Rhubarb! 47

Festival Schedule

Please note that the schedule below lists the order in which the shows will be presented, but the start times for each show may vary. 

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 – Opening Night

Doors 6:30PM / Show 7:30PM

On February 4, the venue is mask-mandatory. KN95 masks will be available for those who need them. 

Live Art // 7:30PM

TESTO by Wet Mess [60 minutes]
ORTOLAN by Eris Thomas with Other Hearts [30 minute loop]
I DESERVE TO FEEL GOOD By Katie Clarke [30 minutes]

Access Notes

TESTO by Wet Mess features a pre-show touch tour and described audio. Please purchase an “Audio Described” ticket if you’d like to access the described audio. 

Thursday, February 5, 2026

Doors 6:30PM / Show 7:30PM

Live Art // 7:30PM

how the wolf says goodnight by River Oliveira + Max Cameron Fearon [30 min]
Seasons of Grief by Cass Cervi + James Jordan (Bad Machine) [20 min]
Sandpaper Hammock by Aliyah Aziz [30 min]
Transfigure/Transfix by Jessie Walker + Oliver Pitschner + Sophie Parisi  [60 min loop]

Access Notes

If possible, please bring a device that can connect to the internet and a pair of headphones to engage with this piece. We will have limited numbers of each to use on site. 

Friday, February 6, 2026

Doors 6:30PM / Show 7:30PM / Rhubarb! After Dark 10:30PM

Live Art // 7:30PM

EEK!!! by jonnie lombard [30 min]
How to Make a Fishing Net by Bronwyn Keough [20 min]
Watch Me by Lucy Coren + Nevaeh May [30 min]
Struggles of No Real Significance by Aiden Robert Bruce [30 min]

Rhubarb! After Dark // 10:30PM
Men Explain Things Men Explain Things to Us… and We Like It! by We Quit Theatre [60 min]

Saturday, February 7, 2026

Public Events 1PM – 4:30PM / Doors 6:30PM / Show 7:30PM / Rhubarb! After Dark 10:30PM

Free Public Events // 1 – 4:30PM

1PM – Coffee Chats
2:15PM – Canada, eh? A public chat on cultural diplomacy and the Canadian touring context, hosted in partnership with SummerWorks
3:20PM – (SOMETHING?): A Public Conversation on International Producing, hosted in partnership with Generator

Live Art // 7:30PM 

TESTing ground by Erum Khan + isi bhakhomen [30 min]
¿Y si me ven? / If they see me? by Macarena Coronado [20 min]
An-ti-gon-nee by Ludmylla Reis [15 min]
And you? a performance on criticism related to An-ti-gon-nee led by Ludmylla Reis [45 min]

Rhubarb! After Dark // 10:30PM

Wrath Month: Louder Than Pride by GRRRL SPELLS

Three free public events on Saturday, February 7 at Rhubarb! 47 are designed to connect presenters, producers, artists, and community members to discuss festival programming and the performing arts industry at large. Come by for one or all of the events on Saturday before the evening’s ticketed live art programming starts at 7:30PM.

1PM // Coffee Chats

We bring coffee and cake, you come to connect. Coffee Chats is a space to talk about festival programming or any thoughts the festival has sparked in your brain. Audiences, artists, and neighbours will all meet at the cabaret for a lightly facilitated yapping.

2:15PM // Canada, eh? A public chat on cultural diplomacy and the Canadian touring context, hosted in partnership with SummerWorks 

Michael Caldwell from SummerWorks, Ross Manson from Volcano Theatre, and Ludmylla Reis from Rhubarb! will start a conversation on navigating cultural diplomacy as curators, artists, programmers, Canadians… the list will go on.

3:20PM // (SOMETHING?): A Public Conversation on International Producing, hosted in partnership with Generator

Generator’s Nikki Shaffeeullah moderates a casual conversation with Rhubarb! Festival director Ludmylla Reis and artist-producer Josh Marchesini about their experiences with and research on international producing. Attendees will be welcome to join the conversation.

The Rhubarb! 47 Industry Series is designed to connect presenters, producers, and other industry professionals directly with local artists. 

FOR PRESENTERS]

Are you a presenter or producer who needs access to this page? Email ludmylla@buddiesinbadtimes.com.

Rhubarb! After Dark is creative late-night programming that happens at Buddies after Friday and Saturday Rhubarb! performances.

From We Quit Theatre
Men Explain Things to Us… and We Like It!

A live-streamed talk show where men explain things to us… and we like it! Conceived in the spirit and performed in the style of 1970’s public access TV, Men Explain Things to Us… and We Like It! features excessively gendered hosts Dasha Plett and Gislina Patterson interviewing real men about topics they are passionate about. A tightrope walk of gender failure, Men Explain Things To Us… and We Like It! invites guests and audiences alike into the playful intimacy of gendered dynamics between trans men and trans women. 

We Quit Theatre

From GRRRL Spells
Wrath Month: Louder Than Pride

Wrath Month: Louder Than Pride is a QTBIPOC alternative music show, featuring gothic, punk, metal, and alternative bands and artists who are usually deemed too “weird,”  “scary,” or “different” for mainstream and corporate-funded Pride month events. On this night, we bring back the riot and trade dance beats for a mosh pit! 

Show Line Up
Takaayla
Morgan-Paige
Chinese Medicine
Monster Magicals

Wrath Month Instagram
GRRRL Spells Instagram

Launched to mark the festival’s 35^th anniversary, The Rhubarb! Archive is a (hopefully) comprehensive list of all the projects, performances, experiments, parties, and special events to ever grace the stage at Canada’s longest-running new works festival.

VISIT THE ARCHIVE

 

Day 1 – Wednesday, February 4 

TESTO

I am Wet Mess (they/them) and I work across drag, movement direction, theatre, and live art. In 2021 I won Not Another Drag Competition (RVT) and have since been largely working in drag, cabaret and nightlife. In 2023 I was part of Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground (Royal Court) and Emma Frankland’s Galatea at Brighton Festival. My film work has been funded by Jerwood Arts and screened at Thunderdance, Raindance, London Short film festival, ICA and The Photographers gallery and won multiple awards. Movement direction work has included

choreographing videos for Will Young and London Grammar. In 2018 we won a Fringe First at Edinburgh Festival with the theatre company ThisEgg. Solo and collaborative works have been shown in multiple contemporary contexts such as the Tate Britain, The Southbank, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Battersea Arts Centre, The Place, Shoreditch Town Hall, Walker Gallery, and Baltic39. As a performer, I have worked internationally with Pester & Rossi, Monster Chetwynd, Donna Huanca, Oriana Fox, Cecile B Evans, Molly Palmer, Beth Kettel, Bhebhe&Davies, Joseph Bond and Rebecca Lloyd-Evans.

Instagram

ORTOLAN

Eris Thomas (they/she) is a Nonbinary, multi-disciplinary artist working in theatre as a director, dramaturg and performance maker. Their work explores the possibilities of hybrid performance forms, and is especially devoted to theatrical ritual, the inventive use of bodies and objects, and the ways our material world informs the stories we tell. Selected Credits: Director/Performer, INVISIBLE ARTISTS CARNIVAL (Other Hearts/Eyelevel Gallery, Nocturne 2023), Director/Co-Scenographer, QUARTET (Other Hearts in association w Video Cabaret, 2024, Dora Nominated), Performer/Creator, ENTWINED/DISTILLED (Sto Union in association w Other Hearts, Nuit Blanche 2024).

Yousef Kadoura is a Disabled Lebanese-Canadian actor, writer, and producer as well as graduate of the acting program at the National Theatre School of Canada (2017). He is a producer and host of Crip Times, a podcast series exploring disability in the arts. Selected credits include: Mo, RUBBLE,  (Aluna theatre 2023) Jonathan,  JONATHAN: LA FIGURE DU GOELAND (surrealsoreal, Montreal, 2022) Jihad, ERASER, (Riser Project, 2019), Writer/Performer, Invisible Artists Carnival (Other Hearts/Eyelevel Gallery, Nocturne 2023).

Eija Loponen-Stephenson (she/her) is a sculpture and performance artist whose work is predominantly concerned with interrogating the choreographic relationship between human movement and urban materiality. She holds a BFA in  Sculpture and Installation form OCAD U and is currently  completing her PHD at York University. Recent credits include: In/tention (Produit Rien, 2021), In support of sex work (Images  Festival, 2020), Costume Design/Co-Scenographer QUARTET (Other Hearts in association w Video Cabaret, 2024, Dora Nominated).

Other Hearts is a Dora Nominated, Toronto based performance collective made up of four core members: Yousef Kadoura, Sebastian Marziali, Silvae Mercedes, and Eris Thomas. Other Hearts seeks to blur the line between artists, audiences, and the world around them. We are devoted to work that is interdisciplinary and intercultural, drawing from the lived experiences of our core team and our collaborators to envision new ways of being together via performance.

Eris Thomas
Other Hearts

I DESERVE TO FEEL GOOD

Katie Clarke is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Directing credits include The Immaculate Perfection of F**king and Bleeding in the Gender Neutral Bathroom of an Upper Middle Class High School (One Yellow Rabbit/BodyCube Arts Collective), The Rocky Horror Show (apprentice director, Neptune Theatre), and can you remember how we got here? (OutFest). They are currently producing and co-directing The Unfamiliar Everything (The Accidental Mechanics Group), a project in residence at The Theatre Centre which will premiere in 2027.  Katie’s poetry has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Wussy Mag, Room Magazine, and with Metatron Press. Their poem “other people’s clothes” was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Katie’s undergraduate thesis on Foucault, domestic violence, and women’s incarceration, co-authored with BL Shirelle, is forthcoming in Hypatia.

D. Halpern (they/them) is a Canadian-based playwright and dramaturg. Playwriting credits include An Orchid and Other Such Lilies and Lies (Dandelion Theatre), Milk and Spittle (Paper Sailor Theatre), The Immaculate Perfection of F**king and Bleeding in the Gender Neutral Bathroom of an Upper-Middle Class High School (One Yellow Rabbit/BodyCube Arts Collective), and Donnelly (Bleeding Hearts). Dramaturgical credits include The Waves (Out of Body) and Creature of Habit (Expanse Festival).

Celia Green’s practice includes choreography, direction, writing, performance, and facilitation. They create highly physical, intimate performances that explore bodily sensation, mess, and the pursuit of freedom. Grounded in care and rigor, their collaborative practice and creations draw on their experiences as a queer, trans-masculine person and their background in care work with children and families. Celia’s work has been presented by English Theatre Berlin, the Toronto Dance Love-In, and The Rhubarb Festival. Most recently they presented their solo work, Jason, at OFFTA and the SummerWorks Festival.

Katie Clarke
D. Halpern

Thank you 

Stewart Legere
Celia Green
T. Thomason
Darren Shaen
Antel Kollenberg
Dale Godsoe

Day 2 – Thursday, February 5

how the wolf says goodnight

River Oliveira (he/they) is a multidisciplinary sound artist, musician, performer, poet and technician interested in creating sonic landscapes that explore altered states of perception, queer experiences of grief and survival, and the marriage of nature and noise. He has worked as a creator and technical leader across the city. Most recently, River was Head of Audio at TMU Chrysalis, and the Composer/Sound designer for the Weston Mural/Sound Installation, “Chasing Wind” with Crossroads Theatre. Website: riveroliveira.com.

Max Cameron Fearon (they/them) is a director-dramaturge & artsworker whose practice centres wonder, urgency, and care. They investigate and (re)create stories that exist between/beyond “the text”; and explore personal journeys & connections as opportunities for social/political transformation. Max has Directed for indie companies across the city; and worked recently with the Stratford Festival (Langham Director’s Workshop), SummerWorks Festival (Co-Festival Producer), and Young People’s Theatre (Teaching Artist). They’re a pretty good baker. Website: mcfearon.crevado.com

Theodore Belc (they/them) is a Toronto-based lighting designer and creative problem solver working at the intersection of colour, space, and story. They graduated from the Performance Production Program at Toronto Metropolitan University, where they focused their studies in lighting design and scenic arts. Theo’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in illuminating stories that reflect and resonate with the Toronto arts community with a focus on queer narratives.

Katherine Teed-Arthur (she/her) is an actor, playwright, and producer known for her colour-coded scripts, multi-tab spreadsheets, and a career dream to play a scary ghost. She has an affection for intricate projection set-ups, speedy pacing, and pretty lights. Most recent work onstage includes Antigone (Sunbeam Theatre), 500 Doubloons (Hamilton Fringe), and Hamlet (Afterlife Theatre).

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard (she/her) aka Belladonna the Blest is an emcee, playwright, dramaturge and agitator.  Her work has been recognized with nominations to the Governor General Literary Award, Siminovitch Prize, Dora Award, META, SATA and Patrick O’Neill Award.  She is currently the associate artist at lemonTree Creations, playwright in residence at Theatre Aquarius and artistic director of New Harlem Productions.

River Oliveria Website Instagram
Max Cameron Fearon Website Instagram
Theodore Belc
Katherine Teed-Arthur
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

Special Thanks

Crossroads Theatre
Mandy Maclean
Marium Raja
Shai Tannyan
Dani Martin
Max MacDonald
Heidi Wai-Yee Chan 陳蔚怡
Dasha Plett
Chel Paterson (SlowPitchSound)

Seasons of Grief

Cass Cervi (they/them) is a screenwriter, facilitator, poet, & performer based in Toronto. Whether they’re writing absurdist comedies, like their IPF-funded webseries (Confession Queens) or their Canada Council-funded feature film (Master Debaters), performing their silliest burlesque acts, or hosting queer events of all kinds, their goal is always the same: to bring people joy. Catch them every Tuesday at Bampot House, where they host weekly sapphic programming!

Bad Machine is a queer, disabled, and non-binary comedian, clown, writer, screen/voice actor, and improvisational loop musician. They’re weird. Their unhinged and entirely improvised live performances mix beatmaking, clown, DJing, and visual and performance art into one eccentric smoothie.  Some recent credits include Rhubarb! Festival 2025, Open Canvas Festival, and the UKAI Carnivals of Shipwreck and Algorithmic Culture. If excited by the above, check them out at badmachine.ca.

Cass Cervi
Bad Machine

Transfigure/Transfix 

Jessie Walker (they/them/she) is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist, theatre-menace, and veritable jack-of-all-trades based in Kjipuktuk /Halifax. As a creator, their work explores the intersection of identity, popular culture, and play. They were the recipient of the 2025 Robert Merritt Emerging Artist Award, and their queer hobbyhorsing epic, “Horse Girls,” has received multiple awards including the coveted “Best of the Fest” at the 2024 Halifax Fringe Festival. In their work as a performer, producer, playwright, and arts administrator, they have been fortunate to collaborate with many arts organizations across Canada and the US including Eastern Front Theatre, Shakespeare by the Sea, Prismatic Arts Festival, Festival Antigonish, CORPUS, Arrivals Legacy Project, Ghost Tower Theatre Co., programsound.fm, Opera House Arts, and more. You can hang out with them on the internet @aroundandouttheatreco + @walkerjessie. Huge thanks to Ludmylla + the entire Buddies team for thier Buddies debut!

Sophie Parisi (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator from Toronto. She loves textiles, ceramics, and comics and enjoys primarily working in analogue mediums, bleeding into material art and design. Her work often explores spectral memories, earnest convictions, various growing pains and afflictions, bittersweet recollection, and feelings that are too big to hold in her hands. Her piece for this year’s Rhubarb! Festival accompanies her dear friend Oliver Pitschner’s audio play “Transfigure/Transfix” and is called “Fester/Ferment”. It’s about repetition and collecting, wanting and desire, remembering and re-remembering, finding the same feeling over and over again in different places, and recollection, glowing and uncanny. Her favourite things to draw are weird dogs, swans, patterns, sunbursts, horses, and women. When she’s not working, the things she love most are eating a good sandwich, taking a nap in the sun on the shoreline of a lake, having the window open, and kissing. This is her Buddies debut.

Oliver Pitschner (he/him) is a transsexual playwright, director, and arts administrator based in so-called Toronto. He is a proud writer of genre fiction, exploring themes of youth culture, the family unit, religious fundamentalism, the early internet, and transgender liberation in his work. He has written and directed Behold, a Man!, The Other Paris, and Transfigure/Transfix. He currently works at Factory Theatre as a commsperson and sits on the board of directors for East End Arts, helping bring accessible arts and culture to Toronto’s east end where he resides. He is thrilled to be back at Buddies after directing Valentine Leger’s The Biography of Harry Allen at last year’s 2025 Rhubarb! festival. When he’s not working on his current writing project UNION, Oliver can usually be found cooking his friends dinner, trying to teach his fiancee Maeve Magic: The Gathering, or at the club dancing to post punk.

Around + Out Theatre Company
Ghost Tower Theatre Company

Jessie Walker
Sophie Parisi
Oliver Pitschner

Sandpaper Hammock 

Aliyah Aziz is a multidisciplinary artist who uses light to talk about shadows, and sound to physically move them through us. She uses disruption as a tool of resistance, embracing glitch and static to channel the friction that exists between the surface and the depth of the technology that we engage with. Aliyah finds inspiration in what reaches below the skin, and in the sensations that whisper behind language in the stories that we tell.

Aliyah Aziz Instagram
YouTube

Day 3 – Friday, February 6

“EEK!!!” or The Really Cool Experimental Reimagining of The “Mice Turned Me Trans!!!” Play

jonnie (they/them) is a trans thing from the woods swirling through side-quests of sentience. They perform, poeticize, and party in pop-art melodrama playgrounds, in bars, basements, bathrooms, and back again, always with the primary intention of wearing fun hot outfits. They have been an Ancient Greek unintelligible being, a monster made of markers, a cyber-canine sex demon, a snail-mountain lovechild, and a pigeon. If you ask jonnie to go dancing, they will always say yes 🌸

Jenna Geen (she/her) (aka moonwatcher) is a singer, sound designer, composer, and actor. her recording artist project, moonwatcher, is an experimental music project exploring the union of classical and contemporary composing within a pop landscape. She created a concert last year with the Music Gallery where she sang under water in a fish tank, she is giving birth to a squash named Pinky in her spare time, and she is excited to score this iteration of EEK!!! at the Rhubarb! Festival with her bff jonnie 💋

jonnie
Jenna

How to Make a Fishing Net 

Bronwyn Keough (they/she) On a dark December night in 1999, lightning struck a patch of neon lichen growing on a seaside cliff – and Bronwyn was born. They have been an artist/ weirdo/ freak for as long as anyone can remember, probably because of the lichen thing. They are a comedian, poet, storyteller, net-maker, little sister, and all-around shit-disturber. They love swimming, and berry-picking, and are learning to play the spoons. Previous Buddies credits: QueerCab 2.0. If you see them around, say hi!

Bronwyn Keough

Watch Me

Lucy Coren is a theatre creator, producer and community arts facilitator. Her work centres around engaging people as they are in their lives, and working with them to unpack and repackage their stories into a dramaturgy which allows them to safely and insightfully communicate their identities and experiences. She has produced nationally and internationally for venues such as Theatre Royal Plymouth, Tramshed Arts, Native Earth Performing Arts and the National Arts Centre. Past creative work includes Football Fathers (De Grote Post, 2019), Transfers (SummerWorks, 2022) and How We play(ed) (Theatre Direct, 2023.) Lucy has been a Buzz Artist with Theatre Passe Muraille, a member of The Foundry with Factory Theatre, and was an artist-researcher with Project: Humanity and Nightswimming. She is currently the Artistic Producer for Outside the March.

Nevaeh May is a sex worker and birth worker. A full spectrum doula since 2018, going to only abortion doula work in 2021. She founded a BIPOC doula non-profit that services the most marginalized navigating the reproductive spectrum. She has been a camgirl/online content creator since 2022 and a stripper since 2023. In her time in both industries she has had to navigate boundaries in unique ways, redefining them respective to the job, and navigating how they are respected or not depending on which of the two feminised work forces she’s in that day. She hopes this piece forces the person seeking services to recognize the humanity of their care provider and get reflexive about the ways in which they unintentionally (or intentionally) strip their service provider of that right to offer or withdraw consent, force compliance, and dismantle their personal power in client need of receiving self-directed care.

Lucy Coren

Struggles of No Real Significance

Aiden Robert Bruce (ARB) is an actor, singer, producer, intimacy director, and playwright. They received their Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Drama from Queen’s University. They have performed with various institutions such as Theatre Kingston, Eye of the Dawn Collective, the Kick and Push Festival, and Kingston WritersFest. Off of the stage, they have worked with Kingston Theatre Alliance, the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and Intermission Magazine. Rhubarb! 47 marks their debut with Buddies.

Rachel Rusonik is a director, designer, and theatre scholar currently completing her MA at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. She received her Bachelor of Arts Honours in Drama and English from Queen’s University. Her previous directing work includes Sunday in the Park with George with Queen’s Musical Theatre and The Scottish Play with Two Rabbits One Hat. Rhubarb! 47 marks her Buddies debut, and she is very excited.

Sara Starling (she/they) is an emerging artist who is absolutely stoked to be making her Buddies debut alongside her long-term friends Aiden and Rachel! Sara has worked with companies such as Peerless Productions, FOLDA, and Thousand Islands Playhouse. She is currently studying production at the National Theatre School of Canada. She is also a playwright and dramaturg whose work mostly focuses on women, sex, and the body!

Breed Bate Theatre Instagram
Aiden Robert Bruce (Arb)
Sara Starling
Rachel Rusonik

Men Explain Things to Us… And We Like It! 

We Quit Theatre is an award-winning, nationally-touring collaboration between trans artists Dasha Plett and Gislina Patterson. Dubbed “the hottest collective to come out of Winnipeg since the Royal Art Lodge” (Globe and Mail), their past performances include include 805-4821, i am your spaniel, Passion Play, and GLORY!

We Quit Theatre

Day 4 – Saturday, February 7

¿Y si me ven? / If they see me?

Macarena Coronado Harman (she/her) is a Toronto-based performer, director, and multidisciplinary theatre artist from Lima, Peru. Weaving together her love for dance, design, and theatre, her neurodivergent brain, and her political science degree, Macarena aspires to make art that is expressive and revealing in all senses. Most recently, she co-created and performed in “…! (The Balloon Show)” at the 2025 Paprika Festival, and was artistic intern at Theatre Gargantua for their production of “Dissonant Species”. This is Macarena’s Buddies debut!

Emma Cuzzocrea (she/he/they) is a performing artist currently pursuing a BFA in Acting from TMU. They have collaborated on and performed in new works with many wonderful artists at Guilty By Association, Sheep’s Clothing Theatre, and the Paprika Theatre Festival. Buddies debut. Thanks to Mum, Pop, Sarah, Kathleen, Ruth, Gilly, and of course all the POPs (People of Paprika).

Osvaldo “Ova” Barreda Buschmann (he /him) is a dancer and educator from Santiago, Chile, who is now based in Toronto. After studying visual arts with a focus on community and teaching secondary school in Chile, he traveled to Toronto to devote himself fully to dance. He is currently a student at the Dance Arts Institute (formerly the School of Toronto Dance Theatre), and his practice unfolds between street dance and contemporary dance. Throughout his career, he has participated in international art residencies in Colombia and Zimbabwe and performed on various stages in Toronto, including the Paprika Festival, Canadian Stage (with Jamii), SummerWorks, and Common Ground.

Seung Eun Cha 차승은 (they/them) is a theatre performer and artist entrenched in multidisciplinary embodiment and expression. They are in their third year at TMU’s Performance: Acting program and while recently partaking in the creation and performances of Rock Bottom Movement’s Be The Bird, Sheep’s Clothing Theatre’s Blood Brothers, The AMY Project’s Creation Program, and There Is So Much More To Say directed by Erin Brubacher. In Paprika Festival’s 2025 Creator’s Unit, Seung Eun collaborated with Macarena Coronado, Ova Barreda Buschman, and Emma Cuzzocrea, under the mentorship of STARLIGHT, to devise an absurdist movement piece called  …! (The Balloon Show).

Macarena Coronado Harman
Emma Cuzzocrea
Osvaldo “Ova” Barreda Buschmann
Seung Eun Cha 차승은

TESTing Ground: Toronto and the world at Rhubarb! 47

Magda “isi bhakhomen” Uculmana-Falcón is an Afro-Peruvian, Nigerian, downtown Toronto-based artist. Their varied works explore themes of Black femme power, ancestral memory, humour and absurdity. Through stories they aim to build worlds that give Black folks the freedom to breathe, to laugh and to heal. A literary giant once described them as “a fiercely blossoming independent artist.” A loving teacher stated that they were “a force to be reckoned with both as a performer and as a writer.” And their formerly estranged father now calls them “brilliant.” You can find out more about them at www.isibhakhomen.com.

Erum Naz Khan is a performance artist based in Toronto. Erum chases frequencies across multidisciplinary practices, awakening the mythic through contemporary lyricism. Committed to collaboration as a core artistic ethos, they seek to honour the varying worlds and pedagogies unearthed by those who are in a room together, forever elevating a collective mess emerging fully from the heart. Recently they were the Artistic Associate at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, a literary artist-in-residence at The Atlantic Centre for the Arts, and a selected playwright for the 2025 National Playwrights Retreat at Caravan Theatre. For a deeper inside scoop: erumkhan.ca.

an-ti-gon-nee / And You?

Ludmylla Reis is a cultural leader, a theatre director, a filmmaker, a Creative producer, and a curator with a BFA in acting and an MFA in directing, as well as an independent career in project management and cultural studies. Currently, they are the Festival Director for The Rhubarb! Festival @ Buddies in Bad Times.

Ludmylla Reis

Wrath Month: Louder Than Pride  

GRRRL Spells is a horror and occult inspired queer and trans art and apparel brand, combining riot grrrl attitude with goth aesthetics and the gay agenda. With Wrath Month, we expand on our love for queer and alternative subculture and aim to advocate for QTBIPOC representation in the alternative scene by creating spaces for the genre and community that is often overlooked. Wrath Month: Louder Than Pride will be debuting at Rhubarb! After Dark as a pilot event for what we hope will become a full fledged festival in the future.

Show Line Up
Takaayla
Morgan-Paige
Chinese Medicine
Monster Magicals

Wrath Month Instagram
GRRRL Spells Instagram

Check out our digital program!

RHUBARB! 47 DIGITAL PROGRAM]