Postcards: Trans Narratives on Stage

November 12, 2023
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
at UBC Robson Square (map)

**This event is sold out**

About the Event

This event brings together a panel of trans theatre artists and UBC graduate students exploring arts-based research to consider the affordances of theatre to centre trans voices, drawing on strategies from theatre-as-research approaches. The panel will be accompanied by performed excerpts from a work-in-progress play, Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self [or YTS], Age 0-119, by Christina Cook.

While more trans performers and artists are becoming more featured in popular media, there remains a dearth of narratives by and for trans communities. Furthermore, although numerous academic disciplines, such as Psychology and Education, are working to center trans voice in their research literature, research by and for trans communities must be supported. This event explores the interweaving of art and scholarship to address these inequities. Trans artists and researchers need to tell trans stories, particularly those based on memoirs and autobiography, to answer back to the centuries of othering in arts and academic spaces and to make room for trans joy, community building, and liberation.

Hosted in partnership with Playwrights Theatre Centre (PTC) and the frank theatre company, with support from the UBC Research-based Theatre Lab.

Event Schedule

1:30 PM Doors open

2:00 PM  Welcoming remarks

2:10 PM Excerpts of “Postcards” shared

3:00 PM Q&A with playwright and performer Christina Cook, dramaturge Joanna Garfinkel and other guests

3:30 PM Program end, mingling and light refreshments available

Cast and Panelists

Christina Cook – Playwright & Performer
Christina Cook (she/they) is a theatre artist and therapist. Christina’s writing credits include the play Quick Bright Things, nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2021; and Gerty, half electronic-communication-from-the-future, half radio-drama-drag-show, and all Genderqueer, published in Educational Fabulations (2022). As a therapist in private practice, she works with adults and youth in the 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. They are also a Ph.D. student in Counselling Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where they explore and create scholarship exploring psychology, gender liberation, and theatre.

Rae Takei – Performer
Rae (they/he) is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist, grateful to be born and raised on Unceded Coast Salish Territory. A graduate of Studio 58, Rae is a Jessie-nominated actor, creative collaborator and consultant, and has devoted the better part of the last decade to the invention and imaginings of their drag persona, Rose Butch (CBC Gem’s Canada’s A Drag).

Sabrina Symington – Performer
Sabrina “Bria” Symington is a transgender artist from Gabriola Island, British Columbia. In addition to being known for her webcomic series, graphic novels, and Youtube videos, she has regularly appeared in local theatre productions since 2018. She lives in Vancouver, where she tries to do one new thing every day.

Joanna Garfinkel – Dramaturge
Joanna Garfinkel is Dramaturg, Creative Engagement at PTC and co-founder of Universal Limited. Current dramaturgy: National Queer & Trans playwriting unit; UL’s To the Sea; Kamila Sediego’s Engkanto, José Teodoro’s Binary Star, Christina Cook’s PTMYTS, Tara Cheyenne’s Pants, and Anais West’s Tomboy. Co-creator, with Yoshie Bancroft, of JAPANESE PROBLEM, a piece about the Japanese Canadian Incarceration, performed site-specifically in Vancouver, at Soulpepper in Toronto, and more. Other credits: Berlin: The Last Cabaret (PuSh), PQLB, (Passe Murailles) Nominated for three Jessie awards; Pure Research grant (Nightswimming), Sydney Risk award for directing. MFA in directing at UBC.

Sara Vickruck – Sound Designer/Composer
Sara Vickruck (they/them) is an award winning queer, multi-disciplinary performer, host, musician, song writer, sound designer, and creator currently living on the unceded territories of the Halkomelem speaking peoples. They work both onscreen, and onstage in many venues across the country. Sara is a Jessie Richardson award winning sound designer and an Equity and Stage West 2020 Emerging Artist award winner. You may know them from the critically acclaimed show Poly Queer Love Ballad, a slam poetry musical, as Mercutio from Bard on the Beach’s Romeo and Juliet, or perhaps as part of the band The Quarantettes. 

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