Single tickets are $28 for VocalEye users or 2 for $36 (companion rate). Theatre Buddies are also available. Please contact Access Push Coordinator, Anika Vervecken, at 604.605.8284 ext 204 or access@pushfestival.ca
Performance Works is a new venue for VocalEye, located on Granville Island near the Granville Island Hotel. VocalEye users will receive priority seating.
Described by Anika Vervecken.
Running time is 90 minutes with no intermission.
Antonette Rea is one formidable presence. In this show she bares her soul, and the story of her life, through poetry. It’s been a long journey for this trans* woman: from life as a middle-class husband and father to the turmoil of a gender-identity crisis to the Downtown Eastside, where she lived as a drug-addicted sex worker. But now is the moment of her triumph. She is a spoken word artist, and when she speaks you’ll be riveted.
This interdisciplinary performance, written with and directed by James Fagan Tait, and produced by the frank theatre company, covers a life of pain: the oppression of queer identity by society, the dangers of sex work and the misery of addiction. It takes a special kind of strength to break through such obstacles, and Rea’s spirit radiates from the stage as we hear her words. They’re words of anger, of fear, of passion, of humour and hope. Rea began writing poetry while working the streets; it was a way of coping. Now it is her art, to be heard by the world and, maybe, to help change it.
Antonette has been performing publicly since 2008. She is a member of the Thursdays Writing Collective, a group of writers from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and is the subject of Gwen Haworth’s documentary A Woman with a Past (2014).
“Antonette Rea is a spoken-word artist who bursts into joyful giggles without any warning during her phone interview with the Straight. The sound is pure and uncontained delight, even if she’s just told you one of the most devastating and traumatic things you’ve ever heard. And it happened to her. This isn’t secondhand sadness or tertiary trauma. It belongs to her and it’s hers to do with as she pleases. Her coping mechanism now is poetry. Once upon a time it was drugs.” –The Georgia Straight
“Times have really changed and one of the things I try to explain is how back in time, being intersex was equated with being someone who needed to be locked away and kept out of society and certainly not watched telling stories on stage,” She says. “As someone who presents the feminine and also can’t deny the testosterone generated features I came with, I wanted to let the world know that there is a place for everyone. People are quick to have opinions and give advice but far less willing to offer genuine help.” -The Province
“I started writing just because I had to. The creativity was there — it wasn’t really a conscious thing,” she says. “It became a coping mechanism in a lot of ways, getting things out and thinking things through. Poetry helped fill that void that was left from sex and drugs.” -DailyXtra
A co-presentation with The Frank Theatre Company and the PuSh Festival.
