ON STAGE: OUTstages Festival
Where: The Metro Studio (1411 Quadra St.) and Intrepid Studio (2-1609 Blanshard St.)
When: Feb. 4-13
Tickets:
Intrepid Theatre’s OUTstages Festival returns this week with a full roster of in-person performances, several of which are being hosted for live audiences at The Metro Studio, after several exhaustive interruptions.
That comes as a big relief for artistic director Sean Guist, to put it mildly. “These are shows I have been trying to bring here for two years,” he said. “We started these conversations in 2020.”
The province’s first dedicated queer theatre festival was digital-only in 2021, for obvious reasons. Guist was elated that he could bring back OUTstages for in-person performances in its eighth year, and its return comes at an opportune time. A return — at long last — to live performance is precisely what the arts and culture needs after two years of uncertainty.
“Hopefully, this is the beginning of something to build on,” Guist said.
Several workshops are being offered at OUTstages, in addition to mainstage performances — including Vivek Shraya’s How To Fail as a Popstar, Kyle Loven’s Me Love BINGO, and a concert by Corey Payette — being held at The Metro Studio. Shows at the Quadra Street theatre are reduced-capacity performances for 80 attendees, while performances at Intrepid Studio on Blanshard Street — including Queer Folktales, an immersive sound experience from Victoria’s Charlie Gates, which is designed for eight people — are substantially smaller.
Guist said he can’t wait to see both audiences and artists in the same room, no matter the scale of what is being offered. “There’s something that happens when artists and audiences get in a dark room together and ideas are shared,” he said. “Some stuff pivots really well to digital, but that shared experience just doesn’t.”
Performances at The Metro Studio during last year’s Fringe Festival, which is produced by Intrepid Theatre, used the same cabaret-style seating that’s in place for OUTstages. The venue is easily convertible, which makes it an ideal spot in an ever-changing landscape. The set-up ran successfully for two months during the Fringe, despite three different health orders keeping organizers on their toes, Guist said.
“When the Fringe opened, masks weren’t required. And then we had capacity limits, too. Then the vaccine passports came in.”
OUTstages will follow the same guidelines. Working in the festival’s favour is the malleability of audiences, members of which have shown their support throughout the pandemic, Guist said. “People are feeling really great and feeling really comfortable. The difference now is, how do feel people feel coming back to the theatre? That’s the question. Because our shows in the fall [with 100 per cent capacity] were all selling out.”
The novelty of the cabaret-style seating at The Metro is a plus, especially when an artist of Vivek Shraya’s reputation is on stage. How to Fail as a Popstar is a bold production, artistically and emotionally, as it folds Shraya’s professional aspirations into her personal failures. “She talks about how she tried to be a pop star so many times, but could never do it,” Guit said.
The key element missing from all corners of the arts during the past two years — joy — is apparently on the return. When indoor events move back in the direction of full capacity later this month, arts organizations can expect to see waves of exuberance and a rush of support, according to Guist.
That has been a long time coming for OUTstages, he added. “We haven’t been able to celebrate or have joyful experiences together in two years. What we really wanted to do with the festival programming is find moments of joy to celebrate. Things are challenging, with queer identity, and queer and trans issues, but the shows are really joyful. They are celebrations. That’s what we’ve been missing.”
