Advance Theatre Festival is back at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts until January 31
Ruby Slippers Theatre presents five staged readings of works by IPBOC playwrights, including Damion LeClair’s Rougarou, Carmen Aguirre’s The Consent Club, and more
Damion LeClair’s Rougarou. Photo by Emily Cooper
Ruby Slippers Theatre, in association with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and Playwrights Guild of Canada, presents Advance Theatre Festival to January 31 at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts
FIVE STAGED READINGS will take place over the next five days as part of Advance Theatre Festival: Advancing the Radically Inclusive Stage, an annual showcase of works by IPBOC playwrights presented by Ruby Slippers Theatre.
The festival kicks off on January 27 with Hair Hair Everywhere by playwright Sarvin Esmaeili, a play which digs into the roots of anti-body hair culture and beauty standards while uplifting Persian femme bodies. Designed to include shadow puppetry, sound scores, and dialogue in both Farsi and English, the play introduces audiences to Shabnam’s head hair, armpit hair, and leg hair, offering a different perspective around the idea of shaving.
A reading of Damion LeClair’s Rougarou, a play based on Métis legend that centres Renee’s harrowing search for their missing sister along Highway 16, takes place on January 28. The following night on January 29, there’s the collaboratively created From This Side of the End by Kate Besworth, Ming Hudson, Charlie Gallant, Kaitlyn Yott, Olivia Hutt, Baraka Rahmani, and Agnes Tong; it follows four young people who must face an onslaught of apocalyptic events—everything from floods and fires to a zombie outbreak—as they cross a Canadian landscape.
On January 30, Faly Mevamanana’s The Baking Show Show: The Play chronicles a woman’s extreme obsession with claiming the title of Great Canadian Baker. And on January 31, the festival concludes with Carmen Aguirre’s The Consent Club, a satirical take on Molière’s The Learned Ladies that unfolds on a North American university campus.
Readings will take place at 7:30 pm each night at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in the Studio 103 Recital Hall. 
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