I was never the popular girl. I was never the girl who had it all figured out, who dressed on-trend and laughed at the right jokes and had the right friends. And I was certainly never the ideal feminine girl.

Nor was I masculine or androgynous, to be clear. The best way that I can describe it is that I was dichotomous, multi-faceted, or contradictory. At four, I insisted on wearing frilly April Cornell pinafores and hair bows paired with boys’ dinosaur sneakers. Many mornings, I forgot to brush or “tame” my hair, but it fell in charming ringlets anyway. I took ballet classes, skipped stones in the creek, held tea parties for my stuffed toys, played with model trains, and read any book I could get my hands on. All of it was authentic; I was ashamed of none of it.

Society didn’t always agree. Small children can be ardent supporters of gender roles, even when they don’t understand them (the fact that I wore “boy shoes” was scandalous to my kindergarten class, though I maintain that all children’s feet are shaped the same, so what does it matter who the shoes are marketed to?). As I grew older, my opinionated and passionate approach to socializing wasn’t really acceptable, either. I was told I came off as “intimidating” and “loud,” which I’ve since noticed are only criticisms when they’re aimed at girls.

…Which is interesting, because being loud and passionate are two of the most important things a stage performer can be. To recontextualize this brief summary of my childhood: While all of the above was happening, I was also exploring acting and singing, and had discovered I was rather good at it. When I was five, I took part in a parks and recreation theatre program, making my stage debut as Chicken Little in a theatrical collection of fables, which led to me asking for more opportunities to act. When I was six, my parents enrolled me in private singing lessons once a week at my request, which led to participating in music festivals and competitions on the regular within just a few years. In combination, both of these paths led me to the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, where, in 2009, I began a career in semi-professional opera that would see me into adulthood. In these spaces, being dramatic was an asset. Commanding attention was praised. I suddenly had access to a kind of social capital that was denied to me in my regular life. The very same personality type that made my peers at school see me as off-putting had secured me leading roles in theatre and won me first place at music festivals. Soon enough, I began to wonder why.

Why was the same, authentic performance of myself treated so differently in different spaces? Why was theatre so overwhelmingly populated by other girls who were similarly ostracized for not adhering to gender norms? Why were there so few boys in theatre and music? Why were, for the same hobby, girl performers scrutinized for lacking femininity, whilst boy performers were mocked for indulging in it? Why was the world so obsessed with gender performance?

Gender performance. The word ‘performance’ operates sylleptically in this archive. As a given, this is an archive of a performer’s career, and so every artifact is connected by its nature as an aspect of performance. However, one cannot explore gender performance without consulting Judith Butler. In Gender Trouble, Butler outlines the societal basis for gender as a universal act of performance, one in which every person must partake in order to assimilate in patriarchal society. While I didn’t have the terminology for it yet, this was a truth I discovered in my preschool years, wearing those April Cornell pinafores with dinosaur sneakers, and which only became more obvious as I forayed into the world of theatre. Butler writes:

“What constitutes through division the “inner” and “outer” worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. (…) “Inner” and “outer” make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, “inner” and “outer” constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the “inner world” no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect” (170-171).

My “inner” world was more complex than the rigid boundaries of femininity imposed upon me by my peers, as nearly every young girl’s is. By not adhering enough to these standards, my social value was scrutinized and my gender identity (and sexuality) were free for debate in schoolyard gossip. Meanwhile, theatre is an art form that, in its nature, forces the participant to inhabit a body and identity unlike their own, to mould one’s exteriority to match a fabricated interiority to a convincing degree. Butler continues:

“In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (173).

Indeed, as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” The stage is liberating for those of us whose inner worlds extend into rarer crevices: metaphorically, a larger fish tank for an understimulated koi, a playground in which we may repurpose the masks and costumes of daily gender performance, step into the spotlight, and command the world look at us, be entertained by us and the talents we have honed by being scrutinized for our multiplicity.

The world of gender in theatre expands beyond social perception and assigned sex. As Sherill Gow explains in “Queering Brechtian Feminism: Breaking down Gender Binaries in Musical Theatre Pedagogical Performance Practices:”

“[Elin] Diamond defines gender critique as ‘the words, gestures, appearances, ideas and behaviour that dominant culture understands as indices of feminine or masculine identity’. She explains, ‘[a] feminist practice that seeks to expose or mock the strictures of gender, to reveal gender-as-appearance, as the effect, not the precondition, of regulatory practices, usually uses some version of the Brechtian A-effect’. I suggest that this mode of feminist performance practice is renewed, refined and developed further by bringing queer concepts into conversation with Brechtian feminism; this approach can then be usefully activated in musical theatre processes. As Stacy Wolf explains, musical theatre is a rich arena for ongoing gender critique” (345).

My experience as a performer always felt like some form of gender critique. When playing a character who aligned largely with my real-life presentation and identity, it was a mode through which I could more safely embody the most extreme parts of myself without the fear of social repercussions. But, one of the most thrilling aspects of performance is to portray a character unlike yourself. When I took roles who were hyperfeminine, I could mock the version of girlhood that had been forced upon me by patriarchy, and would imbue my performance with irony and self-aware comedy. Even more extreme, however, were my transformations into male roles, in which I had to both subvert femininity and embrace masculinity to the point of becoming my own male avatar. Because these were in shows in which the roles were written for cisgender male actors, my performances took on a queerness that had not been present in the original script, and inherently became gender critiques.

Cross-gender performance has existed in theatre for millennia, most famously preserved in cultural memory through the anecdote that women were not allowed on stage in Elizabethan England—therefore, all of Shakespeare’s plays featured men playing female roles. However, there is also plenty of history where the inverse is true: women have played men (more commonly, young boys) for centuries. I partook in this for my performances in The Pied Piper of Hamelin (2010) and The Mousetrap (2016). When reflecting on these experiences in my essay “Conceal Me What I Am: Gender-Defying Costuming in Theatre and the Experiences of a Teen Performer,” I wrote:

“Theatre, especially young people’s theatre, is an incredibly female-dominated field. Between the many troupes, programs, clubs, and production companies that I had the pleasure ofworking with in my childhood and teen years, we always struggled to bring in male members. Scripts, however, suffer from the opposite problem: a gender ratio that skews to the masculine. And so, the common solution was casting girls as boys. This phenomenon is highly ironic when placed alongside the long history of theatre (and other theatrical art forms such as opera, musical theatre, and pantomime)” (2).

In the essay, I go on to explain the ways in which costuming may be utilized to facilitate cross-acting, and how the precedent of “pants roles” set by opera paved the way for my peers and I to grow into ourselves as performers.

“Drag kings formulated innovative techniques to disguise the female body as a man’s even in layers of undress, such as modern binders decorated to look like a natural chest, or glue-on body hair. These are superior to outdated methods such as ace-bandage chest binding because of the lack of medical risks, such as rib deformities. Opera assigned women the roles of young boys rather than grown men so that the gender differences between performer and character would be less stark. Shakespeare buried gender under so many layers of costuming and writing that it stopped mattering who was playing whom. Young people’s theatre, with its overabundance of girls, just accepted the fact that gender roles could not be strictly enforced, and made space for learning and growing within the art form, gender be damned” (6-7).

Throughout this archive, there are examples of girls in young people’s theatre who have taken on “pants roles” to fill in the gender gap caused by high female and low male enrolment. Indeed, as society discourages young men from pursuing “effeminate” hobbies such as theatre, it pushes young women to occupy the leftover space, allowing for even more gender non-conformity from its already gender non-conforming girls. Ergo, societal gender performance feeds the ourobouros of performers who subvert gender.

When examining young people’s theatre and music communities as a safe space for girls to explore the subversion of femininity, I also find it compelling to note the demographics of the adults who make such spaces possible and functional. Music teachers, drama teachers, accompanists, adjudicators, and parent volunteers (whose names are all featured in the programs of the plays, operas, and festivals I took part in) are, in majority, women. This could result from a few avenues. Of course, those who are in the arts as a career were almost certainly this exact type of girl when they were growing up: loud, commanding, creative, subversive. Now, they pay it forward—creating spaces for the next generation of performers to hone their skills, and because society’s ourobouros remains unchallenged, a large percentage still of these young participants are girls. Alternatively, and this may be more true of parent volunteers, it may be a chance to live vicariously. Perhaps they were discouraged from the arts growing up, or were simply unaware of their options, but now they wish to experience the space through the joy of their children, or they too were former “theatre kids” and are able to foster this same appreciation of the arts, perhaps relive nostalgic memories, with their families.

In “Visible Absence, Invisible Presence: Feminist Film History, the Database, and the Archive,” Hanssen writes, “how can one make visible the striking absence of women in certain key functions in the film industry at the same time as one similarly makes visible the significant, continual (often unseen or invisible) presence and contribution of women throughout film history? In short: how do we make absence and presence visible at the same time?” (35-36). This same notion applies to music and theatre education, and it is my hope that “Documenting A Girl On Stage” may help shed a light on the unsung heroes of the community: women and girls.

Women’s work, in a patriarchal society, is continually devalued and dismissed. It is easy to forget the countless women who work behind the scenes to make every show, festival, and concert run smoothly and to a high standard. And because boys in theatre stand out for their rarity, it is easy to forget the girls who step into “pants roles” to take their place. When on stage, when everything is larger and louder than life, it is easy to forget that these boisterous performers are ill-suited to an offstage society which demands they be polite and demure. This archive exists as a reminder, not only of my own versatility as a girl on stage, but of the countless names and faces who shared the space with me over the span of my young career, most of whom are women, and the labours of love and righteous anger that built the art we reminisce about so fondly today.