BUDDIES RESIDENCY PROGRAM

Yolanda Bonnell

The Eighth Fire is a two part play series that follows the migration of the Anishinaabek as part of the Seven Fires Prophecy. Time collides as ancestors presence themselves to a group of land defenders in the future who are fighting for revolution.

Part One: The Great Migration begins the journey and we witness a potential pre-colonial life while time collides into the future. Part Two: Bagosinem/Have Hope picks up with the Anishinaabek struggling to deal with the impacts of colonialism. Meanwhile in the time ahead, communities are at the precipice of sovereignty and revolution.

Yolanda Bonnell is a disabled Queer, 2 Spirit Anishinaabe-Ojibwe, South Asian mixed-race multidisciplinary storyteller, creator and facilitator originally from Fort William First Nation. Yolanda is a multi-award nominated performer and published playwright. bug, which was nominated for four Dora Awards, was also shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award while My Sister’s Rage won the PGC Tom Hendry Drama Award. In 2022, White Girls in Moccasins made its premiere at Buddies in Bad Times and was revived at Native Earth Performing Arts in Spring 2026. Yolanda proudly bases their arts practice in land-based creation and Anishinaabe methodologies, working towards disability justice in theatre.

photo by Tyler J Sloane

madonnanera // Amanda Cordner + David di Giovanni

NERO is a contemporary retelling of the infamous Roman emperor, reimagined as a Black and queer performing artist forced to navigate a system not built for their agency, and pitted against a radical far-right Christian group that is terrorizing the city. Part Greek tragedy, part satire, and part performance art, NERO asks “Is violence ever justified?” and follows the question “Can we ever just burn it all down and start over again?”

Madonnanera is the creative partnership between Amanda Cordner and David di Giovanni, dedicated to crafting original, outrageous, and intersectional work for the stage. Our work includes the Dora Nominated WRING THE ROSES and BODY SO FLUORESCENT, two original plays that blend poetry, performance, and politics. After touring across North America, BODY SO FLUORESCENT made its Toronto stage premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in April 2023. The play has since been published by Playwrights Canada Press where it was a finalist for the Dan Ogilvie Prize through the Writer’s Trust of Canada, and adapted into an award-winning short film.

Amanda Cordner (they/she) is a multidisciplinary performer, writer, and co-founder of madonnanera performance—a company dedicated to creating risky, outrageous, and intersectional new work. Amanda co-created the award-winning solo show Body So Fluorescent with David di Giovanni. The piece premiered at Buddies in Bad Times’ Rhubarb Festival in 2016, toured nationally, was published in 2023, and became a finalist for the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Amanda also co-created Wring the Roses, which premiered through Why Not Theatre’s RISER Project and was presented at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. A recipient of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance (Snow White, YPT), Amanda brings genre-defying flair to every project, from directing Fringe hits to hosting queer cabarets. They are currently in development for madonnanera’s third and most ambitious piece, NERO—a large-scale contemporary epic exploring power, identity, and revenge. Amanda is a graduate of York University’s devised theatre program.

David di Giovanni is an award-winning theatre director and creator living in Toronto. In 2017, he co-founded madonnanera, a rich creative collaboration with Amanda Cordner that is invested in making outrageous and intersectional work for the stage and screen that has toured across the country. Their first show Body So Fluorescent was nominated for The Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Award in 2023 and has won awards and recognition since its inception in 2016 including the Emerging Canadian Artist Award at the InsideOut LBGTQ Film Festival in 2020. He also works as a director and dramaturge with choreographer Andrew Skeels, including Skeels Danse’s production Past Rooms in 2023. Between 2019 and 2022, he was the Artistic Director for Shakespeare in Action: a professional theatre and arts education company working in Toronto’s Weston community. Through this, he produced, directed and dramaturged a number of shows and community-engaged projects while also steering the company through a re-examination of the company’s mission and vision, while strengthening the company’s community partnerships.

Aria Evans

I Will Fall / All Else Fades is a dance-theatre work by Aria Evans about queer love, romance, intimacy, and the fragile choreography of letting someone close. Sliding between tenderness and near rupture, bodies reach toward one another through breath, touch, shared weight, and repetition, searching for connection through memory, longing, and desire.

The culmination of Aria’s MFA research into intimacy choreography, the work embraces contradiction, holding intimacy as both tender and consuming, fleeting and cyclical. Part performance, part installation, I Will Fall / All Else Fades invites audiences into a world where queer love is not spectacle or tragedy, but a practice of trusting another person enough to be fully seen.

ARIA EVANS (they/them) is an award-winning, queer, interdisciplinary artist working across dance, theatre, and film. A certified Intimacy Coordinator, Aria creates collaborative, performance-driven work that centres relationship, embodiment, and connection. Collaboration is central to their artistic practice and informs the work they create with their company, Political Movement. Aria is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre and Film Department at the University of Winnipeg. In 2024, they were inducted into the Dance Collection Danse Hall of Fame. Their work has been presented internationally across North America and Europe, alongside ongoing contributions as a juror, panelist, facilitator, and curator in interdisciplinary performance.

photo by Liliana Evans

Erum Naz Khan

CLEOPATRA: a part theatre / part dance performance
The year is 49 BC. After the exile of Cleopatra from the Kingdom of Egypt, the earth begins to crack open. A mysterious divine force unleashes a plague, engulfing every woman throughout the land to succumb to its reckoning. As tensions of conquest from the Roman Republic rise, time slowly disintegrates, history and mythos collide, catapulting everyone to contend with the end of the world as they know it, and the rise of another.

CLEOPATRA has been developed with support from Modern Times Stage Company.

Erum Naz Khan, reignited, rebirthed, and ready to fuck you up into their orbiting planetary system. Erum is chasing frequencies that infuse multidisciplinary practices that awaken the mythic into contemporary lyricism. Committed to collaboration as a core artistic ethos, they seek to honour the varying worlds and pedagogies created by those who are in a room together, forever elevating a collective mess emerging fully from the heart. Erum holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto, where they studied Sociology, Cinema Studies, and Professional Writing & Communication. Recently they were the Artistic Associate at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, a recipient of the Urjo Kareda Research grant through Tarragon Theatre, and Buddies Queer Emerging Artist Award.

For a deeper inside scoop: erumkhan.ca

photo by Shenny De Los Angeles

Jay Northcott

Can I throw my Trans friend through a table without getting canceled by you people?

Part WWE/AEW, part gender crisis, part thirst trap—where suplexes, satire, and sexual tension all go head-to-head while we asking why don’t our father figures come to our shows. HEEL is an attempt to win back my masculinity, for the second time, to pile-drive grief, and fist desire into an oil-soaked, high-impact spectacle that hurts so good.

Are you hard yet?

Bring your emotionally unavailable Dads and older brothers and we will show them how to really take it like a man.

Jay (They/Them) is a multidisciplinary Creator, Clown, Director, Producer, Costumer and Big Brother Canada contestant.
Jay lives within the mindset of ‘F*ck around and Find out’ Jay Is exhausted.

Central to Jay’s creative and artistic practice is their advocacy for marginalized communities including Palestinian, Indigenous, Black, Racialized, Queer, Trans people and beyond.

The art they create is a window into their world, soul, values, humour and imagination.

Art is freedom and freedom breathes life.

Credits include: 7 METHODS OF KILLING KYLIE JENNER (Obsidian Theatre), KING LEAR (Stratford Festival), COTTAGERS AND INDIANS (Watermark Theatre, PEI), CONCORD FLORAL (Randolph College), 21 BLACK FUTURES (Obsidian Theatre, CBC), The Parasite (Theatre Outrè), PREMIUM CONTENT (Major Matt Mason).

photo by Dahlia Katz

Erin Shields

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a foundational stone to some of the world’s greatest stories – bedrock for eons of characters, archetypes and legends. Humanity’s oldest recorded narrative pulses with sexuality, curiosity, hubris, power, energy and passion. And yet, it remains on the periphery of our cultural gaze. We (erin and ted) are interested in questions it raises about leadership: the boredom of comfort, the self-consciousness of privilege, and the recklessness of power. In sexuality: testosterone as a conquering force and estrogen as a civilizing force. In civilization: notions of progress, the impact of cataclysmic events like the flood as a premonition to our own eco-catastrophe. Through cycles of poetic writing, nerdy conversation and experimentating with bodies in space, we are birthing a contemporary epic from the womb of this ancient epic that will throb with the urgency of today.

Erin Shields is best known for her radical adaptations of classical texts which bring neglected female characters centre stage. She made some of her most daring work as a young creator at Buddies; work that not only pushed at the edges of recognizable form, but also expressed her sexual life-force and visceral rage. That early work which was raw, chaotic and literally naked laid the groundwork for the epic pieces she’s written for Stratford, Tarragon, Soulpepper and other large, Canadian Theatres. Erin’s ecstatic to be returning to Buddies to make a new multi-faceted theatrical feast.

www.erinshields.ca

Photo by Dahlia Katz

Elizabeth Staples

Chez Moi is a sonic solo-performance love letter to the Dyke bars of Toronto. These bars are sacred spaces, sanctuaries, and in short supply. Actor, Playwright, and Lover of Lesbians, Liz Staples evokes the dance floors of the past to better understand how to build the dance floors of the future.

Liz is a queer femme settler of Italian ancestry, who was born and raised in Tkarón:to (Toronto). She is a multidisciplinary theatre creator, director, actor, producer and arts administrator. She is one half of ‘STARLiz’, who creates experimental drag and queer performance art. You can find her in the middle of a packed dance floor where she will offer you water, glitter, and a hug.

Credits for Buddies include: Wishing Well (Nuit Blanche 2024, 2025) Rhubarb! Festival (White Girls.. 2017, Chez Moi 2023, bumbershoot 2024), QueerCab (the ice woman 2018), White Girls in Moccasins (2022), Queer Pride Festival (The Afterparty 2020, PARTYPEOPLE 2021)

Photo by Tyler J Sloane