Youth Engagement — the frank theatre

Youth Engagement Projects

**TELLING IT BENT 2024**
**Queer Youth Writing Showcase at IGNITE! Youth-Driven Arts Festival**

**May 13 @ 8pm**
**The Cultch Lab, 1895 Venables St, Vancouver, BC V5L 2H6**
**The Cultch is a wheelchair accessible venue with gender neutral washrooms**
**Click here for further accessibility info**
Join us for the IGNITE! Festival Kick-Off night! Witness a cosmic collision of visual art and the written word. Featuring the works of a visual artist and a poet in IGNITE!’s first ever commissioned gallery exhibition! Our opening night will also feature an inter(stellar) live music set by Kitty Prozac and the frank theatre’s Telling it Bent cohort to blast us off into IGNITE! 2024.
Telling It Bent is the frank’s writing workshop for queer, trans, Two Spirit, and questioning BC youth, ages 14 to 25. The program provides emerging writers with the opportunity to gain skills, meet other young queer creatives, and explore different styles of writing; all through a decolonial framework. Telling It Bent 2024 focuses on the creation of one person plays and solo poetry sets.
*Photo of the 2022 TIB IGNITE showcase.*

FACILITATOR: Adonis Critter King

Adonis Critter King, is a Black and nonbinary, inter-disciplinary writer, theatre creator, director, facilitator, and activist. Their arts practice is rooted in social justice as daily practice, revolution as habit that starts in the home, and QT2BIMPOC safe space curation. Their work uses afro-surrealism, visionary fiction, and The Poetic Surreal to explore the joys and complexities of mad and disabled QT2MBIPOC life, the unsettling nature of becoming, and the difficult choices we must make to liberate our futures.

Adonis was the 2016 Youth Poet Laureate of Victoria, the 2017 recipient of the VACCS (Victoria African & Caribbean Cultural Society) Community recognition Award, and in 2020 they received the Witness Legacy Award for Social Purpose and Responsibility Through Art.

Recent mentorship credits include: The Parallel Project (2023) with Momentum 180 and Telling it Bent (2023) with The Frank Theatre Company.

MENTORS:

PLAYWRIGHTING MENTOR:

Elio Zarrillo: Trans and Queer Theatre Artist, Educator and Cultural Dramaturg. Playwright of Volare (Prairie Theatre Exchange), The Green Building (Prairie Theatre Exchange), The Show (Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre) and The Outside Inn (Festival Antigonish, co-written with Sharon Bajer). Their latest play in development PEACHES is part of Zee Zee Theatre's National Queer & Trans Playwriting Unit. Currently doing their MFA in Creative Writing at UBC.

CO-PERFORMANCE MENTOR, SHOWCASE DIRECTOR AND PROGRAM PRODUCER:

Tricia Trinh: Queer, Genderfluid, Chinese-Vietnamese-Canadian Interdisciplinary Theatre Artist. Founder of Dusty Foot Productions. Playwright/Director of Probability (rEvolver 2018), Red Glimmer (Fringe 2019]) Attachments (Tremors 2020). Assistant Director: we the same (Ruby Slippers), Henry V (Bard on the Beach). Upcoming artistic ventures: Director - Dil Ka (Ruby Slippers), Playwright - Attachments (Advance Theatre Festival).