Shift Festival 10: Five reasons to go
1 Unveiled
Created by director Fay Nass, Unveiled is a Farsi/English production featuring Iranian-Canadian performers. It’s one of three new works that is part of Shift Theatre Festival 10, which marks a break from previous Shift festivals. “It’s fun to shake things up," said Shift Theatre Society artistic director Coco Roberge. Previous festivals have showcased one-act plays. For this year’s, she “put the call out to professional, returning, and teaching artists. I was looking for passion projects, the story you feel compelled to tell.”
2 Pride
A solo show, Pride is written and performed by Jessie Award-winning Vancouver actor Allan Morgan, with Mindy Parfitt directing. “It’s a piece that parallels his own coming-of-age and coming-out story with the political momentum of the Pride movement.”
3 Titillations
Yvette Dudley-Neuman’s Titillations is all about the female breast. A cast of five women perform a staged reading on the afternoon of June 3. A reception with snacks and a raffle follow. (There will also be door prizes each night of the festival.)
4 Walls
Based on the 2012 book Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Canadian journalist Marcello Di Cintio, Walls is an installation by the Troika Collective. The installation, which includes an actor and “an element of surveillance,” according to Roberge, greets visitors in the lobby of the Firehall. Di Cintio will do a post-show Q-and-A at the festival June 2.
5 Live music
For one ticket price, theatre fans get all of the above, plus live music. “Music festivalizes things,” Roberge said. Musicians include Sara Vickruck, who recently appeared at the Firehall in Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell, and is also one of the actors in Titillations.