Closing Binge | July 26 | 4 PM
Get your dress jammies on, grab a drink and binge-watch the entire Queer Arts Festival with us (take it all in!!). Expect surprises and special prizes.
Get your dress jammies on, grab a drink and binge-watch the entire Queer Arts Festival with us (take it all in!!). Expect surprises and special prizes.
In his Swan Song, contemporary dance legend Noam Gagnon sashays the fine line between pain and pleasure in a fetishization of something glamorous and beautifully twisted: a monster beautified.
Synopsis: This piece is a reflection on the quest for love, through revisiting the worlds of childhood, both real and imagined.
How do we feel when we are hammered or deformed under pressure, but not quite enough to break? How can we be malleable and flexible, deform and reform without losing our core selves?
In ‘This Crazy Show,’ the body becomes a place of transformation, of transmutation, and of transfiguration. Alternately agitated, delicate and humourous, Noam Gagnon choreographs and performs, pushing himself to his physical limit to explore and expose “the art of artifice” in a culture obsessed with pretending authenticity. ‘This Crazy Show’ explores just how precarious and ambiguous identity can be, through the evolution of the body and the self as both are continuously morphing, unfixed and boldly celebrated.
“Because I dream, I’m not.” – Léolo
I wanted to take up the challenge of exploring new avenues of creation by playing with the range of humanly possible transformations, transmutations, and transfigurations. ‘This Crazy Show’ tackles the theme of the perpetual quest for love by revisiting the worlds of childhood, real and imagined, through the bionic woman as superhero metaphor.
“We gratefully acknowledge the support of the McGrane-Pearson Endowment Fund.”
A Night of Storytelling is back for its fifth year and once again hosted by the much-beloved Danny Ramadan, this time around as a new online experience. Spend a night in with the talented LGBTQ2+ voices of the CanLit scene. Danny brings prominent writers from the Queer and trans community into your homes as they explore their identities through the medium of the written word. A Night of Storytelling features readings from Billy Ray Belcourt, Amber Dawn, jaye simpson, Jillian Christmas, and Erin-Brooke Kirsh.
Curator Danny Ramadan is an award-winning Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker and LGBTQ-refugees activist. His novel, The Clothesline Swing, won multiple awards. His children’s book, Salma the Syrian Chef, is out now.
Jillian Christmas lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people, where she served for six years as Artistic Director of Versəs Festival of Words. An educator, organizer, and advocate in the arts community, utilizing an anti-oppressive lens, Jillian has performed and facilitated workshops across the continent.
jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux indigiqueer writer with roots in Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. they often write about being queer in the Child Welfare system, as well as being queer and Indigenous. their work has been featured in Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Mag, GUTS Magazine and Room. simpson resides on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), səlilwəta’Ɂɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations peoples, currently and colonially known as Vancouver, BC.
Amber Dawn is a writer and creative facilitator living on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, Canada). She is the author of five books and the editor of three anthologies.
Erin Kirsh is a writer and performer. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in dozens of literary journals internationally. Her greatest accomplishment to date is that one time she painted her nails without getting the polish all over the place.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation, and lives in Vancouver. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at UBC. His books are THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, NDN COPING MECHANISMS, and A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY.
You can’t get that shit out!
On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the closing of QAF 2019 we’re throwing the party of the half-century! Get ready for a culmination of the creative outpouring of this festival season and the past fifty years of queer art and culture.
Join us at The Roundhouse in collaboration with Vancouver Pride Society, The Frank Theatre Company, and Zee Zee Theatre to revel in the queerevolution with live performances, DJ’s spinning us through the decades, and more!
It’s not your story. It’s your LEGEND.
QAF 2019 rEvolution gathers together artists who disassemble, push, and transgress: art as the evolution of the revolution.
“Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.” — Jeanette Winterson
Guest curator Elwood Jimmy
We often think of revolution in relation to ways of knowing, but we rarely think about revolution in relation to our colonial habits of being – how our habits are dependent on, maintained and enabled by colonization. A revolution of being is not about what we say, how we look, how we perform, or how we trade in the different economies of colonial modernity. A revolution of being invites us to change our desires, our hopes, how we hope, how we sense, how we love, and above all, regenerate and recalibrate our relationships with each other, with the land, with time, with form and with space. In this recalibration of being, time and revolution are not linear. A radically different and tender way of being is necessary to face the violence on particular bodies – the human and non-human – that keep colonial systems in place, and to not lose sight of what we do not want to see. It is the cultivation and maintenance of practices – artistic, spiritual, life – that gesture towards a reimagining of a different way of being, of sitting with the complexities that we collectively face in an increasingly polarized world. In this exhibition, we look towards practices and processes that move towards generative ways of being. – Curator Elwood Jimmy