Queering the Stage

Book excerpt: Queering the Stage: Inclusive Approaches to Performing Gender and Sexuality addresses a history of stereotyping and provides inclusive approaches to navigating gender and sexuality in a way that does not reduce the broad spectrum of LGBTQ+ communities into a single monolith. Butch it up! Be more manly! Add a little swish! Queen out! These instructions make performers feel minimized, erased, and forced to fit in a binary that encourages underdeveloped portrayals of queer identities. This book will guide the reader in performance techniques for confidently embodying the masculine/ feminine, gay/ straight binaries – as concepts of chosen choreography rather than reductive prescriptions – while also providing non- binary exercises to explore and expand the use of the body, voice, heart, and mind to bring life to characters of sexual orientations and gender identities that do and do not align with the actors’ lived experiences. The reader will be presented with multiple tools for analyzing, developing, and embodying a diverse array of characters, empowering them to make their own choices when it comes to performance. While there is no “right” way to teach performance, this book will present tools rooted in trauma- informed practices that aim to prevent and undo harm in a group setting with a facilitator, or individually. This book is written for instructors of theatre performance and acting wishing to expand their curriculum to include queer concepts in their classroom, and actors working in the industry who want to improve their ability performing characters of diverse genders and sexualities. A companion website, available at www.adicabral.com/queering-the-stage, provides additional materials to support exercises given throughout the book.