Category: Past Events
Jun 19 & 26 | 2pm
Queer Arts Festival partners with Cross Cultural Walking Tours in celebration of Pride Month for two Cross Cultural Queer & Trans Walking Tours! Cross Cultural Walking Tours are ‘queering’ their 2.5 hour multi-guided tours to build awareness of the contributions of Indigenous and early immigrants in the past, bridging communities and cultures around the city now, all through a diverse 2SLGBTQSIA+ lens! This tour starts with a walkthrough of Queer Arts Festival headquarters at Sun Wah Centre, led by QAF Artistic Director Mark Takeshi McGregor, right in the midst of QAF 2022: Hauntings!
Find out more on Facebook and Instagram or visit www.crossculturaltours.ca
Stops on this tour include:
- Queer Arts Festival
- Massy Books
- Creating Accessible Neighbourhood
- JQT Vancouver
- Vancouver Japanese Language School & Japanese Hall
- Sher Vancouver
- Forbidden Vancouver’s The Really Gay History Tour
- Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden (walking tour ticket includes free admission to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.)
- And diverse 2SLGBTQIA+ community voices!
Tours take place on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Location: Tours will start in Chinatown and end in Chinatown. Participants will receive the exact starting location upon registration.
Fri Jul 8 | 7pm
Sun Wah Centre, 2nd Floor — 268 Keefer St.
Join us for the festival closing party at the Sun Wah Centre: three glorious floors of art, plus music and performances by the Queens, Kings, and Things of the House of Rice, including the fabulous Shay Dior and Haina from China!
A night of literary readings
Wed Jul 6 | 7pm
Sun Wah Centre, 2nd Floor – 268 Keefer St.
Berend McKenzie, Curator
This year our artists will present works that inspire, provoke, and titilate while exploring the theme, the Masc & Femme We Wear: what are the costs of masking or revealing one’s inner self under the glaring stage lights of colonialist supremacy? How do the expectations of a salacious supremacist gaze fit, chafe, bind, haunt or even unravel the BIPOC queer body and spirit? How is the BIPOC queer body eroticized and fetishized?
Berend McKenzie (he/she/they interchangeably) is an award-winning playwright, actor, producer, screenwriter, and published author living on Treaty 6 land otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Berend is best known for his ground-breaking, Jessie Richardson Award nominated one-person show NGGRFG. He has worked with Oscar-winning actresses Halle Berry and Angelina Jolie. Berend is currently writing his first auto-fiction novel, Adopted. In October 2021, Berend’s short story Hockey Night in Canada was published in the anthology Between Certain Death and A Possible Future: Queer Writing in Growing up with the AIDS Crisis (Arsenal Pulp Press) and has just completed writing their first TV pilot under option with Warner Media.
Sat Jul 2 | 3pm
Followed by an opening reception:
Sat Jul 2 | 5pm
Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – Unit 205, 268 Keefer St.
Adwait Singh, Curator. SD Holman, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director.
Our curated visual art exhibition, Vanishing Act, becomes fully realized and fully materialized on Jul 2, when Centre A opens its doors as our festival partner. We’re celebrating our complete complement of curated artists with a building-wide tour of the entire exhibition led by the exhibition’s Curator, Adwait Singh, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director, SD Holman, and visiting guest artists. Join us as we tour the multiple rooms that make up our most ambitious curated visual art show yet!
Featured Artists:
Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan
Fazal Rizvi
Omer Wasim
Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry
Shahana Rajani
Syma Tariq
This event is ASL interpreted.
Tue Jun 28 | 7pm
Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews
Gabriel Dharmoo is a music composer and experimental vocalist. Bijuriya is a drag artist engaging with South Asian culture. Gabriel values innovation and risk taking as he navigates Eurocentric artistic scenes. On social media, Bijuriya lip-syncs her way into the hearts of brown queers. Both of them have marginal practices but they have very different audiences. But Gabriel and Bijuriya are one person – and it’s time to bring them together on one stage. Code-switching between drag performance, original songs, experimental sound design and the porosity between singing and lip-syncing, this piece celebrates the artist’s brownness through an array of unexpected talents. A quirky yet vulnerable exploration of their inadequacy to fully represent the subcultures they seek to embrace.
Concept and performance: Gabriel Dharmoo (Bijuriya)
Technical Direction and Light Design: Jon Cleveland
Assistant to Light Design and to Tech Direction: Michael Tonus
Sound Design: Gabriel Dharmoo
Original songs: Bijuriya and Gabriel Ledoux
Voice, cello, steel pan and harmonium: Bijuriya
Electric guitar: Gabriel Ledoux
Additional vocals: Vidita Kanniks
Costumes: Bijuriya, Julie Pichette, Angela Rassenti
Wigs: Heaven Genderfck, Keith Fernandez
Sets accessories: Bijuriya
