In relation to your piece The Making of Pinocchio, I am curious about the working process. Why did you choose the tale of Pinocchio for this performance, and how did you work on it and build it?
Initially the choice of Pinocchio as inspiration was partly tongue-in-cheek – we enjoyed the sort of joke of using the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’ as an imperfect metaphor for the trans-masculine experience. We wanted to highlight the difficulty we had finding positive, hopeful representations of couples going through gender transition and found it both comical and somewhat tragic to imagine a scenario where Pinocchio is the best story we could find.
But then we were surprised at how much we could connect with the rich imagery and transformations in the story. It was both fun and fruitful to fit Pinocchio into our lives and our translate our experiences into the world of Pinocchio, represent the story on stage, and also queer it for our own benefit.
The working process of making the performance was very much the process of us living through and coming to understand my gender transition and how it was affecting our lives as individuals and as a couple. Working with Pinocchio as a frame allowed us to revel in the magic of the physical transformation of my body – the voice lowering, the changing shape, the new hairs. Equating these miracles with fairy tale magic helped us appreciate the wonder of what was changing before our very eyes, and then it gave us images to articulate it for an audience.
We were inspired by Judith Butler’s work around fantasy and reality that Butler describes in Undoing Gender. “Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.”
The work sits in this liminal space between fantasy and reality. The process of gender transition for me demanded a lot of creative imagining and fantasising about new ways of embodying my self and being seen by others. Similarly of course, the act of creating a performance is a shared fantasy – trying to conjure up new images and worlds that an audience can connect with – always in a space in between lived reality and willful pretending.
How do you situate The Making of Pinocchio within your artistic evolution?
This is certainly our most ambitious work to date. Much of our work expresses our identities as queer, trans, gender expansive, neurodivergent lovers. In the past this has often been shared in smaller, experimental and queer festivals and clubs for knowing audiences. This work has Intentionally been made to reach and be appreciated by a wider and more mainstream audience. It’s by no means a Trans101, but it welcomes cis and straight allies (or potential allies) who want to understand more about trans experiences.
But it’s also still vitally important to us that we are connecting with other trans and queer people in a way that retains the intimacy of our earlier work.
The scale and richness of the theatrical and technical production is way beyond anything we have created before, although it still holds something of the DIY aesthetic we’ve always worked with. We of course owe this to the collaboration with our amazing creative team who brought the work together and continue to work on the piece: including Yas Clarke (sound/AV), Tim Spooner (design/costume), Kirsten McMahon & Jo Hellier (cinematography/camera), Jo Palmer (lighting/AV), Mary Osborne (Original Producer), Nora Laraki (Touring Producer) and Sorcha Stott-Strzała (Production Manager).
This dream team of collaborators allowed us to situate and elevate our personal material and performance within this rich, sumptuously-crafted world. This staging creates a stable container (even as it shifts and transforms) in which we can be vulnerable and feel safe to invite the audience in.
Would you like to speak about the socio-political dimension of this work, its high relevance, and your role as passionate advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights and culture?
Additionally, could you address the underrepresentation of these subjects in theaters?
In the performance we reference the toxic environment in the UK for trans people. Sadly as we’ve moved forward with this project the situation has in some ways gotten worse. The waiting lists for support and healthcare have increased and trans people are used as a political football which increases discrimination. The work has reached thousands of people internationally, but it has been difficult to tour in the UK – although this may say more about the woeful arts funding situation, rather than only a ‘low risk appetite’ for queer work.
We know we are in a privileged position – financially the support we’ve received to make this piece has allowed me to keep paying my medical bills privately – and there is little actual risk for us, particularly now we see that the work is in demand and sought after on the international circuit. The other side of this success is a question of potential exploitation – to what extent are we falling into a trap of visibility?
But we currently feel willing and able to put ourselves and our lives (or a performative version of our lives) on stage with the hope that this visibility is powerful for people like us who rarely see themselves represented positively. And for non-trans or queer audiences, we offer an alternative narrative that goes against much of the problematic discourse and so-called debates around trans lives.
We know that this work is unlikely to reach and change the minds of staunch transphobes and bigots. But we also know that our embodiment of an ever-evolving love story offers a gift of possibility for those who might need it.
What’s also important to us is how touring a performance might influence change in terms of breaking down barriers around access and disability. We try to address this within the material of the performance, but also through the wraparound activity and the conversations we have with venues and festivals that present the work.
For example we send both a trans rider and an access rider along with our technical rider that gives information about the different identities and needs on the team, and suggest offering gender-neutral toilets to make the venue more welcoming for gender-expansive visitors.
Every performance is a relaxed performance meaning that audience members can do what they need to feel welcome and comfortable in the space, and a wellbeing practitioner is on hand to support anyone who has a strong emotional response to the work.
It takes a lot of work and ongoing consideration to craft the artistic work and material, and also foster a context which allows audiences the best possible overall experience and can change the theatre infrastructure from the inside.