The drag opera Rights of Passage follows three performers as they traverse a series of urban waterways, navigating the eco-illogics of climate crisis. Performing a script written with an early AI writing tool the three characters, Hogweed, Turkeytail and Algae embody plant-drag personas: slippery, hybridized beings that resist legibility as either human, non-human, or cyborg. We follow these three along the riparian zone, an amphibious threshold between water and land that runs along a river’s edge, the three enact a right of passage through the dense overgrowth and crumbling infrastructures we often find along an urban waterway. Remembering old human laws that ensure passage along the banks of navigable rivers, even over private property, the three characters, Turkeytail, Algae and Hogweed, assert their own resistance to a binary of human and nature. 

As the performers move through the city their actions are scored scored by a queer chorus, invisible to the audience but heard and felt in their sonic resonance.  Like a Greek chorus these voices guide us along the riparian zone, sounding a series of graphic scores that notate relationship patterns between waterways and the urban-industrial developments that cluster around them. 

The riparian zone is found along the banks of rivers—a shifting and amorphous line between water and land. Of both ecological and legal significance, the riparian zone within common law traditions primarily addresses the rights of landowners who occupy land adjacent to rivers. Unstated, however, are the implied rights of non-owners to access such rivers and, perhaps more elusive, the rights of rivers to their own courses. As such, riparian responsibilities (as opposed to rights) protects the passage of water over land and the passage of subjects, human or otherwise, along those waterways. When rivers are lost or buried due to development, the riparian zone is only spectrally present. Rights of Passage retraces lost and endangered riparian zones in the Greater Toronto Area, imagining these liminal spaces as points of queer emergence, places where the lines between urban and nature, access and trespass, and human and non-human are blurred. Rights of Passage, a hybrid series of performances and installations, enacts a symbolic daylighting of buried streams, drawing attention to some of Toronto’s lost riparian zones to consider land use, urban futures, and ecological interdependence.

Curated by Michael Maranda

Rights of Passage Credits:

Created by Lou Sheppard
With sound design, choral direction and lead vocals by Pamela Hart.

Video performers: Wayne Burns, Kingchella, and Tess Martens
Costumes: Marley O’brien and Pamela Hart
Makeup and hair: Hally Levy
Camera: Sarah Charette, Emmett Cripps, Michael Maranda, Lou Sheppard

On Location audio recording: Pamela Hart

Choral performers: Lou Campbell, Helah Cooper, Kira Daube, Séamus Gallagher Arjun Lal, and Wren Tian-Morris
Chorus audio recording: Al Melnyk

All photos on this page by Toni Hafkenscheid