FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Nikki Sheppy Preview Ever since The Crying Game (is that a man?), people have been facing up to the curious fact that gender is no longer the double-barelled pigeonhole that made the 1950s so intriguingly homogenous. Vancouver’s Grinning Dragon Theatre, a purveyor of original, imagistic plays (and the only company ever to unite Shakespeare and ballroom dancing), blurs the line even more. Trouser Parts, a hit at last year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival, is their 75-minute gender-bending cabaret. The revue uses wrestling, sword play, body modification and cross-dressing to question the gender binary that has shaped our sense of ourselves. According to co-creator David Bloom, the title hints at just how much the marginalized gender expressions of women-as-men have to say. "In opera, the trouser parts were the male roles that were played by women because they needed that vocal range in the part," he says. Trouser Parts is holistic theatre at its most diverse. Bloom says the play’s inclusion of fighting, song, dance and wrestling, all delivered in a careening high style, made the choice of performers critical. In a variety of moods, from dark to funny, the cabaret picks up and plays with the signifiers of masculinity and femininity – ideas that are pursued thematically by writer Bloom, choreographically by dancer Rita Bozi, and musically by composer David Rhymer. "The cabaret is really a complete mélange (of talents)," says Bloom, "and that to me is an apt metaphor for our understanding of gender. There are no clear dividing lines for us anymore.... We transgress constantly because everything is being blurred. "Gender can be play. But sometimes it’s not. Some people feel they were born in a woman’s body but are not a woman. So we have a variety of physical set pieces which investigate male signifiers, our clichés of male walks and male behaviors. In looking at them, you have to ask what is learned and what is innate. And I don’t think that’s a question that really has a clear answer." The piece came into being after Bozi read a book review of Women Who Wear the Breeches, a collection of fairytales that Grinning Dragon has replaced with true stories of bent gender. The stories range from the very dark to the very goofy and from the biographical to the fantastic. "The piece based on the case of Teena Brandon, a young woman who dressed as a man and was raped and murdered in Nebraska, we play pretty straight and edgy.... After Brandon died, her corpse was in effect fought over by lesbian feminists and female-to-male transsexuals, both of whom wanted to claim her as a martyr for themselves. "There was also an opera singer named La Maupin who was the star of the Paris Opera in the 1690s. She used to dress as a man and go out and get into sword fights and pick up women. She was a real person, but the particular part of the show that’s devoted to her is very cartoon. You could easily think we made it up, but it’s based on an actual event in which she got into a sword fight with three men and beat them all." Wrestlers, western outlaws, drag queens and Bible scholars round out this unique show. "It’s almost a survey course in bent gender," laughs Bloom. "We cast a wide net, but we try not to tell the audience what conclusions to draw. We’re really trying to expose them to a lot of different stories. It goes from people in women’s bodies who are men, to women who like to dress as men for economic reasons, to people who just like to do it for fun, to people who were born as mixed gender. "All of these people are radically different and the playing styles throughout the cabaret are radically different as well. The point is to pose a lot of questions about the nature of humanity and the incredible potential for variety that we all have within us." |
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