Queer Arts Festival 2013: TransgressionNow
July 24 – August 9
Welcome back! Summer may seem a long ways off, but the Festival team is already in full swing. So mark your calendars, because from July 24 – August 9, another incredibly diverse, cutting-edge, and exciting Queer Arts Festival is coming to Vancouver!
About this year’s theme:
Queer art and politics have always included notions of transgression but in the media age ideas of transgression have changed radically. What we once saw as transgressive is now commonplace when the internet can put any manner of visual and digital material on everyone’s screen in seconds. But the digital age is also embedded in one of the most conservative social environments in many decades creating many dichotomies and contradictions. TransgressionNow looks at where Queer artists still transgress social, gender, and political boundaries and what that looks like now.
QAF is thrilled to announce the curators of this year’s Visual Art Exhibit are Paul Wong and Glenn Alteen.
Paul Wong is a Canadian multimedia artist. An award-winning artist, curator, and organizer of public interventions since the mid-1970s, Wong is known for his engagement with issues of race, sex, and death.
Glenn Alteen is a Vancouver-based curator, writer, and director of the grunt gallery, established in East Vancouver in 1984. We can hardly wait to see the artists and work they bring to the festival.
Community Partnership profile
We are excited to be partnering with The Cultch and the IGNITE! Youth festival this year in a unique outreach activity involving some of the talented youth. After IGNITE!, select performers will be chosen for a theatre project to develop and stage a show, Fruit Flambé, as part of the Queer Arts Festival.
Auditions for IGNITE! Youth-Driven Arts Festival
Do you know some teens who love to perform? Or maybe it’s you! Auditions are open for the 2013 IGNITE! Youth-Driven Arts Festival.
With themed shows including a night for music, word, dance, collaborations and Fruit Basket- a variety show about gender, sex and sexuality – the festival is looking for a wide range of artists. Please come by and audition – you name it, we want to see it!The IGNITE! Arts festival takes place from May 6-11 at The Cultch.The deadline to apply is March 1st.
To audition send an email to
auditions@igniteyouthfest.caOpera Magic
Many of you will remember Teiya Kasahara, the beguiling soprano who played the role of Solana in When the Sun Comes Out, the QAF-commissioned lesbian opera written by Leslie Uyeda and Rachel Rose at last year’s festival.She will be returning to play that role in the fully-staged performance of the opera this year, with three performances August 5, 7 and 9!Next month she will be performing the iconic role of Queen of the Night in Vancouver Opera’s upcoming production of The Magic Flute. We are pleased to announce our community partnership with Vancouver Opera this year, and their support of our production of When the Sun Comes Out.
This original production was conceived in 2007 with the guidance of First Peoples’ Cultural Council and an advisory group of First Nations artists. This re-imagining of Mozart’s classic is set in the timeless Coast Salish realm.
Six performances-
March 9 -17.
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