HowlRound Theatre Commons: In Indigenous cultures around the world, genders other than male and female have been recognized since antiquity. As a transfeminine, non-binary person, I take great comfort in that fact, especially when I’m being harassed on the street for simply presenting as my authentic self. My reality is nothing new; non-binary, transgender people have existed for thousands of years. They existed in Shakespeare’s time, albeit not with the labels we use today.
2 comments:
I am so excited to read about this production, and to read about people advocating for nonbinary theatre artists. Reading about the protestors, though, made me go on to wonder if we should be expecting a wave of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) to crash on down and ruin the party. It is often still new and exciting when someone reimagines a play with different gender roles. Much of the time, I think, it is exciting because it shifts the way we see the power dynamics, etc, within the play. Up until recently, it's largely been done as a feminist act—creating spaces for women, power for women, roles for women. Though I would prefer to think that we'll all just get along, it seems possible that some folks might see the movement described in this article as undermining that feminist work. I, for one, am excited to see the emergence of large scale productions featuring nonbinary and trans artists, and I hope that the movement only continues to grow.
For me, what hit about this article was a quote near to the end: “Can we reimagine classic stories and write new ones to affirm the existence of queer and transgender people at every point of history?” A huge part of progress is uplifting modern playwrights with new and interesting things to say about race, gender, and sexuality, but I also love to see how we can bend the rules of old classics to make them more relevant to audiences today. I think the production of Twelfth Night described is absolutely true to the spirit of Twelfth Night, not that it would necessarily need to be in order to be valid. Shakespeare was obviously a product of his time, but there is still something so queer about his work that it is fun to emphasize and play with for today’s times. I love seeing this character of Vi reimagined. It’s absolutely bonkers to me that people would protest – the show wasn’t hurting anyone, and to be honest, the Bard probably would’ve been all over it.
Post a Comment