played in shaping identity and community in the 1960s and '70s, labour movements in the 1980s and intercultural appreciation in Metro Vancouver.

The exhibit also coincides with the City of Bhangra Festival, which kicks off today until May 14.

Co-curator and researcher Naveen Girn spent a year interviewing dozens of locals about bhangra. The documentary footage he shot punctuates the exhibit, which includes sections on gender, how mainstream media has reported on bhangra and the music.

Visitors will be immediately hit with the diversity of views on bhangra with images and sound clips presented on four large video screens at the entrance to the exhibit.

There's a wall of instruments ranging from a more than a century old dhol drum to local bhangra band En Karma's electric guitar, the first bhangra costume worn in Canada in the early 1970s, and a timeline that highlights key moments for bhangra in Metro Vancouver from the '70s to present.

"Apache Indian came out with this song called 'Arranged Marriage' [in the '90s] and I remember being part of this cool phone tree where we would make a call over and over and we got it to be the top song on Z95.3's Top 8 at 8," said Girn, 31, who was born and raised in Vancouver. "I remember watching [Beverly Hills] 90210 and having the radio on in the background and finally hearing it coming out as a top song."

The exhibit's gender section highlights how local all-women university bhangra troupes have been trailblazers by competing as single-gender groups because men traditionally dance bhangra, while women typically danced a slower form called giddha.

Bhangra music was used to lure interest to farm labour concerns in the early 1980s, as is highlighted in a documentary that's included in the exhibit called A Time to Rise.

Four TVs, from models with rabbit ears to a flat screen, show images of bhangra from four decades.

Girn says when bhangra dancers performed in Quesnel in the 1970s and '80s, they had to dodge bottles thrown by aboriginal members of the audience who feared the performers would steal their lumber jobs.

There's a wall of bhangra cassettes from the 1980s and a wall of records from the 1970s and a soundproof room where videos on an iPad instruct visitors how to play bhangra instruments including the dhol. A wall of the bhangra lab is clad with stylish red wallpaper fashioned by local company Propeller Design. From afar, it looks like a traditional paisley print. Up close, one can see a pattern made of whales, squirrels and dogwoods.

The exhibit, co-produced by the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration Society (VIBC) is the first major museum exhibition of its kind in Canada, and Girn and the museum's curator of contemporary issues, Viviane Gosselin, like that it focuses on a living art form.

Girn said when the mini exhibition was launched last year, some old-timers in the South Asian community said an exhibit about their history in Metro Vancouver should focus on its politicians or the Komagata Maru ship, which the Navy forced to leave Vancouver exactly two months after the boat that carried 376 Indians arrived.

But Girn is excited to see an exhibit that moves beyond the same old "ethnic stories" of the Chinese head tax, Japanese internment camps and the Komagata Maru.

"The Komagata Maru, yes that's an important story, but it's a 1914 story," Girn said. "This is something that speaks to a certain immigration period in the '70s. It speaks to notions of identity and coming to terms with Canadian-ness, it also speaks in terms of looking towards the future, so it's a very Vancouver story."

For more information, see museumofvancouver.ca and vibc.org.

crossi@vancourier.com

Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi