Colouring outside the lines of cultural canons

Louie Lang Norman: Hi Teiya! I’m so thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you about The Queen In Me. I’ve heard there are lots of easter eggs for opera aficionados to look out for in the show – can you tease any stand-out moments that people can look forward to?

Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野: There’s lots of easter-eggs…The Queen In Me is simultaneously my love letter to opera, and also my honest experience and depiction of how I’ve struggled these past 25 years in the field. Just from knowing the culture or the repertoire, there’s a lot of jokes and sass, and not taking oneself so seriously about the art form and the industry simultaneously. It’s full of treats…

LLN: I have experienced live Opera just a couple of times in my life – so I perhaps fall into the camp of audiences that are being brought into your show due to the methodology of the show; the queering of the source material and being a fan of queer performance in general. For folks like me, who are not approaching this through the lens of being an opera aficionado or disciplinary fan, how does The Queen In Me welcome new opera audiences in from the margins?

TK: A lot of people have told me that this was the first opera they ever saw – which makes me smile and laugh at the same time, because it’s not technically ‘An Opera’, but it uses operatic material. It’s a theatrical show – I feel like I’m doing drag when I’m up there. There’s a lot of that sass, I’m directly addressing the audience and pulling them in and making fun of them and making fun of myself and being vulnerable at the same time. The character is quite vulnerable and goes through an extensive emotional journey and transformation: metaphorically and literally at the end. And I think people can relate to that as humans – you don’t need to know anything about theatre or opera to appreciate it and to have fun. There’s lots of really great projections that bolster the music, and you don’t need to know Italian, German or French to appreciate the music because the emotion is in the music. If you know the language or the repertoire, that’s great, you have an extra layer, but you don’t need to know it. There’s something for everyone, and everyone will feel welcome… eventually… in the show.

LLN: I like that ‘eventually’. Because I think that inviting audience discomfort in a way that is generative and enables an audience member to go through the process of being brought into – or autonomously bringing themself into – a work is really important, because it doesn’t patronize the audience. It allows space and permission to be a little bit uncomfortable and move through that.

TK: It’s like a constance negotiation, an ebb and flow of calling out and calling in – and it’s that relationship building between the performer and the audience that is a shared journey.

LLN: I also love that you referenced the relationship between this show and drag performance. Applying a draggy approach performing to cultural cannons – whether they be pop music or opera – can not only reveal extra, re-iterative gendered layers of the cultural texts, but of ourselves too. Can you speak more about how performing gender plays a role in the show?

TK: Yeah – I guess that just being trans and playing a hyper feminine soprano character in and of itself is very much an act of genderqueering opera performance. I don’t want to spoil the climax, but there’s a lot of liberation and catharsis that happens in the show – to honor me, Teiya. And to resist the notion that I somehow have to disappear in order to be an opera singer and play operatic characters.

LLN: I suppose you are showing that the text of YOU as a performer doesn’t become mutable in order to privilege the accuracy with which the form of opera is being performed – you yourself become just as important a text as say, the score, for example.

TK: Yeah – because that is so often the case. That is how I was trained, that was what was rewarded. To disappear myself in order to perform the canon, the practice, the tradition, to a very narrow, limited view of what it should be. What a soprano should be, what femininity should be, what the character should be, and how I should sound vocally as well.

LLN: As a trans man by day and a drag queen by night, I perform as a hyper feminine woman a lot of the time too – and it is cathartic. It allows me a way to have control of but also give love to who I’ve been at all points of my gender journey. And to tap into the parts of me that I could have loved more but didn’t feel comfortable doing so when I was being socialized as and presenting as a woman. So being able to proudly and intentionally deliver femininity back to people now that it feels in my own hands feels so good.

TK: It’s so juicy and it’s so…satisfying when that does happen. It’s reclamatory and it’s healing and it’s like – No! I’m performing femininity on MY terms. Not by how it’s dictated by society or by the industry or whatever. You’re playing, you know! I’m planning to start taking testosterone around December or January. It’s gonna take a few years for things to change and settle, but I really want to return to this character and this show, and I don’t know in what capacity yet. I’ve got multiple ideas, but I’m really excited to return to this hyper femininity with a lower voice and a much more masculine presenting body.

LLN: From personal experience – it feels REAL good.

TK: Christmas is 10 years too late but it’s coming!

LLN: It’s gonna be the best Christmas ever! So you’ve been working on this show for 8.5 years now. In trans years, a LOT of life can happen in that time; how has the piece grown and changed with you? Did it help you learn things about yourself?

TK: Where do I start…it’s definitely grown with me and has reflected where I was in those times. I was using she/they pronouns when I started working on the show, then it became just they/them, then I got top surgery just before the premiere. Certain language in the script didn’t really make sense even by the premiere. So with some conversations with my directors and trying different things out, changing pronouns and language, things really started to click as a result of who I became during those years. And it just felt so much more true, I guess. And there are certain phrases and pop culture references that feel outdated now because I wrote them in 2017, 2018 and 2019! It’s come to the end of its journey too – it’s been 8.5 years, and I want to medically transition. So that will change my voice and how I perform this – if I can perform it at all in the future! But I think I’m ready to sing and perform about different things, and it feels okay to do that. I’ll be sad that I may not ever do this again, but it had its time. It encapsulates that time in our world, and how I was responding to socio-political issues and current events.

LLN: How do you feel about the journey you’re about to go on with your voice changing with Hormone Replacement Therapy?

TK: I’m simultaneously so ready and excited. I feel like I’m this over-ripe fruit – we’ve either gotta eat it right now or we’ve got to toss it. I’m so there. I’m so excited to start so I can share that journey. Because I’ve spent 25 years crafting this voice and learning technique for this voice. I’m forty now, so I had to wait a long time to sing this repertoire in this soprano voice. I don’t have dysphoria necessarily all the time when I’m singing, because it feels like I’m playing and the physicality of it feels good. I just want to see what else I can do, what new skills I’m going to unlock with this…new Pokemon evolution of myself. The rules have been blown off, and I feel like taking testosterone (T) will allow me to feel even more free. Even now I don’t know why I haven’t always been singing whatever I want to sing. I feel like I’m still colouring in the lines, and T will give me permission to do whatever I want. I’m just excited to let creativity lead.

LLN: And I’m so excited for you! Speaking of colouring in the lines… something that interests me a lot about The Queen In Me is that it appears to actively reveal the ‘lines’ or structures behind producing and performing operatic works – especially when those structures can operate as constraints. What are some of the constraints that the work talks about, and how have those constraints become fruitful and generative?

TK: A lot of it stems from what is used in the industry – the ‘Fach System.’ It’s a categorization system. It’s how voice teachers identify sound and singers and what range they are in. And composers have written for the Fach system – or we see patterns arise based on voice types. For example, a light tenor voice that has a limited range will often be characterized as comedic and never a romantic lead and often effeminate or gay. So many gender stereotypes have been affixed to these different voice types, and you can’t really get out of it. So you associate certain cultural tropes to these voices – and bodies too. The bass should be a father-figure, slow and wise and big-bodied; the ingenue should be a young soprano, feminine, petite, white-passing; I could go on forever. And because of the voice type I had – a light soprano, a light lyric coloratura – I was singing all these filigree things, and I was never the adult, fully grown woman love interest. I had to be coquettish – I was the cunning little servant. Or I was evil or I was mad! 

So I talk about this in relation to the Queen of The Night, right – she’s a coloratura with a lot of high notes, big scary fast notes. And so the act of stopping the show that she’s in and needing to say – “Hey, we’ve been doing this for too long. Enough already!” – she’s not only advocating for her character but characters and people like her who are pigeon-holed. Who are dismissed by the structures that say we need this kind of voice and look and body, that you can’t be six feet tall and 180 pounds and strong and be an ingenue even if that’s your voice type. They’d be like – no, you’re never gonna have a career in opera honey. That’s the narrative we are directly or indirectly taught, and also what is perpetuated by people in power – the gatekeepers: casting agents and people who run educational institutes. It’s a structural pipeline. I talk a lot in the show about how the person who plays the opera character is often stripped away – like there’s nothing left of them, because they’ve been trying to fit into this idea of what they should be versus being allowed to honour who they are.

LLN: Thankfully The Queen In Me is one of a small but growing number of trans-fronted operatic productions in the world that are defying these narratives and proving that there are spaces for colouring outside of those lines. What other artists and productions should we be keeping our eyes on as we continue to uplift and support emergent and important voices in opera?

TK: I think the first person who comes to mind is my friend Holden Madagame. He lives in Berlin and is trans opera singer. He’s really inspired me just by existing – to be able to see him talk about his voice and to be working in operas and in musicals in Germany and the UK while honouring who he is. And navigating that very cis-normative world. Especially presenting as a man, I think every moment is in flux with him as to whether he wants to disclose or not disclose. And it’s very exciting that he gets to work with companies that really see him and all of who he is, who want to uplift all of who he is – and not just hire him to have their diversity box checked.

Another person I’m inspired by is Katherine Goforth. She’s based in Portland, and is another trans opera singer. She’s a tenor and was awarded the True Voice Award from the Washington National Opera right before Trump got into power and performed at the Kennedy Centre. And now Trump is changing the Kennedy Centre to become his own arts thing that serves to make him look better. Katherine is very smart, and a huge activist, and wants to connect her experience in the world as a trans woman with seeing all the inequity that exists not only in opera but everywhere. She’s so honest – I think it’s the honesty in these people and their courage to not just continue to put up with the BS in this craft that is really admirable.

Louie Lang Norman (he/him) is a trans performance artist, drag queen and occasional independent scholar based on unceded Lekwugen Territory, Victoria BC. He was Intrepid Theatre’s OUTstages 2024 artist in residence, where he remounted his solo show A Car Crash, and in 2025 his drag persona – Ket Bush – co-created experimental drag-theatre show Mouthfull with close collaborator Vivian Vanderpuss. He has presented solo shows at international performance festivals across the UK and Europe since 2017, and his most recently published academic work – on Fantheatre – can be found in Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century (University of Iowa Press, 2025).