These are busy days for Isaac Mulè. The Halifax-based artistic director and founder of OutFest—the largest queer arts festival east of Montreal—has been working for months, trading calls and emails with artists across Canada, booking concert venues and readying the stage for what will mark the festival’s third year in Halifax. And the stage is, indeed, almost ready: From Tuesday, Apr. 23 until Sunday, Apr. 28, OutFest returns to Halifax with its biggest slate of acts yet, ranging from stand-up comedy to dance solos to drag to queer Indigenous theatre. And while the festival will bring some of the buzziest new shows from queer Canadian playwrights to Halifax, it will also showcase some of the city’s brightest emerging talents.
The creative force behind Page 1 Theatre, an outfit “dedicated to producing, presenting and developing original professional queer theatrical work,” Mulè brought OutFest to Halifax in 2022 after a move from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont. At the time, he tells The Coast, he’d been running the festival in Kitchener since 2015.
“I didn’t see anything like OutFest on the East Coast, but I saw a really vibrant queer community, I saw a lot of independent artists creating work and I thought maybe this could be a great place to move the festival,” Mulè says.
The move, he adds, has been “tremendous.”
This year, Mulè and his OutFest planning peers waded through more than 40 show submissions from artists across Canada—a tally that more than doubles the amount they’ve historically received.
That’s proof of two things for Mulè.
“We’re really seeing the need for OutFest,” he tells The Coast. “[And] we’re seeing artists across the region recognizing the festival as a great place to launch a new show or try something out.”
PRUDE, Lifespan of a Mattress among 2024 highlights
This year’s edition of the festival is far from short on local talent. Two of the festival’s marquee shows, PRUDE and Lifespan of a Mattress, are written and performed by Halifax artists. The former, a one-act drag/stand-up comedy combo by Lou Campbell, is described as a “potent and powerful solo show” by NOW Magazine and has toured the Toronto Fringe Festival, Victoria’s Intrepid Theatre and Vancouver’s rEvolver Festival. The latter, written and performed—in part—by Halifax writer/actor Sara Graham, follows “a chronically ill person navigating queer relationships, the medical system and trying to keep their room clean from all the discomfort of their own bed.”
Halifax singer-songwriter Jade Bennett headlines a Sunday show at The Carleton, along with folk/pop singer Natasha Sophia. The Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company’s Logan Robins directs and produces the show Deeper, a “queer love story about a group of women living in ‘80s and ‘90s Newfoundland.” And local comics Abhishek Bhuchar and Trina James will join Ottawa’s Caity Smyck for a night of stand-up and improv comedy at Rox Live on Saturday, Apr. 27.
Show brings talent from Hamilton, Toronto to Halifax
Two of the big shows from elsewhere include Sid Ryan Eilers’ Kiss the Stormy Sky and two-spirit playwright Jordan M. Burns’ A Pineberry’s Past. The former, a solo show that blends contemporary dance with elaborate costume and stage design, tells a story spanning from the 1700s to today—weaving from the Russian Revolution to World War II to the #MeToo awakening. Hamilton, Ont.’s Eilers plays their great great grandfather, their grandmother, their mother and themself in a show that interrogates gender binaries.
“As a genderqueer, the underrepresentation of trans folx in dance, specifically those who have been assigned female at birth, has been a major roadblock for me,” Eilers says in a release. “Kiss The Stormy Sky is my origin story, and my hope is that it sparks conversation around our past to understand how we got to our present, so we can intentionally create our futures.”
Burns’ A Pineberry’s Past tells the story of Mixed, a protagonist both Indigenous and white, who is “left gasping for a community of their own” as they navigate through the intergenerational trauma of colonialism. It showed at Toronto’s Paprika Festival and earned an Ontario Arts Council grant in 2022.
Festival for “everybody,” Mulè says
Beyond the shows, OutFest has teamed up with the folks at Every One Every Day for a neighbourhood potluck dinner on Apr. 23. Vandal Doughnuts is also offering a specialty donut, with a portion of each sale supporting Page 1 Theatre.
“Folks always ask, being a very queer-centric festival, is it only for queer people?” Mulè says.
Not at all, he adds.
“A lot of the shows are touching on a lot of intersecting storylines and a lot of intersecting themes—and yes, sexuality and gender identity is one of the main things they are exploring, but there’s a myriad of other things that the shows are talking about. And I really think there's something for everybody.”
Explore OutFest 2024’s full digital program here.
