The Queen in Me

Premiering in 2020 

Teiya Kasahara, a biracial, masculine non-binary female artist, takes inspiration from her career as a professional opera singer alongside her lived experiences as a queer, feminist, person of colour to re-imagine the Queen of the Night, one of opera’s most infamous “fallen women,” and places her in the centre of a metaphor for silenced and discarded women everywhere. The curtain rises mid-performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, at the beginning of the Queen of the Night’s highly anticipated aria, Der Hölle Rache. However, this time, the work comes to a halt as the Queen stakes a stand against her expected traditional female narrative and tells her story in her own words for the first time – at a cost.

Teiya’s work combines original text and classical opera into one very theatrical event.

Teiya began developing The Queen in Me as a member of the Buddies in Bad Times Young Creators Unit, and is continuing this work with director and dramaturge Andrea Donaldson. An excerpt was presented as part of the SummerWorks Open Studios 2018 and the ROM’s Friday Night Live: Vox event. The Queen in Me was also pitched at the PuSh Festival’s Industry Series in Vancouver, January 2019.