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Vancouver, B.C.

NEWS RELEASE

Premieres at  2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival

All-LGBTQ Creative Team and Majority Artists who are Persons of Colour

Vancouver, BC – August 21, 2018 – Award-winning performance curator/producer Katie Sly (last seen curating performances for the 2018 Pride Toronto festival) has teamed up with an all- LGBTQ creative team to bring the play Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! to the Site-Specific series of the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival, taking place September 6 to 16, 2018. The creative team behind Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! represents the new generation of Vancouver’s diverse performance and art scene, with most of the artists involved being artists- of-colour who candidly and unapologetically make queer art which explores how queerness intersects with other aspects cultural background and identity.

Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! is a Clown-Drag-Karaoke Extravaganza, serving up Filipino- Canadian identity shenanigans, queer insights, family epiphanies, and soul gratifying karaoke. Inspired by Davey Calderon’s visit to his family’s ancestral land, the Philippines, this show is a celebration of the intersections found in oneself.

The lead artists of Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! include Director Chris Lam, who directed last year’s Vancouver Fringe show Bondage, which explored issues of race and racial stereotypes in sex and love. The creative team also includes Costume Design by Vancouver’s long-time drag artist darling Rose Butch, who was recently seen performing at Paul Wong’sPride in Chinatown event and who is a leader within Vancouver’s Man Up Drag series. The creative team is led by Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! writer/performer Davey Calderon, a long-time stalwart of the Vancouver’s theatre community and graduate of Simon Fraser University’s performance program, who has spent years offering financially-accessible performance training to Vancouver through an arts organization called New(to)Town Collective.

As part of the Site-Specific series, this play takes place at XYYVR, one of Vancouver’s queer bars and a staple of Vancouver’s queer community. Patrons at Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! will have XYYVR’s bar available to them during the show, and should expect to be invited onstage to sing themselves, as the show explores the cathartic, bonding medium that is bar karaoke, and how it bridges cultural divides through the shared experience vulnerability and joy. The crew behind this production is proud to be presenting this play at XYYVR, as it is a permanent queer space which has gender-neutral bathrooms. As queer artists it is support and bring people into the spaces who look after queer and trans patrons every day (as opposed to many of Vancouver’s performance venues which will only create trans-friendly bathrooms for select events, if at all).

The Vancouver Fringe Festival is a celebration of all kinds of theatre. Produced annually with over 500 volunteers supporting 700+ performances and attracting over 40,000 attendees, the Vancouver Fringe Festival is consistently voted Vancouver’s Best Arts Festival by Georgia Straight readers. Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night! was developed with support from the BC Arts Council, and is Associate Produced by Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre and New(to)Town Collective.

Friday September 7 at 6:00pm Saturday September 8 at 4:30pm Thursday September 13 at 7:00pm Thursday September 13 at 10:30pm Saturday September 15 at 3:00pm Saturday September 15 at 7:00pm Sunday September 16 at 2:00pm Sunday September 16 at 6:00pm

XYYVR (Vancouver’s Best Gay Bar) 1216 Bute Street
Vancouver, BC
V6E 1Z8

https://tickets.vancouverfringe.com/shows/big%20queer%20filipino%20karaoke%20night!/event s

Facebook Link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/230397074318596/

To schedule an interview or learn more about the event, contact:

Katie Sly (them/they/their pronouns) Producer, Big Queer Filipino Karaoke Night!416-951-9325
katherine.sly@gmail.com