Buddies in Bad Times brings LGBTQ generations together
Participants hope to model spectrum of queerness during fractious time in Toronto
“My clubbing days are over,” sighs Daniel Carter, a mustachioed, world-weary 24-year-old. “I go to bed at 10 and wake up at 5:30.”
“My clubbing days are still going on!” exclaims LeZlie Lee Kam, petite, dynamic and 63.
These kinds of unexpected revelations are at the heart of The Youth/Elders Project, a collaborative performance piece playing this week at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
The 13 performers in the show, including Daniel and LeZlie, are members of the queer community and — one of the project’s underlying rules of engagement — not professional actors. The show’s content is made up of personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings the performers shared with each other over a ninemonth development period.
The other rule of engagement — and what makes the piece unique — is that the participants represent distinct generations of queer and trans folks: half of the cast is between 17-29 years old, and the other half between 56 and 73.
“While we have a robust youth program here at Buddies, there is this other sector of the queer community that is growing, but underresourced and underrecognized,” explains Buddies’ artistic director Evalyn Parry, one of the project’s co-directors along with Leelee Davis and Vanessa Dunn.
Older queer people are facing “distinct but similar” concerns to queer youth: “Sometimes moving into a seniors’ residence means having to go back in the closet. There are a whole bunch of new issues as a generation who’ve been out is aging.”
The gambit of Youth/Elders was to bring those generations into dialogue and see what kinds of synergies were formed, and what sparks flew.
The project is a co-production with the 519 Community Centre, a hub of LGBTQ activity on Church St., in partnership with the Senior Pride Network. About 50 people engaged in initial workshops in September 2016, from whom Parry and her co-directors selected the final baker’s dozen to develop and perform this week’s show.
“A big concept in this has been performing yourself,” she explains.
“I’ve thrown assignments at the cast, like the elders have to teach the youth a lost piece of etiquette — a forgotten skill — and the youth have to teach the elders an app. Or you have to bring in a queer artifact, something in your life that has symbolic importance.”
Another means of generating content was what’s known as a Long Table. In this open-form exercise, developed by the feminist theatre icon Lois Weaver, participants engage in dinner-party style conversation while others listen in; it’s designed to facilitate informal dialogue around serious topics.
“We said, let’s talk about sex — how can we talk about that at this table and have it not feel creepy?” Parry says. “Let’s talk about privilege. Let’s talk about what we’ve not talked about.”
What resulted blew Parry and her co-directors away.
“I was like, I want to listen to this all day,” she says.
She convinced the group to perform a Long Table as a work-inprogress at Buddies’ Rhubarb Festi- val in February, and the exercise now figures centrally in the show itself.
For LeZlie, one of the biggest challenges of Youth/Elders is that among the elders she is the only QPOC (Queer Person of Colour, which I learned should be articulated as a word, not an acronym: kew-pock). Meeting other QPOCs, including Daniel, was when the experience started to be rewarding: “I needed people to understand what all this means for me, and it took the intersectionality of the wider group for that to happen.”
Daniel joined the project because he was struggling to find a social foothold in Toronto after his university years in Montreal. He calls it “an immersive community-building experience.”
Following Black Lives Matter’s (BLM) intervention in last year’s Pride Parade and the ongoing disputes between BLM, Pride and the Toronto police, it’s been a fractious year in Toronto’s LGBTQ community.
As Pride Month 2017 begins, Parry says she hopes this project can provide “a model for productive conversation . . . it’s a series of images and fragments that add up to what the spectrum of queerness looks like at this moment.” Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatrecritic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Carly Maga.