Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists

This issue emerges from my personal experience as an artist and curator. I have had the privilege of collaborating and performing with, as well as curating and directing, a number of the artists featured here. As the director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Hysteria Festival (2003–2009), founder and director of Cheap Queers (a three-day Pride performance festival), co-director of the Rhubarb! Festival, and producer of a number of independent alternative cabaret and performance events, I have had a privileged glimpse into the challenges of creating and presenting alternative and queer performance. This research project began with a paper I wrote in 2010 entitled “The Foster Children of Buddies,”¹ which looked at the role of queer women at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre since its move to the prominent 12 Alexander Street address. This issue of CTR expands the scope of my inquiry as I seek to examine the contributions of queer women and trans artists on a national level. Furthermore, this issue shares some of the work that has most inspired and emboldened me as a curator and as an artist. These artists have led the way in Canadian performance innovation with multidisciplinary and theatrical experimentation while drawing, in many cases, substantial audiences and dedicated fans.

The queer artists represented here are experimental both in their presentation of self and in their exploration of theatrical form and content. For them, identity and desire are always in flux. By naming these artists—and by giving the issue the subtitle of “women and trans artists”—we reveal the tensions between this fluid understanding of self and codified gender binaries. I risk this naming and classification in order to look at the material conditions of theatrical production in Canada at the present moment, and in particular the experiences of women and trans artists in environments that increasingly want to declare themselves post-queer and post-feminist. There is no theatre or performance venue dedicated specifically to the production of these artists’ work. They exist somewhere outside the shimmering rainbow of queer unity, remaining “other” even within the politically defined institutions such as women’s theatres and gay theatres.

Meanwhile the term queer, the only inclusive non-essentialist term we have to describe members of our community, has, in the performance world, been largely reconstituted as the “avant-garde,” becoming synonymous with experimental or alternative practices. Although queer performance does tend toward non-traditional theatrical forms such as performance art, cabaret, and interactive performance installation, this new definition of queer is altogether too limiting and universalist. In making queer synonymous primarily with non-normative artistic practices, we can potentially dilute the political history of this term. Queer performance needs to retain a relationship to anti-heterosexist, anti-homophobic, and anti-gender normative politics.

Moynan King in “The Lustful Ones” (2008)

Photo by David Hawe

The self-authored queer performance attempts to wrestle female and trans queer identities away from homophobic fantasies and generate versions of queer that are non-recuperable by the mainstream. The goal of the material in this publication is to help develop a critical discourse around these fluctuating and creative methods of artistic production. I have engaged in a troublesome form of essentialism by singling out artists according to their gender but my intention is strategic in that it seeks to bring to light some of the most edgy, vibrant, and underrepresented performance work Canada has to offer. While my research began with an inquiry into the performance practices of queer women I have included trans artists in this issue to open the frame of my research and reflect a contemporary alternative queer performance scene with a rich shared history as a community and as artists.

All of the artists featured here are currently active creators who represent a vast range of contemporary practices and styles. While the representation of those practices here is complex and diverse, it is certainly not exhaustive. There are many formidable queer women and trans artists whose work is not included here. My aim is not to create a totalizing queer canon...