 I'm at Kit Yan Poet, K-I-T-Y-A-N-P-O-E-T. A tight-brained group on Twitter, and sometimes I check it. It's K-A Dance Theater, but it's an Instagram. I actually tried to start a Twitter account. When you asked for one, I couldn't figure it out. I think I've had a little more places calls than some of the other people on the panel. So now we're going to talk a little bit about the work that we've done. I'm a playwright and an actor, and aside from working in theater, I'm also a video game journalist, and I organized a group called Press X, Y, which addresses transgender issues in video games. And I also run the secret identities panels that do similar panels at comic book conventions and discuss the history of transgender comic book characters and transgender themes in comics. And the show that I'm doing here at The Brick in The Transfest is called The Astonishing Adventures of All-American Girl and the Scarlet Skunk. And it's a superhero-inspired play. It's set in 1948. It's about masked crime fighters. And most of my plays don't directly address transgender themes, but this play addresses transgender themes and gender identity very directly. The Scarlet Skunk, played by me, is a cross-dressing vigilante in the 1940s. And because it's the 1940s, people are confused and frightened by the Scarlet Skunk. And even though Scarlet is trying to help people and fight evil society isn't quite ready for a cross-dressing vigilante. And we also use these superhero costumes as a metaphor for people dressing in an unusual way and presenting themselves in an unusual way. There's a recurring metaphor in the play of when someone's dressed like a hyena, people think she's dressed like a cat or they think the Scarlet Skunk is a cat. And it's riddled with dialogue of what are you supposed to be and why are you dressed like that. And the recurring theme of people trying to categorize what is different. And the terror that many people have over finding a person that's different but you can't put your finger on why they're different or you don't have a word for the group that they belong to. And in addition to dealing with transgender themes there's also basic gender identity where we have a female World War II veteran who grew accustomed to doing traditionally male work and male activities while she was over in the war and now she's having trouble readjusting back to traditionally feminine work and traditionally feminine mentality when she's back in New York City and she ends up funneling that into her career as a masked crime fighter is all-American girl and even though she's all-American girl and she's dressed in a pretty little baton twirl or outfit she's doing things that by society standards in the 1940s are very masculine and utterly unacceptable for a woman to do. And our other panelists also have some shows that are happening right here in the Brick Theatre is Transfest. Why don't we start with Kit. Thanks. So I'm super excited to be here. This is my first time working at the Brick and I'm super grateful for the space and the opportunity. I work on two major projects currently. One of them is the show here called Queer Heartache. It's a show in 14 pieces of spoken words, land poetry and it's autobiographical so it tells the story of myself as a queer transgender Asian-American person who was raised in Hawaii to the East Coast. I talk a lot about family. I talk about talking to my mother, my grandmothers, my little brother. I talk about the queer animals in our families and in my family there are queer tortoises. I talk about sort of my personal journey and narrative in this story and I've got to throw out my credits to all the folks that I work with on this show. Jane Jung, my producer, my director Jesse Hill, Lizzie Marmon doing tech, Solomon Weisberg on lighting and set design and Melissa Lee who I work with on media. I say that because one of the great learning experiences of working on Queer Heartache here at the Brick is working with a team for this kind of show and earlier this year I had the opportunity to work on the other major project that I work on which is a musical called Interstate and we had our very first reading over at Dixon Place where we told the story of a queer and Asian-American band that gets in the car more specifically from the east coast to the west coast and drives around as an activist band telling stories about being queer and Asian-American and transgender and along the way they inspire a young person who lives in Liberty, Kentucky named Henry to think about his life and break out of his southern Baptist highly stifled community where he's facing a lot of violence, anger and prosecution and so that's the other theater piece I work on and along with Queer Heartache there's also a forthcoming book that is being released last week so those are the major things. Alright and Frances. Okay so I have been making theater for kind of a long time I started writing plays as a 13-year-old and I've continued to do that in a kind of very much like evolving DIY like very intentionally amateur way that has progressed into a model of making theater that I feel has really been kind of at its best when Leslie and I started a type rate group and that is to build a community of collaborators out of very genuine friendships and a group of artists who bring a lot of different disciplines to the field so I would say that this play that we just put on at the brick in April had very few people who probably identify as theater professionals but it was one of the most gorgeous like communities of artists I've ever seen and been a part of and so yeah let me track back and just talk about the piece we were making it's called Won't Be a Ghost and it has been almost three years in the making it started with some residencies here and the Drama League and had an amazing time last summer at Dixon Place, hi Ellie and then we got to put on a full run here at the brick so the play tells two main stories woven together one is about Chelsea Manning who is the trans soldier and whistleblower who divulged a major leak to WikiLeaks and is currently serving a 35 year sentence in punishment of that action a story that I feel like a lot of people know oh yeah that much about and like maybe know her assigned name and didn't really follow up to know that you know her name is Chelsea and that she legally changed it and don't really know a ton about the content she leaked and then also the second storyline to make it a little more complex is about Magnus Hirschfeld and his institute for sexual science so simplest way to put his story is he is the Kinsey of Weimar Berlin he was a gay Jewish doctor whose institute served as a museum, archive, medical center and living space for queer and trans people in the early teens and 20s and 30s in Berlin the very first transgender gender confirming surgeries were performed there in 1929 and he like just was so ahead of his time he proposed that there was a gender spectrum that was 60 different variants or more so essentially like anticipating the conversations we have around a spectrum and fought very hard to change anti-sodomy laws and the German penal code and then all knowledge of his existence and his work was completely eradicated when the Nazis raided the institute in 35, 8, 5 anyway so it was the first book burning of the Nazi era it was to target their specific archive and I had not heard of that story until a couple years ago when I was in Berlin and I just felt that there was something about those two stories that belong together that they're both about queer people devoted to kind of like expanding upon binary identity but also they're happening times of war and knowledge suppression and they both are people who were just like against like very bitter and violent odds proposing to expand access to knowledge Hirschfeld through writing and books and Chelsea Manning through the internet am I good? You're good? You can go on Oh I can go on, great Actually you did use a term that I think some people might not know you said gender confirming surgery is there an archaic term that people are more familiar with? Gender reassignment surgery I feel like I prefer to phrase it as confirming because I feel like reassignment surgery kind of suggests that someone's body's wrong and that there's only two ways that a body can be so yeah but basically what I really wanted to do with this piece was one we have Chelsea Manning who's in jail who's like sentenced by its nature has limited her access to the press she's done amazing things to get her voice out there anyway and publishes with The Guardian and a friend helps her keep up a Twitter account but really the bulk of our access to her own words are this archive of chat transcripts so she was caught by someone that she was speaking on instant message with at the end of her service and right after she had leaked these documents to WikiLeaks she was having a chat with a hacker named Adrian Lamo and he archived their chat transcripts and gave it to Wired who published it and so you can see everything that they talked about pretty unredacted and I thought that there's so much material and so much honest access to this person's perspective and voice that when we have her behind bars there's no good way to talk about her story without having her voice present in the work we're making about her I know there's a number of other people who have made work about her but I think that the best that we can do at least this is how I have come to justify it is that we use her own language so it draws the play draws from those dialogues and doesn't put any words in her mouth besides that and I feel really lucky to have found an amazing trans fan performer in Christian Apple and a number of other amazing trans performers in our show trans people you know in the tech booth and in building sets and it was just a really exciting opportunity to be able to work together so deeply and to pay everyone a little bit was just magic and that's about it for now. Alright tell me about your experience. Currently I'm working on a production like I said it takes in place and it's Alice through the wall it's called actually called wonder through the looking-glass houses based on Lewis Carroll's two books and when I first started to do this as a full-length dance-based production it was more just to sort of explore this literature again and I met early on with a mentor of mine who's in the Dance World Doug Post and over lunch she said you know there's a lot of research about Lewis Carroll might have had an inappropriate relationship or feelings towards this this ten-year-old girl when he wrote these books and I my reaction was thanks Doug I can't know that you know but I bet you know you you so I started going into this these articles that I found and and and while there there's no proof on either side then I started researching Victorian culture and how a lot of times these educated bachelors were friends of families and whether or not things happen it was just sort of accepted it was just sort of part of a lot of oddities of Victorian culture and so now when I read that literature again it's you know it's changed forever while there's whimsy to it there's a darkness to it and and so part of it is not necessarily specifically just about that but I have found being someone who was sexually abused myself and and you know I know it's sort of a big thing in culture victims coming forward there's a conflict and I can relate to it personally because I within the last year I knew someone in the performance community who was assaulted by someone else I knew and it's you know it's like the world was flattened now it's round like wow your work is great I really don't know if I can ever go to your show again you know it's it it's the struggle when it's that close and so I think that's kind of now the books for me but really what I'm doing in a broader sense is they're not about Alice they're really about all of the characters sort of giving a voice or a journey to all of these characters and kind of how they all seem to have an ambiguous struggle to to claim discover their identity in a structured world that has preset rules and manners dictated by Victorian times that they sort of live in this sort of this is where you are and they're torn between acceptance and propriety and who they actually are so Alice isn't really a main character in the piece and sort of the one section maybe that is specifically trans is and it seems obvious but when I've been working on the the caterpillar section and and I really kept talking to the dancer performing it about you know it's not about I'm a caterpillar and I want to be a butterfly it's I'm a caterpillar but I'm not you see that I'm a butterfly I was born a butterfly but the world sees caterpillar and I have to figure out how to communicate this to you and sort of there's a real romanticized idea of I'm a caterpillar I'm a caterpillar I go away in a cocoon and no one sees me for a while and now I'm a butterfly and it's linear and I'm done and for transgender people there's no sort of private cocoon and you know to give a simple analogy you get two years as a caterpillar most of your life in a transparent cocoon you got to walk around in it interact in it and maybe never a butterfly moment but it's not linear like one day I feel great and I'm a butterfly and people affirm it in the next 10 days I feel like crap like a caterpillar got stepped on and not even a caterpillar why'd you step on me so I don't know if that's clear or worse to describe it like that but most of the time in my work I'm not even answering something I'm asking I'm trying to just frame a question and put it out there so that you can however you come into it go away with something a different way of looking at it or maybe even just having seen imagery or a show that affirms what you already feel either way is fine and so yeah that's sort of some a broad sense of what I'm working on in this show and and just sort of contextualizing some of the issues through characters that we all probably most of us know in some way form or fashion so I don't have to have to do a lot of exposition which sometimes I find refreshing because I feel like while a lot of the work probably all of us do we have the queer community is sort of a big part of the audience I'm sure we all are aware of not just preaching to the choir and we want to broaden that we want to communicate and I felt like taking this literature at least brought cisgender and other communities in on some level they already got something they didn't feel like I'm here in a club and I don't understand what's going on so that was another reason for choosing that as a backdrop. It's interesting you mentioned the butterfly metaphor in Alice because that it's used as a visual metaphor in lots of stories that deal with gender identity and when I do my panels on comic books almost any time there's a comic book character story that deals with the transgender character there's always a butterfly drawn in the background and so the artist behind the comic is trying to be all you know look how already I am and behold my symbolism so maybe tell us a little bit about you. I grew up in musical theatre actually and it's funny that you just drew a trans metaphor into the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland because that's the first show I ever did and I played the caterpillar so like you just rocked my world a little bit but I grew up in musicals and while I was in college I was realizing that like a lot of the mainstream American musicals are very cis-heteronormative and don't really have a space for me to exist and I played Troy Bolton in high school but I can't keep doing that and so I started finding other places that I could do work and I mainly started out as like a stage manager and assistant directing for people I had choreographed for a small amount of time with a company that I grew up with out on Long Island and at my high school and I just like found that I love telling stories and I needed to find other ways to make that happen and then while I was in college I started working with Honest Accomplished Theatre soon after college but while I was in college I had written what started as an open letter to the man who raped me while I was in high school and then I found out through like writing it and getting it out to some of my friends to look it over that the best outlet for me to express that was theatre mainly because at the time I didn't know where to post an open letter and have it read by people so I wrote this play that I called Do You Want Me to Stop which was about a 7 minute play it was a 10 minute play that I later had produced in the Fresh Fruit Festival which won the short play competition for the Fresh Fruit Festival and later won a fruity for Outstanding Ensemble award and it was a beautiful experience it was the first thing I had ever put out there and written and something so deeply personal but I got such a beautiful response to it and people who had never had an experience like that were telling me how relatable it was and people who had similar experiences were happy to finally see something that they had never experienced before and so I was just like how do I do that more for you people how do I get that out there more because I have such an experience that is not known to a lot of people I have such a unique perspective on the world but I've also in doing this kind of work I found so many people who have the same experiences as me to a degree or have something that resonates a little bit at least so I found wonderful homes like Honest Accomplice that lets me go tour colleges in the local area talking about how I found my gender identity and letting kids know that they're not alone if they're going through the same thing which is such a beautiful thing to be able to do and then Michael Gardner reached out to me to curate this festival and I'm co-curating with MJ Kaufman who is a wonderful friend of mine and when Michael first reached out to me my response was kind of just like why do you want to do this festival are you doing this because everybody else is talking about trans this year or are you doing this because you want to create a space for trans artists to just make work and you want to let us live luckily it was the latter and so here we are creating work and I'm blown away by the pieces that we have in this festival I'm so happy with everything we had our opening night cabaret last night and I was standing in the dressing room just watching everybody get ready and prepare down the mirror and I got choked up it was such a beautiful thing just to see all these trans artists doing the thing together like having so much fun and I do have a show in the festival it's called love letters to nobody or insignificant others which started I started this little online journal of me every time I went on a first date I would write a letter to the person telling them how it went for me and I thought it would be cute if I like ended up with somebody for a long period of time like years down being like hey I wrote this after we first met but none of them stayed so I found that I had all of these things and then I had stuff like do you want me to stop that I had written and I started going through messages with my exes and letters that I have written and like emails I had sent to family members while I was figuring out and I was just like I have all of these letters essentially around the topics of love and sex and trauma and identity that I just feel like people could hear and it could be poignant to somebody so I started writing this piece that now exists as love letters to nobody or insignificant others and pulled it's completely autobiographical I would say about 85% of the material is pulled from things I've actually said to these people and things that they've actually said to me there's a number of things that are fabricated based on real life experiences some things that I wish I could have said and didn't get the chance to but most of it is actually the stuff that I had said or like a summary of what I had said if I didn't have it in writing to pull word for word from a lot of it is just copy and pasted off of Facebook Messenger whoops but it's just this I realized that I've referred to myself as a hopeful romantic often and I was realizing a couple of years ago that I kept trying to be dating gay men while not being a man and they wanted to be dating a man and I just wasn't that thing for them and that's probably my problem but it's an interesting conversation that I don't think a lot of people are having so I'm having it if you want to have it with me I'm opening on Saturday night at 9.30 but this whole festival is full of so many stories that aren't usually seen in the theater scene and aren't usually talked about because we have and I'm gonna harp on some other topics in this a little bit I won't go too far into it but because there are there's such an influx of trans identity in the media and in the mainstream eye right now that so many people are trying to write stories that include trans people in them which is why I was so excited by the opportunity to do this festival to not have a space for cis people to put your projections on to a trans narrative let's jump back on to the authentic stories in a moment Francis, you were going to talk a little bit about what are trans issues for people out there who maybe you run a theater company or maybe you're trans or maybe you're cis gender artists that wants to address what are trans issues so I was a little about that so I'm tackling this primarily as a playwright and so subject matters in a way so it seems like from my perspective on theater seems to have this correct trajectory of how new identity categories can be absorbed into mainstream topics of conversation and as everyone's been talking to and I'm sure you know we're in a particularly identity centric moment when it comes to trans issues in theater and media so there's so many trans characters and sometimes even trans people playing those characters in film, TV show and on stages it's kind of record breaking though that record is a pretty low bar but what kind of stories are we seeing a lot of coming out narratives transition narratives some stutteringly positive and some violent and disturbing and I guess that this is a preferable subject matter to the stories of the past that have been completely dominated by you know trans people as tragic wrecks liars, tricksters and psychopaths murderers the most empathetic roles having been something like the sassy friend conveniently dying of AIDS which they're still having us do but the explicit violence or the subtle violence of being relegated to the background these are all pretty cis narrative frameworks right extensions of the way society has dehumanized trans people when more trans people can tell their stories I know that this will change but it's not going to happen all at once and it seems that where trans people are at in societal terms is reflected in what types of stories we get to see as we stand at the threshold of civil rights definitely not inside the house yet theater is staging a lot of stories that serve as an intro trans 101 or if we're being honest white binary trans 101 the coming out narrative is a narrative framework that subsumes actual trans stories so that cis people's acceptance process is the actual arc coming out is the right of passage constructed by cis heteroculture is a requirement for a trans person seeking social legibility and legibility I feel like is the topic we're at in theater right now trans legibility that's what we're doing right now for everyone out in the home audience so I just wanted to talk for a little bit about what I was trying to achieve in writing about Chelsea Manning in this play won't be a ghost so like I said I used the chats she was having with Adrian Lamo and in these chats she talks a lot about her gender identity how she's repressed it in the army the consequences she experienced while growing up sparse moments in her life when she felt she actually could live her authentic self there's this amazing point in these chats where she's really talking about the first time she dressed as a woman and went and took a train ride on the Acela and it's just she seems to have like transported herself in describing it and she like remembers every detail of like the fabric on her skin it's just gorgeous and heartbreaking because as we all know she's in an all men's military prison and it's going to be in there until she's something like in her late 20s so I don't know it's just such a unique moment to have access to her description of it so I mean I could have made an entire play based on her talking around her identity and her gender and coming out and finding her true self but I really wanted to focus on what she leaked which are hundreds of thousands of state department cables video of like really horrific acts of essentially war crimes on part of the US Army and other material that just really addresses what an imperialist state we live in and I think that there's something that comes through in her language about how she ethically justified this choice to herself and how she was willing to shatter all of the facades and hierarchy of the Army and US imperialism so she was 22 when she made that leak and I've come to understand her choice to do that as profoundly related to being trans she's a person who knew about keeping secrets she was in the US Army during Don't Ask Don't Tell and she just I feel like her personal experience and how secrets can corrupt and destroy a person is something that she then extrapolated to what she was seeing in all of these top secret documents so we know that the past 20 years at least have been rapidly increasing government secrecy and that opacity has led to so much unaccounted for global damage and I think that essentially though I said I'm not that into coming out narratives necessarily but Kelsey Manning flipped the script and outed the US and that's a coming out narrative that I'm way more interested in and I think that's a way of understanding how embracing difference in oneself and societally is a profound and transformative thing I don't think that there is an essential trans story but I do believe that there is a commonality that I'd like to see for their explored in theater and it's something that I'm even willing for cis identified people to explore essentially I want to see theater do a lot more conversion I think on some level everyone is a little trans and just to explain I don't believe that most people have experienced the kinds of struggles that out trans people face not even all trans people face the same struggles people who are experiencing this misogynist society with more masculinity definitely have different privileges and there's certainly degrees of urgency right but I think that every single person is failing under a binary system and I'd like theater to be a place where stories can unify more people to understand that failing to be cis hetero white man is powerful it's a powerful failure because 7 billion people are failing at that including nominally cis hetero white men alright so that's Chelsea Manning is a authentic trans story tell us a little bit about what happens when maybe well-meaning people will try to tell a story about a transgender character or people who aren't well-meaning decide that they're going to go through the diversity checklist and throw in a transgender character to this week's episode of their cop show there's such a conversation right now like I was saying before where people are just like doing the trans thing because it's the hot topic right now which I find to be really unsettling for a lot of people in the trans community and really damaging to the young ones in our community the fact that we have trans stories being out there but not being told for us is not okay with me there's I mean on like the mainstream higher level there's things like Dallas Byers Club and Hedwig that are casting cis men to play these trans women and lining up white cis men time and time again to win awards for playing these women when I just think about the poor girl sitting at home watching these movies or listening to these soundtracks and realizing that no matter where she goes in life, no matter what she does her story will always be told as a man's story and that's not fair to her and that's not fair to me growing up I didn't know that I had that option because that wasn't even in the theater that I was listening to and I was thinking about and I was doing I did have a director once tell me that the show we were doing where there's a male-to-female transgender character that he would not even consider allowing me to play the role it had to go to a cisgender woman because at the end of the play it's this is revealed as you know the big surprise the big plot twist and so he the director quite smugly said no it must go to a cisgender woman because why talk about a trans person if it's not for shock value if it's not a surprise I've been told when I started writing this play I actually love letters to nobody or insignificant others I mentioned to somebody that it wasn't necessarily about my gender identity it was just about me and so it came up and their response was so it's not about you being trans then what's the point and I was like I'm sorry what's the point of me speaking if it's not about my identity is that the question you're asking me right now and that seems to be the mentality around it that so many people are talking about trans to talk about trans where I'm like make a space for us I'm not saying a cis person should not cast trans people in their shows I'm just saying when you project your beliefs onto what my experience is like so often I'm just seeing that it's not being done correctly it's being so many of these narratives are so one dimensional and don't really get into the heart of what it actually is to be trans I'm fine with casting trans people just don't try to talk about what I'm going through if you don't know talk to a trans person cast trans people in roles that don't talk about their gender identity just cast us in other things get our names out there so that when you need a big name to do a show you'll have one trans person things like that that are easy ways to make us more accessible to audiences get us around, get us heard out in the space without having to accidentally maybe well intendedly say something wrong or off pudding I've spoken a lot about I am a performer to an extent but I for a small amount of time like factor thing like going on auditions a lot and for auditions I went on in a row asked me to play the role more subdued or shy I was actually told to be more demure at one point and I realized it's because nobody's ready to understand a trans girl who's confident in herself and I was only auditioning for trans feminine roles cause reasons but I was realizing that they're not telling my story they're not telling my true experience there's so many people that I know who are comfortable in themselves and will walk into that room and be like hey what's up I'm here, I'm queer but they're people are still telling the story of just the shy little girl who doesn't know she's a girl yet and like just figured it out and oh it's so happy but it's still quiet and I have to do it in my bedroom I mean that is a logical story that is an experience that a lot of people have and that's important but I still think about that girl sitting at home watching that movie or seeing that play who just isn't having that experience but feels like she has to now and has to have that and I'm realizing that I'm talking about this all from the Femme side of things sorry it's my lived experience but it goes both ways it's on the other side of things and also the trans masculine experience doesn't have that much exposure in the world because that narrative isn't really being spoken about and when I think about that I'm like realizing it's shock value again it's more shocking that somebody would want to be a woman in the society than they would want to be a man and on top of that non-binary identity like you were saying it's just like a white cis binary story that we're telling basically we're always confirming to cis normative standards not just being people and having gender maybe sometimes occasionally on Tuesdays so once someone has a show that they want to do that's going to have an authentic trans narrative what can they do about a sustainable show so what a great segue thank you so I talked a little bit about the work that I do in the show that's in this festival called Queer Heartache I've been working on this show now for almost three years to get to this place on the musical I work on with my collaborator Melissa Lee we've been working for almost five years now and I've been a full-time slam poet for the past eight years and I sat down and I thought you know one of the things that I could offer in a public setting or a panel is to talk about how that came to be but I because we're talking about trans issues here we're in a world where our stories our voices are invisibilized and I wanted to offer some tangible steps but also before I do that I wanted to bring into the room what are the trans voices that we're missing who are we missing here right here in this theater who are we missing from the canon of American theater of trans theater and I sat down and I thought the kinds of voices that I want to see in production are the voices of trans folks who are youth who are our elders who are homeless who are trans folks living with HIV and AIDS trans folks who are undocumented folks with disabilities with pain indigenous Native American first nation folks black trans women trans women of color these are the voices that are often missing in even our trans spaces and especially in theater in media in life and so a lot of folks here are trans folks and when you cannot wake up and see and look in the mirror and think like I'm feeling myself how are we going to step out of the room and tell that to someone else how are we going to sit down and write a play how are we going to write a song and then dance in a show so I felt in my career that some of the things that as a trans person that have been some barriers to entry are less access to spaces practice money training fellowship with other trans artists the ability to be in a festival with other trans artists to say hey what was hard about your show what was great about your show and so I'm interested in the ways that people and trans folks are disrupting the bureaucracy of theater in order to create these authentic stories that we're talking about and how do we get to be writers producers dramaturgs directors how do we get to that step and make art that doesn't rely on an institution and so when I look to the kinds of inspiration out there trans folks have been making theater forever we have a lot of theater that it's just not theater that people are seeing our theater our artwork lives on instagram on twitter in blogs on tumblr we're we're making art that lives in our living rooms and I know I know we talk about Dixon Place a lot I know that the story is a theater that starts in the living room that's the kind of theater that I feel like we need and so I thought today very concretely I would bring an example of a show that I tried to produce and was a failure and success in different ways and to be very transparent about the process because one of the things I really wish happened before I did this show was that I got the opportunity to sit down with someone and say hey how much did that cost like where did the money come from you know how did you eat where did you stay that sort of thing and and so I'm going to give the example of last summer taking queer heartache to the Chicago fringe festival and I I signed up for the fringe you know it's a lottery system you put your name in the hat and it comes back out and if you're lucky and one of the first things I did is I signed up to take the largest theater space I was like oh that's how it's going to work right you signed up for the largest theater you make you make it back so I signed up for the 120 person theater I'm not from Chicago I don't know what the theaters in Chicago look like on that block and so I didn't know that all the theaters that the people see shows at were located on a main strip and that the theater that I was at was in an alley very far away and so I wish I had the opportunity to call someone and say hey did you have a show in Chicago fringe like where it was what theater was the best one I would have especially liked the opportunity if that to talk to that person if they were trans if they were Asian-American if they were somebody that I could trust to give me that guidance I let's see I know that the opportunity for me to take that show there is a privilege because I was able to get there I was able to you know be in a venue with limited accessibility and so I just want to recognize the privilege that I have being able to even make a show being able to put that on paper in English in a language that folks are experiencing at this festival and so let's see one of the things that I did at that festival was I funded it myself on credit I don't know that I would do that again I thought I thought you know big theater no problem it's coming right back that did not happen and so the I'm just going to go through the budget because I mean why not I have nothing I don't want to hide what it actually took me but we're actually running a little low on time cool cool so let's see it was a $1000 entry fee $1200 salary $500 in travel $800 in food and accommodations for two people $200 in advertising I made that was $3,700 I made back $700 in sales and lost $3,000 if I were to do it again I'm just going to give the five things that I would do again I would crowd fund the show because what I realized from that experience is that when I think about producers our producers are in our communities our producers are our friends our family our producers are the people so if I had the opportunity to crowd fund it I would if I had the opportunity to sell merch at the main venue instead of at my venue I would have done that if I could have thought of passing the hat or a tip jar I might have done that or a raffle every time those are I just want to give the concrete things I would do again in order to make the budget and on that Ari you were going to tell us a little bit about the narrative being controlled by certain groups can you elaborate on that I can stop me whenever you want because I think that dancers spend their life in classes not talking so we can't shut up when you give us a microphone but I'll try to summarize I sent this like long topic that's not that long I find one of the challenges in the process for any artist is to contextualize your work and sort of narrow it down you know you don't want to have 18 things out there so knowing that thinking about any person that might walk into a show as broad as that audience might be feeling like right now in the political sort of cultural world we live in with social media that there is already a definition a lot of definitions by other groups non-trans of trans people trying to see anybody's theater on the one extreme you know you do have the phobic sort of extremist side that probably would never buy a ticket to my show but if they did I would love to have them right down the front row to experience it but then I find this gray area I only have one family member that pseudo makes an attempt to talk to me but this sort of summarized what many people think where my mom lives in Texas and about a year ago she literally said she's never asked me about my experience personally we talk maybe twice a year doesn't want to know she literally said after watching I Am Kate so now are you going to go out and get $100,000 worth of surgery too and I said yeah you know I'm glad you suggested that because I have not known what to do with that I'm sitting in my bank account and it showed me and she's an intelligent woman but it really brought home how bizarre many people that we all don't have on our regular Facebook streams and you know we're not used to talking to in any other topic might sound totally rational but literally think things like this and I'm going okay so you might be part of my audience and I'm dealing with that baggage before the curtain goes up that's this group another sort of group that I find is and when I say this I'm not in any way being negative about the hetero or cis advocate friends but I think even if someone's agnostic or not religious in any way there seems to be this subtle lineage of puritanical Christian I must help in our country even if it's so sincere this sort of adopting issues like you're a dog with three legs at the shelter and they need to take you in and speak for you and they come in with this attitude of loving condescension and so I'm dealing with that and how do I talk to that person without doing something that makes them turn me off within the first two minutes of my show and now this one again like you said if you there may be different opinions about this the hardest one for me is members of the broader LGBT community that I feel can and sometimes even hijack an issue skip the points without actually talking to a trans person and when I say that I'll just give a specific example about two days ago on my feed popped up this video that was supposed to be a sort of campy protest to the North Carolina bathroom law by the kinky boots cast and I hated it a friend of mine sent it what do you think and I watched it and I watched it again and I waited about ten minutes and I don't post a lot of stuff online because I don't like to invite that is this key where you want to yeah and I just I wrote back and I said I'm I'm disheartened and I'm really angry because when you when you take one there was no mention of trans in the whole the word wasn't even mentioned I can't say whether there's someone on that cast trans or not I mean I'm not going to make that call but it was clearly just let's put it up here on it it's just a musical number and it's just about pain and I'm going you know if there's someone that's already on the fence about this bothers me it's not because what you fail to realize even if you're a gay man or a lesbian woman who's born in the body they feel is who they are with all the persecution you've got if you take that into it's just about pain what you fail to know is that I have to plan days and road trips around where I feel safe going to the bathroom my passport says female I've gone through every hoop with doctors and psychologists my fucking passport says female I've paid the cost and sat and had a judge tell me my name is my name I thought to well I know other people to affirm all these things and I still get at best weird looks sometimes told I still can't go in and sometimes unsafe and just I'll just wait an hour to pee until I get somewhere else and so to do that with in my opinion I guess not consulting other members of this community in an intention that you're making like let's let's make it fun and make it not a big deal sometimes a joke is not the way to go and I think had you consulted a few people they would have gone sometimes humor is a great tool probably not now you know I mean I use jokes in my ex too but there's times it's like that's just not don't do that and and so it is that slippery slope of I mean I'll hear comments and one that incenses me and I guess real quick to finish that out I'm not arguing for a binary world but say I wake up in a world where we have six bathrooms I'm still going in a women's bathroom because that's me right so I'm not arguing we should only have two but when I hear a person in the queer community who's not trans say well what's with all this anyway gender doesn't matter and it breaks my heart because I'm like yeah well that's like saying who you marry doesn't matter like why do you care if you can legally do that I'm not saying we should only have two but don't tell me it doesn't matter because if it didn't matter then I wouldn't have these realizations where I recently got married and my mother-in-law literally said I actually thought we'd meet some of your family at the wedding because I don't have one blood relative that would come I have one that talks to me like I said twice a year and the more people in my wife's family that would come up and ask about a family oh they have brothers and I kind of in a coping have gotten I realize that I go oh they don't talk to me I've kind of done that and their heart would break and like I had to go home and cry because I was like I usually don't let that in but it's so bizarre because it made me realize how strange that is to most people and so it's these kinds of things where it's like to say it doesn't matter that means all of this doesn't matter what I go through what anybody doing this regardless of whether you know you're a woman or a man or gender queer or you consider yourself other gender it matters that's a gender identity it's not a nothing your struggle is not a nothing and I think the thing I struggle with when contextualizing some of these experiences that not everybody can ever have and I realized when I started transitioning how we all want to say we have no prejudices not and we do and then when all of a sudden the concept of certain things becomes your life I would never say I can totally relate to someone who you know a person of color in this country but there are things now that I thought is it really that way because now I mean I've had three instances one that was an illegal battle lawsuit of being accosted being accused of crimes in stores and when the cops came I felt less sick I never knew what now I'm going oh no that's a thing you've had that your whole life I've had it for years holy shit since birth you've had now I know you know I mean when we had to fly recently I felt so bad because travel should be fun but when it doesn't matter that my passport says everything I have to stand in the thing and they blurred out to the whole line you know you have an anomaly in your crotch area we have to go you can do it here there we have to do a head to toe pat down staying in your carry ons and I said to my wife like I suck it up and then I cry when we get on the plane and I said you know this is going to happen for the rest of my life I will probably not live to where this doesn't happen where I feel like I don't want to travel and so it's when I hear gender doesn't matter I'm going why the fuck would anyone do what someone like me does if it really didn't matter why bother you know so I think it's these diverse knowing there's all this noise we all deal with it as live artists as writing and choreographing knowing I'm going to have this noise feedback baggage come in it's how much do I give an exposition how much do I being aware of it do I not deal with it do I deal with it how do I not derail what my show is about to at least get everybody in the ballpark of what's going on here so yeah I don't have an answer that's just I wanted to communicate that challenge that I think we all fit in the audience want to see something you're in or if they want to follow up with you on social media where can they do that you can come see love letters to nobody or in significant others this is your last night June 11th at 9 30 p.m. next Saturday the 18th at nine o'clock p.m. or Wednesday June 22nd at 815 p.m. and you can also check out honestaccomplice.org that's honestaccomplice theater the company that I mentioned earlier well I've got to check my fire for the tie Okay, Querhardek opens on Friday this Friday June 10th at 9 p.m. again and then we close on Tuesday June 21st at 9 p.m. 9 20 p.m. and my website is kityanpoet.com and I'm at kityanpoet and I would love to talk. I don't have anything quite to promo. I'm going to be a 2050 fellow this coming year at the New York Theater Workshop so there will be some opportunities to show me work through the New York Theater Workshop and to find out about that in the future you could go to Francisweisrapton.net for my company's theater tight tight braid group.org. So the show wonder through the looking-glass houses will run the first three weekends in December Friday and Saturday nights at Dick's in place you can go to their website company website kahanstheater.org or we have a Facebook page committee architecture you can see me I'm an artist in residence also with badass burlesque last Monday of every month at the sleeper room if you want to come see that kind of work and thank you all for coming and thank you for watching online