Festival season: Progress and Rhubarb banish the winter blahs
30 Jan 2019.

by Drew Rowsome -

February is the most miserable month in Toronto. Cold, snowy and seemingly without sunshine. But it is also one of the most enticing months for theatre and performance art because of the Progress international festival of performance and ideas, and the Rhubarb festival where "artists explore new possibilities in theatre, dance, music, and performance art." This year the festivals overlap briefly with Progress running from Wednesday, January 30 to Sunday, February 17 and Rhubarb running from Wednesday, February 13 to Saturday, February 23. Instead of competing, the two festivals have teamed up to create The Performance Bus.

Audience members attending Progress on the 13th can hop on a shuttle bus to join in the raucous festivities at Rhubarb's notorious opening night party. Those attending Rhubarb on the 16th can bus to the Progress festival's big  closing bash. The Progress festival is centred around The Theatre Centre and Rhubarb is headquartered at Buddies, not that far apart geographically or artistically. But why risk the TTC when one can be hosted by a yet to be named artist (for a memorable party bus experience, I'm hoping for Keith Cole), peppered with "pop up performances en route." That sounds infinitely preferable to delays for track maintenance, mysterious emergencies and the inevitable weather.

Though parties are a crucial component of any festival, it is the content that illuminates the grey of February. Progress presents Australian Jacob Boehme's Blood on the Dance Floor billed as a "blend of theatre, image, text and choreography" paying homage to traditional Indigenous ceremonies while "dissecting the politics of gay, Blak and poz identities." Boehme's intersectional identities are channeled into art that speaks to the "need to love and be loved" that we all share.

Already almost sold out is salt. wherein two artists recreate their journey retracing one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle to question how colonial history exists in the everyday. And answer the loaded question "Where are you from?" Artist Haley McGee offers very useful advice with the self-explanatory The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale which lead her to discover a mathematical formula for the cost of love. Not only entertaining and inspiring, but information we can all use.

Documents explores "race, class, gender, and sexuality" through the contents of a filing cabinet. Poor People's TV Room SOLO commemorates and explores Nigeria's Woman's War of 1929/Woman's Egwu through dance, theatre, the visual arts and an array of spare but spectacular sets. For one night only, real real brings the heat of Brazilian music to the stage as queer artist Bruno Capinan blazes through songs and videos set "at the crossroads of sexuality, race, gender, politics, and art."

The first weekend of Rhubarb is packed with short tasty performances. Who could resist "an afro-futurist, queer rock opera that charts alien witch BiG SiSSY's journey from Black Starr Planet to Earth to liberate us from our oppressive systems," or a visit to The Temple of Divine Queer set in "a future world where Queerness has become the dominant religion. You're invited to take part in a future-faith that isn't just making room for you, but where your joys are the very Word of God. There will be glitter." Even more glitter from A Trouble of Queers: The Brick and Glitter Cabaret featuring "performance art, queerlesque, comedy, and an avant-garde slop queen."

Weekend two is just as eclectic and tantalizing with Femmes du Feu's In the Fire "grappling with fire, trauma, and the memories of her firefighter father in an intimate aerial circus performance." The Green Line explores queer love in the inhospitable environment of an Arabian war. New York's Pioneer Go East Collective present "a dance-theatre kinetic ride through the cowboy myth, inspired by artist-activist Agosto Machado's stories of Stonewall and the early Gay Liberation movement" with CowboysCowgirls. And Tobias Herzberg "digs beneath the labels he's been assigned – gay, Jewish, German, romantic, nymphomaniac, and uncircumcised – to create a militant hymn for the perverted and marginalized of this world" in Feygele.

Perhaps the most radical Rhubarb offering is also the most innocent and sweet. Superstar dragsters Fay Slift and Fluffy Souffle bring an expanded version of their popular and populist Fay & Fluffy's Storytime out of the libraries and bookstores and onto the stage with Fay and Fluffy's Family Fun Cabaret. While all festivals brag that there is something for everyone, Progress and Rhubarb deliver. Plus a bus ride.