Towards a Trans Canon
When you hire people to be themselves, bring their own lived experiences, and represent their communities, additional care is required.
In summer 2019, Emma led a two week workshop lab with a group of trans and cis performers exploring the potential and presence of trans stories in the Western classical canon. The lab took place at the Stratford Festival, Ontario.
Link to Howlround Article here: https://howlround.com/toward-trans-canon
As we neared the end of our time together, the core group wanted to do something to recognize that, although these moments of “lab” and “workshop” can be helpful and exciting, we are ready and eager to now take our bodies and our stories and our practice onto mainstream stages and into rehearsal rooms. We do not need further workshops to investigate if trans lives are worthy of performing; to “explore” how to reassure cisgender audiences that our presence will not destabilize their world. Our presence should change things. It must.
We collectively wrote a guidance document (available as a downloadable PDF), which can be used when employing or working with trans people, and which also should be considered when a company is contemplating working on a story that represents trans narratives.
We wrote it specifically with theatre companies in mind, contemplating some of the specific issues that actors encounter in the mainstream theatre industry. We kept to the forefront of the document an awareness of the specific factors that impact trans people who are Indigenous, Black, or people of color and the extra steps that are required to support them.
Oftentimes the theatre industry does not work in a healthy way and actors often have the least input in a production hierarchy. We propose that a move towards a trans canon and towards decolonizing theatre must also move away from these damaging hierarchies. But we also recognize that in the shorter term, trans actors are likely to be hired under existing structures and expected to fit seamlessly into existing ways of working. This is unlikely to work.
Two-Spirit, trans, and gender variant people have been kept out of the Western performance industry and theatre culture for too many generations now and, if we are to move towards a body of work that one day could be considered a canon, it is necessary now to employ, celebrate, and center Two-Spirit and trans actors, directors, writers, and artists.
The following guidance document is a starting place for how theatres could begin to do this, now, today.
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This document was compiled by Cole Alvis (they/them), Samson Bonkeabantu Brown (he/him), Rhiannon Collett (they/them), Emma Frankland (she/her), Cassandra James (she/her), Beric Manywounds (they/them), and Subira Wahogo (they/them) during a Lab investigation called Toward a Trans Canon, which took place at the Stratford Festival of Canada in August 2019.
