Queer Based Media brings new visual magic to TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival's filmed celebrations
Bash program journeys to waterfalls and forests, while The Darlings delve into dreamlike detective story
Chris Reed. Emily Cooper photo
Maya Ritchey. Emily Cooper photo.
The Cultch and Urban Ink Theatre present the TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival Opening Night BASH on September 23 and The Darlings on September 30, all via online stream and live screening at the Historic Theatre.
IN ONE OF THE more dazzling sequences in the TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival’s Opening Night Bash film, a drone camera sweeps over drag and Diasporic Dynasty star Mx. Bukuru as they stand by a gushing waterfall.
The idea of taking cabaret acts outside the dark confines of a nightclub to the great outdoors may seem incongruous, but breaking new ground is what the production company Queer Based Media—and the festival—are all about.
“It partly has to do with having been inside all year,” adds Chris Reed, whose Queer Based Media shot the video. “We’ve been in our apartments all year. And when do you get the chance to present a theatre cabaret set in a forest? Or on a gorgeous waterfall?”
The production company was able to bring those big ideas to the screen like never before this year, taking a larger role in the festival put on by The Cultch and Urban Ink Theatre.
Reed, who has long appeared as Continental Breakfast with the multiracial, nonbinary drag troupe The Darlings, launched Queer Based Media with colleague and fellow drag performer Maya Ritchey. Blending their skills in photography, video, and art, their company offers production capabilities to the LGBTQ2SIA+ community; before the pandemic, that meant digitally animating live performance spaces and other work.
With the shutdown of venues, Queer Based Media stepped in to take on another important role: it’s been providing a free streaming platform for queer and drag artists throughout COVID-19.
Forced to move to mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitch over the last pandemic year and a half, drag artists were facing censorship from wider audiences. In 2020 at the height of the pandemic lockdown, The Darlings’ own artful Quarantine I and II streamed shows were halted midway due to viewer complaints to Facebook—blocks that were later lifted by the platform, but too late for the broadcast.
“One thing we lost with all the queer spaces and galleries being closed was the agency we had over our bodies,” Reed says, adding just the sight of lingerie on a non-gender-conforming body could trigger a complaint on social media. “As artists we knew how it made us feel to have lost that safe platform. We basically tried to make it easier as a community.”
Alongside all that, Queer Based Media has now stepped in to take a leading role in the TRANSFORM fest, conceiving, producing, and creating the opening-night Bash celebrations and shooting a high-concept Darlings video called The Queer and Compelling Case of The Darlings’ Demise. (Audiences will be able to stream the films at home or watch them live, with pandemic safety measures, at The Cultch.)
For the opening Bash, Reed and Ritchey gathered a diverse cast of BIPOC and LGBTQ2SIA+ cabaret performers who helped conceive their elaborate numbers outside in BC’s vast nature, as well as in the city and inside the York Theatre. Reed, wearing their signature mix of high-art-meets-clown makeup as Continental Breaktfast, would normally “host” an evening of cabaret. Here, instead, they work as the throughline, travelling to meet each artist, interview them without their makeup and costumes about how they became artists, and flowing the performances together. Amid the acts: Shay Dior, Bo Dyp, Lynx Chase, Skim, Venus, Quelemia Sparrow, and Zaya Sawchyn (who also worked as production assistant on the shoots). They perform everywhere from fern- and moss-covered rainforests to the neonlit stage. And they speak to Reed walking trails, sitting on downtown steps, and relaxing on grass. (To get a feel for how dreamlike the footage is, head to the trailer below or to the TRANSFORM site for clips from Bash.)
“We usually only get to see this polished, painted, refined version of us,” Reed says of drag and cabaret performers. “They talk to me about experiences being queer, or of being settlers here.”
Mx. Bukuru in a scene from the TRANSFORM opening Bash film by Queer Based Media.
“It’s more of an interview style outside of their makeup and wearing what they would normally wear,” adds Ritchey. “So you see what they look like when they’re performing and then more of a day-to-day look. We play with contrast in the whole film: half of the film is shot in outdoor locations, and the other half in the city and inside the theatre.”
In the end, the film does what couldn’t be achieved live on-stage this year amid a fourth wave: connecting a wide range of performers into a single show. “TRANSFORM is about bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks together, and this is such a clear example of that,” adds Reed, who is Indigenous.
In The Darlings’ new film, Ritchey says she plays noir-ish black-and-white off colour footage. The Queer and Compelling Case of The Darlings’ Demise is an entirely new type of show for the troupe, as they break away from the vignette-style evenings that were a streaming hit during quarantine. The Darlings have long challenged the conventions of drag, not just through gender, but in the way they infuse dance, poetry, performance art, physical comedy, theatre, video, and art installation into their shows.
Here, the quartet of performers—who, aside from Continental Breakfast, are PM (Desi Rekrut), Rose Butch (Rae Takei), and Maiden China (Kendell Yan)—play detectives investigating the disappearance of their own drag characters.
“We had been talking about creating a storyline where The Darlings weren't necessarily playing ourselves, and that allowed us to really dissect what our drag personas were,” Reed says. “So it’s introducing a whole second set of characters investigating their disappearance—it’s very meta and surreal, with a lot of fun high-energy concepts and the same Darlings magic.”
In that show, as well as at the Bashes, Queer Based Media has the kind of budget to bring a new kind of cinematic production value to streamed cabaret programming. At the same time, they’re helping queer artists fully realize their wildest dreams—whether it’s at the top of a waterfall or deep in a rainforest.
“We’ve always been going on the experimental aspect of it, but now we have the budget to expand that,” Ritchey says.
In other words, the pair is able to throw a visual celebration like never before. As Reed puts it, “That cabaret energy is going to be really cool.”
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