An Artist’s Call for Accountability

A Trans perspective on creating safer spaces in opera

Last week the COC hosted a panel called “Gender & Opera,” led by their new Disruptor-in-Residence company, Amplified Opera. A key question emerged over the course of the panel: how can the opera industry create safer spaces for artists to explore and innovate without fear of encountering serious harm based on their gender identities and presentations? The general consensus was that white, cis, straight men, never having been forced to advocate for their own humanity, are uniquely underqualified to lead such spaces. So why do we, as an industry, continue to give them the vast majority of such positions of power?

OIR Ontario Mentor’s Ryan McDonald and Camille Rogers in OperaQ’s production of Dido + Belinda

As a performing artist, I have been in many rehearsal spaces that felt incredibly unsafe, both emotionally and physically. As a non-binary person, I have been in many spaces where I didn’t feel safe being ‘out,’ and instead allowed myself to be constantly misgendered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been a significant overlap between these two categories. This is not just a matter of discomfort on my part—the disruption of being repeatedly misgendered presents a serious barrier for me when it comes to remaining present and engaged in a rehearsal. As an opera singer I’m already trying to sing beautifully, remember all the lyrics, count, watch the conductor, and somehow also find the brain capacity to act and feel authentically as a character. As you might imagine, there’s not much room left for any distractions!

Like the panellists last week, I have also found that the organizations I feel most comfortable with are those led by women, people of colour, and queer people. (The only rehearsals I’ve ever experienced being led by a trans person are those I have led myself.) I hear a lot of institutions claiming to be safe spaces, and I see an awful lot of rainbow stickers and trans flags hung on walls and in windows. And yet, I encounter very few organizations that have actually done the work to make their spaces truly safe for queer, and in particular trans, people. So many places that claim to be queer- and trans-affirming still present barriers such as gendered washrooms and dressing rooms, a lack of understanding of gender-neutral language and pronouns, and even ignorant and transphobic personnel, volunteers, and donors.

So how can we make our spaces safe? The answer is that we can’t, or at least not perfectly—not as long as human beings are fallible and limited and capable of harm, which we all are. We can do many things to reduce and ameliorate harm, but it will never be eradicated entirely. And yet, I believe it’s still worth it to strive towards safer spaces, the safest possible in the real world of power differentials and systemic oppression. And while it can be very hard to identify the precise specifications that make a space feel safe, in my experience there is one particular litmus test that I find effective, no matter the context: does the space make room for play? 

Play requires a certain base level of safety, comfort, and permission to fall flat on your face. If I feel safe enough to play, it means I trust those in the room with me to accept my creative failures along with my successes, and to offer me the grace of joyful laughter rather than ridicule. A playful space means there is enough courage and curiosity in the collective atmosphere to keep us all bouncing from idea to idea, without getting bogged down in shame at our mistakes and missteps. An atmosphere of play allows each individual to bring their fullest, most authentic self to the space without fear of judgement or misrecognition. It means assuming best intent and yet also taking responsibility for the impact of our actions.

This might sound suspiciously like another important component of safer spaces: accountability. Another word that gets thrown around with abandon, usually backed up with very little concrete action—which makes sense, because accountability is difficult. It’s vulnerable, and very often terrifying. Accountability requires recognizing that we, all of us, have the capacity to cause serious harm, no matter the purity of our intentions. It’s a hard truth to accept, but once we do we can actually start the more important work of figuring out what to do when we (inevitably) encounter harm and conflict in our workplaces, institutions, and relationships.

And so I arrive at my last cornerstone of safer rehearsal spaces, which is a concept most musicians and performers will be intimately familiar with—collaboration. We all know the joy of feeling in sync with an ensemble, a duet partner, negotiating and adjusting sometimes wordlessly, through breath and motion alone. The same concept can be applied to conflict and harm. When we shift our mindset from “who is most right and who is most wrong” to “what is the problem and how can we work together to find a solution,” then we can move towards a collaborative model of conflict resolution and equity work.  So often virtue signalling and emotional fragility get in the way of actual, concrete action towards harm reduction.

To extend my metaphor even farther: a good chamber ensemble is one where all of the individual voices are in balance and moving together, yet independently. This does not mean every voice receives absolutely equal attention—at different points certain voices may need to be foregrounded, and others fade into the background in order to tell the most compelling and authentic musical story.  At times one section may need more rehearsal time than another, because their part is more difficult to fit together and requires more attention.  Most importantly, each musician holds both the autonomy and the responsibility to shape their line in a way that best serves the group’s artistic goals.

My fundamental question is this: could we apply this concept of collaborative ensemble to an opera rehearsal?  What if we accounted for every contributor’s voice, and not just the director’s? What if we allowed for the collective wisdom in the room to come into play, prioritizing those with the lived experience necessary to tell the most authentic version of the story we want to explore? Whenever I have been a part of collaborative spaces like this, problems have been solved far more creatively than they would have been in traditional hierarchies with individual, all-powerful leaders. Inevitably at least one person in the room—and not always the one you might expect—has the necessary knowledge or skill or experience (or even just a suggestion of who we might ask for advice). What if we could dream past patriarchal, colonial power structures that inhibit such collective practices of problem solving? What other worlds could we play into being together? What stories would we finally feel free to tell?

Camille Rogers (they/them)

OIR Ontario Mentor

Co-Artistic Director, OperaQ