On Queering Theater in a Time When We Do Not Have the Freedom Not To

When I think about queer theater, I think about the notion of queer temporalities in space, in form, in community, in language, and in content. I am an Iranian Canadian nonbinary artist living in Canada. I exist in the space between East and West, man and woman, gift economy and capitalism. I am both inspired and troubled by opposing binaries. In my work, it is in this tension that I find meaning and create new forms and aesthetics. I have been developing a theoretical and practical framework for this process by calling it queering theater, which best describes my practice and process of creation. My process of queering theater is a way of decolonization and de-Westernization of what we create and how we create it. To me queering theater is a way of thinking about the linguistics and semiotics of theater in order to give birth to a new set of vocabulary and language that ultimately could increase potential for transcultural exchange and the cultivation of empathy.While queer theater is about lgbtq2+ communities, queering theater is a system of thinking beyond an individual identity and sexuality. In some ways the two things are not the same, yet they are intertwined by the fact that they both exist outside of the “norm” and heteronormative framework. However queer theater, at least in Canada, on these colonial lands, still exists within Western and Eurocentric paradigms, whereas queering theater is a structural effort to change the affect of theater.The inception of the company that I now lead, the frank theatre in Vancouver, bc, came from the desire of a group of artists in 1996 to create space for queer voices. They named the company Screaming Weenie. In 2017 when I became the artistic director of the frank theatre, one of the organizers, Ilena La Cramer, shared the story with me: “In 1996 queers needed to occupy space, to be loud and scream that they exist.” Screaming Weenie produced playful, funny, campy shows in nightclubs and nonconventional spaces. Coming out of the aids crisis, queer theater was an abject subject — the disruption of norms in a creation of disgust, disturbance, and resistance. However, the word queer was not even really used at that time; there was no such a thing as “queer theater” but perhaps a “theater of others,” a theater of the abject.1 Staging queer sexuality as a form of activism subverted social norms. However, once again, queer theater faced an imperative: though radical in its essence, it has left many intersections of community behind, and it is now time to address those issues. In 2008 the group decided to rename the company as the frank theatre as a response to the contemporary climate, the desire to have honest and frank conversations about queerness. I find this interesting as a linguistic side joke, that even subconsciously, the Screaming Weenie became the frank. Which in some way when read as a noun not as an adjective, the phallic legacy of the company in its gendered roots was carried over and remains today. Under the leadership of Sean Cummings, the company moved to text-based work and produced work in larger, traditional theaters. While radical for its time, queer theater in many ways was normative, patriarchal, and binary. The company, like its name Screaming Weenie, highlighted the voices of gay men, contributing to a queer canon through texts and performances that centered whiteness, maleness, and Western practices. This desire came from an urgent and important need to bring awareness and healing to the community so affected by the aids crisis and othered, but queer theater simultaneously alienated those who did not fit into this emerging canon including bipoc and trans folks.In 2017, when I started my leadership, I brought my own concerns and what I felt were urgent priorities to the company. My focus was to highlight voices from bipoc communities, immigrants and refugees, trans and nonbinary folks, and those who have existed on the margins of the normative queer community. I also wanted to de-Westernize the way we create, to practice queering theater from within a creative process. For example, stepping away from text-based work, inviting collaborators from different linguistic backgrounds, working with community participants, and creating new forms of performance more authentic to bodies with lived experiences rather than inserting queer bipoc stories into a frame of formal Western aesthetics.In some ways, like any theater, queer theater responds to what is urgent in a given moment. When we look at the history of the frank, we see that it didn't operate on queer time: its progression is linear, moving from past to present to future. Theories of queer time have been explored most remarkably by theorist Jack Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place.2 Like the queering of bodies outside of binary conventions of male, female, hetero-, and homosexuality, queer time, Halberstam suggests, is a time that exists beyond heteronormative conventions. Subsequently, queer time does not rely on symbols of heterosexuality, such as birth, marriage, and procreation. Nevertheless, I would argue that queer theater has fallen into the trap of heteronormative time and has actually existed outside queer temporalities that are a refusal of the normative referent, as an ontology that exists outside of this reference system. This is not surprising, as queer theater lives in a tension of wanting to exist outside of the norm while simultaneously desiring the Symbolic Order.3 The institutionalization of queer theater in some ways has legitimized voices of queer people, of course: it has created possibilities for queer archives, queer studies, queer critics, and yet these conventions are the very reason that queer theater can't explore queer temporalities with the freedom that Screaming Weenie could in 1996.Someone asked me many years ago how my work is political. I responded by saying that it doesn't have the freedom not to be political. My existence and my body do not allow me to separate my art from my existence. My body and my existence are never going to be a blank canvas; they will always be politicized, and so will my art. This is also true for queer theater. So, the best way for queer theater to be the agent of change is to “be,” to exist in an ontology of its own making. This is the ontology of queering theater. In this way queering theater is a way for queer theater to free itself from its very properties that it cannot escape.With the surge of far-right ideologies, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, more than ever we need to address the systematic powers that are in place to divide us, harm us, and destroy our humanity. We also have to be cautious to not assume that it is the responsibility of queer theater to respond to xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia. Such expectations are inherently colonial, as they assume that a marginalized community with a political wound is automatically responsible for saving the world.Looking at the barriers that have historically and systemically been in place to exclude many queer, trans/nonbinary, and bipoc folks, I have been developing a program at the frank with a focus on social justice and devised creation. The program starts with an inquiry and invites community participants to join a two-day workshop to discuss various issues. In the second phase, selected participants join me in a devised process to bring their stories to life. Through a two-year process the community participants meet with a professional team of designers and actors to create a new piece that is based on this material and draws from the desire of participants. To date the program has resulted in several pieces, taking the form of verbatim theater (Diaspora), short documentary film (What If), audio installation (Mother Tongues), and even theater-film new-media hybrid musical performance (Be-Longing). Our focus on process and flexibility to allow the medium to emerge from the content is another emphasis of queering theater. In 2018 we made Diaspora, an inquiry about barriers queer immigrants and refugees face in Canada. Eventually the project resulted in Be-Longing, a collaboration among myself, Meghna Halder, and Sammy Chien.Be-Longing, which premiered online in 2020, offers a good example of how queering theater can use queer temporalities to locate potential for change. To me, the word be is a state of existence in the present moment, being alive in this present moment in a physiological sense, as a body in time and space. However, when it comes to being as a sense of self, as identity, as being in relation to the immediate world around us, two things are at play: first, the way one is experiencing their sense of existence, and, second, the way they are seen through the gaze of society that gives meaning to their sense of identity. Being an immigrant means traveling in time, not only through actual time and space but also the traveling from one's past — symbols, meanings, language, and an identity no longer attached to any of the previous definitions/semiotics of its “being.” Jacques Derrida talks about the concept of “différance” (an intentional misspelling) both as a “difference of meaning” and “deferral of meaning,” a temporally inflected interpretation.4 Many folks living in diaspora start developing their own definitions of identity through the recognition that they are different and that they are who they are based on what they are not. For example, in my life in Canada I realized I am poc, I am a settler/visitor, I am nonbinary (all my life I have just known that I am not a woman). This is my personal experience of queer temporality, which I use as point of departure in creation.For example, these ideas became concretized in the collaborative creation of Be-Longing, which involved folks from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds who brought their own stories of queerness and queer expression into the room. Formally the piece breaks the linear format of storytelling: there is no beginning or end, there is a circular tempo that feels like each character is in a constant state of change. A constant becoming. The musical, film-theater hybrid form of Be-Longing was a way of de-aestheticization and removing the language of characterization. One can argue that Be-Longing is not a film, it is not a play, and it is not a digital media installation; by not being, Be-Longing was an experiment of queering theater — an unfolding of static definitions. In this way I was hoping to free the bodies that are often politicized and to free queer theater from queer aesthetic. Furthermore, the cross-generational aspect of the collaboration was a way to connect the past and present history of queer migration and how our identities have been shaped differently with access to language or lack thereof.I believe queer theater is currently in a moment that is resisting much of its previous history while wanting to embrace and preserve parts of it. It is longing for a future utopia, hoping to create spaces free of intolerance while falling into the same heteronormative traps, prejudices, and political rectitude. What is a serious threat for queer theater is the queer tension between past and present and its longing for future. If we imagine queer theater as a body, like any human being it longs for freedom. Freedom from the constructs that shape it, as well as agency to free the world from intolerance, however, while we long for freedom we move forward in time, and moving forward in time means getting closer to death. The death of an era, the death of a previously accepted form, and the death of previously relevant content. This is another reason that queer theater often falls in the heteronormative temporality. While the relationship between life and death moves in a circular motion, the timeline remains linear. How can one escape the inevitably of death while longing for freedom?In Be-Longing, we explored this longing for a new self as a continuous being. A continual process of contrasting with what comes before and later. That is, a sign acquires meaning by being different from other signs. The meaning of a sign changes over time, as new signs keep appearing and old signs keep disappearing. However, the meaning of a sign is determined not just by the current system of signs. Past meanings leave traces, and possible future meanings haunt. The meaning of a sign is determined by the interaction between past traces, future haunts, and the system of signs present right now.Most queer immigrants and refugees dance a delicate tango between these cultural and linguistic realities of past and present self. We want to queer the form by bringing in personal stories, Rumi's poetry, and other texts from queer philosophers and weaving them together. The collaborative text, written by seven participants, was assigned to four first-generation cast members, and through these four composite characters, all these materials blurred. This blurring was a way to defamiliarize the text from bodies and play with the notion that language only exists as traces of traces. Formally, Be-Longing challenged the logical process of obtaining narrative and in fact created a transient space where past, present, and future combine with no clear beginning or end.Furthermore, due to the covid-19 pandemic, it became possible for us to create a digital show that would have not been possible prepandemic as our funding is for live performances. Creating a hybrid form meant breaking the construct of a physical performance space. The process mirrored how we identified queer experience. The original state (“the Being”), the immigration (“the Longing”), and the future self in connection to the new society (“Belonging”). We started with theater, rehearsed in an actual physical theater space; we then kept traces of the rehearsal and the original shape and adapted it to the camera/film and then brought the new digital media as the future form into the piece. None of these was didactically included in the piece, but one could sense the journey and the new aesthetic without having any previous references. This fact references Brian Massumi's discussion of how Deleuze thinks of the virtual in Sensing the Virtual. Massumi writes,Having the opportunity to use the digital medium for a piece that was about changeability and breaking pattern of meaning made it possible for Be-Longing to be felt, seen, and experienced is a more subconscious and transitional state. Queering theater to me is about de-aestheticization, about breaking form and the relationship between form and content, about freeing ourselves from the semiotics that define form, and about continually shifting social and political signifiers in order to bring radical change. Queering theater means fluidity, innovation, and resistance to heteronormative and colonial models. Queering theater allows us to relax our logic, to create new contracts as a viewer to receive information and images in a new way. In some ways, queering theater and queering form is a longing to construct new visual and philosophical literacy. It is about developing a new ontology of queering.I believe we as human beings, and theater itself, relentlessly dance with ourselves, with others, and with predetermined notions of selves. We wrestle with being, and we long for a better future while nostalgically clinging to the past. We try to use language to free ourselves, deconstruct language to create new vocabulary, we try use our bodies to share stories instead of words, then we try to free ourselves from the semiotics and preassumed meanings that our bodies bring into spaces. We do all of this, trying to be unique, defining our differences while desperately needing the opposition to exist. We do all of this to belong. We ultimately want to belong and be part of a community that feels safe, loving, and progressive.Queering theater to me is about belonging, about creating space for diverse voices and allowing queer temporalities to influence form and content. To create a canvas of possibilities that allows for nuance, new language, a new literacy of viewing, and new creative processes, ultimately honoring cultural and linguistic diversity by letting it be present in what we create formally. Queering theater is to deny binaries and allow the liminal spaces in between to be activated. The liminal space has a potential to become anything, and in that it holds political and radical power to shift meaning. If we accept that queer theater is about queering our way of thinking, perhaps we can become more forgiving, more empathetic, and more understanding of different viewpoints and ideologies. We can long for a future Utopia while unlearning and decolonizing our current aesthetic and practices.

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