Vision and mandate.

Established in 1996, the frank is the oldest professional queer theatre company based on the occupied, stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, colonially called Vancouver, BC, Canada. We play a crucial role in this city’s theatre ecology: we are one of few theatre organizations in the country led by a genderqueer, immigrant woman of colour, and we collaborate with a large community of 2SLGBTQ+ artists and arts workers. We are a non-profit society in British Columbia (registration S-44774), and a federally registered charity (86172 8061 RR0001).

Through collective approaches, we create work that challenges Western, Eurocentric and Colonial aesthetics and storytelling. We subvert these methods by engaging collaborators whose practices are rooted in different disciplines, cultures, abilities, and languages. We strive towards a utopic world free of prejudices and assumptions. We believe in the power of storytelling to show the nuances and the complexities of human experiences, and we pursue this vision through award-winning productions and community-based activities. We explore what it means to be queer, and the place of queer individuals in society, by creating, developing, producing and presenting theatrical work.

“We‘re subverting traditional methods by engaging collaborators whose practices are rooted in different disciplines, cultures, abilities, and languages.”

— Fay Nass, Artistic Director

Our Core Values.

  • Prioritising.

    Prioritizing artists underrepresented within queer theatre (female, trans, Black, Indigenous, racialized, immigrant, disabled and neurodivergent artists)

  • Queering.

    Queering traditional theatre creation through interdisciplinary and media arts approaches

  • Fostering.

    Fostering the next generation of queer artists through mentorship

  • Valuing Process.

    Privileging process over product

  • Adapting.

    Adapting to the individual needs of participants and holding space for differences

  • Collaborating.

    Decentralizing power through horizontal collaboration

In our programming and operations, we strive for a culture of trust, safety, and accountability, where healthy conflict exists. We actively challenge white supremacist cultural characteristics, as articulated by Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones in White Supremacy Culture. This includes a commitment to:

  • Complexity over either/or thinking

  • Community over individualism

  • Collaboration over competition

  • Power sharing over power hoarding

  • Transformational relations instead of transactional relationships

  • Appreciation over perfectionism 

  • Real equity over equity washing

  • Self and community care instead of over working

  • Vulnerability over defensiveness

 

Our History.

 

The frank was co-conceived by founders Matthew Bennet, Ilena Lee Cramer, Dale Kohlmetz and Kären Matthews in 1996 under the name Screaming Weenie. While the frank is committed to our mandate of presenting queer theatrical works, we strive for an agile, responsive approach to programming, evolving to serve the present needs of the queer community.

In the 90s, 2SLGBTQ+ stories were excluded from local theatre, and the company fought this exclusion through bold, campy, unapologetic performance.

In the 2000s, Sean Cummings became Artistic Director. During this time, queer arts gained wider visibility, and our focus shifted. We were no longer trying to presence queerness in any way possible, we wanted to complicate it, to represent it with nuance and authenticity.

With the arrival of Artistic Producer C. E. Gatchalian in 2011, our priorities shifted again, this time to text-based works that centred queer characters, developed through the Clean Sheets reading series, and to making our work intersectional by collaborating with QTBIPOC artists. In 2013, our name became the frank theatre, to reflect our commitment to honest conversations and storytelling. During this time, the frank also played a vital role in initiating national dialogues about 2SLGBTQ+ performance by producing the inaugural Q2Q Queer Theatre Conference.

Since Fay Nass became Artistic Director in 2017, the frank has sought to not only represent queer characters, but queer theatrical forms. We work in a range of approaches and mediums, including devised creation, verbatim text, oral histories, theatre, film and new media.

Under Fay’s guidance, the frank also strives to challenge colonial and white supremacist structures and models in its operations, programming and artistic processes. We collaborate with queer youth, community members, and artists, prioritizing narratives led by BIPOC, non-binary, trans, immigrant, and femme creators.

Since 2017, the frank has won a Jessie Richardson Award for our production of Walt Whitman’s Secret and three Jessies for our production of Camera Obscura with the Queer Arts Festival (QAF.) We’ve also received two nominations for our co-production of Poly Queer Love Ballad with Zee Zee Theatre and QAF and six nominations for Walt Whitman’s Secret. We’ve partnered with many local companies, including the Firehall Arts Centre and Zee Zee (Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women), the PuSh Festival (She Mami Watah & the Pussy WitchHunt by d’bi young anitafrika), and CHIMERIK (Be-Longing by Fay Nass, Meghna Haldar and Sammy Chien.)