MEET THE QUITTERS
We Quit Theatre is a performance collaboration between transsexual artists Dasha Plett and Gislina Patterson. We are Canada-based, on Treaty 1 land aka Winnipeg, Manitoba. In a tradition of Winnipeg artists like Guy Maddin, Primus Theatre, or Venetian Snares, the art world has left us to our own devices, and in the absence of supervision, things have gotten weird. Our inspirations: public access television, death metal concerts, Isabelle Hupert movies. Our heroes: Forced Entertainment, Frances Koncan, Ishmael Reed, Gary Indiana, Lingua Ignota. At heart, we are shock-rockers: we’ve never met an expectation we didn’t want to knock down.
We love to quit. Style and form are ideas that are useful to us only insofar as they can be subverted, broken, exploded. The same goes for the real self, the performed self, and the literary canon. A destructive impulse runs through our work, fuelled by our desire for a better genre, a better gender, a better politics, a better performance. We love to quit. We always do, and never will.
Most recently, We Quit Theatre presented an anthology of our work as part of Buddies in Bad Times 2023-24 season. We also released Passion Play, an art book of transcribed improvised erotic revisions of bible stories with original linocut illustrations. A live version with improvised stories and electronic music is touring to music festivals. We are spending winter 2024-25 in development mode, composing a verbatim musical about the lyrical pseudo-journalistic practices of the transphobic political right, finalizing the script for a dance-theatre hybrid performance about state infiltration of leftist movements, and writing a new play entitled Good Cop.
DASHA PLETT
Dasha Plett works with performance, sound, and video. Her work is informed by artists like Maria Chavez, La Pocha Nostra, and the New Narrative movement, and practices of psychoanalysis, collective creation, and plunderphonics. Named one of 10 Toronto theatre artists to watch in 2024 by NEXT Magazine, she has performed her work at Cluster Festival, Art Holm, Nuit Blanche, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, WNDX Festival of the Moving Image (where Etudes for Keyboard received the Best New Prairie Work award), and send+receive (where she opened for Carl Stone). Her projects are fmmf, an experimental dj performance (album forthcoming 2025), and a trio of new semi-autobiographical expanded-cinema/video works about betrayal, power, lesbianism, and cults.
As a sound designer and composer she has worked with the Buddies in Bad Times, Stratford Festival, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Cercle Molière, Theatre Projects Manitoba, Mammalian Diving Reflex, OneTrunk Theatre, Frances Koncan, Waawaate Fobister, Debbie Patterson, and Alexandra Elliott. She is a proud member of IATSE local ADC659 (Associated Designers of Canada) and a professional audio describer with Vocal Image Ensemble Winnipeg. You can read about Dasha’s work here.
GISLINA PATTERSON
Gislina Patterson is a writer, performer, director, and dramaturg whose preoccupations include propaganda, family abolition, eroticism, and violence. His work has been presented and developed at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, SummerWorks, OFFTA, Hold On Let Go, the London Ontario Media Arts Association, Theatre Catapulte, Rainbow Trout Music Festival, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Theatre Projects Manitoba, the Stratford Festival Lab, Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Manitoba Association of Playwrights, and Playwright’s Workshop Montreal.
In the interconnected fields of direction, dramaturgy, and cultural criticism, Gislina has worked in theatre, music, and dance with Buddies in Bad Times, Sick + Twisted Theatre, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, The Mariachi Ghost, Sawa Theatre, ted witzel, Emma Beech, and Karuna Vellino, among others. He was named one of 10 Toronto theatre artists to watch in 2024 by NEXT Magazine. They are a member of Vocal Image Ensemble Winnipeg, which provides audio description for live arts events.