We Quit Theatre is a Winnipeg-based Canadian performance collective made up of Dasha Plett and Gislina Patterson. 

The works we’ve made vary widely in style and form, but share a fundamental interest in the space of play between the real and performed self, a destructive impulse toward the canon, and a constant challenge of the expectations of form. 

Our first piece, 805-4821, is an overhead projector expanded cinema performance that used fictionalization and depersonalization to explore childhood trauma, transition, psychoanalysis, and action movies. In 2020 we adapted the piece to a live Google Doc performance in English and French.

Men Explain Things to Us… And We Like It! is a live talk show in the style of 1970’s public access TV, where two excessively gendered hosts, Dasha Plett and Gislina Patterson, interview real men about topics they are passionate about. On its face Men Explain Things is a tongue in cheek comedy, but just underneath is a tightrope walk of gender failure, with the ultra-macho Gislina failing at every masculine skill he attempts and the high-femme Dasha recounting tales from her boyhood during commercial breaks. Its ultimate goal is to invite guests and audiences alike into the playful intimacy of gendered dynamics between trans men and trans women.

i am your spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson was originally developed as a coming-out show, in which a female academic named Gislina Patterson finds her gender and sexuality thrown into chaos by the process of close-reading the queer themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Over the course of its development, spaniel has become a much more in depth research project, exploring the political circumstances under which Dream was written, at the end of a plague and the beginning of European capitalism, enclosure, witch hunts, criminalization of homosexuality, criminalization of contraception, and the last gasps of workers uprisings in England. Using Iggy Pop, pop-up books, and popular culture the academic is transformed not into a man but into a dog as they reread Shakespeare not as a prophet but as a propagandist.

Most recently, We Quit Theatre released Passion Play, an art book of transcribed improvised erotic revisions of bible stories with original linocut illustrations.

Currently, 2023-24 will see us touring 805-4821 and i am your spaniel, as well as premiere a live version of Passion Play.