Nick Tsagaris - Meet Three Trans And Non-Binary Artists Who Are Reimagining The Way We Tell Stories

If you look at lives as if they are stories, there's one plot line that seems to dominate: birth, puberty, work, marriage, child-rearing — and finally, death.

But if you're queer or gender non-conforming, many of these plot points can be inaccessible, irrelevant or otherwise fraught.

In this context, some artists are creating works that trouble the line and the form, and in turn making their own plot points.

For Bailee-Rose Farnham, a classically trained dancer and trans woman, choreography has been a way to reconnect with the artform she loves.

"I feel like society tells you that you have to live a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way. I was in an environment [at a major dance company] where that was all people really did, and it was soul-crushing," says Farnham.

For non-binary theatre-maker Bobuq Sayed, "linearity [in narrative] has never been really something that appealed. I think there's a lot of really boring theatre out there. [You have to ask]: What is the theatre offering us that no other space can even hope to replicate?"

Trans and non-binary writer and poet Quinn Eades' hybrid works also resist linearity. Eades explains that while the prefix "trans" means "going across", his writings "trouble the idea that trans narratives are very simple and follow a fairly linear model of moving across from one [gender] to the other".

'Femininity is different for every single person'

There was a time when Farnham felt completely alienated from one of the things she most loved.

"It was quite confronting when I first transitioned," she says.

"I grew up in ballet being told I had to be really strong, and all of a sudden I was told I had to be more soft, that I had to have this essence of femininity — that I feel like I wasn't able to achieve because of the way I looked and the body type that I have."

She spent two years in a major dance company, and developed an eating disorder while attempting to meet their ideal of femininity.

As a woman of colour, Farnham also "felt very exoticised", she says. "I felt like my technique and my performance was only valid if I was being sexy or sprawled out across the floor; if I was exuding this hyper-sexual female."

Through choreographing her own work, which dismantles traditional ideas of femininity, Farnham has learnt to embrace her artform and her body.

"I try to swap the gender roles of the dancers around, in my pas de deux or pas de trois [ballets of two or three dancers] — where the male usually would be lifting the female, I would have the women doing the lift … or the man doing pirouettes."

The choreographer has also cast her ballets with two women or two men, rather than the usual opposite-sex couple.

"This changes the tone and changes the storyline, because I'm trying to have as much queerness [as possible] in my art," Farnham says.

She describes the results as "liberating".

"If I want to exude a hyper-sexualised feminine energy, I can do it in my own way. I don't have to conform to [another choreographer's] idea of what femininity is, because femininity is different for every single woman, every single person."

"I'm not afraid to look a certain way anymore."

Recently, Farnham choreographed a work for ABC Arts iview series Art Bites: Unboxed. "It was about my experiences in different relationships, with beauty standards, and as a gay person," says Farnham. Her next piece will explore her transition.

"I hope to draw out these experiences in the hope that it will help others."

What could trans dramaturgy be?

Bobuq Sayed is a non-binary writer, performer and multidisciplinary artist, and a member of the Afghan diaspora. Sayed doesn't identify as a man or a woman, and uses the pronoun "they".

Sayed is also a member of trans and non-binary theatre group Embittered Swish.

"We are dedicated to progressing trans representation, beyond a very introductory 'Trans 101' perspective," Sayed explains. "That perspective often panders to cisgendered audiences [people whose gender identity is in line with their sex assigned at birth], which is not who we are making art for."

An Embittered Swish performance doesn't unfold like a conventional piece of theatre. There is no easily discernible sense of a beginning, middle, or end. There are, however, narrative moments, punctuated by music and movement in unexpected ways.

"Trying to specifically name what trans dramaturgy is, is difficult," says Sayed, "but it is the outcome of what happens when trans artists and theatre-makers come together to make art about their experiences."

"I think often, as trans artists, the kind of art we make is confined to art about our transition and about our gender dysphoria, which is prescribed from outside our community," Sayed says.

"With [Embittered Swish], we're trying to make art that hopes to dismantle or interrupt how trans representation is typically done."

In Estrogenesis, which premiered at Melbourne's Next Wave Festival in May, the group took aim at ideas of transition, resolution and power, by examining the medicalisation of the trans experience.

This work is part of a larger vision to "contest narratives of representation, specifically this idea of transition or resolution … [or] of linearity, of moving from A to B [from one gender to another]".

"The reality of transitioning is that it doesn't look the same for anyone and there is no right or wrong way to do it," says Sayed. "It does take a lot of work and it has a psychological, emotional and financial cost on bodies, communities and subjectivities."

Hybrid, fragmentary writing

Quinn Eades is a writer, poet and researcher. "My gender identity is that I'm a trans-masc [masculine] person, my pronouns are 'he, him and his'. But it's a very layered pronoun for me; it also holds the 'she' that I was," Eades says.

"I'm pretty non-binary and so 'they/them' is in there as well," he adds.

Eades works in a kind of hybrid writing style. For example, All the Beginnings: A Queer Autobiography of the Body was "a mixture of philosophy, critical theory, poetry and autobiography".

"I pull out quotes from whatever I'm reading and then I use them to jump in and out of the writing. I think of myself as having conversations with other writers, theorists and sources, rather than doing analytical work," he says.

"There are definitely echoes and resonances for me, between living a transqueer life and also exploring those marginalities in writing, through refusing to stick to a recognisable genre and really playing with form, as well as content."

Eades is currently working on a new book, titled Transpositions. "It's a memoir from the body in transition," he says.

He says that he's working in "fragments" of memoir, alongside a column of fairy story.

"I think what we see in popular culture is a really stable narrative around trans bodies," he says.

That stable narrative sees people transitioning from one gender to another, through "a series of hormone treatments, medical procedures and social transitional processes — for example, changing your name".

"By using fragments and fairy story, I'm saying that for me and I think for most trans people, it's a lot more complex than that. There is no one trans narrative that we can follow."

By: abc.net.au