Queer Arts Festival

BY YVONNE ZACHARIAS Published Fri, Jul 18, 2014
ORIGINAL ARTICLE here

Australian-born theatre artist Sunny Drake isn’t afraid to tackle difficult subjects on stage but there is nothing preachy or didactic about the way he delivers them.

First, there is the story of his own transitioning — from being born a girl to becoming a boy.

Then there is his struggle with alcoholism.

This is hardly the stuff of laughter. Yet he makes people laugh.

The dynamic new-age thespian had sold-out shows in San Francisco, received rave reviews in his native country and has received awards and accolades for his one-man, 63-minute show called X that he is bringing to the 2014 Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver.

“It is really important for me to make work that is stunning and beautiful and magical and entertaining,” said the 37-year-old performer in an interview from Toronto, which he now calls home.

“I like people to leave my shows with an array of questions, an open-ended experience rather than sort of having been told well you should think in this way.”

Drake has taken the classic tip “write what you know” and spruced it up with puppets, stop-motion animation and humorous monologues to tell the story of a girl and her best friend struggling with addiction and their sexual identity.

It took about six months of solid work over a period of a year and a half to create this piece with his signature blend of art forms.

“This one was one hundred per cent the hardest show I’ve ever made because I felt such shame around it.”

Like so many other queer and trans people, Drake used alcohol as a coping mechanism to deal with the difficult search for his sexual identity.

In the midst of the interview, he throws out a startling statistic. “Queer and trans folk have nearly double the rates of substance and alcohol use as their non-queer, non-trans counterparts.”

Far be it from him to tell them to stop drinking. “I’m not this sober person who thinks everyone else should be sober. I completely respect people’s autonomy in deciding for themselves is this a good coping strategy at the time?”

For him, it probably was at one point. But it crept up on him. “The effects of alcohol in my life started outweighing the benefits of the coping factor.”

At first, he decided there was no way he could write a play about this problem. “We have such strong judgments of people who struggle with alcohol or drugs. I felt a big sense of failure. I felt a big sense of shame and I hid my drinking problem really really well for a lot of years.”

But he reasoned that if he was suffering in this way, there must be many others out there in the same boat. It was then that he decided he had to put his own story on the line.

He was still drinking when he started working on the show but he has been sober now for two years. While grateful for this, he still misses alcohol sometimes.

He knew if he delivered a tale of woe, no one would come. People want to be entertained. They want to laugh and cry. So he set out to find “a nuanced and beautiful and compelling way to explore important stories.”

“I take difficult topics and I make a magical and moving and entertaining and funny and ridiculous show out of them.”

Stitching together a monologue with puppetry and stop-motion animation requires precision. For example, at one point, one of the two puppets opens a manhole and climbs down. At that point, the puppet becomes an animated character.

Drake credits an amazing creative team of 10 people for helping him pull the show together.

His show is one of the highlights to the Queer Arts Festival that is fast becoming a staple on Vancouver’s cultural landscape. It is billed as one of Canada’s fastest growing arts festivals.

Running from July 23 to Aug. 9, it offers a breathtaking breadth of talent, combining musical, dance and theatrical performances with visual art exhibitions and workshops, both local and from 27 countries around the world, under one roof at the Roundhouse Community Centre. Here you will find everything from slam poetry by Floyd VB and Olivia B to a performance by 80-year-old venerable harpsichordist Colin Tilney.

Underlying it all is an exploration of the perplexing terrain of human sexuality in all its variations. Our understanding of it seems to be getting ever more complex, moving well beyond the black-and-white world of straights and gays.

The festival, according to its own literature, is a haven for “bisexuals, gay men, intersex, lesbians, transsexuals, third gender, transgender, two-spirit, queer and questioning individuals.”

In other words, just about anyone who is at odds with straight culture.

Here again, Drake seems to fit right in. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia, he had this pervasive sense of something not being quite right. He was a girl on the outside but felt like a boy on the inside. But because there were no stories, no possibilities, no examples of what he was feeling around him, he couldn’t define it. He felt isolated.

Then in his late 20s, he spent two years in San Francisco where he was surrounded by a strong community of “trans” people who helped him define and validate what he was feeling inside.

At age 30, he came out as a trans person and took hormones to transition from being female to male.

While back in Australia, he fell in love with a Canadian woman who has become his partner. “I have a really wonderful relationship. I’m very very lucky for that. That’s why I moved to Canada.”

But here, too, the story gets more complicated. Far from eschewing all things feminine when he transitioned into a boy, Drake says, “I’m actually an effeminate man so I love pink. I love frilly things. Sometimes I wear makeup.”

He said people look at him and assume he is a gay man, “such a flamer” who can’t possibly have a female partner. Trying to explain himself is like a whole second coming out.

Which just goes to show “there’s so many different ways to be a man and there’s so many different ways to be a woman.”

Far from lamenting this strange state of affairs, the Queer Arts Festival embraces and showcases it, making people who have hovered on the fringes of the mainstream straight world or dived straight off of it feel right at home.

Rachel Iwaasa, the festival’s artistic director, is a case in point. A classical concert pianist and a “queer person” who says she is attracted to all genders, she wound up going to the queer arts festival in San Francisco, a month-long extravaganza that takes over the entire city with several dozen venues and every kind of art.

“It was the first pride that I’d been to where I felt I really belonged.”

Pride parades aren’t exactly her cup of tea. “I have huge value and respect for what the Pride Society does but I am not a big outdoors person. Parades have never been my thing and I am not a big bars and parties person.”

She found the San Francisco event was just the ticket, combining both the artistic and the queer sides of her identity.

Artists whose works are displayed at the Vancouver festival, which is now in its sixth year as the Queer Arts Festival although it was launched as Pride in Art in 1998, “often will say this is the first time they have been able to do a show where they could be wholly themselves,” Iwaasa said.

She pointed out that historically, the arts have been a safe place for queers who often found refuge in high schools in drama class or in school bands.

“As a community, we count among our artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde and arguably Shakespeare,” said Iwaasa, pointing out that many had to live closeted lives in terms of their sexuality.

“When you read a list of LGBT figures throughout history, of illustrious achievers, 80 to 90 per cent of them are artists,” she pointed out. And “if you go through a list of artists throughout history, a disproportionate number seem to be queer.”

The arts and the queer community seem to go together like honey and bees.

yzacharias@vancouversun.com

Here are five events not to be missed at the Queer Arts Festival from July 23 to Aug. 9 at the Roundhouse Community Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews, Davie at Pacific:

• Master harpsichordist Colin Tilney celebrates turning 80 this year with a solo recital. In his concerts, the world-renowned musician tries to use historical instruments or modern replicas in an attempt to match the music with the sounds the composers heard as they wrote.

His program will include Bach’s sixth English Suite, a prelude and dances by Louis Couperin, five sonatas by Scarlatti and Quinque by South African lesbian composer Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986). July 25, 7:30 p.m. Regular admission, $30; $15 for youth, seniors and the underemployed.

• The debut of Canada’s first professional queer classical choir Cor Flammae. Co-founders Missy Clarkson, Madeline Hannan-Leith and Amelia Pitt-Brooke have brought together a large group of queer choral talent including Peggy Hua and Hussein Janmohamed. Their talents have been involved in a wide range of choral acts, including the UBC women’s choir. July 24, 7:30 p.m. Regular admission, $30; $15 for youth, seniors and the underemployed.

• Queering the International features artists from a wide range of nations including Brazil, Canada, the Cree Nation, Guatemala, Guyana, Hawaii, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Mexico and others. The exhibition is curated by Zimbabwe-born Laiwan and curatorial assistant Anne Riley. July 23 to Aug. 9. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays; 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekends. By donation.

• In a fast-paced, one-man show called X, Australian-born theatre artist Sunny Drake offers a magical, humorous and honest look at addiction grounded in queer and trans experiences. Drake combines multiple art forms in his performance, including stop motion animations and puppets. July 26, 7:30 p.m.; July 27, 3 p.m.; July 28, 7:30 p.m.

Regular admission, $30; $15 for youth, seniors and the underemployed.

• Initiated by the filmmaker Rodrigue Jean, Epopee is a collection of short films made in collaboration with male drug addicts and sex trade workers in Montreal.

Post-show talkback with filmmaker Rodrigue Jean and Serge-Olivier Rondeau, a member of the Epopee collective.

Aug. 5, 7:30 p.m. General admission $10; $8 for youth, seniors and the underemployed.

The event is co-presented by the grunt gallery.© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

BY MICHELLE DA SILVA Published Fri, Jul 17, 2014
ORIGINAL ARTICLE here

THERE’S NO ARGUING that the range of images of women depicted in mainstream media is limited—not only in terms of race, class, and body size, but gender expression as well. The term “butch” is often used to describe the performance of female masculinity in LGBT communities. These are women who don’t necessarily fit into traditional gender roles and resist limited definitions of what a woman is.

BUTCH: Not like the other girls is a new photographic art exhibit by Vancouver-based artist SD Holman. Starting in March, the collection ran as a public art exhibit displayed in 20 bus shelters across Vancouver. From April 9 to 25, BUTCH: Not like the other girls will open as a gallery exhibit featuring 20 more photographs at the Cultch (1895 Venables Street).

“I’m really interested in the liminal space, the spaces in between that don’t occupy the binary of gender,” Holman, who is also artistic director for Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival, told the Georgia Straight in a recent phone interview. “I want to document our community for us because I don’t think there’s enough images that we can relate to.”

Holman, who was born in California and received a degree in photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design started the BUTCH photography project nearly five years ago.

“I went to Portland and Seattle, and…a conference so there were people from other places. I shot people from England, and somebody from New York—all over the States,” she recalled, noting that the majority of her subjects are Canadian. “People came out and really wanted to do it.”

However, when Holman’s wife—Vancouver social worker Catherine White Holman—died in a float plane accident in 2009, the artist put her photography project on hiatus.

“I’ve taken it back up for her because she was the one who pushed me to do it,” Holman said. “Catherine was the biggest fan of butches I ever met.”

Holman has now taken photographs of nearly 100 models and hopes to turn BUTCH: Not like the other girls into a book. She is also working towards a Master of photography degree from Savannah College of Art and Design.

“We have so many images that we’re bombarded with about the way we’re supposed to look and the way we’re supposed to be in the world,” she said. “It’s dangerous for people like me and people that I photograph to be in the world, so I think the more images we have out there can help people on both sides.”

Holman hopes that the BUTCH exhibit extends far beyond LGBT communities and that her photographs—whether displayed in transit shelters or art galleries—challenge audiences to re-examine definitions of gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a woman.

“I hope it is meaningful and transformative and people will recognize themselves in it,” she said. “I hope they think that they are beautiful, and people can be outside of our normal ideas of what it means to be female or male.”You can follow Michelle da Silva on Twitter attwitter.com/michdas.

BY STACY THOMAS Published Thu, Jul 17, 2014
ORIGINAL ARTICLE hereThis year’s fest aims to build bridges across all kinds of borders

For Rachel Iwaasa, ReGenerations means cultivating new connections across age, boundaries, experience and borders.

“This year our focus is on mentoring tight relationships,” the artistic director of Vancouver’s multidisciplinary Queer Arts Festival (QAF) says. Whereas previous festivals have facilitated shorter workshops and mentorship programs, this year’s programs will last longer and, she hopes, go deeper for participants and mentors alike.

One such participatory workshop spent two months encouraging gay refugees and immigrants to express themselves through painting, assisted by mentors from Jordan and Colombia. The results will be shared during the festival along with an international art exhibition, curated by multidisciplinary artist Laiwan, calledQueering the International, which will feature the work of established and emerging gay artists from around the world.

“Art is meant to expand our perceptions, expand our worldview,” Laiwan says, “and I think it won’t do that if we’re not including people from everywhere in the world. That is my interest here, to bring all of those worlds into this exhibition at the Roundhouse.”

A prominent figure in Vancouver’s art scene since founding Or Gallery in 1983, Laiwan has brought together 21 queer artists from backgrounds as diverse as Russia, Iran, Hong Kong and Trinidad to speak visually about their particular experiences.

“We’re not that much different on another level from some of the things that people in different parts of the world experience,” Laiwan says. “They just might be different in scale, and they might be different in terms of spectacle. It’s not about comparing us, saying that we have it easy here compared to there, but to be able to say, ‘In what ways can we be better allies or have better networks around this?’”

One of the more controversial — and well-known — of the visiting artists is South African “visual activist” Zanele Muholi. In her home of South Africa, lesbians, especially black lesbians, live in daily fear of violence and death. Using almost an anthropological portraiture approach to photography, Muholi has documented lesbian lives, deaths and relationships in South Africa, including her own, since 2006.

Her work has been publicly derided at home; in 2009, it was called “pornographic” and “immoral” by then-minister of arts and culture Lulu Xingwana. It has also been widely appreciated and exhibited, including in a current solo show at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Other notable artists exhibiting at Queering the International are Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, who was detained in Egypt in 2013, and Tejal Shah, an Indian lesbian video artist who describes her gay- and feminist-focused art as “political” in a country where homosexuality was recriminalized last year.

Many refugee artists living in Canada will also be featured in the show, offering unique perspectives as newcomers and, at times, outsiders to Canadian society. “I see the project solely as a seed; it’s like a beginning,” Laiwan says. “The show really celebrates the variety of experiences that people come from. So it’s not homogenous, it’s not simple; a lot of the stories are very complicated.”

Another group of artists attempting to tell heretofore untold stories is Cor Flammae, an all-queer professional classical choral group dedicated to queer-focused content that bills itself as Canada’s first such ensemble.

Managing director Missy Clarkson was so inspired by a performance at last year’s Queer Arts Festival that she quickly rounded up 21 eager singers and two composers from Vancouver’s professional choral scene.

The timing was right, she says. “They came out of the woodwork and word spread . . . I could tell that there was a need, because the answer was always resoundingly, ‘Yes, I want this, this is my dream, let’s do it,’” she says.

Clarkson and co-founders Madeline Hannan-Leith and Amelia Pitt-Brooke brought the idea of a Cor Flammae festival performance to the QAF board, and the answer, again, was a resounding ‘yes,’ she says. “They said, ‘We don’t have the money, and we don’t have the room, but we’re going to find some money, and we’re going to make some room.’”

The choir’s performance on July 24 is meant to highlight hidden stories from classical music’s queer history, but that’s not the only objective of the group’s formation: it’s a way for queer choral singers to open up and be themselves while practising their art, where often it’s one or the other, Clarkson says.

“People don’t necessarily feel entirely welcome to be their full selves. There’s a lot of erasure,” she explains.

“It was really interesting to see how comfortable people got so quickly because we didn’t have to pretend, because you’re usually wearing a muumuu with shoulder pads, and maybe you want to be wearing a suit, and maybe you’re singing and pretending that you don’t have a same-sex partner.

“We have a comfortable connection to each other, to the composers,” she says. “We just want to do justice to the experience of the music, and hopefully that’s what we do.”

Colin Tilney, who turns 80 this year, has emerged as a leader in the last few decades of classical music, performing pieces with the instruments for which they were originally composed. The early-music pioneer, whose body of work includes a long list of prestigious harpsichord and piano recordings, doesn’t open up readily, preferring to keep his private life private.

“Having been conventionally married for the first half of my musical life, with two daughters, it’s not likely that I should have experienced discrimination,” Tilney says in an email to Xtra.

He and his current partner married three years after Canada legalized same-sex marriage. “When my partner, William, retired in 1988, the RTO [Retired Teachers of Ontario] allowed us joint medical coverage under common law,” Tilney says. “When we married in 2008, it was partly to confirm what we feel for each other and partly to set our future life together on a firmer and clearer foundation.”

Despite his reserved demeanour, Tilney reveals that one of the highlights of his career was “delighting my partner on our first meeting by playing him Scarlatti in the nude.”

Tilney’s upcoming QAF performance, entitled Colin Tilney Celebrates LXXX, will include music by Scarlatti, as well as by Bach, Couperin and South African lesbian composer Priaulx Rainier.

Having lost, then regained, three quarters of its federal funding last year and more recently received stable operating funding from the BC government as well as a five-percent increase from the federal government, Iwaasa says the festival is financially secure for now.

Still, she hopes community members will contribute to the festival’s future to shift its reliance away from government funding. “One of our goals this year is to talk to our audience and community, who aren’t necessarily used to thinking of the Queer Arts Festival as a place where they can go for their taxable donations,” she says.

“It would be fair to say that we are one of the fastest-growing cultural festivals in Canada,” she says. “We have an incredible pool of artists to choose from. It makes it very easy to curate a festival that’s going to be amazing. It’s not hard to find great queer artists.”

Queer Arts Festival 
Wed, July 23–Sat, Aug 9 
Roundhouse Community Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews 
queerartsfestival.com

BY LINDSAY GLAUSER KWAN Published Fri, Jul 11, 2014
ORIGINAL ARTICLE here

Dare being challenged. Risk being changed at this year’s Queer Arts Festival at the Roundhouse. From July 23 to August 9, the festival will highlight cutting-edge performance art, music, visual arts, literature and more by artists of all ages at this year’s festival under the theme “ReGenerations.”

The organizers call this year’s festival “a defiant reframing of the Nazi term “Degenerate Art,” where artists including such notable painters as Pablo Picasso, were claimed as a dangerous threat to the Nazi society. This summer festival will instead celebrate the contributions to society by queer artists and from queer art.

The Pride in Art Society has been doing just that for the visual arts since they began operation in the 1990s. By making queer artists and art visible, recognized and celebrated, the festival aims to “build a better world.” In 2006, the festival expanded to include more genres. Today, the festival is a multi-disciplinary celebration of music, literature, performance and the visual arts by artists around the world.

While this year’s festival is jam-packed with talent, here are some highlights in all genres of arts to pique your interest:

If you are a lover of literature (and have always wanted to write), sign up for Amber Dawn’s pay-what-you-can Tough Language and Tender Wisdom memoir writing workshop for transgressive voices. Amber Dawn is the author of two books, How Poetry Saved My Life (the 2013 City of Vancouver book award winner) and SubRosa (a Lambda award winner). With a variety of powerful exercises spread over two days, this workshop is designed to encourage participants to take risks in writing their personal stories.

For visual arts enthusiasts, “Queering the International” will set-up in the exhibition hall and features artists from around the globe. Curated by Zimbabwe-born curator/artist Laiwan, the exhibit explores queer identity on an international scope and from a variety of viewpoints including from Mexico, Iran, Russia, Brazil, India and here in Canada. Admission is by donation.

For performing arts buffs, the award winning X by Sunny Drake explores the topic of addiction and recovery with a visionary show of stop motion animation, puppetry and live performance. Over forty interviews with community members put real-life addiction issues in the spotlight of the performance. An unforgettable show for a $15/$30 ticket.

For music connoisseurs, Colin Tilney will give a solo harpsichord recital to celebrate his legacy in his 80th year. In collaboration with Vancouver’s Early Music Festival, Colin Tilney had a historically informed performance technique, which means he only uses original music sources and plays on either antique instruments or those that are based on the antique design. Tickets for the Colin Tilney Celebrates LXXX event are $15/$30.

The Queer Arts Festival runs from July 23 to August 9 and all events take place at the Roundhouse. For more information about the events, please check out queerartsfestival.com.