Genrefuck: Never Walk Alone and Reina and some trigger warnings

10 May 2025. by Drew Rowsome -Photos courtesy of the artists and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

Genrefuck is a double bill of two movement driven pieces by two "audacious artists." Julie Phan has created Never Walk Alone wherein a dancer works the pole on Christmas Eve, and Augusto Bitter (Craze, White Muscle Daddy, True Dating Stories, Chico, Iphigenia and the Furies, The Monument, Lear) presents Reina. envisioning the life of the anonymous woman depicted on bags of Harina P.A.N. flour. Being intrigued, I asked the artists a few questions to find out what to expect.

Drew Rowsome: How would you describe your piece? 

Julie Phan: My mom called and I’m at work. Act natural and get through the shift, pretend that shit don’t bother you.

Augusto Bitter: Reina envisions the many lives of the anonymous woman depicted on a bag of Harina P.A.N. corn flour. It invokes and celebrates personal femininity through a collection of poems, sculptures, and choreographies in conversation with music by Y Josephine.

What was your initial inspiration to create your piece?

Julie Phan: I knew when I first started pole I wanted to create something for theatre with it. I’d been doing recreational dance starting at three years old until I was 15. I stopped dancing after being sexually assaulted because I couldn’t quite deal with the feeling of awareness I had in my body. It was too painful so I numbed it. I hadn’t danced at all for two years until I came across a Groupon for pole dancing classes after watching a Buzzfeed video by a creator who talked about an experience similar to mine, and how pole dancing helped empower her after what happened. It gave me the gift of being able to reconnect with my body, and find a sense of agency in movement. Aside from that experience, I was also dealing with coming to terms that I was never going to be able to be the doctor my parents wanted me to be and that created a lot of conflict between us. Their resistance created additional blocks to me being able to commit to my artistry because I was really afraid of disappointing them. Eventually I reached the realization that I have to do what’s right for me and I can’t prioritize anyone else’s desires over my own well being; it’s been a process growing up from my upbringing and how that hasn’t been a perfect, linear process.

Augusto Bitter: I dressed up as the Harina P.A.N. woman one Halloween because I was dating a makeup artist who was willing to put me into drag for the first time. At the same time, Venezuela was going through another wave of extreme food scarcity and malnutrition, and using this product almost daily highlighted the cultural importance between food and politics. I instantly knew I wanted to make a show about this iconic woman.

At what point were you inspired or dramaturged into molding it into what it has become?

Julie Phan: This play has gone through many drafts spanning from before I even started working at a club; but I’d say the shape of it really started to form once I’d started working and especially, following the Christmas Eve shift I’d actually worked. Honestly, I think I did it for shits and giggles; I wasn’t going home because it really wasn’t healthy for me to, and I think I was morbidly curious about the clientele we were going to see. But I met some really special people that night and got to know them and shared some beautiful moments that I think neither they nor I were expecting. I think they were feeling alone, and for reasons different than theirs I could understand where they were coming from, and while I didn’t get into it with them— that I was also feeling alone, and we were able to hold all of that together pretty serendipitously at a strip club that night. Later my dramaturg Matt McGeachy brought to my attention that this was really the most appropriate, and funniest, container to hold this story in and so that’s how this story came to be set on Christmas Eve.

Augusto Bitter: I did a Canada Council research residency at hub14 and TPM, looking at the relationship between kitchens and theatres. I wanted to make a show that felt as intimate and immediate as sharing a meal. My first solo show CHICHO was intentionally verbose and linguistically dense, and I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I was adamant about writing with my body instead of words. This research was motivated first and foremost from improvisations between musician Y Josephine and I, who both happen to be queer Venezuelan artists from the same tiny Caribbean peninsula hometown. We would write poems together or translate each other’s music/choreographic improvs and string them together following an intuitive, playful, non-linear logic. Research and conversations with my mother and aunts about their upbringing and our ancestral connection to corn further inspired the text in this piece.

What did you learn about yourself and your artistic process while creating your piece? 

Julie Phan: I struggle sometimes with letting shit go because I’m very particular about my vision and how I want it to be realized. It was important to me to have control over the overall creative and brand direction of the show and the materials we’re putting out. It’s how I wound up taking on producing, (graphic and costume) design, social media strategy and outreach on top of writing and performance. I’ve also been very lucky to assemble a team of all stars, including director Tawiah M'Carthy [Feast, Sankofa: The Soldier's Tale Retold, Here Lies Henry, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Maanomaa My Brother, Obaaberima, Black Boys], that have made it possible for me to lead in all of these different areas, who believe and trust in my vision. It’s been very affirming. .

Augusto Bitter: I learned I’m not drawn to creating narrative, naturalistic theatre. I’m generally bored by it as a creator, and other playwrights will do a better job than me. I learned that the language you use in the room influences the work you create - translating the show from my Spanish dialect for Anglo audiences has been a fascinating learning curve. I so badly want to tour this show to Latin America. I learned I don’t want to do drag in the traditional sense, but use elements of its transgressive history without all the artifice and lip-syncing. I learned I’m not interested in autobiography, but my writing feels worthless if it’s not extremely personal and revealing. Ironically, after creating Reina and evolving with it over the last eight years, I’ve also learned how much I love and appreciate my masculinity, and how to embrace it as a performer beyond this show.

Genrefuck is such an evocative and provocative title. What artistic genres does your piece fuck with?

Julie Phan: I joked this play is an XXX version of Home Alone, if Kevin McAllister and his mom had long held resentment against each other and he ran off to Montreal to be a stripper. Christmas stories are typically light hearted, feel-good narratives about families coming together, it can sometimes be a bit hard to watch when maybe your family isn’t as warm as the ones you see on TV and there’s a lot of heavy shit there that you can’t really see yourself in any of these Hallmark scenes. I find a lot of humour in my pain and I try to do that through this show, and even as I’m trying to end it on a lighter or more hopeful note, it winds up still being kind of weird. 
Another important aspect of Never Walk Alone is the creation of digital content through beautiful photos and videos captured by Felice Trinidad and Alex Chung that  help create the world of the show outside of the theatre. It’s an experiment and I have no idea if it’s going to work, but I think it’s worthwhile to try to engage audiences that aren’t maybe already following your company because they are already familiar with theatre and like your stuff. If people enjoy the show, there’s a whole library of content that can be easily accessed by them afterwards that can deepen their relationship with the piece, if they’re craving more. Live performance and social media can have a very symbiotic relationship and don’t have to compete with each other.

Augusto Bitter: Reina fucks with dance, theatre, and performance art, and constantly resists categorization altogether.

Both shows require physical exertion, neither pole dancing nor choreography are easy. How are you preparing for the physical stamina required for the run?

Julie Phan: I don’t know. I go to bed every night feeling like I was hit by a bus. However, I’ve been pole dancing now for almost seven years and working at a club for three years and over an eight hour shift I can dance anywhere for three-six songs in a night. For me, it’s about pacing myself, and luckily the choreography for the show we created is more free styling and about designing how the movement should feel in the moment in the script as opposed to being very specific about what moves are being hit when. 

Augusto Bitter: Because of an exciting TV opportunity, Reina is now starring the wonderful Jaime Lujan [White Muscle Daddy] as the titular performer, so I don’t have to train as hard as I usually do for a full run. Working around shoot dates, I’m hoping to perform one night only, but the show remains extremely unique to my artistic voice, and audiences will still get a lot of me despite living through a fabulously different body.

How are you preparing mentally to be so revelatory on stage?

Julie Phan: I’m a chronic oversharer in my day to day and sometimes it gets me into trouble. Still though, I don’t know what else to do with it other than to put it in my work. I feel like I’ve been talking about this shit for years and now it’s being packaged and presented in a piece of theatre that encompasses some, but not all, of my experiences. Some of these stories are verbatim, things that have happened to me in the club; some of the stories are close to, but maybe not exactly what happened. But all of them are rooted in the truth of the feeling and impact that these experiences have had on me.

Augusto Bitter: The core of this project is the joy and freedom that comes from embracing and celebrating femininity, something that was/is very discouraged in my upbringing. It still feels dangerous in many contexts. Combined with the playfulness and simplicity embedded in my early childhood dialect we used to create the show, it allows us to focus on the pleasure instead of the fear of vulnerability.

Both of you are, as well as talented, very sexy performers. How will this piece enhance or refute that reputation?

Julie Phan: I think it’s a yes. Sex workers are very hot, sexy people but also we’re complex people with very vast and wide-ranging motivations and rich backgrounds. Ultimately, I was motivated to create a piece that humanizes a sex worker for audiences that might not have access to those worlds, we’re a group of people who are under a lot of scrutiny and deal with projections that other people have on who we are. It’s also rare we get an opportunity to talk about our own experiences. More often than not, we get to be the sexy supporting character to a male lead, or dead plot device, or background dressing for a Sopranos episode or Grand Theft Auto. My character is a bitch and has a chip on her shoulder, but she’s also hyper sensitive and very empathetic. She’s lazy as fuck but also super smart, she can stand up for herself against any disrespect from a man but she's terrified of her mother. These are the nuances we don’t typically get to explore. It’s also important that I’m clear that these are drawn from my own experiences and I’m not trying to speak for anyone else. But I hope that if we succeed with this play, it’ll make it more possible for my peers to come out with their own stories because we need them as well.

Augusto Bitter: There’s nipple play, a lacy thong, a bathing scene, and a lot of sexual metaphors in the writing and choreography. I can neither confirm nor deny Reina’s divine sex appeal, I am simply a vessel.

Both of you have a history with Buddies and Buddies has a history of genrefucking. Do you feel the weight of either of those histories? How does it feel to carry on the tradition of creating art in that venerated space?

Julie Phan: I really owe a lot to Daniel Carter [The Life and Death of Fred Herko, Shove It Down My Throat, The Youth/Elders Project) who invited me to Buddies once he made the move there from Paprika. I had been developing the first draft there under Bilal Baig [Box 4901, Acha Bacha] and was really unsure of where I was going with this piece at that point. But he saw something in the piece and gave me the resources to dig deeper and figure out what was really there. I’m really grateful that the project is also being co-produced by fu-GEN theatre company, and being supported by both the longest running Asian Canadian theatre and longest running queer theatre in Canada, I feel the weight of both histories and bridging these two parts of my identities together around this show feels honest. 

Augusto Bitter: From the beginning, I always imagined premiering Reina at Buddies — manifestation is real! — so when ted witzel [Oraculum, Roberto Zucco, Every Little Nookie, Lulu v7, Mr Truth, The Marquise of O, All's Well That Ends Well, La Ronde) proposed this experimental double bill, it was a dream come true. Not only is the chamber space perfectly cavernous for the abstract poetry and ethereal atmosphere of our show, but the Buddies stage holds the history of so many queer and trans ancestors that have paved the way for us. For a piece that directly invokes my own ancestry, it could not be a better fit and a bigger honour to contribute to that history.

What most intrigues you about the other act on the bill?

Julie Phan: The Harina P.A.N corn flour lady is so ubiquitous and iconic and I’m really excited to see how she will be interpreted through Augusto’s performance and through the combination of different forms of movement; I have no idea what to expect but everything I’ve seen so far slays.

Augusto Bitter: Pole dancing is having a big cultural moment right now, with new studios and clubs cropping up around the city, shout-out to Strangers, a new queer pole party hosted at the Foxxes Den. I’m so excited to see a narrative show centred around this super sexy and visually exciting dance form, led by talented QTBIPOC peers like Julie and Tawiah.

Since they are so trendy now, what trigger warnings would you give an audience?

Julie Phan: Mentions of sexual assault, emotional abuse There will be nudity And there will be strobing lights, haze, and loud noises

Augusto Bitter: There’s nudity, crude language, haze, and discussions of sex. We like to treat them like allergy warnings on a nutritional info package. You are what you eat!