Queer Actz/DaPride Café

In preparation for DaPride Café on July 19th, 2010, I luxuriated in the pages of Orton's celebrated, irreverent farce Loot again last night ("I'd like to get married. It's the one thing I haven't tried.") immensely, and dipped into Bryden MacDonald's deliciously stark While Riding Weather for the first time with the great joy of discovery, like finding a hundred dollar note in the pocket of your old jeans (which has never happened to me). Letting my lips and tongue once again roll over the Bard's words: "A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted/Hast thou, the master-mistress of my soul…". Letting them heat up in the mental slow cooker.

As always, we are seeking ingredients for an eclectic menu of scenes, songs, speeches, monologues, poetry and improvisation to be plated and delivered to culture-hungry patrons at Halifax's Menz Bar. This will be the first time we will be included in the official Halifax Pride events line-up as part of Queer Acts. Replete with song & dance, strip-tease and whipped cream and excerpts from the classics, DaPride Café menu has been one of our most outrageous, quirky and exuberant ones, seasoned with wit, camp, titillation and served with great abandon.

Canada supports a rich and integrated queer arts culture – where would theatre be without the innumerable homosexual men and women who spend their lives creating, designing and presenting plays? –, including staples of the thespian diet such as Daniel McIvor, Michel Tremblay and Timothy Findlay, but also such stark sides as Marie-Claire Blais, Tomson Highway, Brad Fraser, Sky Gilbert, Don Hannah and Ronnie Burkett. As Lana puts it so eloquently in Sky Gilbert's play Drag Queens on Trial: "Why do you think so many homosexuals have become famous writers, artists, crusaders–because a passion to dare to be different, to live dangerously is the most enthralling disease in the world. And it's catching."

Mayworks Café x 2

For our two back-to-back, ostensibly labour-themed Cafés, we had prepared a variety of carefully chosen material, tailored to taste, including Political Speeches, DaBIG Ensemble Happeningz, Monologuez, Scenez and Songz. On the night, we performed by request two DaSexTangles – musical improvisations on The Rocky Mountains and Indecision, respectively –, a "Songologue", and an Improvised Scene & Song on polyamoury. (Coincidentally, we have actually written a song about polyamoury for our musical revue 'So… what About Love?', but we were missing performers.)

The sock puppetz came out en masse at Menz Bar. Hamlet's grave diggers returned to ponder the injustices of "great folk" verses "their even Christians". My favourite: a large ensemble rendition of The Log Driver's Waltz. We premiered "The Worker's Chorus of Dissent", an interactive piece during which members of the audience must make noise when they disagree with statements about work, art and wages.

Attendees were boisterously appreciative. Performing for a politically-minded audience – and our friends from the PPTP – was thrilling. We all felt a sense of solidarity from the deliberate applause, the hoots and the politically sensitive responses to controversial and topical issues. Too often art is reduced to a form of entertainment, devoid of any sense of positive social change. The Mayworks Café at JustUs on Spring Garden and its reprise at Menz Bar put back in mind the power of the word, and a living culture.