Author: Dave Deveau

Visual Artist Call-Out | The Cultch Gallery

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie
Apply Today!

Zee Zee Theatre is looking for 1-3 visual artists who would like to showcase their art for the duration of our theatre production Every Day She Rose written by Andrea Scott and Nick Green taking place at the Culture Lab located at the Cultch Theatre located at 1895 Venables St, Vancouver, BC V5L 2H6 from May 1-11, 2025. Artists will have a chance to have their work in the Cultch’s gallery from April 28th to May 12th, 2025. 

Synopsis of Every Day She Rose:

“The personal becomes political in this collaboratively created work from Andrea Scott and Nick Green. After the Black Lives Matter protest at the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade, two best friends find their racial and queer politics aren’t as aligned as they first thought, and the playwrights behind them must figure out how to write about the fallout. 

Every Day She Rose is a powerful exploration of white supremacy, privilege, and patriarchy in supposed safe spaces.”

More info about Every Day She Rose at the Cultch can be found here: https://thecultch.com/event/every-day-she-rose/

Themes:

– Black & Queer identities

– white supremacy

– privilege

– patriarchy

Who:

We are reaching out to the local artist community to engage with those that have created art that uplifts voices of marginalized community members and potentially ties into some of the themes of our production of Every Day She Rose. We are currently looking for 1-3 artists at the intersections of Black and Queer identities to apply with pre-existing 2D works that are still available to them to showcase within the Cultch’s gallery. Everyone’s art however, will be considered. 

Who should apply: emerging artists, 2SLGTBQIA+ artists, BIPOC artists

Key Dates:

Application Opens: February 18, 2025

Application Closes: March 20, 2025

Application Review: March 20 – 28, 2025

Applicants Notified: March 28, 2025

Art Drop Off: April 7 – April 18, 2025

Art Installation: April 28, 2025

Art Taken Down: May 12, 2025

Art Pick Up: May 12 – 20, 2025

When & Where:

On March 28th, 2025 Zee Zee Theatre staff members will be selecting and contacting those that have submitted their works using this form to participate in the gallery space. Not every artist who submits works may be selected. Pieces that best fit the themes of Every Day She Rose will be given preference. 

From April 7th to 18th, 2025, Zee Zee Theatre staff will be collecting the selected works of art that will be hung in the gallery space. Art drop off times will be coordinated with artists at our office at The Green House at 1885 Venables St, Vancouver, BC V5L 2H6.

If selected, on April 28th, 2025 at 12:00 pm your artwork will be installed in the gallery space. On 

May 12th, 2025 at 10:00 am your artwork will be taken down from the gallery space. 

The gallery in located within the Historic Cultch Theatre located at 1895 Venables St, Vancouver, BC V5L 2H6.

You will have a week after May 12th to pick up any art that has not sold from our office located at The Green House at 1885 Venables St, Vancouver, BC V5L 2H6.

Art Specifications:

  • Dimensions: Any! Pieces can be as small as 4″ x 6″ and as large as 12′ x 20′. 
  • All artwork needs to have 2 “D hooks” on the back so they can be hung properly. If there are no “D hooks” on the back of the artwork it can not be hung. All artwork is hung from a rail system and everything must hang from wires. No nails. You must purchase and install your own D hooks. More details about how to do this will be sent via email. 
  • Canvases and framed works are accepted with the 2 “D hooks” on the back of the piece. 
  • Artists must supply their own frames and frame their own work (if applicable to your work). This must be all ready to go by April 18th, 2025. 
  • Technicians from the Cultch will be installing your artwork. Artists will not be hanging their own artwork. 

Compensation:

Compensation Offering: $100.00 honorarium to those selected plus an opportunity to generate funds from the sale of your art from April 28th, 2025 to May 12th, 2025 within the gallery space. 

Sales:

There is a potential to sell your artwork that will be hung within the gallery space at the Cultch. Details about this will further be discussed with selected artists. 

PROTEST!

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

Cathartic Celebrations: express resist/release expand

Register


Join us for a transformative day of creative expression and collective practice, where we explore the tension between resistance and release. This workshop reimagines ceremony, oral traditions, and reverence through an artistic lens, offering a space for cultural preservation and emotional expansion.

Inspired by Everyday She Rose, our upcoming production, and the radical reimagining of communal spaces for reflection and renewal, this experience invites you to engage with all your senses and activate your sensations. Through playful yet meaningful practices, we honor ancestral traditions and embrace our present reality while reclaiming space for connection, expression, and healing.

Our featured artists will guide you through:

  • An Ancestral Plant Journey: Connect with the earth as we explore the significance of plants in culture and tradition.
  • Body and Voice Exploration: Tap into the power of your emotions through movement and sound, discovering new ways to resist, release, and expand your sense of self.
  • Eruption [An Experimental Cake Performance]: Taste test “edible” art tied to unceded territories and destructive conflict avoidance through sensory discomforts. 

Come ready to celebrate, protest, and play. Together, we’ll create a space that uplifts, challenges, and inspires.

When: February 23, 2025, 10am – 2pm

Where: The Greenhouse Studio at: 1885 Venables St, Vancouver, BC V5L 2H6

Who: Self-identified Black folks for workshops. Everyone welcome for the lunch provided.

Let’s reclaim, reimagine, and renew—together.

Additional Event Information:

  • The Green House space is fully wheelchair accessible.
  • There is free parking in a gravel lot behind the Green House studio on a first come first serve basis. There is additional parking on Venables Street and surrounding streets also on a first come first serve basis.
  • Ages: 16+. There will be no childcare provided on site. Please plan accordingly.
  • Space limited to 15 participants.

For additional inquiries, please email: alysha@zeezeetheatre.ca

Big Beaded Bling Workshop

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

With Indigenous Community Engagement Manager Alysha Collie!

Saturday, June 8th | 1:00 PM – 4:30 PM PST

Get Tickets Here!

Green Thumb Theatre, Studio A
5522 McKinnon St.
Vancouver, BC
V5R 0B6

Presented by Zee Zee Theatre
Thank you to our Community Sponsors: Rise Consulting, Improv for Work and Wellness, Nerd Nite,

Come celebrate National Indigenous People’s Month and Pride Month in this hands-on ‘Big Beaded Bling’ beading workshop with Alysha Collie (Soowahlie First Nation). Whether you’re wanting to update your drag wardrobe, celebrate contemporary Indigenous beadwork, or build allyship and connections with Indigenous community members, this is the place to celebrate our intersectionalities through common appreciation for sparkly earrings.

In this workshop, you will be guided by Alysha Collie, Zee Zee Theatre’s new Indigenous Community Engagement Manager, as you create your own show stopping pair of beaded earrings. All supplies needed to complete the earrings will be provided in a beading kit. Light refreshments of bannock with jams and Indigenous teas will be offered to all participants.

Come out to kick off Indigenous People’s Month and Pride Month with your own new stunning pair of earrings.

ABOUT ALYSHA COLLIE

Alysha Collie is a Coast Salish artist, storyteller and filmmaker from the Soowahlie First Nation mixed with European settler and African ancestry. In 2019 Collie graduated from the University of the Fraser Valley with a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in Biology and minoring in Fine Arts. Under the guidance from Indigenous Elders and knowledge-keepers at her university she studied traditional plant medicines and applied that knowledge to help create the first Reconciliation Shakespeare Garden at UFV. This unique garden brings Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities together through plants and storytelling.

While completing her degree, Collie began working with 3 Crows Productions filming documentaries, performing as “Qwalena” and storytelling. Her passion for change helped steer Collie in a direction of educating those directly responsible for change in Indigenous student’s lives.

Collie is a multi-disciplinary artist and owner of her own company called The Collie Collective (@Collie.Collective on Instagram) where she focuses on decolonization and reclaiming her ancestral roots through her beaded jewelry, Salish art and weavings. She is a professional storyteller performing on stage in live theatre productions and improv workshops at The Flame, Surrey Civic Theatres and Tightrope Theatre. She is a filmmaker and has produced over 20 documentaries uplifting Indigenous artists, families, and Residential School Survivors. She also uses her graphic design skills to vectorize other artist’s artwork for murals in museums and galleries, including the works of Coast Salish artists Les Wells, Joann Williams, and Roxanne Charles. “Having our ancestral art forms in visible spaces is important for our current and future generations of Coast Salish Peoples to feel a sense of pride and belonging in our own territories”, Collie says. 

She also works with Zee Zee Theatre, a Queer based theatre located in Vancouver, as a Curator, Storyteller and Indigenous Community Engagement Coordinator. Her exemplary activism within the 2SLGBTQ+ community was recognized when she won the 2021 Honourable Mention of the Marie Lapuz Youth Leadership Award from SHER Vancouver.

Since 2022, Collie in collaboration with Tightrope Theatre, have raised over $3500 for local Indigenous non-profits who support healing initiatives for the multi-generations that have been affected by the Residential School system in some of the most underserved parts of Vancouver. 

When Collie is not working, you can usually find her creating in one of her many disciplines of art beside her cat or nestled in the living room of her grandparent’s house.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • Previous beading experience a benefit but not necessary.
  • We will be learning the two needle beading method, however you are welcome to use your own method if you prefer the one needle method.
  • Limited bead colours will be provided. You are welcome to bring your own beads if you have a personal preference.
  • Ages recommended are 13+. There will be a use of strong adhesives, needles, scissors and other sharp metal tools. Caution is advised. 
  • Unfortunately there will be no childcare available on site. Please plan accordingly
  • Space limited to 15 participants. An additional 5 kits available for pick up for folks who would like to complete the earrings in their own space at their own time.
  • Masks are not mandatory and will be a personal choice in this space (OR)
  • Masks are not mandatory in this space, and your personal choice to wear.
  • If this event is not something you feel comfortable attending in person, a limit of 5 beading kits are available for those who wish to take part in the beading at their own pace. 
  • Green Thumb theatre and their bathroom is accessible for folks who use mobility devices.

A Season Launch Message

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

To those of you joining us for the first time, thank you! To those of you who have been with us for a while, welcome home to the sweet 16th season of Zee Zee Theatre.

A dear friend and mentor of mine always talks about organizational life cycles being 5 years. Well, we are now entering our fourth cycle. And, true to this idea, so much has happened, so much has changed and we stand at the next major juncture. 

With the departure of my brilliant long-time collaborator (and husband), Associate Artistic Director Dave Deveau, which timed out with the departure of our incomparable Operations & Development Manager Sabah Haque, Zee Zee is once more at a moment of great possibility. We are starting something new with someone new. 

It is my great pleasure to officially welcome someone who has been a part of the Zee Zee family and our own family for many years. From first serving as my student Assistant Director in 2015 during the development of Elbow Room Cafe: The Musical at Studio 58, all the way to being the brilliant playwright whose work we premiered last season with Unexpecting, the incredible Bronwyn Carradine joins the team in the new role of Artistic Managing Producer. I am thrilled for what the future of this new Zee Zee looks like. 

After our biggest season to date – our mammoth crystal anniversary season, we are focussing on development in all its forms this season at Zee Zee: new play development, new partnerships, new community connections.

We open this season with the final stage of my passion project that’s been in the works since early 2020. The Public Reading Series, which is the culmination of 10 months of paid writing in our National Queer & Trans Playwriting Unit. Five new plays, written by five exciting writers from across the country will happen in real life in five cities across Canada and streamed through our Presenting Partner The Cultch’s RE/PLAY digital playground. Starting in Vancouver at the Cultch, continuing to Halifax, Saskatoon, Lethbridge, and finishing in Montreal. I am so thrilled that we have been able to support these writers with something more sustainable than the current commissioning rates in Canada while connecting us all to the eight other partner companies in this initiative. I can’t wait to see the fruits of this labour. 

Our annual storytelling project is back with our long time partner the Vancouver Public Library, to celebrate Queer Asian Stories curated by the mother of the House of Rice Shay Dior, event producer and co-founder of Theatre as a Second Language Society Yanting Qiu, and theatre maker and storyteller Jaylon Han. 

We are continuing the development of what started as TERF Wars now renamed You Could Be My Safe Space written by JD Derbyshire and Dave Deveau in consultation with Morgane Oger and Jessie Anderson. With the protesting of drag queen story hours and attack on trans rights and trans children in this country and to the south, this work couldn’t be more vital. 

We wrap the season with a new partnership that continues our work of providing queer families opportunities to see themselves reflected on stage. We will be producing in association with Carousel Theatre for Young People and the Vancouver International Children’s Festival the world premier of Dave Deveau’s The Papa Penguin Play, a family musical all about gay penguins who happen to be drag queens who happen to be parents. Sound familiar? 

We have had lofty ambitions for this organization from day one, and we are thankful that so many of those dreams and goals have been realized. This season is about creating the blueprint for those next lofty ambitions, those artistic dreams that make the impossible suddenly possible. And we can’t wait to reveal them to you in the coming seasons. As I’ve said, this is an exciting time for Zee Zee and I am so thankful and honoured that you are joining us. 

Thank you for your support. 

Let’s change the world!!

Cameron Mackenzie
Artistic & Executive Director
September 2023

Welcome Bronwyn Carradine!

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

We are so pleased to welcome Bronwyn Carradine as our new Artistic Managing Producer.

Bronwyn Carradine is a queer administrator, theatre creator and playwright. As an artist, she’s collaborated with Zee Zee since 2015 when she was the Assistant Director of Elbow Room Café: The Musical at Studio 58, since then she’s Assistant Directed Elbow Room Café: The Musical (The Cultch), My Funny Valentine (Buddies in Bad Times), written for Nyet: Again (2017) and most recently wrote Unexpecting (2023). She’s beyond thrilled to be joining the team of this company whose mandate is so close to her heart.

As an arts administrator she has focused much of her work on building community connections and furthering equity for artists in terms of safe working conditions, clear & concise contracting, deliberate hiring, inspiring auditioning, and more robust on-boarding. In her most recent role as Company Manager & Assistant to the Artistic Director at the Arts Club Theatre Company, Carradine worked to open doors for artists by implemented programs such as: Arts Worker Rush Tickets, Industry Nights, Relaxed Auditions, Audition Childcare, as well as Write from the Wings, and the Incubator Series.

When she’s not at the theatre, you can find her either on the couch with her partner and their cat watching Below Deck, or running in the mountains.

22/23 Season Launch & Annual Glamour Meeting!

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

September 8th, 2022

The Cultch’s Historic Theatre, 1895 Venables St

Official AGM 5:15pm-5:45pm  

Season Launch 6:00pm-6:45pm

Our favourite Zee Zee tradition is back: the Annual Glamour Meeting! Part society business, part season sneak peek, part drag show, all good fun!

Join us for our official AGM then stick around as we launch our entire season with another sneak peak of our show in development “Cool Moms” by Thanks Jem.

Tickets $5 at the door which includes a one year membership to Zee Zee!

This is a limited capacity, distanced and masked event. All will need to show a record of their vaccine status and must stay in the seats unless going to the bar or bathroom and remain masked unless they are consuming food or drink and only then while in their seats.

Featuring Thanks Jem

The following business will be considered by the membership:

  1. Acceptance of agenda (motion required).
  2. Approval of minutes of 2020 AGM (motion required).
  3. Report by management to the members with financial statements presented (motion required).
  4. Election of directors of the Society (motion required)
  5. Any further information respecting the society required by the bylaws or the regulations.

CASTING CALL

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

Zee Zee Theatre is inviting submissions for our upcoming production of 

Men Express Their Feelings

By Sunny Drake

CREATIVE TEAM:

Director:  Cameron Mackenzie 

Stage Manager: Jenny Kim

Creative Consultant: Paneet Singh

Intimacy Coach / Choreographer: Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg

Design Team: Kimira Reddy, Donnie Tejani, Sara Vickruck, Carol Macdonald

Technical Director: Ash Shotton

Other Cast Members: Munish Sharma, Jeff Gladstone

AUDITION DATES & LOCATION: 

November 24, 11-3pm, location TBC

DATES:

Preliminary Cast Reading: December 9, 2021

Rehearsals begin:  February 22, 2022 at The Greenhouse Rehearsal Hall (1885 Venables St, beside The Cultch)

Performances :  March 17-April 3, 2022 at Firehall Arts Centre (280 East Cordova Street)

Artists will be engaged under the Equity DOT Contract

THE ROLE: 

RAJ SHARMA, 17, male, hockey player and star goalie, first generation Indo-Canadian, beginning to explore his pansexuality.

Zee Zee is committed to equity, diversity, and representation. With regard to cultural specificity, for this role we will only be seeing male identified actors of South Asian descent. 

TRIGGER WARNING:

The show deals with race-based bullying and implied sexual activity. The role will require kissing another male actor four times. Intimacy coach will be provided.

TO SUBMIT:  

Please send headshot and resume and any questions to Associate Artistic Director Dave Deveau at dave@zeezeetheatre.ca

Please note:

In order to better serve our local community we will only be seeing actors based in the Lower Mainland.

In accordance with our COVID-19 Safety Plan all artists, staff and contractors must be double vaccinated except for those who have a verifiable medication condition or religious exemption based on a prohibited ground in human rights legislation. Artists will be required to provide proof of vaccination to Zee Zee prior to commencing work. Other COVID-19 protocols, such as masking, are also in place and evolve to reflect best recommended practices at the time of production. These protocols will be communicated clearly to artists at the time of offer, and be included in the rider to their contract.

PLAY SYNOPSIS: 

A comedy about culture, hockey, relationships and sex. Two dads and their sons are sentenced to stay in the hockey locker room until they’ve talked through their feelings about a violent incident. In 90 hilarious minutes, these guys get to know each other and themselves a whole lot better, while redefining what it means to WIN. Men Express Their Feelings enriches, instigates, and empowers questions of gender, sexuality, identity and the cultural impact on all of these. 

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT:

November 22, 5 pm

For questions or accommodation requests related to the submission process, please email Associate Artistic Director Dave Deveau dave@zeezeetheatre.ca

21/22 Season Launch & AGM

Posted on by Cameron Mackenzie

September 18th, 2021

The Cultch’s Historic Theatre, 1895 Venables St

Official AGM 5:15pm-5:45pm  

Season Launch 6:00pm-6:45pm

OMG WE’RE LIVE!

Welcome back to your favourite tradition: our Annual Glamour Meeting.

Part society business, part season sneak peek, part drag show, all good fun.

Join us for our official AGM then stick around as we launch our entire season.

With a sneak-peak scene from our Spring main stage production, drag performance from our playwright-in-residence and story by one of the curators and storytellers from this past year’s Virtual Humanity.

This is a limited capacity, distanced and masked event. All will need to show a record of their vaccine status and must stay in the seats unless going to the bar or bathroom and remain masked unless they are consuming food or drink and only then while in their seats.

Tickets $5 at the door which includes a one year membership to Zee Zee.

Featuring Alysha Collie, Thanks Jem, Munish Sharma, Jeff Gladstone

The following business will be considered by the membership:

  1. Acceptance of agenda (motion required).
  2. Approval of minutes of 2020 AGM (motion required).
  3. Report by management to the members with financial statements presented (motion required).
  4. Election of directors of the Society (motion required)
  5. Any further information respecting the society required by the bylaws or the regulations.