Emerging Creators Unit Showcase

Tuesday, June 9

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queer pride 2026 logo with rainbow bar and dates: June 5 – 28, 2026

Tuesday, June 9, 2026 // Doors 6:30PM Show 7:30PM // In the Chamber
Tickets $10 – $75 + fees

All season long, our Emerging Creators Unit has been forging a path of artistic discovery. At Queer Pride, participants Dae Conrod, Tyler Cunningham, and Lili Robinson conclude their time with a sharing of newly developed work and insights into their creative processes and learnings.

Dae Conrod, Tyler Cunningham, Lili Robinson // ECU participants
Amanda Cordner // ECU director

The Emerging Creators Unit is an artist-driven, mentor-supported creative model for strongly motivated emerging queer and/or trans artists, facilitated this year by artist Amanda Cordner. The Emerging Creators Unit offers an intensive opportunity to develop your artistic practice and producing skills. Artists are invited to apply with a project — or a seed of a project — that will serve as a vehicle to advance their artistic practice.

image for Emerging Creators Unit 2026 a person points at the camera in front of a red velvet curtain

Dae Conrod

is a white, trans multi-disciplinary artist living in Tkaronto by way of Mi’kma’ki. They are a writer, actor, nap enthusiast, and abolitionist. They are grateful for the many opportunities for growth and exploration they’ve had at places like Sheridan College, The Second City Toronto, and Neptune Theatre. As well as the people they’ve had the pleasure of exploring with, including the Liberation Practice Field and The Bus Stop Theatre Cooperative (Kjipuktuk). They believe love is a revolutionary force and hope to remind you of that through their work and presence. They hope you laugh with beloveds today.

RED

created and performed by Dae Conrod

She’s a Cancer. She’s a mother. She’s a Republican. She’s had enough. 

In 1949, a young actress named Nancy was shocked to see her name on a list of Communist sympathizers making the rounds in LA. Fearing for the future of her career, she met with the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, to set the record straight. 

The birth mother of North American neoliberalism, Nancy Reagan, served as the 40th First Lady of the USA from 1981 to 1989. 

RED follows the former first lady and her fresh-faced assistant, Missy LaLaurie, as they wade through the murky waters of politics, motherhood, and the divine act of creation. 

 

Tyler Cunningham

(he/they) is addicted to ASMR slime videos but is also a performance artist. Across Canada and Europe, Tyler has collaborated with other artists and spirits to create performances, audio walks, music theater, and installations that have taken them to the ruins of city walls, playgrounds, experimental music venues, the Atlantic Ocean, sex clubs, and bathrooms stalls. Lately, Tyler has enjoyed wearing inflatable elephant costumes. He is overjoyed to be making his Buddies Debut as a member of the 2026 ECU Cohort!

Stalling

created and performed by Tyler Cunningham

Meet Indigo: a lonely shark with the simple dream to have a wedding inside of the Buddies in Bad Times’ bathroom stall. A longing to understand so-called “human connection”, the performance traces unrealized dreams of theater, a broken heart, and drug-induced benders while Indigo prepares to marry someone from the audience. If he’s totally honest, Indigo just wants to move on with his life – can’t someone help him to turn the page?

Lili Robinson

is a Black queer creator with political transformation and collective healing central to their work. They draw from lineages of Afrofuturism, Black horror, and Black Feminism to get at the things that haunt and the things that are hard to talk about. Companies/programs she’s worked with include: the Cultch, the Arts Club, Rumble Theatre, Theatre Replacement, Neworld Theatre, Queer Arts Festival, rEvolver Festival, Obsidian Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, and the Banff Playwrights Lab. Her award-winning play, Mx, laid the groundwork for the murky, genderbendy neobouffon clown world she’ll be returning to with reap. This is Lili’s Buddies debut.

reap

created and performed by Lili Robinson

This wasn’t how Octavius planned to meet his father.

It’s every apocalypse outside, and Octavius has been forced to shelter in his dead dad’s filthy apartment in Buffalo, New York. The plan was to pick up the ashes, get the keys from Cousin Nell, sort through the apartment, and head back to Toronto.

And then, well. Everything happened.

Inspired by Black horror, bouffon clowning, and the absurdity of grief, this end-times-era fever dream asks, how do we reclaim what’s been taken, and reckon with what we’ve been left? 

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Queer Pride 2026