Speaker Series: GENDER BENDER: Beauty, desirability, lovability

The cabaret stage has traditionally held space for queer bodies to negotiate corporeal boundaries. Queer performance has historically taken place on the fringes of popular culture accessible only to those within community. Contemporary queer cabaret invites a broad audience to participate in challenging status quo notions of gender, sexuality, desirability, lovability and human value.

Featuring;
James Knott
Tygr Willy
Mikiki
Gay Jesus
Lwrds

Date and Time: Wed Dec 16, 6-8pm
* Registration is required.  Sign up via Eventbrite.    

James Knott is an emerging, Toronto-based artist, having received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Integrated Media from OCAD University . Their performance-based practice combines theatre, video, and audio art to create immersive and emotionally resonant experiences for the viewer. Currently their practice looks to house personal narratives and queer experience through poetic retellings, self-mythologizing, and auto-iconographic aestheticism. Explored themes include: paradoxical and queer identity, inner dialogue, mental illness, and camp theatrics.
website: knottart.com
Instagram:@jamesnotjames

Tygr Willy is BoylesqueTO’s newest Boylesque member, as well as a drag artist part of HausBoat and a Drag-rent of Tygr Haus. They’ve recently performed for the FSU Stage as part of PrideTO’s Stay Home Saturdays and is a frequent performer and producer around the city.
Website/social: @tygrwilly_ Insta

Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Newfoundland, Canada. They attended NSCAD and Concordia before returning to St. John’s to work as Programming Coordinator at Eastern Edge Gallery. They later moved to Calgary to work as the Director of TRUCK Gallery. Their work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in self-produced interventions, artist-run centres and public galleries.Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history as a sexual health educator, harm reduction worker and activist. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss. Mikiki has worked as a Sexuality Educator in Calgary’s public schools, a Bathhouse Attendant in Saskatoon, Drag Queen Karaoke Hostess in St. John’s. Mikiki has worked in various capacities in the Gay Men’s Health and HIV response in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, and recently in Harm Reduction Outreach and HIV testing.
https://menshealthproject.wix.com/Mikiki
IG: @MKKUltra
Twitter: @pozPrevention
FB: mikikimstrrbbr & RoseBeefTO
YouTube/Twitch: MikikiandGuest

The one and holy Gay Jesus is a drag king serving up a mouth-watering communion of Latinx wine and non-binary bread. Born of virgin-ish loins and baptized in sex-appeal, his sermons consist of multidisciplinary protest pieces decked out in draglesque. Dubbed one of the Ten Canadian Drag Performers to be Following by OutTV in 2018, Gay Jesus is featured on Season 1 of the CBC Arts’ docu-series Canada’s a Drag and, in 2019, was announced as a nominee for LGBTQ Person of the Year by the Inspire Awards. When selected as the 2019 Producer’s Choice Feature at the FIERCE! Queer Performing Arts Festival, Gay Jesus debuted his first drag film entitled Préstamo. One of his most recent video creations, All of the Above, debuted on CBC Gem as a part of the CBC Arts & Buddies in Bad Times virtual cabaret, Queer Pride Inside. He’s bushy. He’s bearded. He’s blasphemously #blessed.
Insta/Twitter/Tiktok: @theirholiness

lwrds (pronounced ‘lords’) is an interdisciplinary artist developing critically-engaged work that celebrates and centers the liberation of 2-Spirit, non-binary, queer, trans, intersex, Black, Indigenous, racialized, and invisibilized peoples everywhere. lwrds’ work responds to their personal journey of healing sexual trauma at the intersections of gender variance, Blackness and Indigeneity (complicated by an imposed latinidad they reject due to its colonial underpinnings), and disability for reasons of neurodivergence and chronic illness. A born storyteller with a deep commitment to healing personal and collective traumas, their material approach is an intuitive process of learning with other non-human beings, valuing energetic exchanges with all that exists.
Instagram: @lwrdsss / @lwrds.art