I’ve been spending time with opera singers Clouds and Jessie, talking about their company Better Strangers and upcoming show,Ah! Forget My Fate: A Brief History Of Women In Opera (Abridged) at Islington’s King’s Head theatre. I asked them some semi-intelligent questions, and they gave me some pretty damn cool answers.

Tell us a bit about yourselves.

“Better Strangers started with Clouds and Jessie, two queer feminist geeks. We met through LARP and bonded over a mutual love of opera, together with frustration at the lack of available jobs. Clouds is now in her second year of a singing course at music school. Jessie is a youth worker at the East London Out Project, and does freelance community arts with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities. We both have literature degrees. Jessie likes queer theory and graphic novels. Clouds likes metal and baking. Pleased to meet you!”

Men at work. Kinda. Not.

“Better Strangers coalesced into an actual concept some time around May 2010. Our stated aim is to create musical performances by, with and for all kinds of women, and to use these to reach out to people who might normally feel excluded from opera.”

We love the idea of feminist opera – what role does it play in opera as a whole and in the wider arts world?

“To the best of our awareness, Better Strangers is the only feminist opera company in existence. There are occasional feminist productions dotted around, but no other companies dedicated to performing them, as far as we can tell. So that’s a start. In addition to putting on feminist productions of existing operas, we’ll be commissioning new music from female composers, asking female writers to contribute song lyrics and stories, and opening up discussions about women’s roles in opera, and how and why they need to change.

“At least two thirds of any singing class in a music school is likely to be made up of women – most of them sopranos – and yet each commonly performed opera will contain two, maybe three roles for the ‘female’ soprano, mezzo or alto register. It’s a hugely (and in some ways needlessly) competitive world. So, instead of wringing our hands about the dwindling interest in opera and classical music, why not create more? Our commissioned works will address this problem in two ways: firstly, by including more soprano, mezzo and alto roles; and secondly, by scoring many of them for small groups of instruments, so that they can be easily performed with limited space and resources.

“As well as performers, we’re encouraging contributions from female directors, MDs, producers (BadRep’s own Sarah C is working with us right now), composers, technicians, librettists and artists. Women composers are more widely recognised now than they have ever been, with Performing Right Society awarding funding for music written and commissioned by women, but there is still a lot of work to be done. We hope that as we bring the work of stage professionals and writers to light, women might start to be taken more seriously across the arts world.

“Our feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit. We at Better Strangers are interested in stories, and particularly stories that aren’t often told. This means listening to all kinds of different people – women, QUILTBAGs, people of colour, people from lower income brackets, people with disabilities, and anyone else who has something to share with the world.”

Artwork by Alex Campbell

The show features a lot of pieces for women performers. What are your opinions on the roles available to women in opera?

“The premise of Ah! Forget My Fate! is that women are very frequently typecast. The most common types of female characters are the weepy virgin, the terrible slut, the saucy servant girl, or the boy. In operas written before 1820 there were a lot more witches and evil sorceresses, but the villain’s role was handed over to basses later on. That’s it. If you’re a weepy virgin or a terrible slut in an opera written after 1830, chances are you’ll go mad or get consumption and die. Bad luck!

“How does one sing with consumption anyway? A wasting disease of the lungs and throat plays havoc with your timbre. There are a few exceptions, of course. We just want to create more of them. Besides, what about the mezzos who want to play a bold, upstanding young hero? Or the basses who want to play weepy, consumptive virgins?

“There is a heavy heteronormative gender bias in opera, which is kind of silly because not all sopranos, mezzos and altos are women, and not all tenors, baritones and basses are men. CN Lester of En Travesti is a gender neutral mezzo. Florestan of Lashings of Ginger Beer is a female baritone. Yet it’s expected, in opera as in life, that women and men will fit into these nice little boxes with a set type of voice and a set type of role to go with it, and it’s astonishing and disturbing how often the woman’s voice is silenced at the end of an opera.

What’s next for Better Strangers?

“After Ah! Forget My Fate, Better Strangers will be having some fun with devised performance. Alongside that, we’ll be doing some education work in community settings around how awesome opera and feminism are, and how opera does have something to offer people who aren’t rich and white, honest. Also in the works is a show in which all the dead heroines of famous operas rise again as zombies and take their revenge.

No, really. Keep an eye out – it’s going to be awesome.

• Ah! Forget My Fate! is on Wednesday 16 November¹ and Friday 25 November – book your tickets here.

1. It seems this date has now had to be cancelled – so all the more reason to try to make the second one!

I got an insight into their work, and into their minds, before I’d even gotten into the auditorium. Alongside the programme (with its photo of a barbie doll shoved into a pair of boxer shorts worn by an androgynous figure) was something that looked like one of those ghastly tick-box questionnaires. Except it wasn’t. Instead, it presented a whimsical but pertinent checklist about the performers (tall/small), the show and how you could get involved to help them (cake baking or pant sewing) with future projects.

Scientists. For Science!

The play is an hour long and it’s about tomboys. Hurrah! It’s also about the challenges of growing up feeling confined by limited gender options, and the accompanying problems of underwear, of going into the “right” toilet, of working out who you are, who you want to be, and how to fall in love and be yourself. The pair use pseudo-science, white labcoats and some strange experiments alongside clownful vignettes, sad stories and bizarre situations that describe accurately, and often painfully so, the experience of  “disappointment” – how our hopes and expectations of life can fall short when we’re confronted with the brick wall of “what is expected”.

I especially loved the physicality of the two performers, their deft ownership of the space, as well as the glimmer of the personal at the edges of their characterisation. It’s funny and very, very heartfelt – I found myself watching bits of my own childhood and teenage experience onstage. The awkward, clumsy, strangeness of having a cis female body but not feeling especially feminine, and not feeling sure that was allowed, or sure of how to be “in-between”.

Everyone else had come out as these beautiful butterflies and I’d come out as a kind of butterpillar

– Tomboy Blues

The show ended with a discussion with Gendered Intelligence, who work to help improve awareness of gender issues in the public sphere, especially amongst young people. We talked about the word “queer” and what it meant, about how tomboyism might sit under the queer umbrella, and about anxieties of perhaps not feeling “queer enough” sometimes as a person happy within their body yet unhappy with the social requirements of being feminine.

Photo: Kevin Clifford

I also managed to catch up with nat and Rachel via email, to prod them a little further about their work and their ideas.

 Tell us a bit about yourselves and your work so far.
“We met four years ago at a live art performance workshop, and were immediately intrigued about each other’s work, histories and bodies. We made our first show, 27 Ways I Will Never Fuck My Mother by mashing together our two solo shows, then made a spoken word piece called Trauma Top Trumps. Tomboy Blues is our third show.”

Why did you decide to do a piece on tomboys? 
“Our work comes, foremostly, from ourselves and our experience. When we were getting to know each other we found places of similarity and difference, and the common tomboy childhood (and adulthood) was ticklish to us to explore. nat’s friends were having kids, she was looking again at childhood and was alarmed at how often it still is ‘pink for a girl and blue for a boy’ even in these supposedly broken open gender dialogue times. It was also the time of Caster Semenya and her disqualification.”

What kind of research did you do – did you find anything that surprised you?
“We talked to paediatricians, psychologists, tomboys (big ones and small ones), family, friends, mothers and fathers, and ourselves, and we looked at current consumer trends (and their attackers, like Pink Stinks). We were surprised that 50% of women identified at tomboys in childhood, and also at the amount of confusing and conflicting information about tomboys and queerness.”

There’s a bit in the show that talks about the “missing tomboys” – women who identified as tomboys when younger and now do not – why do you think that is?
“We think its a combination of wanting to conform, interest in boys/feeling like you should have an interest in boys, family pressure, high heels, bars and thongs for 7-9 year olds, and negative perceptions of any kind of femininity that isn’t ‘classic’. Plus, there isn’t really an accepted identity that is ‘Adult Tomboy’ – most often it is just ‘lesbian’, which doesn’t take into account straightness, or other kinds of gender queerness at all.”

The full title of the show is “Tomboy Blues or the Theory of Disappointment”. Do you think that being a tomboy has the potential to be a positive as well as a disappointing experience?
“Absofuckinglutely. The title is intended to be playful and provoke thought rather than suggest conclusion. The whole exploration of the piece is about that positivity in all its challenges both from within and without.”

• Tomboy Blues runs at Oval House until 19th November – click here to book.