The Rhubarb Festival
February 8–18, 2024

Week One // February 8-11

CABARET + LATE NIGHT PRESENTATIONS

Young-in-Craft Cabaret

Thirst Nation: Chill

Week Two // February 15-18

CABARET + LATE NIGHT PRESENTATIONS

Künst Kids & Friends

Amateur Strip Night Judged by Drag Things

isi bhakhomen

isi bhakhomen (they/them) is a storyteller of Afro-Peruvian and Nigerian descent. Their work as an artist spans many different mediums. Through stories they aim to build worlds that give black children the freedom to breathe, to laugh and to heal.

Bathhouse & Body Works

Bathhouse & Body Works is a series of alternative filthy queer events that take place around Toronto. We emphasis body positivity, queer magick, and the dirty queer underground.

Cloud

Cloud (she/her) is a trans femme theatre artist, actor/performer, and musician/composer (bass & keys). Excited by exploring and blurring the lines between senses and mediatic forms, Cloud uses a colourful “mixtape” approach to creating new work, with theatre as the melting pot. Previous projects as creator include Dreams (Toronto Fringe, 2022) and Hip Hop 100 (Tarragon Greenhouse, 2024). Cloud is also an alumni of Nightwood Innovators, Paprika Festival’s Design Lab, TENT, PXR’s IBPOC Fellowship, and Black Theatre Workshop’s AMP, has collaborated with the likes of xLQ, Venus Festival, and Dead Name Theatre, and regularly shares original music on Bandcamp here: cloudj.bandcamp.com

Vridhhi Chaudhry

Vridhhi is an interdisciplinary artist from Delhi, India, currently settled in Tkaronto. Drawing inspiration from personal narratives, she delves into the intricate realms of post-traumatic growth and the queering of the trauma body, guiding a healing journey for her inner child. Utilizing her body to express the nuances of trauma, she crafts rituals that prompt viewers to reflect on their unique paths to self-healing. These narratives are woven with whimsical objects, forming a distinctive tapestry that invites audiences to connect with the intimate threads of her experiences. The core intention of her work is to extend healing to those who engage with it.

Nickeshia Garrick

Nickeshia Garrick is a settler on the stolen land of Tkarón:to (Toronto) and has performed on this land for over 25 years. They are unapologetically a Black, Queer Artist, who believes in the healing power of breath through raw emotion and movement. Nickeshia received their dance training at the Carousel Dance Centre (Kitchener), the NYIDE (New York Institution of Dance and Education), the National Ballet School of Canada (Tkarón:to), Toronto Dance Theatre (Tkarón:to), and Simon Fraser University (Vancouver). Nickeshia is a Dora Mavor Moore, winning and multi-nominated artist who holds a BFA in Dance from Simon Fraser University and is a Co-Founder of CinnaMoon Collective who is currently working on their premiere piece, Surrendered Spirits.

Brigita Gedgaudas

Brigita Gedgaudas is an emerging, interdisciplinary, trans*, and diasporic-Lithuanian artist working in so-called Toronto. Eir work engages with in-betweenness as they explore contradictory experiences of gender and cultural heritage through realms of dance and digital worldbuilding. Using glitches as mechanisms for queering Lithuanian folk dance, they are interested in translating the body between physical and digital worlds through interactive and immersive installations. Brigita’s practice is informed by his engagement in the queer street dance style, W*acking, the performance collective, PriXm, and the Lithuanian folk dance group, Gintaras.

S.E. Grummett

Throughout my artistic practice, physical theatre techniques – particularly puppetry and mask, allow me to move beyond my physical body and the assumed gender of its attributes. Puppets don’t have to have a gender, let alone be human. In my work, I am curious about using object-manipulation to explore trans/queer identities and this feeling of the “other”. I’ve also been drawn to comedy and clown as a means of disrupting and criticizing those in power in accessible ways – laughter often makes the best Trojan horse. While we are seeing progress in the bodies, identities and stories allowed onstage, these artists (myself included) are often being asked to perform their trauma onstage for the sake of educating the (often) cis, white, able-bodied middle-class audiences that come to the theatre. With “Nude Parade” I want to unpack the “trauma porn” narratives that so many of us are asked to tell and examine what it means to tell our stories within a capitalist system. How do we, as artists, consent to be packaged, and shaped to become profitable depictions of our identities?

Stephen Jackman-Torkoff

Stephen Jackman-Torkoff is a wandering poet, travelling painter and a lover. They create poetic dreamscape odysseys and perform them in places big and small; From large theatres to living rooms. Stephen has acted in several productions including Fifteen Dogs at Crows Theatre, Trout Stanley at Factory theatre and most recently as Richard in Richard II at the Stratford Festival. They are in the upcoming production of The Inheritance at Canadian Stage. Stephen loves you.

Jan Jennings

Jan Jennings is an artist of many seasonings! With the core ingredients being: Voice, Performance, Writing ,and Visual Aesthetic. Everything Jan does will leave you amused, reflective, and with a belly full of laughs.

Jaye Kovach

Jaye Kovach is a multimedia and performance artist who lives as a white Magyar/Scottish settler on Treaty 4 territory (Regina, Saskatchewan). Her work, which has received local and national attention, often engages their queer and trans community, taking as its starting point his positionality as a disabled and neurodivergent, butch trans woman.

Künst Kids

The Künst Kids is a collective of five alternative performers based in Toronto producing themed drag events in the city’s west end. Our main goal with our parties is to showcase diverse local talent, encourage audience participation with prize winning runway challenges, and foster a reliable and inclusive space for queer joy. Recently, we’ve expanded our producing efforts into putting on a bi monthly open stage show for new and experienced performers to have a chance to try new acts, or even try doing drag for the very first time.

Lester Trips (Theatre)

Lester Trips (Theatre) is Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton, a performing/writing/directing/designing duo with a decade of shared training in physical performance and making people uncomfortable. We create questionably comedic theatre, film, and “digital not otherwise specified”, often revolving around the internet ruining our brains, distorting our sexualities, and how we all can’t stop looking at it.

Valentine Leger

Valentine is a writer and performer based in Toronto. His passion for queer semiotics and history overlaps with his love for playwriting, which he uses to explore the vastness of trans narratives. This has led him to his current artistic mission of imposing transsexuality onto God. Valentine is graduating from the University of Toronto with an Honours B.A. in Theatre, Art History, and Material Culture. In their free time, they enjoy practicing aerial silks.

Tanya Marquardt

Tanya Marquardt is a memoirist, playwright and performer. Their work is intimate — memoirs, Tedtalk/séances, private dances, ‘texting plays’, MP3 meditations, epistolary performances written to dream lovers — a fierce mucking about with vulnerability to get at life as a former runaway, third generation Magyar settler and genderqueer. They live and work on the unceded, ancestral and occupied traditional lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sə̓lílwətaʔ, and Skwxwú7mesh Nations and in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape People, and Canarsie and Munsee Nations. Visit Tanya’s website, and follow them on instagram.

Michael Martini

Michael Martini creates work for various contexts, from the gallery to the video screen to the blackbox. Since graduating from Concordia University’s Playwriting program, he has navigated Montreal’s interdisciplinary, bilingual scene, often collaborating with dancers and visual artists. His creations shift between the banal and the eccentric – layering text, video, and dress-up with a DIY atmosphere.

Anthony (Ani) Palermo

Anthony (Ani) Palermo (they/them) is a performer, writer/composer, director, and producer interested in recontextualizing the canon– adapting true histories and classic works into contemporary queer narratives through music and storytelling. Writing & composing credits include; The Gray: A Wilde Musical (Hart House Theatre), One Song Glory 2022 (Musical Stage Company), She, Men, & the Giant F*cking Snake (Soulpepper Theatre QueerCab), Mythic Women (University of Toronto). Selected theatre acting credits include; Retrograde (Toronto Fringe), Alcestis, Tartuffe (Theatre Erindale), Bare: A Pop Opera, Ghost Quartet (University of Toronto). Upcoming, Anthony will be making their debut in the Stratford Festival’s 2024 season, in Cymbeline and The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?. Visit their website.

Sindi Pinari

Sindi is a writer, performer, community worker, and organizer born in Tirana and currently based in Toronto/Tkaronto. Their writing explores themes of queerness, sisterhood, migration, home, memory, rituals, and love as a radical act. Though her art is always shapeshifting, it is grounded in the influences of Albanian folk legends, folk music and dance, and folk ceremonies, which are about deep kinship, layers of nostalgia, movement as release, and nature as part of performance and gathering.

Emile Pineault + Gabriel Cholette

Emile Pineault is a choreographer, performer and curator based in Montréal, first known as Tiohtiá:ke in Kanyen’kéha and Mooniyang in Anishinaabemowin. Through a multidisciplinary practice rooted in body-based research and performance, his work explores desire and sexualities. Bodies and objects mingle and become heaps of textures, shapes, sounds, vibrations, narratives and affects. He develops choreographies which oscillate between, on the one hand, messiness, clumsiness, and unruliness, and on the other hand, intense textures, exacerbated physicalities and a deep sensuality. He composes his creations like sensory poems and he uses duration and repetition to shift the experience of spectatorship.

Gabriel Cholette holds a doctorate in medieval literature and is a lecturer at the Université de Montréal. His book Les carnets de l’underground was published by Triptyque in the “Queer” collection (2021), it has been translated in English at the House of Anansi (2022) and a reworking of the book without the illustrations was also published in France by Le Gospel (2023). The book was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvy Prize for emergent LGBTQ2S+ writers. In a short period of time, he has established himself as an essential voice of queer literature in Québec.

Ranganathan Rajan

My research and creation in the realm of contemporary performance utilizes mediums of body, objects, landscape and multimedia. The practice involves contemporary dance, improvisation and working with objects. The choreography employs efforts of athletic physical labour with object work. Objects become performing phenomena, exploring their situation, needs, influence and presence. There is scope for investigating aspects of duration and conceptually site specific in these works that make them adaptable. Aesthetic of physical and mental exhaustion and approach learning and making through an “More than a human approach”.

Roberto Soria

Roberto is the new era no longer restricted by time she walks the earth with patience noticing how all is changing he doesn’t interfere she listens he watches ready for nothing yet it all shows it’s true colours the sun and the moon have her life and it’s the random that keeps him alive.

I am Roberto, a MULTIDISCIPLINARY HUMAN WITH MIXED HERITAGE Slovakian and Irish on my moms side AND Andean from the Plurinational State of Bolivia (Norte Potosi) on my dads side.

i am:
a raver
a dj/creator of noise
a photographer/filmmaker
a sagittarius
a company dancer for toronto dance theatre
and friendly so if you see me in the street come say hi!

Elizabeth Staples

Hi! I’m Elizabeth (Liz) Staples – a bisexual queer femme theatre artist. I am a white settler with Italian ancestry and I was born and raised in Tkarón:to (Toronto). I am a multidisciplinary theatre creator, performance artist, director, and arts administrator. I am one half of the performer-director duo ‘Jord and Liz’, with Jordan Campbell aka STARLIGHT. My practice involves physical theatre, devised work, and immersive experimental projects. Recent Acting credits include: Training Enhancement Program (Factory Theatre), White Girls in Moccasins (manidoons collective/Buddies in Bad Times), Private Eyes (lemonTree creations). Recent Directing credits include: PARTYPEOPLE (SummerWorks) PARTYPEOPLE 2.021 (Buddies in Bad Times), Crystallize (Caminos Festival). My work draws from queer history and looks into the queer future.

Thirst Nation

Thirst Nation is an Indigenous Queer and 2-Spirit artistic and thematic night-life experience that bridges the artistic communities with shared or allied sexuality, gender expansion and creative expression. First created as a late-night talk and cabaret formatted show during the 2020 lockdowns, the show was created by Tygr Willy under the name “Thirsty 2 Spirit Tuesdays” through the Glad Day Lit and Twitch Platform. Thirst Nation will always be a gathering to escape, a soft moan to ripple, and means to leave you sweaty and thirsty. Now, 2024, Thirst Nation: Chill marks the first in the upcoming series of Thirst Nation events.

Ashley T.

As a young, Black Biracial, Bisexual Woman with Bipolar Disorder from Toronto, Ashley T. has coined herself as “The BiFecta”. She is a multidisciplinary artist who creates within the realms of abstract visual, literary, and performance art. She works with diverse materials spanning from acrylic paints on canvas, to ink on paper, to her voice on the mic, to her body on the stage. Ashley T. uses art to ground and remind herself of the power she possesses to be a positive change in this world. Each piece she creates is a small chapter of her visual memoire.

Evan Webb

Evan Webb (they/them, fae/faer) hails from Calgary Alberta, and is based in Tkaronto Ontario. They attended Toronto Metropolitan University in the Performance Dance program. Evan is well versed in various movement practice’s and visual art forms, allowing them to naturally perform authentically and idiosyncratically in all aspects of movement expression. Evan works as a freelance dance artist, notably they are a company member of Côté Danse under the direction of Guillaume Côté, and ProArte Danza. Experiences of growing into an a-gender, member of the LGBTQ+ community, has given them a unique perspective, and influenced their artistic values. They continue to research gender, sexuality, and politics in their own Art practice.

Jian Yi

Jian Yi is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance art, multimedia, contemporary dance and new genres. Their practice is rooted in an ongoing enquiry into the ambiguities of emotional experience. They seek to explore the experiential trauma of marginalised persons within our society, such as neurodiverse and queer people of colour, and how we reflect on the broader human condition. Their work has been performed and exhibited internationally in major venues such as New Museum, The Kitchen NYC, Summerhall, Dance Base Edinburgh, Tramway and CCA Glasgow, among others. They have been artist-in-residence at Dance4 Nottingham, Merchant City Festival Glasgow, LADA London, Theatertreffen Berlin, Seventh Gallery Melbourne, and at the People’s History Museum Manchester. Their performance ‘Weathervanes’ premiered at Dance Base Edinburgh and at Tramway’s Dance International Glasgow and DanceLive Aberdeen in 2021. That year they also curated the first flagship iteration of the Journey to the East festival, a multi-day artist-led performance art festival focusing on experimental approaches to live art and committed to amplifying the voices of Queer and PoC artists working from non-Western/Eurocentric traditions. They re-mounted their piece ‘Weathervanes’ for the Made in Scotland Showcase featuring the best performance works of the year, as an immersive visual installation and full performance run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023, curated and produced with JTTE Productions the second iteration of Journey to the East festival 2023, and they were recently selected for the prestigious funded international residency programme at Cove Park.

“TORONTO’S GO-TO EVENT FOR THOUGHT-PROVOKING, POLITICAL, ADVENTUROUS ENTERTAINMENT”
-Toronto Life

“ONE OF THE BEST EVENTS ON THE TORONTO THEATRE CALENDAR”
-Toronto Star

“THE WILDEST THEATRE FEST IN TOWN”
-Toronto Life

“RHUBARB IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PREDICT, BUT EVEN MORE IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST”
-My Gay Toronto

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

Festival Artistic Producer

Sue Balint is a creative producer, curator and facilitator. In recent years, she has curated projects for Hybrid by Design (The Theatre Centre) and SummerWorks, and served as Festival Producer for Aluna Theatre’s CAMINOS and RUTAS festivals, Progress international festival of performance and ideas (SummerWorks / The Theatre Centre), and Weesageechak Begins to Dance (Native Earth). Sue is also Executive Director of the Bonavista Biennale, a public art event that embeds contemporary art along a coastal loop of rural communities throughout Newfoundland and Labrador’s Bonavista Peninsula.

Artist Committee

Jordan Campbell is a queer performance artist, dancer, theatre artist and party maker. Also known as STARLIGHT. You might know her from her party WISHING WELL, or from Magic Chicks!, or her silent disco drag show in the park, PARTYPEOPLE (created with Elizabeth Staples).

She is also half of xLq: the POP ART performance duo with Maddie Bautista. Together they create interactive theatrical playgrounds like 4inXchange (the one with $1000 cash) and their upcoming collective ritual/musical gameshow: Are You The ONE? xLq are the facilitators of The Creator’s Unit at the Paprika Festival. Jordan is the artistic director of The Purple Stage: a neurodiverse theatre company creating original performances with artists from The Purple Carrots community. Jordan loves to dance with trees.

Greetings! My name is daniel jelani ellis and I’m a multidisciplinary artist from Jamaica working in performance-installation, playwriting, dub poetry, and acting. My artistic practice is Afrocentric and celebratory. I’m especially passionate about arts-based community organizing for social justice. As a Black queer immigrant, I’m committed to celebrating those of us who live within the margins. I’m a graduate of the English Acting program at the National Theatre School of Canada. I work as the Artistic Associate for Obsidian Theatre Company. I also steer ad-hoc entity Groundwork Redux – an ever-evolving gathering of artists and projects – creating original art, performance, and community activations. Groundwork Redux recently presented my acclaimed solo work speaking of sneaking as the season opener here at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
www.groundworkredux.com

Leelee Oluwatoyosi Eko Davis (they|them) is a dance theatre and intermedia artist. As a disabled, queer, trans/non-binary artist of Nigerian/French/Algonquin descent, they work in intersectional, liberatory frameworks. Born and raised in Treaty 1 Territory, WinNipee (Winnipeg, MB), Leelee studied across Kanata (Canada), and works professionally as a dancer, performing artist, producer, and curator. Their creative projects aim to blur the lines between performance and life, building a bridge to reveal the human condition. Leelee also works as a program designer, facilitator, and consultant in the field of Social Innovation and Adaptive Change and is a Co-Artistic Director at the Toronto Dance Community Love-In.

@leeleeoluwatoyosi // www.leeleedavis.com

Ludmylla Reis was born in 1991 in Pindorama ( Brazil ) and immigrated to Turtle Island ( Canada ) in 2016. They are a Multidisciplinary Artist in Film, Theatre and Visual arts, known for poetic approaches to storytelling through exploration of silence, space manipulation, character point of view and intimate experiences in all mediums. With degrees in Advertising, Acting Conservatory and an MFA in Directing, their work examines the private with the public via an imaginative lens.

Industry Series

Who defines “industry” anyway? This year, Rhubarb is shifting the focus of its Industry Series toward emerging and young-in-craft artists and creators. Read on if you’re interested in putting your name in the hat to participate!

The 2024 Young-in Craft Cohort will participate in an exciting lineup of behind-the-scenes and special events, including:

• Pre-show programming conversations accompanied by fancy coffees
• An invite to the Rhubarb community meal for Buddies’ team and this year’s artists
• Bespoke opportunities to engage with Buddies’ staff and Rhubarb’s Artist Committee

AND we’ll throw in a Festival Pass so you can see all of this year’s work for free!

We are excited to invite twelve participants into this year’s Industry Series who will join forces with the six young-in-craft artists who have been selected to present work as part of a Young-in-Craft Cabaret evening hosted by xLq during Rhubarb.

Submissions are now closed for the Industry Series.

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Coffee & Conversation

Sunday, February 11 & Sunday, February 18
12pm – 1pm
Cabaret
Free & open to all

Both Sundays during Rhubarb, we’re hosting an informal pre-show conversation about the work you’re experiencing at this year’s Festival. Bring your thoughts, questions and inspirations. Chats will be facilitated by Artist Committee member Ludmylla Reis.

Thanks to Red Rocket Coffee for offering complimentary coffee and treats!