By: Petra Chase, Arts & Culture Editor

The Firehall presents Pants
When: January 17–20, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Firehall Arts Centre, 280 E. Cordova St., Vancouver

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, artistic director of her self-named performance company and experimental dance veteran, uses comedy, dance, and theatre to explore what makes a simple garment so contentious: Pants will take audiences outside of the gender binary by crawling “inside our ‘packaging’” and asking “what happens to one’s flimsy identity, built on blending, when one’s offspring sheds the binary before recess?”

PuSh Festival
When: Various times from January 18–February 4
Where: Various art centres around Vancouver

The annual international performing arts festival (PuSh) features  “edgy, controversial explorations of the new frontiers of performance in the blended arts.” Highlights include Dear Laila, an immersive experience by Basel Zaraa recreating his home in a refugee camp, and L’amour telle une cathédrale ensevelie, which “tells the story of exiled Haitian families through opera-theatre.” Youth passes are available for audiences up to 24 years old for $20. Explore other options, including a digital pass, on their website.

Lunch poems: 
When: January 17, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m.
Where: Online

Two poets will perform readings of their work for the SFU community for this intimate event. Pushparaj Acharya is a poet and literary scholar born in Nepal. His poetry collections are in Nepali and English. Gillian Sze is a Montreal-based poet and childrens’ book author with multiple award-winning poetry collections under her belt, including Peeling Rambutan and Redrafting Winter. She’s currently an instructor at Concordia University and just published her latest childrens’ book, I Drew A Heart. Lunch Poems is a monthly recurring event that happens on the third Wednesday of every month, so if you miss this one, you can still make the next one!