Buddies18/19 Season Brochure

YEARS

40

OF QUEER 1979 – 2019

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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Buddies in bad times I’m gonna say good-night

I’m gone The show tanked It’s all my fault Nobody else to blame I should have listened to you I should have played the poodle That always works But I did whatever the hell I wanted And now I’m done When you play the tough-haired bitch You have to sweeten your tone No one goes to concerts to hear you howl at the moon And that song about the humane society was such a mistake Buddies in bad times I’m gonna say good-night Sleep well dream good dreams I’m taking my hat and the last two or three cigarettes and I’m gone

Buddies in bad times think of me every now and then When you wake think of me somersaulting like a river otter with candied salmon somewhere at night by the lakeside then passing round a jar for change for something to eat and drink Buddies in bad times I’m gonna say good-night Sleep Dream I’m gone — Jacques Prévert “Le concert n’a pas été réussi” translation by Soraya Peerbaye

YEARS

40

OF QUEER 1979 – 2019

design

Lucinda Wallace photography

Tanja-Tiziana

art direction + styling

Vanessa Fischer

hair + makeup

Jessica Panetta Gertrude and Alice background artwork

Hazel Meyer

Youth / Elders Podcast artwork

Paul Dotey

translation of Jacques Prévert’s “Le concert n’a pas été réussi”

Soraya Peerbaye writers

copyediting

Lesley Fraser additional photography

Jeremy Mimnagh (pg 50) Dahlia Katz (pg 55) styling assistance

Olivia Davidson

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Artistic Director’s Message 07 Gertrude and Alice 11 Now You See Her 14 2-Spirit Cabaret 19 Obaaberima 22 The Scavenger’s Daughter 27 The 40th Rhubarb Festival 31 School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play 34 Shove It Down My Throat 39 OUT 42 Shakespeare’s Criminal 47 Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama 50 Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools 54 The Youth / Elders Podcast 55 The Buddies Residency Program 56 Tickets + Season Calendar 57 Sponsors, Partners + Donors

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Mark Aikman Cole Alvis Bilal Baig Yolanda Bonnell Dave Deveau Waawaate Fobister Susanna Fournier Sina Gilani Mel Hague Michael Lyons François Macdonald Aidan Morishita-Miki Evalyn Parry Beatriz Pizano Lara Rae Nikki Shaffeeullah Aurora Stewart de Peña

Contents

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BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

It’s 1979.

Evalyn Parry Artistic Director

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

EVALYN PARRY

It’s three years before the Toronto bathhouse raids will galvanize our community. Ten years after the Stonewall riots. Three years before the AIDS epidemic will begin. Six years since homo­sexuality has been removed from the DSM. Twenty-six years before gay marriage will be legalized in Canada. Gloria Gaynor is topping the charts with “I Will Survive.” More than 100,000 people march on Washington demanding “gay and lesbian rights.” The St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street is a popular gay bar, a stone’s throw away from 12 Alexander Street.

It’s the year that a group of young theatre artists in Toronto put on a show called Angels in Underwear. They name their production company Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Four decades later, Buddies has become – as unlikely as it may have seemed in 1979 – a cultural institution. It is a space where risk and provocation continue to define our artistic mission.

A space where many communities intersect to engage in the challenge and glory that is queer performance. A space that, nearly a quarter century ago, found a permanent home at 12 Alexander Street in the heart of downtown Toronto, making it the largest and longest-running queer theatre company in the world.

As Buddies turns 40, I’ve been thinking a lot about space. What it means, at this moment in time, to occupy a space – as a community, as a city, and as a nation – and what it means to offer space. I’ve been thinking about how queer spaces evolve, and about the unchanging imperative for brave, courageous spaces.

In our home at 12 Alexander Street, we’ve had the incredible privilege of staging our queer stories and theatrical experiments in a physical space large enough that we can stand back and see ourselves… from a bit of a distance. Not pressed into the margins of a cramped storefront space or studio, The Chamber – our beloved main stage – has offered generations of queer artists a sense of perspective.

For 40 years, Buddies productions, festivals, and community programming have uncovered unique queer viewpoints and offered theatrical experiences like no other company in this city or this country. We have introduced generations of artists to the world, and generations of audiences to the transformative power of seeing our stories played out onstage. We have seen our community suffer great losses and make great gains. We have grown. We have persisted. We have held our space.

This anniversary season, we reclaim works from the not-so-distant past, and we showcase the new; we tip our hats to our history, to our future, and to the continuous present.

Now, let’s make space for what is to come.

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40 YEARS OF QUEER...

AND WE’RE JUST GETTING STARTED

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

40th Anniversary Season

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In the following pages, you’ll see what we have in store for our 40th Anniversary Mainstage Season.

In addition to all this, we’ll be hosting a series of surprise parties, community events, and play readings to celebrate our history and imagine possibilities for the future.

We’ll be announcing new events throughout the year, so stay tuned to buddiesinbadtimes.com/40 for the latest news.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

THE LIVES, LOVE, AND LEGACY OF GERTRUDE STEIN AND ALICE B. TOKLAS

A Buddies in Bad Times Theatre production

Gertrude and Alice

conceived + created by THE INDEPENDENT AUNTIES directed + dramaturged by KARIN RANDOJA written + performed by ANNA CHATTERTON + EVALYN PARRY

EVALYN PARRY + ANNA CHATTERTON

Visiting the audience in the present day, Gertrude and Alice come to find out how history has treated them. The couple recounts stories of their 40-year marriage, of meetings with iconic artists and writers, and of Alice’s overwhelming, consuming devotion to Gertrude’s genius. Before they leave, they want to find out what has become of their artistic and cultural influence, and how their lives and work are – or are not – remembered.

Nominated for three Dora Awards and recently published by Playwrights Canada Press, the beloved story of Gertrude and Alice returns to the Buddies stage with a new production design from celebrated visual artist Sherri Hay.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

September 15–October 7, 2018

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Her: Plural Gertrude and Alice / September 15–October 7, 2018

by Lara Rae

‘‘O

ne day when Picasso was to lunch with us I decorated a fish in a way that I thought would amuse him. I chose a fine striped bass and cooked it according to a theory of my grandmother who had no experience in cooking and who rarely saw her kitchen but who had endless theories about cooking as well as about many other things.1 This was the year 1907. Gertrude Stein was just seeing through the press Three Lives which she was having privately printed, and she was deep in The Making of the Americans, her thousand page book. Picasso had just finished his portrait of her which nobody at the time liked except the painter and the painted…” 2 This amuse-gueule, tap-happy googlers will discover, is an amalgame. The first sentence arrives via The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, the second from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Her.

Lara Rae is the artistic director of the Winnipeg Comedy Festival.

She lives in Winnipeg with her rat, Nina.

Who is her? The one a friend of the food writer M.F.K. Fisher said had a black moustache that made other faces seem nude? The one who cooked while the other wrote. The one who remained post mortem: ate to sustain, at a table for one, while a colourful pageant of modernist art looked down, millionaires all, redeemed from poverty and obscurity by her resilience and grit. And her good taste. Who knew?

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Her.

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Pronouns. If I knew them. Would they like it? Would they like it, this modern art of ours for erasing the gender lines? Would they? They.

Singular or plural? Amuse bouche.

Would they like it? Would they know it? How much as a woman, as a feminist, as a trans person?

Would they? How much her work has informed me? As a cook, as writer, as one whose own autobiographical play DragonFly puts words of mine into the mouth of her the actor I wrote the play for and him the actor who plays her after she transitions.

She was a genius she often told us. And was, for a time, as has been said for some time: famous for being famous. Though she might have said: famous for being so.

Her.

How quickly pronouns reform the tyranny of proper names, roles, and labels. What kept them apart, distinguished and extinguished their plurality and made a hearse of hers were the stuffy signifiers; when they become some thing to each other. Famous writer and secretarycompanion instead of just letting her be. Murderous euphemisms and bloody, bloodless ceremony.

Engage with the sycophancy of the 18th-century novel with its dedications to lords and patrons and pomp, and in a flash you will see her, hear what she saw, and see what she meant.

They should have named a hurricane after her.

She thought men better but they sat at her feet. She thought the he of her made her a genius and the she of her made her wise. Do I care?

I saw this remarkable play last time out. It grabs something of her and returns it. They are incredible.

Both of her.

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book

by Alice B. Toklas.

2 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

1

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

She was a genius she often told us.

And was, for a time, as has been said for some time: famous for being famous.

Though she might have said: famous for being so.

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10

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

FROM THE CREATORS OF THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL HIT MOUTHPIECE

A Nightwood Theatre, Quote Unquote Collective, and Why Not Theatre co-production

Now You See Her

co-director / creator / performer / composer AMY NOSTBAKKEN co-director / creator / performer NORAH SADAVA performers / creators LISA KAREN COX, MAGGIE HUCULAK, RAHA JAVANFAR + CHEYENNE SCOTT choreographer ORIAN MICHAELI

RAHA JAVANFAR

They are the invisible, the vanishing, and the disappeared. In an insurrectionary outburst of original music, words, and movement, six characters in Now You See Her explore some of the diverse ways women fade from sight in our culture. They sing, dance, and thrust themselves into the elements as they travel through the seasons of their lives. Their voices are defiant. Their question is simple: why and how do we allow our power to disappear without a fight?

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

October 16–November 4, 2018

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Disappearing Act

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Now You See Her / October 16–November 4, 2018

by Aurora Stewart de Peña

12

‘‘ I

was walking down the street with – she’s not my mother, but she’s a mother figure.

She’s about 65, and we ran into this other friend of mine.

And this friend – he’s a lovely person. And he looked her in the eyes and shook her hand and said, ‘Hi, nice to meet you,’ and we talked, and when he left, she was so excited: ‘I can’t believe he looked me in the eye. I can’t believe he saw me.’”

Norah Sadava, one half of my iPad screen, takes a sip of her coffee. She and Amy Nostbakken, the other half of my screen, are Quote Unquote Collective, and they’re taking a break from recording music for the film adaptation of their international hit play Mouthpiece to Skype with me about their new work, Now You See Her. Sadava continues, “Because so often when you’re around young people, they don’t see you. You’re just this general wash, you’re the background.”

Nostbakken, nodding in agreement, tells me that the 65-ish character in their play, Joanne, is a journalist being given a lifetime achievement award, which comes with the unspoken message that she is to stop working and age gently out of sight. To become, after an accomplished life, part of the wash, part of the background.

Now You See Her is about all the insidious ways women fade away, get talked over, get written out, and disappear into the ether.

There are so many roads to vanish down while womaning, and Nostbakken and Sadava are walking them with a diverse team of collaborators to create their work. Initially conceived as a three-hander, Now You See Her’s scope has grown to include

Aurora Stewart de Peña is the co-artistic director of Birdtown and Swanville.

six actors. Characters include a scientist who is being written out of her own research; a new mother sucked into isolation, postpartum depression, and an eating disorder; a pop star pressured by the music industry to perform a version of Blackness for white audiences at the expense of her real identity; and an exceptional Indigenous woman whose disappearance is, Nostbakken says, “quite obvious and literal.”

Quote Unquote’s three-year process has been extremely collaborative, and their team members have driven the collective development of the piece and their characters’ arcs. They’ve also invited outside eyes into the studio with the hope that no particular actor would have to feel the weight of speaking for their entire culture or community, or telling a disappearance story that felt like a dangerous trope. Each of the characters is painted by the experiences of the woman developing her, and her behaviours, her movements, her relationships are discussed in the room.

In a story about vanished, invisible, and disappearing women, the conspicuously absent parties are men. I ask Nostbakken and Sadava whether they think men are responsible for the erasure of women. The question leads to an uncomfortable pause.

Nostbakken says no, men aren’t to blame, but the structure they created is. “I think it’s oversimplifying to say it’s just men – of course, it’s the patriarchy that’s hiding us and pushing us down again and again, over and over. But it’s being upheld by all of us. And yeah, women weren’t allowed to create the structure we have to live and function in. But we are functioning, and it’s built within us. Men disappear women, but a lot of women disappear each other, disappear themselves. You think about something like an eating disorder:

who to blame for that is so complex it’s kind of not worth asking – well, it’s not worth blaming.

It is worth asking. But in terms of women, we feed ourselves this toxic material of movies and media. We know it’s wrong, but we still do it. We feed it to our kids. So the play is less about who to blame and more about ‘Now what?’”

Now what? is the question the play asks, but it’s also a question the collective makers of Now You See Her are working to answer through the process of creation. The theme of disappearing women means something very different depending on the body you were born into. One woman’s workplace invisibility is another woman’s life.

Sadava and Nostbakken chose their collaborators with this in mind. They wanted the most gifted performers, people who could move, sing, and create the surreal physical, musical world that Quote Unquote is known for. But just as importantly, they wanted people who would call them out. Nostbakken says, “We chose people who were going to challenge us. We saw a lot of really talented actors, but we chose the ones we knew would not let us off the hook about anything and who would challenge the politics at every turn. We chose activists, people who want to be actively changing the world.”

Sadava elaborates: “A part of the core thesis of this piece is that we are a group of six women who come from very different backgrounds, who have different bodies, who are all of different ages. As women, we’ve been divided and pitted against each other so frequently that the impetus to listen and hold on to each other and move forward together has been torn away from us.

What we are trying to do, even in building this play, is a political act in the room. That there’s six of us hearing each other out and trying to understand each other. It’s not about ‘We’re all the same.’ It’s about ‘I hear you. I hear your experience. And I empathize, and even if I don’t understand, I’m trying.’”

I ask, does it feel possible? Is it possible to move forward together? To make something together? Nostbakken takes a sip of coffee, and Sadava laughs. “It’s not a straight line. It’s not like ‘Oh yeah, forward is that direction, and we’re all doing it together.’”

So instead, they tell me, they’ve been working together with their collaborators, engaging in questions.

“How do we not erase each other?”

“How do we listen?”

“How do we make each other feel more seen and heard?”

Now what?

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

The theme of disappearing women means something very different depending on the body you were born into.

One woman’s workplace invisibility is another woman’s life.

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PART OF WEESAGEECHAK BEGINS TO DANCE 31

Native Earth Performing Arts in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre presents

2-Spirit Cabaret curated by MICHAELA WASHBURN

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Back for a third year, the 2-Spirit Cabaret is a celebration of the strength, beauty, and talent of queer and two-spirit Indigenous people. Buddies and Native Earth present an evening of performances, music, and spoken word as part of Weesageechak Begins to Dance – Native Earth’s annual festival of Indigenous works.

MICHAELA WASHBURN

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

November 16, 2018

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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Dance Your Style

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

2-Spirit Cabaret / November 16, 2018

by Waawaate Fobister

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D

rum. Singers. Sweat.

Song. Moccasins. Beat.

Heart. Spirit. Colour.

Flow. Energy. Breathing.

These are some of the words that come to my mind when I think of pow-wow. I am a grass dancer and have been dancing since I was about five years old. The grass dance represents the grass blowing in the wind. It is rooted and fluid at the same time. Free expression and tradition embrace within the dance, and I am very honoured every time I get the opportunity to dance in my regalia, which itself is an extension of the movement. Pow-wow is the foundation of my dance. At powwows you can hear the MC encouraging people to find their own style within the frame they are dancing in. They always say, “Dance your style. Dance your style.” This is the very first platform we are given at a young age: to express ourselves in front of our audience.

In August 2017, at the Shoal Lake First Nation pow-wow, I participated in a special event called the switch dance, where participants can adopt roles and dance styles from a different gender. Dancers were asked to make their own outfits from materials not used in real regalia; this was the time to get crafty and make it as elaborate as we wanted. I decided to use garbage. I chose pollutants to honour my home community of Grassy Narrows, which is always on

Waawaate Fobister is the creator and performer of Agokwe, which premiered in Buddies’ 2008/09 Season.

my mind, as are my family and community, because of the suffering we have endured from mercury poisoning. I called my outfit the mercury dress.

This was the idea I brought to the Weesageechak festival’s 2-Spirit Cabaret. This unique event, a celebration of two-spirit artists and their work, is the result of two mothering companies – Native Earth Performing Arts and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre – joining forces to create an evening you will not experience anywhere else in Canada.

When Michaela Washburn, the curator, asked me to be part of the 2-Spirit Cabaret in 2017, I built a character named Omaagomaan, which means one who bites really hard.

Omaagomaan is a two-spirit being, a manifestation of the earth and of man-made poisons that have seeped into the earth’s crust. It is man, woman, landscape, and mercury poison interwoven into one being. A fierce shape-shifter inspired by Anishinaabe mythology, Omaagomaan forces us to watch the manaadizi (ugly) and the onizhishi (beautiful) collide.

I say “Anishinaabe” because the word is very specific, unlike “Indigenous,” which is a huge umbrella with many nations under it. If you broke up Canada and the United States by putting borders around all these nations, there would be hundreds across this land, many overlapping the Canada-US border. Within my own family, there are relatives in Manitoba, Ontario, and Minnesota, but the Anishinaabe stretch beyond this. Colonization and the land-ownership mindset have disrupted the Anishinaabe’s caretaker relationship with the land and our way of life. I created Omaagomaan as a fierce land defender. She is inspired by the women in my life: my grandmother, my mother, my aunties, and the community members of Grassy Narrows.

The 2-Spirit Cabaret provided a great platform for an idea that snowballed into a much larger piece in the 2018 Rhubarb Festival. It continues to grow into a full-length piece. I feel the possibilities are endless when these kinds of opportunities are offered to artists who don’t fit the mould of conventional theatre. The MC at the pow-wow always says, “Dance your style. Dance your style!” and it is in that spirit, or two, that we shape the next 2-Spirit Cabaret.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

At pow-wows you can hear the MC encouraging people to find their own style within the frame they are dancing in. This is the very first platform we are given at a young age: to express ourselves in front of our audience.

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BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

“A TOUR-DE-FORCE” –TORONTO STAR

A Buddies in Bad Times Theatre production

Obaaberima written + performed by TAWIAH BEN M’CARTHY directed by EVALYN PARRY live music by KOBÈNA AQUAA-HARRISON

November 27–December 9, 2018

TAWIAH BEN M’CARTHY

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Imprisoned in Canada for committing a violent crime, a young man from Ghana tells his cellmates a story on the eve of his release. Although there is great risk in sharing his tale, he must tell it to be truly free. Through storytelling, dance, and live music, Obaaberima chronicles a young African-Canadian’s journey across continents, genders, races, and sexualities.

Winner of the 2013 Dora Award for Outstanding Production, Obaaberima has played on stages across the country, garnering rave reviews from coast to coast. Our 40th anniversary season sees Obaaberima’s long-awaited return to the Buddies stage.

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Obaaberima / November 27–December 9, 2018 BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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There’s Something in the Water

by Bilal Baig

‘‘B

ut there is no name for all of who I am.”

Sibongile speaks these words just moments before she summons light and walks away.

Does naming and claiming your truth set you free? How do you do that? As queer, trans, gender-fucking People of Colour who are immigrants or refugees (or children of immigrants and refugees) and also feel bound to their religion in some way, what does it mean and what does it take – for us – to be free?

For me, there is no purpose in denying the power of gender play. When we refuse to access all our genders, we do a great disservice to our bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits. Perhaps we are not living as fully and truly as we can when we prevent the rivers of our obaa and our oberima from meeting and flowing together.

What gender-fuckers inherently know early in their lives, and what others come to know much later (and in some cases never know), is to seek pleasure. Actively. We seek our pleasures any way we can. We seek pleasure that is dirty and we seek pleasure that is dangerous. We seek the pleasure that sits deep within us – for so many of us it can be quite scary to look at – and we do this at such early ages.

For Agyeman, pleasure lives deep in their mother’s heels. For me, it lived deep in my mother’s long, thick black hair and how she would wrap it up in a towel after a shower. And what an honour it was when I was given the opportunity from time to time to comb her long, thick black hair for her.

For Agyeman and myself, we are our mothers.

They live inside and outside of us. We carry them in our chests and hands, in our feet and our hair.

In our eyes. We see how closely their love of god and fear of god sit next to one another, like two small boulders in a stream. We know how their bodies move, what stories live in their hips, and where they’ve come from. We know everything they’ve given up. We know what their crushed

Bilal Baig is the author of Acha Bacha, which premiered in Buddies’ 2017/18 Season, a co-production with Theatre Passe Muraille.

dreams sound like. We know what we sound like when we open our mouths and disappoint and fail them. Again and again. We know what that’s sounded like before we could even speak. We know so well what it takes to make them smile.

And at the same time, we don’t know a single true thing about them. We carry all of that.

For Agyeman and myself, we are our lovers too. We are the people who showed us a love and appreciation for our queerness as it was just blossoming. We are also the people who fuck us without looking at our faces. We are the women who held our hands just when we needed them to, and the men who helped us understand that feeling beautiful and sexual and safe can all happen at the same time. We are the gender-fuckers we fall in love with at first sight. We are our lovers who say, “I love you” so easily and mean it so truthfully. We are the men who adore the colour of our skin because it makes them feel like they’re colonizing the countries we come from every time they come on us. We are the men who love to explore our bodies by running their hands over the lace, the silk, the leather, the nylon, the butterfly-buckle hook belt we wear.

And for Agyeman and myself, we are also our abusers. We are the little girls who feel strongly that something isn’t right when they watch the way we move our hips and hands. We are the white women, too, who feel personally attacked by the way we move our hips and hands. We are the man at whom

we screamed “NO,” with our minds and our bodies, and he still didn’t fucking listen. We are every single person who took advantage of us, who lied to us, who broke our hearts and spirits. We are the people who left us too early, too abruptly, who didn’t seem to care what happens to the fish in this pond when you stop checking in with them. We are the letter, the email, the text, the phone call we received that shattered our world. We are part of the system that separates and destroys families, disposes of bodies, shames survivors, rapes the land, imprisons Black and Indigenous folks and other People of Colour, kills Black and Indigenous folks and other People of Colour, and doesn’t look at our faces as they continue to fuck us.

We are trapped.

So, what sets us free?

I thought I was going to die, as I was drowning in the ocean just off the shore of a beach in Bali, Indonesia. It is July 2016. I’m by myself.

I don’t know how to swim, but I like danger and I go too far out. All the white tourists are splashing around and swimming just far enough from me not to notice that I’m drowning.

Strange. The sun burns bright and makes my skin feel golden brown.

A wave consumes my whole being, my whole man-body wearing small, tight swim shorts and bangles on my wrists. My mom doesn’t know where I am. I always wanted to get pregnant somehow before I died. I should’ve prayed more. I try to make peace with how I’m going. I breathe. The water holds me, my body, and my thoughts, and it moves me. The water pushes me, past the sea of oblivious white tourists, towards shore. I survive.

The water held me, all of me, my obaa and my oberima, and I survived.

I felt powerful after. I walked in the sand, and I suppose if Agyeman were walking with me, we’d put on our red heels and swing our hips.

What gender-fuckers inherently know early in their lives, and what others come to know much later (and in some cases never know), is to seek pleasure. Actively.

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YOU SAY DEATH IS THE STRANGER, THE ONE WE MEET THE DAY WE DIE. YOU’RE WRONG

PARADIGM productions presents the second installment of The Empire Trilogy

The Scavenger’s Daughter by SUSANNA FOURNIER

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January 15–27, 2019 At the edge of an unknown empire, Jack, Ash, and Sarah have grown up in a war that’s been waging for 20 years. Jack’s only weeks away from civilian life, his freedom from the army having been bought for him by a mysterious philosopher who taught him to read and write.

All he has to do is wait, smash Sarah’s heart, and keep in line. But when rations wear thin and the king seizes the opium trails, Jack and Ash must fight their way through the violence of withdrawal, scarcity, militarization, and each other.

The Empire Trilogy spans 500 years of an imagined history (not unlike our own). Each play is its own story, but when combined they reveal a secret, over-arcing narrative.

SUSANNA FOURNIER + TED WITZEL

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

directed by TED WITZEL

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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A Scavenger’s Dialogue The Scavenger’s Daughter / January 15–27, 2019

a conversation between Susanna Fournier and Sina Gilani

W

ar is a space that allows for male intimacy.

But is that the only place that male intimacy can be achieved?

I hope not.

When I think of my Persian heritage for example, I find the culture very homoerotic. Maybe not in the domestic sphere, but socially for sure.

For me, growing up in a culture defined by a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant worldview, war narratives were the only stories in which I saw men care for and protect one another. The language of “brotherhood” always seemed to be connected to enduring violence together, surviving hard labour.

That is so interesting. In Iran (and, to my knowledge, in many Islamic countries) we call each other brothers as a term of endearment; it’s like our version of “dude.”

I always observed “brotherhood” as something a man had to earn. I wonder if war became a place of male initiation – surviving war meant you had earned your masculinity.

It’s very Spartan if you ask me – hero narratives.

It’s the rite to become an individual in that way, no?

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

War epics and poems are a significant part of how I arrive at my sense of self, culturally. For god, king, and country, as they say.

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Yes, and these are symbols of the Father, no? War is attached to a deep sense of the masculine. Millions of young men are sent to serve this Father symbol, to fight for him. I wonder how this deep longing for masculinity has been harnessed by power – I’m thinking of imperial power. “Country” is a relatively new word for empire.

Yes, but now we also have women serving in the army, and others.

Absolutely. Yet we still see modern armies as an incredibly “male” sphere – with a very narrow understanding of what is “male.” Women soldiers and queer soldiers are marginalized, often violently abused.

Eurocentric-Western notion of arriving at a sense of self is violent. You know – I don’t know how to say it – but the self is aggressive. “I,” it is separate from the rest; it needs an other to dominate to assert itself.

We are a fiercely individualistic culture. Modernity has created a space where the “I” has replaced a sense of collectivity, or sense of god.

Capitalism is fuelled by exploitation, so the pursuit of individual power is, within capitalism, a violent pursuit.

YES. The self is a consumer.

And the self is a “soldier” within this system. The self must attain power (through wealth) or else have power extracted from oneself.

That is why I think modern warfare is an expression of capitalistic aesthetics and individualism.

And much of war is played out through economics these days: violent takeovers of countries and communities are done through neoliberal trade negotiations. A country and culture can be destroyed without troops ever setting foot on the land.

And a “good” war is no longer about the story of it. I mean, Syria is all over the news, but I can’t name a hero, like an Achilles versus Hector or a Rustam versus Isphandyar. Capitalistic aesthetics do define a new “good war,” don’t they?

A war no longer about heroes, but a war that is cost effective, profitable. But then what happens to the individual, the soldier?

They become a tool of labour, like in any other industry.

But one without a good story. What is there for them? Glory? A medal? A pension? Is a genderfluid Penelope eternally waiting for their return?

We’re actually seeing an increase in veteran suicides. They participate and survive brutality only to “return” to a life that cannot comprehend or support what they have endured. What is this initial act of colonization that must occur in the creation of “soldiers”? In order to dehumanize others, to kill on command, what part of the self must first be dehumanized?

Susanna Fournier is the author of The Scavenger’s Daughter and was one of the three co-creators behind 2018’s LULU V.7 // aspects of a femme fatale.

It is also safe. “King” gives the illusion of control. “Phallic” is a time-tested symbol of dominance over chaos.

Which is, in a sense, to dominate and control the Feminine – the realms of chaos, life, and creation.

Is every war a war against the Feminine? Is every war actually being waged against death, in an attempt to control it?

I really think it is: we offer the best of us! For death to claim, or we used to. Modern warfare – I’ve seen it – there’s very little agency involved.

So, in an attempt to dominate chaos, we create it?

Yeah, we manufacture chaos, and we create it.

War was once an expression of violence connected to life and death.

And what I wonder, perhaps what this play wonders, what The Empire Trilogy as a whole examines, is how this expression, this longing, has been harnessed, as a narrative, like so many of our governing narratives, to serve imperial power.

Great.

Dehumanized? That word is interesting.

That is what I’m trying to get at by connecting masculinity and individuality. The

Sina Gilani was most recently seen on the Buddies stage in 2015’s The 20th of November and is the production dramaturge for The Scavenger’s Daughter.

Yes, considering war has been a part of human activity since the beginning, what is this violent part of ourselves we want to believe isn’t a part of “humanity”? Especially in a culture where power feels good. We all want to be near “the king.” It’s attractive.

I wonder if war became a place of male initiation – surviving war meant you had earned your masculinity.

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“THE WILDEST THEATRE FEST IN TOWN” –TORONTO LIFE

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre presents

The 40th

Rhubarb Festival festival director MEL HAGUE

February 13–24, 2019

MEL HAGUE

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Canada’s longest-running new works festival returns for a 40th year.

Rhubarb transforms Buddies into a hotbed of experimentation, with artists exploring new possibilities in theatre, dance, music, and performance art. Rhubarb is the place to see the most adventurous ideas in performance and to catch your favourite artists venturing into uncharted territory.

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The Magic of Rhubarb

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The 40th Rhubarb Festival / February 13–24, 2019

by Yolanda Bonnell

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eptember 4, 2011, 9:00pm, I hopped on a Greyhound bus in Thunder Bay to move to Toronto to become a professional actor. I was alone. I was terrified. But I was also determined to find my place in the big city and add my voice to the already active and thriving theatre community. On my arrival, the first thing I did was head straight to Buddies in Bad Times to volunteer. It was the only theatre I knew about, coming from a small city. I knew that it was a queer-positive space, and being bisexual/pansexual/queer myself, I knew or at least hoped that “finding my place” could start there.

And it did.

I was given the opportunity to see incredible pieces that opened my eyes to different ways stories could be told. I watched bodies and hearts open in space. I saw people weep in their seats. I was in a space where I could be whatever, whoever I wanted to be, and it didn’t matter that I was fat, brown, queer, lost. I was accepted at Buddies, and that provided me with a comfort that I believe allowed me to take those steps forward that I needed to, to get me where I am now.

So, fast-forward to 2015. I had just graduated from theatre school with a solo show in my hands that I didn’t know what to do with. I applied for and was accepted into Native Earth’s Weesageechak Begins to Dance festival with the piece, and I had heard about Rhubarb while I was in school, so I decided to apply. I invited Evalyn Parry and Mel Hague to the Weesageechak showing and shortly after made it to the second level of the application process. Now, at this time, I had never actually been to Rhubarb. I had volunteered for ArtAttack and, you know, been in the Cabaret space, but Rhubarb. Rhubarb was something else.

I remember the phone interview with Mel and how nervous I was. I pitched my show and myself as an artist as best I could. Mel didn’t seem to need much convincing because the next thing I knew, I was bounding down the stairs, yelling, “I’M IN THE RHUBARB FESTIVAL!”

For anyone who has never been to The Rhubarb Festival – firstly, for shame, and secondly, you are missing a wonderful and beautiful, weird, experimental, performance art party. Rhubarb takes place over two snow-filled weeks in February.

It’s a combination of mixed media, visual arts, theatre, music, dancing, and so much more. You get different programming each week with the addition of special presentations.

A night of Rhubarb would include the option of a performance in either the fun, open Cabaret space or the traditional black-box beauty of the Chamber. For one price, you can see up to three performances and potentially a special presentation, depending on the night.

Rhubarb! Rhubarb!, as it was first named (and Buddies itself ) was founded by Sky Gilbert, Matt Walsh, and Jerry Ciccoritti in 1979.

Buddies was just a wee babe back then, and there was a strong need in the community to present new and cutting-edge works in development.

The name itself came from a combination of “to rhubarb,” which was to complain, and “rhubarb, rhubarb” as background noise onstage. While there may have been some changes over the years, The Rhubarb Festival has remained a staple of raw, experimental, wild theatre in the queer theatre community, and I’ve talked to many artists who say that their first shows in Toronto were at the festival, proving that it acts as a gateway to furthering careers.

So there I was, dragging more snow and slush into the Cabaret on orientation night with a room full of excited creators, collaborators, actors, dancers… Some folks I knew, most I didn’t, but as usual at Buddies, that didn’t seem to matter. We each had to do an “elevator pitch” of our shows – which I’m terrible at – but I sat there listening to everyone’s pitches and was blown away by what was going to be presented.

And let me just say, the staff and techs at Buddies are nothing short of amazing! They are some of the hardest working, most supportive folks in the biz and made teching my shows super comfortable. I was really nervous performing that first year, but those audiences… The audiences

Yolanda Bonnell has presented their work as a playwright and performer twice at The Rhubarb Festival, first with BUG in 2016 and then with White Girls in Moccasins in 2018.

that attend this festival are like no other audience I know. Supportive and lovely, and trust me, they will cheer for you no matter what. They are an audience that wants to support you – even if you fuck up. Even if you “fail.” They will “WOO” the loudest and let you know that you can do it.

During my time at Rhubarb, I have seen folks strain under the weight of kitchen sinks full of books, watched menstrual readings, seen an incredible solo nude dance piece, seen clowns simulate sex with balloons (hella hot), and watched some of the most jaw-dropping performance art. I’ve walked through a giant vagina with a cute girl and witnessed some important, political solo and collaborative shows. My pieces wouldn’t be where they are now without this platform, and one of the things I love, as an Indigenous artist, is that there is always Indigenous content being programmed.

There is a strong sense of home at Buddies, I find. During Rhubarb, that feeling is amplified with the number of familiar faces coming through – everyone sharing space and feeling safe and comfortable.

The dressing rooms themselves act as a museum for shows past, with old posters covering – and I mean covering – every inch of the walls.

Queer icons looking down on us as we slap on makeup and strange costumes, sending us love as we go out to change people’s views on what theatre and art could be.

It is like nothing I’ve ever been a part of before.

It is magic.

Full on, change your life, magic.

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I was given the opportunity to see incredible pieces that opened my eyes to different ways stories could be told. I watched bodies and hearts open in space.

I saw people weep in their seats.

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HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO BE QUEEN BEE?

An Obsidian Theatre production in association with Nightwood Theatre

School Girls;

or, The African Mean Girls Play directed by NINA LEE AQUINO

March 5–24, 2019

PHILIP AKIN

Paulina, the reigning Queen Bee at Ghana’s most exclusive boarding school, has her sights set on the Miss Universe pageant. But the mid-year arrival of Ericka, a new student with undeniable talent and beauty, captures the attention of the pageant recruiter – and Paulina’s hive-minded friends. Jocelyn Bioh’s buoyant and biting comedy explores the universal similarities (and glaring differences) facing teenage girls across the globe.

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by JOCELYN BIOH

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Satire 101

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School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play / March 5–24, 2019

by Mel Hague

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ne of the things I’ve noticed about myself as I’ve aged is that, yes, I have matured. Things don’t bother me the way they used to. I don’t worry as much about what people think of me. That’s been a nice part of growing up. But when I read Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play, I am reminded how close to the surface my insecure and ravenous inner teenage girl is.

Set in an exclusive Ghanaian boarding school, Bioh’s play beautifully creates the battleground that is teenage girlhood.

In the halls of a high school there is no room to breathe, no place to escape to. Everything that happens there is the most important thing that ever happened there. It’s not being dramatic – it’s just that teenagers play life at a higher frequency than adults do.

In the play notes, Bioh talks about a controversy during the 2011 Miss Universe Ghana pageant. The winner was an American-born, mixed-race woman whom the Ghanaian officials had sought out during her reign as Miss Minnesota. Bioh writes: She beat out two of Ghana’s most famous models at the time. Ericka went on to the Miss Universe pageant that year where she did not place.

I thought that story was pretty damn interesting and wanted to explore how the Western idea of colorism infiltrated into African society.

School Girls offers a glimpse, rarely seen in Western theatre, into the complex relationships between Continental African and African American communities.

Set in 1986, the play draws on a time when American power and prowess were at a peak internationally. When a biracial American student transfers to the school, that American Dream™ shine, with its promise of power and wealth, upsets the balance in the delicate ecosystem that is a teenage girl crew.

Shadism. Colonialism. Capitalism. Beauty. Class. In the minds and mouths of teenage girls, these systems of societal control become weaponized. These young women are whip smart, feel deeply, and can be brutal power brokers in the commodity of friendship.

Mel Hague is the company dramaturge at Buddies and at Obsidian Theatre.

School Girls is the fifth partnership between Obsidian Theatre and Nightwood Theatre; the collaboration began in 2001 with Obsidian’s first-ever production, Djanet Sears’ Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. That production catapulted Obsidian from a small collective of Black artists producing a new script into a multi-Dora-nominated powerhouse. Whenever Obsidian and Nightwood come together, we do something special that speaks to the heart of both our companies.

When I asked Obsidian’s artistic director, Philip Akin, about the choice to program this play, he had two main reasons. First, School Girls presents the opportunity to have eight Black women onstage, a rare and coveted opportunity in Western theatre.

And second, it is a comedy: a biting, satirical, almost acidic, fast-paced, character-driven play that is, no exaggeration, funny as hell.

When done well, comedy has a particular capacity to change audiences’ hearts and minds.

I think this is why it is so rarely attempted in contemporary theatre, because truly good and effective comedy is such a rare thing. It is through comedy that School Girls is such an effective piece of political art. And this is a fiercely political play: the complexities of these young Black women coupled with biting satire that takes aim at the weighty societal constructs that have been placed on them; teenagers on the cusp of adulthood navigating systemic power not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually.

Obsidian and Nightwood’s production of School Girls will, no doubt, take us all to class.

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Shadism.

Colonialism.

Capitalism.

Beauty.

Class.

In the minds and mouths of teenage girls these systems of societal control become weaponized.

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A GONZO TRUE-CRIME DOCU-PLAY ABOUT HOMOPHOBIA, VIOLENCE, SEX, AND MYSTERY

A Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Pandemic Theatre co-production

Shove It Down My Throat by JOHNNIE WALKER

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March 30–April 21, 2019 In 2013, Luke O’Donovan is arrested after a knife fight at a New Year’s party. The media portrays him as a maniac who went on a stabbing spree. Luke says he’s the victim of a queer-bashing, punished for fighting back.

In 2014, theatre artist Johnnie Walker begins writing letters to Luke in prison and working on a new play.

A fierce and freewheeling exploration of a powerful true story, Shove It Down My Throat puts queerness, identity, and complicity through a theatrical kaleidoscope as Johnnie sifts through the different versions of Luke’s story – and the different versions of Luke – in search of the ever-elusive truth.

JOHNNIE WALKER

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directed by TOM ARTHUR DAVIS starring JOHNNIE WALKER, DANIEL CARTER, HEATH V. SALAZAR + OTHERS

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On Luke O’Donovan

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Shove It Down My Throat / March 30–April 21, 2019

by Dave Deveau

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n 2013, Luke Donovan, a 19-year-old self-described queer anarchist, was involved in an altercation following a New Year’s party. A group of men (between five and 12 of them, depending on the source) hurled homophobic slurs and physically attacked him. This may have been an escalation from comments made earlier in the night. In a statement, Luke said that “in an attempt to defend myself from the attack [which] I thought could end my life, I stabbed five of them, while also being stabbed three times myself.”

Luke was charged with five counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, yet none of his alleged attackers were charged. Potentially facing a gobsmacking 110-year sentence if convicted by a jury, Luke agreed to a plea deal of two years in prison, followed by eight years on probation and, even more strangely and archaically, banishment from his home state of Georgia, save one small rural county far from his community and home.

Judge Todd Markle claimed that words like “faggot,” which Luke’s assailants had used, were inoffensive and akin to calling someone a “baby.” He said he wished he could hand out a tougher sentence and found Luke’s attackers to be “very impressive” on the stand.

I wish I could say it gets less weird from there. That it ends triumphantly. That justice has found its way through.

But instead, the curious case becomes more shrouded in questions the more you dig; different opinions, perspectives, and supposed witnesses deliver drastically different accounts of what was going on. The complexities of the case and the unfathomable bias present in Luke’s sentencing are shocking.

Scandalous. It’s the kind of reading you sink your teeth into only to find your blood boiling. How can this make any sense?

When I was first compelled to write My Funny Valentine, about the 2008 murder of Lawrence King, the 15-year-old Californian who asked a boy in his class to be his valentine only to have that boy shoot him at school the next day, I couldn’t help but look at fringe perspectives, at the voices that the mainstream press wasn’t addressing. Though the case of Luke O’Donovan didn’t end in death, the embedded homophobia and self-righteousness within the proceedings and the verdict demand deep scrutiny.

Dave Deveau is Playwright in Residence at Vancouver’s Zee Zee Theatre Company. His play My Funny Valentine was recently onstage at Buddies as part of the 2017-18 Season.

There are inherent challenges in adapting real-life case material for the stage. Johnnie Walker’s Shove It Down My Throat leaps defiantly into the untenable divide between fact and fiction(s) in a whodunit – or perhaps “whydunit” – for the modern age. Taking inspiration from these real-life events, Johnnie disembowels them onstage, sifting them through playful lenses in an attempt to make sense of something that perhaps doesn’t make sense. Perhaps it can’t.

Following his sentencing, Luke was quoted as saying, “It is regrettable that anyone had to come to harm, but given the choice of whether to lose my life to a hateful attack or fight for the chance to live, I will always choose the ferocious refusal to go quietly into the night. This refusal was fuelled not by hate for my attackers but by my love for life. It is this passion for life that came in conflict with my attackers and this same passion that was arrested by the cops and is being punished by the courts. It is this passion that they are trying to chain, to cage, to rehabilitate me away from, but it is this passion that will pull my gaze – always forward – through the dark.”

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I wish I could say it gets less weird from there. That it ends triumphantly. That justice has found its way through. But instead, the curious case becomes more shrouded in questions the more you dig.

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“A HILARIOUS, NOSTALGIC, AND EMOTIONAL LOOK AT ONE MAN’S EXPERIENCE COMING OUT IN THE 70s” – MOONEY ON THEATRE

A Big Bappis production

OUT

written + performed by GREG CAMPBELL directed by CLINTON WALKER

April 24–May 5, 2019

GREG CAMPBELL

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In a tour de force performance, Greg Campbell brings a cast of 22 characters to life to tell a hilarious and heartwarming story about coming out of the closet in 1970s Montreal. We follow 17-year-old Glen on a journey of celebration and discovery that takes him to discos, youth groups, several bedrooms, and all the way to the Gay Pride March in New York City.

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OUT / April 24–May 5, 2019 BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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Memory, Archive, And Bell-Bottoms

by François Macdonald

P

icture this: a 17-year-old boy braving a frigid Montreal night in the middle of December. He exits the Metro at Beaudry station with a few of his colleagues from The Gap, his first job. As he steps outside, he walks westbound and his heart starts beating faster. A block later, he spots a short lineup at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Montcalm streets leading into Unity – a vast two-storey gay bar with a rooftop patio. This is where he’s going – his first gay bar ever – and he’s both terrified and excited.

Human memory operates in a fascinating way. While it can sometimes fail us in the most quotidian of things, like a locker combination or a recently met acquaintance’s name, it can make something that happened eons ago seem like it happened yesterday. That boy going to Unity was me, and that night happened 13 years ago, yet there are dozens of things I still remember vividly: the bitter cold outside, the slippery stairs leading up to the entrance of the bar, the overwhelming scent of artificial fog, the three bottles of Smirnoff Ice I drank (yes, I was 17), and the way all my clothes and giant mop of curly hair reeked of cigarettes (yes, one could still smoke indoors back then) and sweat after three hours of wild abandon on the dance floor. The list goes on, always surprising me with its length.

Even though I moved to Toronto five years ago, Montreal still feels like home. Twenty-two years’ worth of memories are scattered all over the cityscape, and I reacquaint myself with them every time I come back to visit family and friends.

This experience is not unlike encountering ghosts, albeit in a less morbid manner. They float by street corners, outside apartments, and inside bars, reminding me of times both happy and sad as I began to come out and discover my identity as a gay man. Together, these ghosts form a personal archive of sorts – a collection of memories superimposed onto a map of the city. And in this way, Greg Campbell and I are very similar creatures.

Campbell is the writer and performer of OUT, a brilliant autobiographical play that explores his coming out and sexual awakening as a gay man in late 1970s Montreal. Originally performed at the 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival, the play is chock-full of crystal-clear memories and details of Campbell’s adolescence set against the bustling nightlife of downtown Montreal. As the sole performer in OUT, Campbell takes on 22 different

roles with startling ease and leads us back and forth between Montreal nightclubs and the Campbell family home.

A self-confessed archivist, Campbell has a memory that is beyond impressive, stemming from his long-time interest in journaling, as well as his careful conservation of important items from his past: “My play came out of my journals. When I started to research the play, the research was right there in front of me: my 1977 diary. And what amazed me is the rapidity of the events.”

As Campbell points out, 1977 was a very momentous year in Montreal, but also in queer history in general.

With the Summer Olympics held in Montreal the year before, vast efforts were made by the municipal government to “clean up” the city, and this involved a number of raids on queer establishments in the downtown core. These efforts reached their climax on October 22, 1977, when a massive raid took place at Truxx, a gay bar on Stanley Street; 220 people were arrested, 146 of whom were charged with gross indecency and other charges. This raid led to an even larger protest the following night attended by over 2,000 people and, two months later, to an amendment in the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to include sexual orientation as a prohibited form of discrimination.

The outcome was significant for the history of Montreal and the province of Quebec, and it would serve as a powerful example to other provinces, which would soon experience similar conflicts.

It is important to remember that things were not always rosy lest we fall into nostalgia. It can be easy to idealize the past, especially for

François Macdonald is originally from Montreal and was a member of Buddies’ 2017 Emerging Creators Unit. people such as me, who did not experience any of this firsthand yet who remain deeply curious. Queer folks living in 1970s Montreal experienced glamorous disco-filled nightlife just as they experienced harassment, violence, raids, and even firebombings (one of which I explored in my own one-person play Aquarius, presented at the 2017 Rhubarb Festival) – they fought for their rights and lives.

Nevertheless, Campbell never loses sight of the joy and love that he experienced in his youth as he went out to the legendary Lime Light discotheque, danced with wild abandon, fell in love, and discovered his sexuality. Even the tensest conversations with his parents are filled with love and tenderness, as he performs them in OUT. Campbell reminds us that it is through our encounters with different people and different environments that we shape our identities, sexual and otherwise.

And while it may cause us strife at the time, it is an essential part of coming of age and coming out. This is undoubtedly something we can all relate to, and ultimately, the heart of Campbell’s play for me is found in its relatability. As he recently explained to me, “This story is an exploration of belonging, of wanting to be appreciated, accepted, and loved. And this is universal. This is my journey to be accepted and to be part of something.” It is, indeed, a journey – one that, I believe, we take every day of our lives. Thirty years separates my coming out from Greg Campbell’s, as does geography (the current location of Montreal’s Gay Village is two kilometres east of where it was in the 1970s) and history. But in memory, we are connected, and I could not be more excited to watch him share OUT with all of you.

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Queer folks living in 1970s Montreal experienced glamorous disco-filled nightlife just as they experienced harassment, violence, raids, and even firebombings – they fought for their rights and lives.

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A CONTEMPORARY YET TIMELESS FABLE OF QUEER SEXUALITIES

A Workshop Presentation from Orpheus Productions

Shakespeare’s Criminal directed by SKY GILBERT

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April 27–28, 2019 Shakespeare is an old, conservative farmer/ poet who claims to be heterosexual. A young, HIV-positive gay man appears at his farm and tries to seduce him. Will Shakespeare succumb? The surprise entrance of a female academic, who has the gift of transformative power, suddenly changes the fortunes of the two men. And in the end, someone is turned into a tree.

Perennial provocateur Sky Gilbert is back on the Buddies stage with a special workshop presentation of a new pastoral cantata, being developed with Dora Award–winning composer Dustin Peters and internationally celebrated mezzo-soprano Marion Newman.

DUSTIN PETERS

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composed by DUSTIN PETERS libretto by SKY GILBERT starring MARION NEWMAN

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Was Shakespeare Gay?

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Shakespeare’s Criminal / April 27–28, 2019

by Michael Lyons

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illiam Shakespeare – the son of a glover, grandson of an affluent farmer in Stratford-upon-Avon, prolific playwright, husband, father, respectable businessman – is a lie, a myth based on a loose collection of historical data points that are bickered over by historians to this day.

Much in the same way that the Bard based one of his most famous works, Hamlet, on the Ur-Hamlet, a precursor of unknown authorship lost to history, itself likely based on a legion of myths and legends, Shakespeare’s life is a story we’ve built up, written. Anyone who tells Shakespeare’s story has an agenda.

Say, for example, capitalist, white, heterosexual men who have an interest in how the greatest writer in the English language is understood.

Or, say, an older, Canadian drag queen named Jane standing in front of the Globe Theatre in London with a sign that says, “Was Shakespeare gay?”

This moment, catalyzed by a lifetime love for Hamlet’s author, was the genesis of a new piece by Sky Gilbert – said drag queen, prolific playwright and writer, professor, and Buddies co-founder.

“We have myths about Shakespeare already,” says Gilbert. “He’s like the guy next door who happens to be a genius, and everyone wants to think he’s just like that. He’s heterosexual, he’s completely capitalist, and he writes genius plays in his spare time. We love that myth, every one of us in a capitalist society; all the straight, white men who could be geniuses in their spare time, they love that.”

“But artists, I would suggest, are different from that quite often,” he continues. “Great artists are very screwed up, very dark.”

Shakespeare’s Criminal finds the titular Bard as an old, conservative, allegedly heterosexual farmer discovered by a young, HIV-positive gay man who attempts a seduction. This is complicated by the transformative powers of a female academic who enters the scene. The piece was developed from a one-act play performed by Gilbert (as Shakespeare) and queer theatre-maker ted witzel.

Gilbert feels the production is very much about the closet. As gay men in Western countries have found a level of respectability, their culture has developed in the same way that straight culture has. There’s a trajectory: get a job, get some money, get monogamous, get married, get some kids, die – the seven ages of gay man.

Michael Lyons is an author and journalist who has written for numerous publications, including NOW and Xtra, and was a member of the 2008 PrideCab ensemble at Buddies.

“In my view, the closet is very relevant in that sense,” he explains. “A lot of people are still closeted about being gay, but they’re also closeted about being good gays and bad gays.”

Shakespeare, in a similar fashion, is a paradox: the basest, most violent, sexual, primal human emotions, performed for the groundlings by men and boys in drag – believed by puritanical moralizers to encourage homosexual lust – now the pinnacle of Western culture. Shakespeare is rife with sex and innuendo, but Gilbert believes sex in modern Shakespearean works doesn’t land because it’s either ignored or taken to a crotch-grabbing, absurd extreme. Shakespeare’s Criminal sets out to explore what happens at the confluence of this stodgy, aged, heterosexual culture and the essence of uninhibited, wild youth that just wants to fuck.

All this set to music, as the production is a cantata, a collaboration between Gilbert, composer Dustin Peters, and mezzo-soprano Marion Newman. Gilbert has attempted opera before, but Shakespeare’s Criminal is the first time it’s taken. He says that Peters’ take on the work syncs with his own. “Both of us are pretty camp in our approach.”

When opera first arose as an art form, women’s singing voices were heard as uncontrollable, hysterical, wounded, and as the Renaissance moved into the Romantic era, composers began to write music for these voices. Men had to subscribe to the order of masculinity, but women were free to reach new octaves. Gilbert plays with this idea in his piece.

“I’m interested in expressing what I see as the wonderful dynamic between women and gay men, and how women are very important to gay men, and how our relationships

with them are not less because we don’t produce children with them,” he says. “As opposed to that heterosexual model, there is a queer thing that happens between gay men and women, sometimes straight, sometimes lesbian, where the women are able to liberate the men, because men are very fucked up by our culture.”

One reason Shakespeare’s men are so interesting to watch is that they are often plagued by qualities associated with emasculation. Gilbert says that of all Shakespeare’s characters, he identifies most with Hamlet, the Dane of Denmark afflicted by three acts’ worth of inaction. “His perpetual adolescence – in some ways I feel like a perpetual adolescent,” Gilbert says. “Somebody once said of me – it was supposed to be this damning thing; it was one of the founders of Buddies, actually – ‘Sky’s just always going to be trying to shock his parents.’”

“To some degree that’s true.

That’s sort of what Hamlet is” – a perpetual student, just returned from Wittenberg, not quite able to graduate into adulthood, trying to reveal a terrible truth through artifice, through words, words, words.

“That’s the problem with Shakespeare,” says Gilbert. “We have to see Shakespeare as an ordinary, good man, and that’s the mythology. Part of breaking this down is suggesting his sexuality is conflicted – perhaps a different kind of person, and not a perfect person.”

Shakespeare’s Criminal is like Hamlet’s castigations, perhaps with respectable gay men taking the place of Queen Gertrude, with Gilbert’s accusatory cruelty his means for being kind as he cries, “Nay, but to live/ In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,/ Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love/ Over the nasty sty.”

Re sp ec tability b e damned.

“It’s Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before,” says Gilbert.

“Shakespeare with his pants down.

Shakespeare doing the dirty.”

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

We have myths about Shakespeare already. He’s heterosexual, he’s completely capitalist, and he writes genius plays in his spare time.

We love that myth, every one of us in a capitalist society; all the straight, white men who could be geniuses in their spare time, they love that.

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BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

A QUEER MASTERPIECE, REIMAGINED

A lemonTree creations, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and Why Not Theatre co-production

Lilies; or, The Revival of

a Romantic Drama by MICHEL MARC BOUCHARD

May 4–26, 2019

WALTER BORDEN

In 1912, two schoolboys fall in love performing a play about Saint Sebastian. Their passion is interrupted when one is unjustly sent to prison.

Decades later, several inmates agree to stage this story of young love in search of their own redemption.

Prolific indie company lemonTree creations revives Michel Marc Bouchard’s masterpiece, with Walter Borden (African/Mi’kmaq/Choctaw) leading a cast of Indigenous, Black, and culturally diverse artists to make visible the high incarceration rates of these communities.

Centring Indigeneity and diverse worldviews, the creative team bring this romantic drama into the 21st century, unearthing love, lies, and colonialism.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

directed by COLE ALVIS starring WALTER BORDEN, MARK CASSIUS, BRUCE DOW, RYAN G. HINDS, INDRIT KASAPI, TSHOLO KHALEMA, TROY EMERY TWIGG + JOSEPH ZITA

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Love, Loss, and (in)Justice

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama / May 4–26, 2019

by Nikki Shaffeeullah

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M

ichel Marc Bouchard’s script is and has always been a theatrical gift to the queer community: a complex, affecting, timeless story of star-crossed lovers, with queer characters, queer conflicts, and queer ways of knowing. Written in the 1980s, set in the 1950s, and telling stories that transpired in the 1910s, Lilies; Or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama is, among many things, a testament to how tales of queer love have always existed, and have always been worthy of telling.

But from our vantage point, knee-deep in the 21st century, and entering the fifth decade of the largest and longest-running queer theatre in the world, we are able to confront a more tenacious reality: for many 2SLGBTQ people surviving colonialism on Turtle Island, queerness is but a starting point for our systemically star-crossed lives.

Lilies is a story about love, loss, and (in)justice.

Its metatheatrical setting is a Quebec prison, where a group of incarcerated people gather to perform the story of events that transpired 40 years prior at an all-boys’ Catholic school in nearby Roberval.

A social justice organization I once worked with framed one year of our public programming under the title What Does Colonization Look Like Today? I return to this question often, still struck by the depth of critique invited by its six words. What does colonization look like today?

What does it look like here, in this land called Canada? Every time I ask, I see that colonization today looks like many things: The continued occupation of unceded land. The nonconsensual building of pipelines through Indigenous territory. The lingering intergenerational impact of residential schools. The ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples around the globe and the ensuing migration. The continued containment of the Indigenous, Black, and other racialized bodies massively overrepresented in prisons. It looks like the fact that while Indigenous women represent 4 percent of women in Canada, they comprise half the women’s population in maximum-security facilities and are the fastest-growing prison demographic overall. It looks like how 25 percent

of incarcerated Black women in Canada are foreign nationals who are made to serve a sentence and are then deported. It looks like the queerphobia and transphobia that was brought to this land through colonialism and that has led to the overrepresentation of queer and trans people in prisons, especially trans women of colour. Colonization today is upheld by the institutions of the state, and the prison system is one of its most effective tools.

This production brings together a powerful team: three generations of queer, trans, and two-spirit artists, in the forefront those who are Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour. Lilies director Cole Alvis is a Métis artist with Chippewa, Irish, and English heritage from the Turtle Mountains in Manitobah. As Cole likes to say, one of our responsibilities as we work to be good guests on the Indigenous lands and waterways of Tkarón:to is to grapple continuously with colonialism in our arts practice. I have come to be on these lands through other legacies of colonialism – the British colonization of what is now called India, and of the Arawak and Carib land that is now called Guyana; the coercive movement of Indians from the former to the latter several generations ago via the colonial project of indenture; and the recent emigration of Guyanese fleeing post-colonial civil turmoil and seeking new homes elsewhere in the “Americas.” For me, as a queer theatre-maker in double diaspora making art on colonized land, this project is an opportunity for diverse people, impacted by colonialism in distinct, intersecting ways, to gather around a beloved text

Nikki Shaffeeullah is the artistic director of The AMY Project and the associate director of Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama.

and experiment with how theatre can aid us in both better understanding this world and imagining new ones.

In this production, we resist using the prison as passive setting for its characters to “storytell” the events of Roberval, and we do not accept prison uncritically as a metaphor for other kinds of un-incarcerated human experience. We have instead, through a multi-stage structure that weaves conventional rehearsal methods with collective learning and facilitated community processes, invited the creative team to bring their experiences of the so-called justice system and of colonialism into the rehearsal hall, so that it may inform our artistic work. We are celebrating this queer Canadian classic in a new way, one that, we hope, deepens its capacity to present and ignite conversations about what it means to love, to lose, and to serve justice.

We now invite you, our wider community, into this process as audience. We encourage you to join us in exploring this passionate story that is at once about the delicate power of concealed relationships in a tight-knit community, as in 1912 Roberval, and about the revolutionary potential of marginalized people searching for truth through collective storytelling, as in the 1950s Quebec prison, as well as on the Buddies stage today. We invite you to come to this production with open hearts, to bear witness to a creative process that has linked itself to a wider project of collective healing, and to task yourself to find the many ways you can locate yourselves within the layers of love, loss, and (in)justice.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

But from our vantage point, knee-deep in the 21st century, we are able to confront a more tenacious reality: for many 2SLGBTQ people surviving colonialism on Turtle Island, queerness is but a starting point for our systemically star-crossed lives.

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“A BRACING, BEAUTIFUL, THOUGHT- PROVOKING, UNSETTLING, CHALLENGING SHOW” – INTERMISSION MAGAZINE

Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools

created by EVALYN PARRY, LAAKKULUK WILLIAMSON BATHORY, ERIN BRUBACHER + ELYSHA POIRIER WITH CRIS DERKSEN

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Following a sold-out run in 2017, Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools will head out on a multi-city tour in 2019. This will be the sixth time in the past decade that we’ve brought one of our shows – and our unique queer mandate – to audiences across Canada.

A concert and a conversation, Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools is the meeting place of two people, and of the North and South of our country.

Inuk artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and queer theatre-maker Evalyn Parry met on an Arctic expedition from Iqaluit to Greenland.

Now sharing a stage, these two powerful storytellers map new territory together in a work that gives voice and body to the histories, culture, and climate we’ve inherited and asks how we reckon with these sharp tools.

In the Inuktitut language, when a knife is dull, it is said to “have no face.” The word “kiinalik” translates to mean the knife is sharp – or, “it has a face.” Embodying the stories of their heritage, Evalyn and Laakkuluk put a face to the colonial histories, the power structures, and the changing climate that lie between them.

The 2017 premiere production of Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools was co-produced by Buddies and Theatre Passe Muraille.

DECEMBER 2018 Qaggiavuut (Iqaluit) JANUARY 2019 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, presented with Touchstone Theatre (Vancouver) MARCH 2019 Espace Libre (Montreal) JUNE 2019 Luminato Festival (Toronto)

EVALYN PARRY + LAAKKULUK WILLIAMSON BATHORY

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

On tour December 2018–June 2019

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

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What Do You See?

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools / On Tour December 2018–June 2019

by Beatriz Pizano

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O

n a recent trip to Colombia my sister kept repeating, “We have lost the art of conversing, and therefore no one remembers anything anymore. No one knows the history of the peoples and the places we live in.”

“To converse” is an intransitive verb. It answers not the what or the whom, but the where, when, how, or for how long. The word itself means an exchange of thoughts and opinions.

I am hungry for conversations in theatre. I crave creators who risk, whose goal is to fight against “smart dialogue” for actors to regurgitate.

I yearn for works that think of the audience as a partner in the conversation. Where there is no manipulation. Where the phrase “What is the payoff for the audience?” is erased.

I understand the colonized world in which we create. I am part of it.

Although I think I can rise above it, I still accept, unintentionally, its business model: its narrative of the truth and its rules of where, when, how, and for how long.

Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools is described as a concert and a conversation, a meeting place between two people and between the North and South of our country. I see it as a conversation between two or more artists who want to get to know each other in a meaningful way.

Where the personal is the political.

I see a bold, moving, provoking, performative experience. I see it as an invitation to converse. I see it as an opportunity to reflect on my own life and work.

Performer Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory expresses her delight in working on a piece in which she is not expected or asked to “play” an Inuit. This feeling resonates deeply within me, at this juncture of my personal life and artistic development, for similar reasons. I am a cultural

Beatriz Pizano is the artistic director of Aluna Theatre, which most recently brought its work to Buddies’ stage with 2016’s Blood Weddings.

by-product of this place we, the settlers, now call Canada. I am a guest in this land. I am an immigrant. I am an “other.” I am an ally. I am considered a culturally diverse artist. I can never simply be “artist,” or even a person, without being stamped with a definition. Although I love words, I detest definitions.

In theory the phrase “cultural diversity” can also refer to having respect for each other’s differences.

The reality is that the task of understanding differences is always too much work for the dominant culture.

Is it really a terrifying proposition?

The default method of dealing with all of us is management: to put us in one box that fits all. Boxes are very convenient. They are easy to pack, to label, to ship, to use and discard.

On paper, boxes can also be checked with a simple X. The settler’s mind is appeased, and they can go home believing they have done their piece, fulfilled the quota. But do we know who the people behind the X in the box are?

As a Colombian-Canadian – there goes another bloody definition – as Bea, I have been colonized and have also, unintentionally, colonized.

(The roads in the Americas are paved with unintentionalities.)

Okay, let’s talk about you and me. In this era of reconciliation, we all want to be the “good people.”

Who wants to be bad? An actor who played all the bad guys in Hollywood once told me, “I don’t have to play the bad guy. The words and actions of the character do it for me.” This is one of our problems: we always want something or someone else to do it for us.

We inundate our First Nations organizations and colleagues with questions on how to do it right. We politely demand that they give us a set of instructions on how to be good. And with the mere action of asking, we feel as if we have been through confession. (By the way,

I have also been colonized by religion. Can’t avoid the references.) After we dump our sins onto someone else and we receive the penance – and recite a few Ave Marias and Padre Nuestros in my case – the guilt is gone, and we can go back to our old ways.

We recite land acknowledgements, even in places where no Indigenous artists are ever part of a theatre’s season. I ask others… NO, I ask myself, Do I even know what I’m acknowledging? Do I have a physical, emotional, and spiritual map that allows me to connect and understand these words within my body? Have I taken the time to get to know this place, this land, these peoples who host us? What is my responsibility to this place? Where do I get my information about the history of Canada? Do I know the truth? And what do I do with that knowledge? Do I go and see a play and feel I have done all I can do?

Colonization is as deadly as addiction. The first step is to recognize it. And then, you have to change yourself, by yourself, from the inside. Yes, beating an addiction lasts a lifetime. It takes hard work, belief, commitment, and the willingness to face your dark side, your unintentional side.

Perhaps works such as Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, and the conversations that take place in the black box, can do the kind of work we normally assign to support groups. Safe places where we can begin to acknowledge and take responsibility.

Spaces where we can learn about the other and ourselves. Landscapes where no one or nothing is more than anything else. Mental states where we can begin to acquire tools by seeing.

In Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools I see Evalyn Parry – an open, honest, generous, and talented artist. I see Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory sharing her love and knowledge of a land she knows and feels in her bones. I hear the reverberating sounds of Cris Derksen. I see the moving paintings of Elysha Poirier of a landscape unknown to me. I see Kaitlin Hickey’s melting world and the chance for transformation, I see Rebecca Picherack in light and shadows, and I see the determined walker Erin Brubacher traversing territories.

I see exceptional storytellers that remind me that conversing can still be an art.

I see North and South.

I see Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, a place where these conversations can take place.

I see a community of like minds wanting to find ways through.

I see a beyond.

And I see myself, a woman, without definition, sharing these thoughts.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

I ask others…

NO, I ask myself, Do I even know what I’m acknowledging?

Do I have a physical, emotional, and spiritual map that allows me to connect and understand these words within my body?

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BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

The Youth / Elders Podcast

54

SHARING STORIES, SHARING SPACE

host + project facilitator VANESSA DUNN

September 7–December 21, 2018 After the runaway success of the 2017 production of The Youth / Elders Project, we have been experimenting with new ways to foster intergenerational connection inside our queer communities. This year, we will bring Buddies’ queer magic out into the community for the latest installment of this work – The Youth / Elders Podcast.

Recorded live at the Oakwood branch of the Toronto Public Library, this weekly podcast will feature personal stories, lived histories, and candid conversations from queer elders and youth. All are welcome to participate as either audience members or storytellers as we explore ideas of queer history, aging, identities, and the evolving and intersectional way different generations relate to their queerness.

In addition to the podcast recordings, there will be weekly drop-in workshops at the library that explore creative writing, storytelling, performance, and community engagement. Working with Buddies artists, queer folks of all ages can learn new skills and be part of creating original content for the podcast.

The Buddies Residency Program

Through this program, Buddies commissions and develops new queer work for the stage. Using an artist-centred approach, we work with writers, theatre collectives, directors, performance artists, and choreographers to create meaningful opportunities to explore new work and the creation process through a distinctly queer lens.

Throughout the year, there will be chances to see workshop presentations and readings of some of the work as it develops.

Since its launch in 2010, the Buddies Residency Program has supported dozens of artists and collectives, yielding eight Mainstage productions: Obaaberima by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy; Of a Monstrous Child: a gaga musical by Ecce Homo Theatre; The Gay Heritage Project by Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn, and Andrew Kushnir; Freda and Jem’s Best of the Week by Lois Fine; Gertrude and Alice by The Independent Aunties; Body Politic by Nick Green; Black Boys by Saga Collectif; and LULU v.7 // aspects of a femme fatale by the red light district.

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

THE ONLY PROGRAM IN THE COUNTRY SOLELY DEVOTED TO THE CREATION OF ORIGINAL QUEER PERFORMANCE WORKS

company dramaturge MEL HAGUE

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Tickets Whether you want to see just one show or keep coming back for more, Buddies has affordable ticket options that are right for you. Single ticket prices start at $30 depending on the date and performance. We also have $20 preview tickets and $25 early bird tickets to select shows in our Mainstage Season, and you can save even more when you sign up for Buddies Rewards or purchase one of our fully flexible Season Passes. New for our 40th anniversary season, we are expanding our Pay What You Can ticket program to include even more performances throughout the year.

Season Calendar

ONLINE

buddiesinbadtimes.com/tickets

BY PHONE

416-975-8555 IN PERSON

12 Alexander Street

PERFORMANCE

P

PREVIEW

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OPENING

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 P

P

P

P

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OCT

SEPT

Gertrude and Alice 01 02 03 04 05 06 07

P

P

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16

01 02 03 04

Obaaberima

NOV

NOV

2-Spirit Cabaret

NOV

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

27 28 29 30 P

P

O

DEC

OCT

Now You See Her

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

JAN

The Scavenger’s Daughter 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 P

P

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

MAR

School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 P

P

P

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30 31 P

P

APR

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 P

P

O

Shakespeare’s Criminal

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 P

O

MAY

APR

OUT 01 02 03 04 05

APR

MAR

Shove It Down My Throat

27 28

Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama

MAY

BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE 18/19 SEASON

FEB

The 40th Rhubarb Festival

04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 P

P

P

P

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FOUNDATIONS

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Our Donors LEGACY CIRCLE Anonymous Ed Cabell + Roy Forrester John Alan Lee Russell Mathew + Scott Ferguson Richard McLellan Jim Robertson + Jim Scott

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BENEFACTORS Ken Aucoin + Gerald Crowell Lawrence Bennett Derek Billsman Michael Boyuk Martha Burns Ed Cabell + Roy Forrester Bob Gallagher Mark German The NigE Gough Shine on Foundation William Hodge + Robert Wylie Russell Mathew + Scott Ferguson Mardi Matthews Martha McCain Stephen McGregor + Tony De Franco Mandy McNeil + Beck McNeil Ken Moffatt Jason Oord Mark Pratt Megan Richards + Abi Slone Jim Robertson + Jim Scott Elliot Smith + Jonathan Steels John Stanley + Helmut Reichenbacher Louis Tsilivis Ayse Turak Jaime Woo

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MONTHLY DONORS Cole Alvis – in Honour of René Highway Ken Aucoin + Gerald Crowell Michel Beauvais Derek Billsman Richard Bingham Mary Breen Ed Cabell + Roy Forrester Betty Carlyle Sheila Lynn Cavanagh Donna Daitchman Barbara Fingerote Gordon Floyd Danny Glenwright Cathy Gordon George Grant Barry Higgins William Hodge + Robert Wylie Matthew Hyams Daria Ilkina Joshua Jacobs Karim Karsan + John Rider Tom Keogh + Paul McClure Paul Klein Kim Koyama Jim Lawrence Bradley Lister

Listed donations for June 1, 2017 –May 31, 2018

Dr. Ben Louie Gilles Marchildon Richard McLellan Mandy McNeil + Beck McNeil Lawrence Moore Thompson Nguyen Philip Nozuka Evalyn Parry Charles Pavia Wes D. Pearce Rui Pires Ingrid Randoja Megan Richards + Abi Slone Andrea Ridgley Susanna Reid Jim Robertson + Jim Scott Mitsuko Sada Jayne Schneider Jamie Slater Elliot Smith + Jonathan Steels David Steinberg Peter Taylor Louis Tsilivis Lionel Tona Ayse Turak Cathrin Winkelmann Jaime Woo Kai Wa Yapp

YEARS

40

OF QUEER 1979 – 2019