Youth Engagement — the frank theatre

Youth Engagement Projects

Ronnie Cheng performing in the 2025 Telling It Bent Showcase at IGNITE!

TELLING IT BENT 2026 - QUEER YOUTH SHOWCASE

MAY 13, 2026 | 8:00 PM
THE CULTCH HISTORIC THEATRE

Facilitated by Anjalica Solomon
Featuring: Lauren Han, Hawk, Dora Zhang, Viviane Wu, Vanessa Lazare and Mythili G.

Part of the IGNITE! Youth-Driven Arts Festival at the Cultch

This year, our Telling It Bent Queer Youth Writing Cohort will be performing at IGNITE’s Opening Night, GERMINATE, an evening dedicated to new ideas breaking through the surface!

Highlighting original works created by queer, trans, and Two Spirit youth artists from across BC, the TIB showcase will be accompanied by the IGNITE! Visual Arts Exhibition in The Cultch lobby, featuring works by Shivangi Singh and Carmen Toledo Bores.

Closing the evening, IGNITE! welcomes an Emerging Comedians Showcase featuring “Vancouver”-based comedians Kendall Clark and Erin Purghart, bringing sharp humour and bold storytelling to launch the festival’s week of creative experimentation.

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:

Telling it Bent is an interdisciplinary writing workshop for queer, trans, Two Spirit and questioning BC youth ages 14 to 25. Throughout the program, participants will explore poetry, playwriting, and interdisciplinary creation through a queer, decolonial, future building lens. Participants will build connections with other young queer creatives, liberate their sense of imagination and play, and gain a deeper understanding of themselves, their artistic practice, and the possibilities of the stories they can tell. Telling It Bent 2026 focuses on creating one person or small cast pieces, and participants will perform each other’s work.

**FACILITATOR: Anjalica Solomon**

Anjalica Solomon is your favourite local genderfluid-bird-watching-heart-eyed-astro-queer. They blend their Desi roots and Pacific NorthWest up-bringing in art forms such as singing, songwriting, loop pending, poetry, and the spoken word.
They are known and beloved as an organiser and multi-disciplinary performer based in what is colonially known as Vancouver, BC on the stolen and unsurrendered territories of the Coast Salish, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations.
Anjalica is currently exploring new genres such as screenwriting, non-fic and playwriting as an MFA student in The School of Creative Writing at UBC.
Their poetic work often seeks to proclaim the possibilities of love and resilience. Anjalica is a poet of startling emotional intellect and candour whose work testifies to a deep faith in beauty, the power of nature, and ultimately, the human capacity to salvage integrity, radiance and joy from moments of struggle. In this way, Anjalica Solomon's poems and performances offer robust visions of hope, tenacity, and love.
Their debut poetry collection "Apocalypse Joy" is out NOW with Write Bloody North Publishing!

MENTORS:

PLAYWRITING MENTOR:

Anais Mateusz West: Mateusz (they/he) is a Jessie-nominated trans playwright, actor and creative producer, and a Polish settler on MST Territories. Their work is text-based, collaborative and interdisciplinary, disrupting boundaries within form, gender, sexuality, and language. Their plays have been presented by the Cultch, the National Arts Centre, PuSh Festival, Rumble Theatre, Queer Arts Festival, Zee Zee Theatre, ITSAZOO, Theatre Passe Muraille and more. His writing has been published in Nuits Claires (Éditions Prise de parole) and This is Beyond: A Time Capsule of Queer Experience (Playwrights Canada Press.) Mateusz is the frank theatre’s Artistic Producer and a graduate of Studio 58.

SCREENWRITING MENTOR:

Karter Masuhara: Non-binary artist and arts manager. They have worked for a variety of artistic companies in administrative and communication roles with a focus on creating opportunities to uplift diverse voices. As an artist they have written and directed an award-winning short film, Where to Piss, which has been entered into multiple film festivals globally. They have also written and self-produced their own play, Before They Cut Down Our Tree, which was presented at the 2023 Vancouver Fringe Festival. They have a Masters in Screenwriting from Leeds Beckett University.

Youth Engagement Projects

TELLING IT BENT 2026 - QUEER YOUTH SHOWCASE

FACILITATOR: Anjalica Solomon

MENTORS:

“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story can make all the difference.”