What to know
- Sweet Ephemera explores Queer intimacy, identity and belonging through two experimental performances rooted in diasporic experiences.
- Pearle Harbour Walks into a Bar transforms a hotel lobby into an intimate cabaret packed with music, storytelling and sharp-witted satire.
- Two-Spirit Cabaret returns for its 10th year, celebrating Indigenous Queer and Two-Spirit artists through a one-night-only showcase.
- Queer Youth Cabaret spotlights the next generation of 2SLGBTQ+ performers debuting original works spanning drag, music, comedy and more.
If you’re looking for Pride plans beyond the usual parties and street festivals, Toronto’s theatres have you covered.
Toronto is a global hub for cultural production, with theatre shows, concerts and other events happening almost every day. This month, a range of Queer productions are taking over stages across the city, offering everything from intimate cabaret and drag performance to experimental works exploring diaspora, identity and self-discovery.
Here are a handful of 2SLGBTQ+ productions to check out this June.
Sweet Ephemera
Where: The Theatre Centre
When: June 18-20
Sweet Ephemera is a double-bill show coming to Theatre Passe Muraille. The show explores Queer intimacies through a diasporic lens in two shows: Eilish 미정 Shin-Culhane’s Peel Me and Jose Miguel “Miggy” Esteban’s pahinga ka muna.
pahinga ka muna
Influenced through disability arts practices, pahinga ka muna invites audiences to return to rest as a “crip space of memory, dreaming, and worldmaking,” welcoming them to participate in a ritual of mourning that traces the “mad and Queer” routes of Esteban’s diasporic inspirations.
“In many ways, pahing ka muna challenges rest as something to be looked at, instead exploring it as a deeply reflective and embodied practice of navigating difficult stories of experiencing belonging and unbelonging,” Esteban told Queer & Now.
He explained that throughout the piece, he explores movement with objects connected to his Filipino roots and moments of practicing rest, including rosary beads, which connect them to their Catholic faith and Filipino-Catholic community.
“I remember practices of praying the rosary with community and family offering such important places of rest for me as a child,” he explained.
“However, as I return to the gestures of rolling the rosary’s beads in between my fingers, I also navigate the experiences of struggle, of depression, and of anxiety that come from recognizing the ways in which my Queerness marked my unbelonging within heteropatriarchal manifestations of Filipino community.”
Peel Me
Meanwhile, Shin-Culhane’s Peel Me explores Queer intimacy through mess, consumption, and transformation. The artist explained that throughout the show, performers navigate a space filled with grapefruits and fortune cookies, offering an incredibly sensory experience. They shared that when beginning this work, they were fascinated by the concept of using food in performance.
“Food is both universal and individual, holding the potential to indicate cultural nuances, enhance sensuality and easily embody catharsis through its destructibility,” they told Queer & Now.
“Citrus especially has the added layer that we must peel them open to get to the fruit inside. This imagery is what then inspired the thematic journey that Peel Me takes, diving layer by layer deeper into our own experiences, all in an effort to build care and access catharsis.”
Speaking on the theme of “peeling back layers,” Shin-Culhane says that the show addresses the idea of self-making, aka the lifelong process of shaping your own identity.
“I heard someone say recently that Queerness is constantly arriving. This resonates with me so deeply,” the artist explained. “I see it as always sitting on the horizon, continually offering newness, excitement and deeper understanding. It is the ongoing journey of knowing and understanding yourself.”
Pearle Harbour Walks into a Bar
Where: Luminato Festival, The Fairmont Royal York Hotel
When: June 3-28
Described as hilarious, heartfelt, and a little unhinged, Pearle Harbour Walks into a Bar sees Canadian drag icon Pearle Harbour perform an intimate cabaret that combines music, wild storytelling, and razor-sharp satire into an electrifying show you won’t want to miss.
Set in a small hotel lobby bar seating just 25 audience members, the show explores the ways that bars bring us together in a show that is impossibly intimate, overly rowdy, and hysterical, complete with the queen’s signature dark humour.
“Bars are the last place that strangers can still gather together. Every other third space… has been abandoned or demolished; this show is a celebration and indictment of that,” Pearle shared in an interview.
The show sees the sweet and sharp queen turn the bar into a space of revelry and debauchery, confession and communion, with iconic drinking songs and new arrangements created by Tony Award-winner Greg Morrison.
2-Spirit Cabaret
Where: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
When: June 17
Back for its 10th edition, the 2-Spirit Cabaret is taking over Buddies in Bad Times Theatre this Pride Month for one night only.
From Native Earth Performing Arts, a company that has championed Indigenous artistic expression since 1989, and Buddies in Bad Times, the show celebrates the strength, beauty, and talent of QQueer and 2-Spirit Indigenous people.
The show features Filipino, Two-Spirit actor, burlesque and drag performer Haley Robinson, known for their heart and authenticity to every role and performance they take on, while the rest of the line-up has yet to be announced.
Tickets range from $10-$75, with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. and the show kicking off at 7:30.
Queer Youth Cabaret
Where: Soulpepper Theatre, Young Centre for the Performing Arts
When: June 20-21 @ 8 p.m.
Support young 2SLGBTQ+ talent at the Queer Youth Cabaret. Coming to The Village, the show sees nine selected artists debut new, original work in genre-bending forms. We’re talking everything from drag to music, comedy and more. Mentored by Academy and Queer Youth Cabaret alum Will Dao, the show is a great opportunity to see budding talent in the community.
Running 90 minutes, the cabaret showcases the work of young 2SLGBTQI+ artists, with this year’s cohort featuring Tkaia Green, Helen Ho, Zoe Marín, Simone Matheson, Chelsea Mathieu, Hemali Sankalya Ratnaweera, Maggie Tavares, and Michelle Blight and Elm Reyes.
