TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival—The Digital Remix 2023 is here and it’s FREE!
(Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Nations) – Urban Ink and The Cultch are proud to present an all-digital TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival featuring new works and past favourites, March 28 - May 28, 2023.
With a focus on empowering Indigenous artists and encouraging collaboration with non-Indigenous artists, this unique festival builds relationships and brings communities together to create lasting social change and groundbreaking performance. Over the past three years TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival has presented new works from some of the most exciting talents from Vancouver and around the world. Now in its fourth year, the international festival is being presented online, free to watch for all.
TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival was started in the autumn of 2019 with over a dozen in-person shows, a cabaret club, artist talks and workshops. After a successful inaugural festival Urban Ink and the Cultch were excited about the 2020 festival. The realities of the pandemic put their hopes to the test, and instead of hosting an in-person festival, they decided to innovate to bring a groundbreaking digital festival to hungry at-home audiences. This digital pivot broke new ground in the theatre community and TRANSFORM developed a reputation for being a place for some of the best digital performance in the world.
The 2023 TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival offers a selection of new shows, including powerful works from local artists—Kim Senklip Harvey’s Making The Mystics: An Artistic Ceremony Documentary and Urban Ink’s Guide My Way, a concert film by Corey Payette—as well as some big Canadian and international shows including a new show from Manitoba’s Darla Contois (The War Being Waged), and powerful interdisciplinary cabaret and circus shows from Australia’s Polytoxic and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Te Rēhia Theatre and The Dust Palace (Demolition, and the documentary Te Tangi ā te Tūī).
On top of these new shows, this free digital TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival will offer viewers the option to revisit some of the festival’s past favourites. People can watch the digital Opening Night Bash that brought TRANSFORM online in 2020, a compilations show of some select moments of the late Candy Palmater’s The Candy Show, contemporary drag from Vancouver’s favourite non-binary drag collective, The Darlings, and Connective T/issue - Classical Cirque, collaborations between contemporary classical musicians and circus artists.
With so many exciting shows available at no cost, Urban Ink and The Cultch hope TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival—The Digital Remix 2023 gives people the opportunity to experience world-class performances from wherever they may be.
Watch the 2023 Launch Video
Details at transformcabaret.com
