Buddies has announced their full slate for the 2022/23 season, making a full return to in-person programming featuring presentations, world premieres, and festivals.

Back for a 44th year, The Rhubarb Festival transforms Buddies into a hotbed of experimentation, with artists challenging our notions of what art-making and art-watching can be. This year, the festival intentionally expands its scope internationally, through a curatorial exchange with three live art festivals in Europe and the UK: FLAM in Amsterdam; Les Urbaines in Lausanne, Switzerland; BUZZCUT in Glasgow. As part of this multi-year exchange, Rhubarb will invite artists from and send Canadian artists to each of these contexts to perform. Curated by festival director Clayton Lee

Buddies presents a New Harlem Productions and Great Canadian Theatre Company production

An epic exploration of history, war, and forgiveness, The First Stone delves into the exploitation of child abductees, the communities from which these children are stolen, the determination to bring them home, and the hard road to reconciliation that follows. Through poetry and song, this world-premiere production follows one family’s effort to reunite, measuring the cost of holding on, and of letting go. By Donna-Michelle St. Bernard. directed by Yvette Nolan

Zom-Fam

November 3–6, 2022 

an interdisciplinary solo by Kama La Mackerel

In Mauritian Kreol, “zom-fam” means “man-woman” or “transgender.” This intimate solo brings to the stage Kama La Mackerel’s award-winning eponymous poetry collection. Through dance, storytelling, spoken word, and ritual, Zom-Fam weaves together ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages, and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which grapple with the legacy of plantation servitude. Written and performed by Kama La Mackerel 

The Man That Got Away (A Special Appearance)
December 8–18, 2022

How do we reinhabit the stories that make us who we are? How do those who’ve left us continue to inhabit us? In an intimate performance weaving together music, confessionals, and personal archives, Martin Julien unmaps, through space and time, his queer upbringing as the child of a lesbian mother and gay father in mid-20th-century Toronto. 

Exploding the cabaret form, The Man That Got Away grapples with the layers of our performed identities and the plurality of ways that we ‘come out.’ Family secrets, shared histories, and the musical theatre canon come together in this gesture towards a space of liberation, memory, desire, and truth. By Martin Julien. directed by Peter Hinton-Davis

Body So Fluorescent
April 13–23, 2023

a madonnanera, Buddies, and b current production

What happened last night on the dance floor? Two friends retrace their steps from the night before to figure out how it all ended in an explosive fight, shifting from self to alter-ego in their effort to untangle the facts. Body So Fluorescent is an electrifying solo performance that asks difficult questions about Blackness, otherness, and appropriation. Following a national tour, critical acclaim, and a short film adaptation, co-creators Amanda Cordner and David di Giovanni reimagine their hit show for the Buddies stage

This season, each of our mainstage shows features tiered ticket pricing, meaning you get to choose how much you pay, starting at $10. If cost is a barrier, this is your chance to get an affordable ticket. If you are able to pay more, this is your change to increase your support for the work onstage and ensure it stays affordable for those who need it. Plus, you can accrue discounts throughout the season with our Buddies Rewards program.

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist with a focus on travel, lifestyle, entertainment and hospitality. He has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He enjoys discovering delicious eats, tasting spirited treats, and being mesmerized by musical beats.